Author: martinsimpsonwriting

Another Self-Detonating Hero, and You’ll Never Guess Why the Dems Are Worried about Fetterman (posted 5/9/25)

After two over-long columns on the serious subjects of lawfare and the courts, today I’m returning to the kind of material that is right in my usual wheelhouse: a quick rundown of recent stories requiring juvenile mockery. 

But I appreciate the many thoughtful comments that you all posted on my last two columns.  I’m going to share a little more next week to answer your questions about how my buddy responded to my emails, and also about my conversion from being a liberal in my callow youth, to the wise old conservative you know and love today.  

First up, we have a new candidate for the leftists’ “Self-Detonating Hero” designation, so get ready for a fusillade of “unexpectedly”s:

He is a pro-Hamas, anti-Semite Columbia student (unexpectedly!) from “Palestine” (unexpectedly!), here on a green card (unexpectedly!) named Mohsen Mahdawi. 

Mahdawi was taken into custody by ICE, but has been temporarily released on bond on the order of a US District court judge in Vermont.  (Unexpectedly!)  Of course that judge was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

HA! I kid because I love.  He’s an Obama appointee.

Unexpectedly!  

And the Dems are already beginning to transfer their schoolgirl crushes from Kilmar to Mohsen, like a 13-year-old girl replacing her Donnie Osmond poster with a Shaun Cassidy one.  (I’ll take “Timely late 1970s pop culture references” for $100, Alex.)

Mohsen looks like an Arab Luigi Mangione, and he’s got the soft-spoken peace-loving protestor routine down pat.  CBS and the NY Times have already given him tongue-bath interviews. (Unexpectedly!)  So start your countdown clocks, because you know he’s going to blow up in their faces soon.

I just came across a group called Canary Mission, who documents and publicizes people and organizations who promote hatred of the US, Israel and Jews, and they’ve put together a great two-minute video of Mohsen spouting some soothing talking points about how his activism “is centered in the energy of love.” 

Hilariously, the video intersperses Mohsen’s assertions with video clips and pics that belie his words.  He says, “Antisemitism has no place in our movement.”  Cut to him holding a microphone wearing a keffiyeh, in the middle of three other people, under the chyron, “Mohsen surrounded by anti-Semites.”

He says, “My compassion is also for the Jewish people.”  Cut to him standing on campus, using a bullhorn to drown out a small group of students calling on Hamas to release the red-headed Bibas babies, whom they eventually murdered, along with their mother.  (In that clip, Mohsen has a hateful smirk on his face that made me wish the IDF had placed one of their pager charges in his bullhorn.)     

My favorite part of the video is when Mohsen mournfully accuses the IDF of killing six of his cousins and his uncle.  Cut to a photo lineup of scowling “Palestinian” terrorists, one of them holding an AK-47, identifying them as his cousins and uncle. 

It reminded me of a mafia movie scene in which an old gangster looks through wedding pictures.  “There’s Sammy the Bull, Fat Tony Salerno, Frankie the Blade Lucchese,  Big Paulie and Little Paulie Genovese.  All of them upstanding Italian Americans, unjustly harassed by the police!” 

I hope the Dems go all-in on dreamy peacenik Mohsen as their newest poster boy.  Then, pics of him in a suicide vest, proudly holding up a copy of Mein Kampf can show up in 3… 2… 1…

While the Dems are hot and bothered over Mohsen, they’re very worried about another one of their own, Lurch Fetterman.  Last week New York Magazine ran an alarmist story about his health, with the tagline, “John Fetterman’s Struggle:  The senator insists he is in good health.  But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.” 

If you didn’t know what a left-wing rag NY Mag is, you might think that Fetterman has had another stroke, or a heart attack, or is possibly collapsing on a regular basis and bleeding from the eyes.

But if you were a certain hilarious genius with a fully functional wizard hat, you might guess that Fetterman is continuing to make more sense, which his leftist handlers regard with alarm.  And you’d be 100% right.

Expectedly!

The story actually has various members of his staff hysterically getting their dresses – or in some cases their gender non-binary onesies – over their heads because Fetterman has demonstrated such ominous signs of dementia as… wait for it… disbelieving that the IDF is bombing “Palestinian” “refugee” camps full of “innocent civilians,” and… wait for it again… considering not voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for SecDef! 

One of his key advisors who quit last year captures the tone of the article: “I hope Senator Fetterman gets the help he needs.”

The story is unintentionally funny, and it perfectly sums up the elite left in a nutshell: When Fetterman shuffled around like a stuttering, lobotomized mental patient who would vote for whatever they put in front of him, they praised him to the skies!  But now that he’s occasionally making sense, they think he’s lost his mind.  Perfect!  

Speaking of losing one’s mind, did you catch the CNN interview with a Sinaloa cartel member?  They put him in a disguise and altered his voice, and the interviewer talked to him as if he was an aggrieved victim of unfair accusations.  She said, “According to the Trump administration, you are a terrorist.  What do you make of that?”

The guy answered, “Well, the situation is ugly, but we have to eat.” 

Of course you do.  And of course the CNN dope didn’t push back at all.  Because who among us hasn’t been in that poor criminal’s situation?

I remember my junior year in high school, when I’d smuggled some fentanyl into study hall, shot two of my rivals execution-style, and sex trafficked several of my female classmates for cash, and I got caught.  Boy, was my dad mad when he got called down to the principal’s office with me!

But I said, “Dad, if I didn’t sell drugs, pimp out my girlfriends and assassinate my competitors, what would I do for lunch money?” 

And everyone agreed that I’d made a compelling case.  So I spent a year in juvie and missed my graduation, but four short years later I got a job as a reporter at CNN.  True story.

Anyway, I can’t believe that even CNN can be this stupid.  They hate Trump and would do anything to discredit him, but do they really believe that a violent cartel thug giving him a thumb’s down is going to help the Dems and hurt Trump?!

You keep doing you, CNN!

Hamas delenda est!

On Lawfare, Rule of Law and SCOTUS, Part 2 (posted 5/8/25)

I appreciate the many thoughtful comments on the first part of my debate responses to my lefty friend.  Here’s the second (and final part), though I’ve got a few thoughts to post on Friday, asking what many of you asked yesterday: Have any lefty acquaintances of yours ever become conservatives, and if so, did debates with conservatives influence their decision?

“I hadn’t really thought about this until the last 6 or 7 years or so, but there is only one part of our entire federal government which has no explicit checks on it, and that is SCOTUS.   

The legislative checks the executive, by passing legislation and over-riding presidential vetoes.  The executive checks the legislative through the veto, and the president controls foreign policy and the executive branch (though dozens of partisan leftist judges have said that that’s over now, if they have their way). 

The judicial branch checks the legislative and executive branches, and appellate courts check district courts, and SCOTUS can check appellate courts.  But as it stands, there is no means by which anybody – not the legislative, the executive, or lower courts – can check SCOTUS.  It is the highest court, and by definition it dictates what “the rule of law” means, based solely on how it interprets the constitution.  

That was not always the case.  In fact, SCOTUS first introduced that idea (by inference from the constitution) giving themselves that power in 1803 (in Marbury v Madison), and since the executive and legislative didn’t object or stop them, that never-voted-on arrangement hardened into the law of the land.  

Theoretically, the legislative can check SCOTUS by passing constitutional amendments.  But since post-Marbury, SCOTUS is the final authority on the constitution, in reality, it could just declare that a recent, legitimately passed amendment is actually unconstitutional, thus nullifying it.  (That’s basically what SCOTUS does every time it overturns a precedent.)

But in the real world, we know that that’s not completely true.  Because if it were, any 5 SCOTUS judges would be de facto dictators over us all.  I’ll give you two quick examples to illustrate the concept through absurd analogies.  Say you’ve got a SCOTUS with 5 far-right justices, and they say that by proposing a unitary executive, the constitution meant that the president has all the powers of a dictator.  So Trump IS a dictator from this day forward, and can declare himself president for life, abolish the right of leftists to vote, etc.

(I know: that’s actually very close to what some on the far-left believe right now, in their TDS fever dreams!)

Or consider the opposite: a SCOTUS with 5 far-left judges declares that hidden in the “emanations and penumbras” of the constitution is the never-heretofore-detected entitlement of all Americans to a utopian socialist scheme of free food, shelter, health care and education from the cradle to the grave.   (That’s actually pretty much how we got abortion as a “constitutional right.”  The Warren court “discovered” a right to privacy in 1965 in Griswold, and then eight years later, the Burger court piggy-backed – citing only “emanations and penumbra” – on that ruling to “discover” a right to abortion in Roe that no Founder or American citizen had ever found in two centuries of reading the constitution.) 

And since those entitlements would require a quasi- or fully totalitarian government to declare farmers, construction workers, doctors etc. to be indentured servants, and coerce them into growing the crops, building the housing and giving the medical care that those new “entitlements” demand – which is what happened in every socialist/communist state to a greater or lesser degree – SCOTUS could declare that we are henceforth a communist country, and personal freedom has been abolished.

What those absurd examples tell us is that the only real check on SCOTUS’s power is the large-scale consent of the voters.  Because while SCOTUS has no theoretical checks on its power, it also has no enforcement mechanisms for its rulings.  The executive and legislative have police, courts and military power to enforce their laws on people, and they do so regularly.  SCOTUS has nothing, unless the executive and legislative voluntarily subject themselves to its rulings, and then force them on the people.

This has happened multiple times, the most famous being when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for four years during the Civil War.  The Taney court said he couldn’t legally do that, and told him to stop it. And he said, “I’m a Republican president, and I’m going to defeat the Democrats and free their slaves, and I’m not going to let your rulings stop me, so suck it, Trebek.”  Or words to that effect.

The concept underlying this idea was probably best stated by Andrew Jackson, when he forced the movement of Indians on the Trail of Tears, despite the Marshall SCOTUS ruling that that action was unconstitutional.  Jackson allegedly (and it appears, likely apocryphally) said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”  Whether Jackson actually said that or not, those words did capture his attitude – and what actually happened – when nobody enforced the SCOTUS ruling, and the Indians got screwed. 

Many commentators on both sides regularly accuse presidents on the other side of blatantly defying the court.  Many conservatives and independents said that Obama’s DACA and DAPA actions, for example – unilaterally changing immigration law without legitimate legislation from congress – were blatantly unconstitutional.  And Obama agreed, admitting dozens of times in public that he couldn’t legally do that without action from congress…right up until he did it!  (I don’t like that guy!)  SCOTUS eventually allowed a 5th circuit ruling saying DACA and DAPA were both unconstitutional to stand – which again, Obama and everybody else knew had always been the case.

But Obama – and Biden after him, on all the examples I gave you in my last email – both defiantly said, “The constitution says X, but let somebody enforce it.”  In all those cases, SCOTUS eventually did slap them down, and they only then stopped defying the law.  But by then, they’d gotten what they’d wanted, and nobody was able to reverse their illegally gotten gains: Biden won the midterms (in part) by illegally pushing student debt transfer to the taxpayers, and he forced millions to take an experimental vaccine against their will, and he forced landlords to take losses and give free rent to tenants for 8 months before he belatedly stopped.  And over a decade since Obama knowingly defied the constitution to keep illegals here through DACA and DAPA, many millions of them are STILL here.

And like psycho kids who kill their parents and then ask for mercy from the court because they are now orphans (!), the Democrats are now insisting that the DACA and DAPA illegals must be allowed to stay, since they’ve been here so long, and have now established roots in America.  (That takes some balls!) 

Which brings us to today, and the hundred-plus legal actions against Trump, and the troubling possible outcomes of them.  The lefties are saying that every action that Trump takes is creating a “constitutional crisis.”  Conservatives and some independents are saying that the lawfare being waged against every presidential action is essentially giving 677 local judges the power to totally paralyze the executive branch – a result that has never happened before, and was never contemplated in the constitution – and is what’s causing a “constitutional crisis.”

I think there’s a chance that these will become self-fulfilling prophecies.  I’m hoping that SCOTUS rules correctly, and allows Trump to do what all presidents before him have done: control budget and personnel in the executive branch; enforce immigration and civil rights laws as written, etc. 

But if SCOTUS doesn’t do that, I think Trump – or most presidents, really – could possibly follow the examples of Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, and say, “Roberts has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”  And then that would REALLY be a constitutional crisis. 

The reason I think that could happen is the crucial difference between now and the earlier examples: Trump would have the consent of the majority of the governed.   It’s true that Biden and Obama both eventually did submit to the SCOTUS rulings.  But they only violated the law in the first place because they knew that they couldn’t have gotten what they wanted legitimately, because the majority of the public was against what they wanted to do.  And they only belatedly submitted in the end because they’d gotten what they wanted, and because public outrage would have produced the crisis that their continuing lawlessness would have justly brought down on them.

Trump, on the other hand – and I know you hate his guts, and think he’s wrong about everything – is doing everything he ran on, and that the majority of the voters want.  (In fact, even though he’s always been a divisive figure personally – because of his tendency toward assholery! – achieving personal approval ratings of 50/50ish at best, his major campaign promises all received majority polling approval.) 

During the campaign, he clearly laid out the agenda that the dozens of leftist mini-president judges are now thwarting.  He said he would close the border and build a wall; deport the illegals, fight DEI, etc.

I’m not saying that popular approval means everything, and that the majority should get everything it wants.  (At one time, majorities in the south wanted slavery, majorities approved of mistreating Indians, and of FDR penning up Japanese Americans, etc.)

But I think the far left of the Democrat party – and their partisan judges – are effectively arguing that majority will means NOTHING, if it goes against their own political preferences.  The people may have voted to enforce the border, protect women, cut bureaucracy, and all the rest, but they can pound sand, because a few dozen local judges know better. 

And that’s NOT the way our system is supposed to work, or has ever worked!

It’s not about Trump, man!  It’s about us, and what we voted for.  (And by we, I don’t mean just conservatives, but also the independents who won him the election, and the higher number of blacks, Hispanics, married women, and young people than any Republican president has won in over 40 years!)  Those of us who loathed Biden – and those who gave him a chance, but quickly soured on his nasty, incompetent governing and obvious mental deficiencies – weren’t happy, but we didn’t riot for months like antifa and BLM, and we didn’t try to assassinate him.  Most of us thought the election had been rigged, but we couldn’t prove that it had been stolen, so that’s the way it goes.  He won a narrow victory, so he got to set the agenda, and we had to live to fight another day. 

Well, now it’s another day, and we played by the rules, and we won.  Convincingly, if narrowly in the popular vote.  But now we’re told that we can’t get what he ran on, because it makes the other side mad?   To quote Dr. Evil, “How about NO!” 

I think that defying the will of the majority of the people in that way is dangerous, and I think that what Schumer illegally threatened to do to judges who defied his will could eventually happen to the far left: they’re sowing the wind, and they might end up reaping the whirlwind. 

I REALLY don’t want that to happen, and because I’m fundamentally an optimist, I don’t think that it will.  But the Boasberg-types on the district courts are playing with fire.

To wrap up (finally! 😊), I think a healthy fear of the kinds of tensions I’ve just summarized is part of what underlies the conservative/originalist view of the constitution and SCOTUS: judges should be humble, and do their best to rule based on what the constitution says, regardless of their own political preferences.   (Thus conservative judges often vote against their own politics, as when Scalia upheld flag burning, even though he repeatedly said that he’d love to see it outlawed, etc.) 

The progressive judicial view, on the other hand, is “the living constitution” theory, which holds that since society is always evolving, SCOTUS should be willing to change our laws to reflect that evolution.  (Sarcastic jerks like me call this the “just make shit up” approach. 😊) And they don’t mean to do that through constitutional amendments, the way the mostly conservative, genius Founders set things up – which is very difficult to do, b/c it involves that pesky “respecting democracy” stuff — but through fiat, by the diktat of 5 legislators in robes.

Two quick examples of that: Before Roe, the entire nation was working through the issue of abortion on a traditional, consent-of-the-governed, federalist basis: conservative states were passing laws to make abortions harder to get, and liberal ones were making them easier.  But then SCOTUS stepped in and short-circuited the democratic process, and dictated a poorly reasoned and controversial new “law of the land,” forcing it down on all 50 states.

The Obergefell decision in 2015 did the same thing with gay marriage.  Laws on that issue were being proposed, debated and voted on in many states. (And, infuriatingly to progressives, usually being voted down, even in deep-blue CA.)  Then SCOTUS stepped in, “discovered” that the Founders and the constitution had always wanted gay marriage everywhere, and forced that decision on all 50 states. 

Interestingly, I think the intervening years have proven that even though both of those decisions were arrived at in an unconstitutional and wrong way, one of them has the democratic approval of the voters, and the other does not.  Obergefell is the former: society was evolving toward more tolerance of gay marriage, and many if not most states would likely have approved it by now anyway.

(In fact, even in 2015, a reasonable, democratic compromise was being worked out.  “Civil union” laws were being passed that stopped discrimination against gays in relationships – not recognizing their marital rights in divorce or inheritance, or their right to ‘next of kin/spousal privileges’ in health care situations, etc. – without coercing the majority into calling that “marriage,” when marriage had never meant that before.  That seems like a reasonable, compassionate way to work out some differences without screwing with people you disagree with.  And it was interrupted by an arrogant court who acted like a legislature – a fundamental breach of our Founding and constitutional law – and created a new law.)

How do I know that Obergefell has democratic approval, despite the legally illegitimate way it was forced on us?  Because even though it’s only 10 years old, and many millions of Americans still don’t accept the validity of calling gay unions “marriage,” there have been no serious challenges or widespread social unrest over it.  The country has accepted it and moved on.

The Roe court did the same thing – legislating from the bench in a way that invalidated the many state legislative debates about abortion that were going on, and dictating to the entire nation by making up a new, foundational law that had never existed before.  But the reaction was the opposite of that to Obergefell: that law was fought over and challenged constantly for 50 years, with no signs of passions diminishing.  Every January, millions of Americans protested in frigid temps in DC in the March for Life, which mourned the anniversary of the Roe decision.  And finally, after half a century, a quasi-originalist/conservative court undid the Roe mistake (IMHO), in Dobbs.

I know that most progressives are still outraged because they think that Dobbs “banned abortion.”  But of course it did nothing of the sort!  It just sent abortion back to the states, where it belonged.  And the enthusiasm for abortion rights in most blue states has given Dems a lot of electoral victories over the GOP in the last 3 years, and by some counts, there are more abortions happening now that there were before Dobbs.  (Which I find depressing, as democratic outcomes often are.)

The result of Dobbs can best be summarized in a political cartoon I saw in its aftermath: an  angry pro-choice crowd is confronting the SCOTUS justices.  Their screams are in a speech bubble: “5 judges should not be allowed to dictate abortion law!”  And a thought bubble over the 5 quasi-originalist judges says, “That’s exactly what we just said!” 

So I think Dobbs resulted in a just outcome: conservative states in which voters believe that abortion after viability – or 15 weeks, or 6 weeks, or whatever the voters decide – is infanticide-adjacent have banned later term abortions, with the big 3 exceptions.  Progressive states, in which voters believe that a baby is part of the mother’s body rather than a separate entity, or at least that a mother’s choice supersedes those of a fetus/zygote/tissue mass/baby (?), have passed laws that allow abortion – in 9 states plus DC, right up until the moment of birth!  (I almost can’t believe that that is true, but in AK, OR, CO, NM, MN, MI, MD, NJ and VT, if a doctor can get a scalpel into a baby’s skull before it crowns out of the birth canal, that killing is totally legal!)

As a conservative, and a sinful, flawed follower of Uncle Jesus, I appreciate our federalist system, which allows me to not violate my conscience on this issue.  I am free to (and will) never live in a blue state that would force me to tolerate (and pay for) abortions after viability, which I believe is murder. 

Similarly, progressives are free to never live in a red state governed by laws passed by troglodyte, evil, patriarchal fascists like me (in their view 😊) who would prevent them from aborting their babies at will.

In this fallen world, I think that is the best possible outcome we’re likely to ever get.  Especially when the alternative is to allow arrogant judges to force everyone to violate their consciences based on those judges’ whims, and/or whoever controls the White House and congress on any given day.” 

On Lawfare, Rule of Law, and SCOTUS, Part 1 (posted 5/7/25)

If you missed my column on Monday, I mentioned that I’d be posting parts of a debate I’ve been having with a good old friend of mine who is a committed lefty.  I value his friendship – and that of a handful of other long-time leftist friends – in part because knowing him reminds me that everybody on the other side isn’t like the morally bankrupt dullards who make up the elite left, and run the national Democrat party!

There are good Democrats out there, and we shouldn’t be enemies, or let our differences end friendships.  (Unless they make that choice by demanding our agreement with, or submission to, their ideas.)  Their arguments can clarify issues, sharpen our thinking, and sometimes change our minds. 

And while life is too short to get upset over politics, a spirited debate with a good-faith interlocutor who is open to reasonable argument is one of the pleasures of a well-rounded life.  So I thought I’d post some excerpts in the hopes that at least some in CO nation will find this discussion interesting.

I’ve done some editing to remove some personal information and summarize some context, and my friend’s framing of the issues.  (So this won’t really be a debate, as much as my half of it, responding to the topics he raises.)    

This discussion started with him advancing the idea that Trump has repeatedly acted lawlessly, citing the many court cases against him in 2023-24, his conviction on so many counts in the Stormy Daniels case, and especially his defiance of SCOTUS and resistance to giving due process to many deportees, and especially Kilmar Garcia.  And he ended his email to me with a rhetorical challenge as to whether I think everyone should follow “the rule of law.”

I discussed the many flaws in the lawfare cases against Trump, but I agreed with him that Trump would have been better served just bringing Kilmar back – but only to a detention center, where he would get a quickie hearing confirming the original two judges’ decision that he was here illegally, and associated with MS-13.  Then he could be immediately re-deported, but just not to the CECOT prison.

What follows are my thoughts on the “rule of law” as national Democrats are using it, and then on the way Biden and Obama adhered (or didn’t) to the rule of law:   

“Moving on to something that I think we might only mostly agree on, but you can tell me: yes, we should abide by the rule of law.  But as a blanket statement, that hides several types of complications that I’m sure neither one of us would agree to.  To take the most glaring type of examples: If you and I were alive in 1858, the law of the land included the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857), which meant that blacks could never be citizens, and if an escaped slave made it to your farmhouse, you’d be required to hold him at gunpoint and give him back to his master.  A century later, we’d both have to accept segregated schools, because “separate but equal” was the law of the land until Brown v Board of Education changed it.  And Lincoln famously suspended one of the central legal concepts in our system, habeas corpus (for years, and in contravention of multiple specific rulings from the Taney SCOTUS that he had no authority to do so), when the alternative was to make it harder to fight the South.

So neither of us would accept “submit to the rule of law” as a universal statement.  I’m obviously not comparing any action of Trump or any of our courts now to Dred or Brown.  I’m just pointing out that the rhetorical question, “do you believe in rule of law or not?” creates a false binary that you would not accept 100% any more than I would.

But let me get to a relevant, real-world application of the rule of law idea.  Over 100 legal cases have been filed, and district court judges’ TRO’s have been put on practically every action Trump has taken (from hiring and firing in the executive branch, to enforcing our immigration laws, to stopping Harvard from allowing bullies to violate our civil rights laws in their attacks on Jews, to stopping biological males from going into women’s sports, showers and bathrooms) which is unprecedented.

By comparison, I think I remember that the first TRO ever filed by a district court judge in US history was in the mid-1960s, and the total injunctions against all presidents before this year is around 100.  (As I understand it, before then, nobody ever thought that a local judge – one of 677 nationwide – had the authority to dictate legal and political action in the entire country.  I’m not sure how or why that understanding, which seems like commonsense to me, has morphed into our current situation, in which we now have 677 unelected, de facto shadow presidents who can dictate nationwide policy and paralyze the executive branch, potentially for months or years on end.)  In other words, more have been filed in Trump’s first 90 days than were filed in all of prior US history.

The right-wing commentariat sees that as proof that the left is engaging in a defiant, lawless wave of “lawfare” and an assault on democracy, since it is meant to deny a legitimately elected president whom they hate the ability to carry out the constitutionally prescribed duties of the chief executive.

The left-wing commentariat sees that as proof of Trump’s lawlessness.  “Look at all of that smoke – there has to be a fire there!  These judges are only taking their constitutionally sanctioned jobs seriously, and checking an executive whom they believe is ignoring the rule of law.”  In fact, most of the legacy media lefties are treating the amount of judges ruling (temporarily) against Trump as prima facie evidence that he’s in the wrong.

I think that’s a fair summary of the two sides’ positions, and there are two ways to decide who is closer to right.  The one that we should all do as citizens is to look at the cases and the arguments, and use our God-given reason to evaluate the evidence to come to a conclusion.  (I expect that you and I will do a lot of this in the coming weeks or months, and I look forward to it!)

But the one way that matters most in the real world is obviously what happens when all of these cases are settled, either at the appellate level or the SCOTUS level. If the lawyers you cited a couple months ago are right, and Trump loses the vast majority of these cases on appeal or at SCOTUS, and he then defies those rulings, you’ll be able to say that he’s violating the rule of law, possibly even as much as Biden did.  (More on that below.) 

If, on the other hand, I’m right, and Trump wins the majority of these cases – either because an appellate court found for him and SCOTUS didn’t take it up on appeal, or because lower courts found against him and SCOTUS reversed them – will you then agree that “the rule of law” dictates that you and all of the progressives in the nation cannot legally prevent Trump from carrying out Obama-style deportations, streamlining executive agencies, protecting women from biological males in sports and bathrooms, forcing the Ivy League to either comply with federal civil rights laws or lose federal funds, etc.? 

I’m going to guess that’s a hard NO! 😊 If so, will you then be a proud conscientious objector to “the rule of law?”  And if that’s the case, are you sure that you’re as devoted to the rule of law as you’ve thought you were?  I’m not trying to irritate you, but I think that’s worth contemplating.

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Finally, I share some of your concerns about the role of SCOTUS, but I’d like to save that for my next email.  Instead, I’d like to end with 4 examples (not counting Biden’s systematic breaking of our immigration laws) of issues on which Biden and the Dems have openly violated and flouted SCOTUS rulings, and see how many of them you agree with me on.  I’m not bringing them up to make a tu quoque argument, but to explore your ideas about rule of law.

The four issues are: illegal student loan “forgiveness,” forced covid vaccine use, illegal eviction moratoria, and sanctuary city/state violations of the supremacy clause.  I’ve summarized them, but if you already know them well, you can just skim to the bottom.

1. The student loan “forgiveness” program.  This was obviously popular with a couple of groups who are (unexpectedly!) a big part of the Democrat support base: students who had school loans, and universities who would profit greatly from more students attending in the belief they would be able to stick the taxpayers with the bill.

If Biden wanted to do this legitimately, he could have tried to get a bill passed through congress and then sign it.  But he knew that he couldn’t do that, because the majority of Americans hated the idea. (That pesky democracy again!) So he acted unilaterally, and simply declared that many billions of dollars of school debt was no longer the responsibility of those who had borrowed it and benefited from it, but of the taxpayers.  He first attempted to do it in August of 2022, and even NPR admitted that “its warm reception by younger voters may have contributed to Democrats’ better than expected showing in the midterms.”

Of course Biden didn’t care that this cynical, illegal vote-buying scheme was clearly unconstitutional – it helped him stop a GOP “red wave.”  And by the time SCOTUS shot it down (duh!) in June of 2023, he’d unethically gotten the result he wanted.  But Biden still didn’t abide by the rule of law; instead, he pushed the work-around SAVE act, which tried to do the same thing, except by instituting an income-based repayment plan, with a shortened time until the remaining balance would be forgiven.  (The result was the same: billions of debt transferred from those who owed it to those who didn’t!)  

By August of 2024, that plan too had been stopped by appellate courts, and SCOTUS finally killed it on the same grounds as before: a president isn’t a king who can unilaterally stick a bunch of poor and working-class people with the debts voluntarily taken out by generally richer college graduates. 

And rather than accepting that the courts had gone against him, Biden demonized the GOP and the courts, accusing them of “literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives.  These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working class and middle class Americans.”

Ugh!  You can’t get more dishonest than telling people that the GOP wouldn’t let him “forgive their student debt,” when he knew damn well that he couldn’t legally do that.   If that wasn’t bad enough, he then bragged about defying the rule of law: “The Supreme Court blocked us.  But that didn’t stop us.  We continued to find ways to reduce student payments.”

2.  Biden and the Dems did the same thing with the covid vaccine mandates.  In 2022 – over a year after we knew for certain that the vax did not prevent you from getting it or spreading it, and after a lot of evidence of the danger of sometimes deadly and often lifetime-injury-causing heart damage (myocarditis and pericarditis) in young people, especially males – Biden rammed through a requirement forcing federal employees to take the experimental shot or lose their jobs.  (No more spouting off about “my body, my choice!”)  He also tried to force large private employers to coerce their employees to take the shot.  Even as he was doing that, he admitted that SCOTUS might say that it was unconstitutional…but he did it anyway.  Eventually SCOTUS slapped down those policies, but not until millions of healthy people had been strong-armed into submitting.

3. When he first came into office, Biden pushed a moratorium on tenants having to pay rent for a few months, and then he extended it for 3 more months.  At least he tried to use congress to pay for this, though he only secured $25 billion in aid, which was already $80 billion short of what was needed to cover the rent that tenants had stopped paying by late spring.  A responsible pol would have either gone back for more cash, or else told the public the free rent had to stop.  Instead, Biden extended his federal eviction moratorium that Congress had NOT authorized (and which was clearly unconstitutional on its face) and that he knew wouldn’t be paid for, forcing landlords to allow their tenants to squat in their properties for the foreseeable future.

As you can imagine, that was personal for me, since it threatened to bankrupt me.  I know some lefties loved the idea of poorer tenants getting to stick it to “rich” landlords, except that many small landlords like me rely on rents being paid to survive.  (Not to mention the fact that stealing is wrong, even if you empathize with the thief and hate his victim!)  And of course the Dems didn’t force the REALLY rich –  huge corporations like Deutsche Bank, Chase, Bank of America, etc. – to take it in the shorts.  Only guys like me.

So my tenants could tell me to suck it, and sit in my houses without paying.  But I didn’t get a “mortgage moratorium” – if I had stopped paying my mortgages to Chase for six months, they’d have taken my houses from me. 

SCOTUS finally ruled the obvious way in June of 2021, ordering the Dems to stop boning landlords.  So what did the “Rule of Law” party do?  (Can you tell this example gets me especially pissed? 😊)  They told SCOTUS to stick it, and kept screwing landlords for three more months, forcing them to apply for emergency relief, which SCOTUS finally gave them in a pointed opinion at the end of August, after 8 months of Biden-caused losses.  

(I didn’t have any losses, because I live in a state with a great governor who declared that squatting wasn’t going to work in Florida.  And because I’ve got good tenants.  And because any tenants who tried to stiff me would have seen the murder in my eyes, as well as the likelihood that I’d burn my own property down before I’d let some deadbeat squat in it.  Because: Appalachia!)

4. The sanctuary city/state policies that many progressive local governments have are also clearly illegal as well.  But when some GOP governors and pols (and now Trump) started talking about withholding federal funds to get compliance, the progressives said that the GOP was the law violator.  Because sanctuary cities should be able to break federal laws at will, while still being entitled to full funding from the government whose laws they are breaking, I guess?

This despite a lot of precedent from the 1970s and 80s, in which multiple SCOTUS rulings said that the federal government could withhold federal highway funds (for one example) to coerce states into following federal wishes (not even laws, but just things the feds wanted!), e.g. changing speed limits or drinking ages to ones the feds approved of. 

In all of the above cases, when SCOTUS – not a partisan lower court judge, but the highest court – ruled against lefty wishes, Biden and Dems showed no respect for the rule of law.  He defied one ruling after another, demonized SCOTUS on student loan “forgiveness,” said that the vax ruling was “a mistake,” and also smeared the obviously correct affirmative action/racial discrimination ruling against Harvard as evidence that “this is not a normal court.” 

And I don’t remember Chris Van Hollen or any other national Democrat excoriating Biden for flouting the rule of law! (In fact, Chuck Schumer directly threatened SCOTUS judges whose rulings he didn’t like: “You’ll never know what hit you, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, you’ll reap the whirlwind…”)”

Okay, this hasn’t been my usual snark-fest of a column, but I’m curious to hear CO nation’s thoughts. 

For those who are willing to persevere, I’ll post more tomorrow, this time on the likelihood of an actual “constitutional crisis” if this lawfare persists…

Hamas delenda est!

Tim Walz Thinks He Can Talk to Regular Guys, & a Greek Lady Blows Herself Up (Posted 5/5/25)

I’ve got a hodge podge of stories for you this Monday, starting with the results from Friday’s semi-final round of the April Moron of the Month competition.  This vote was the closest so far, with Chris Van Halen edging out the broke baristas and Grandma Squanto to move on from the southern division.

So the competition has come down to four finalists, in reverse chronological order: 

Chris Van Hollen in his role as a dim-witted Juliet with a school-girl crush on brooding, gang-banging wife-beater Kilmar “Romeo” Garcia

Michelle Obama for her performance as a narcissist, and also a bitter, angry, black woman upset by the stereotype of black women as angry and bitter  

Elie Mystal, a racist, public “intellectual” who apparently thinks the constitution was written after 1965, and

Jasmine “Lashes” Crockett, another thick-as-a-whale-omelette racist who thought she was taking the moral high ground by arguing that we should allow illegals to stay here because… wait for it… we need them to be our slaves! 

If you need to refresh your memory on the finalists, you can see their nominating write-ups in four of my April columns, available at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Get your votes in this week, and I’ll announce the winner on Friday.  

Among the many worthy contestants I could have written about as April MOM contestants was former VP candidate Tim Walz, who recently gave a speech at Harvard (because of course he did) that touched on why Que Mala chose him as her VP pick. 

You’ve all heard his explanation: “I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease.  I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can… vote for this.”

Or maybe we can’t.

I don’t claim to be King of the White Guys with pickup trucks who like football – though I am a member of the Ruling Council – but phony phrases like “code talking” are just the kind of idiotic language that we laugh at during our Council meetings. 

The word “code” implies some mysterious language, shared by a small in-group that is opaque to the larger world.  It calls to mind secret writing in invisible ink, Enigma machines, or Navajo code-talkers who outfoxed our enemies in WWII by using their obscure dialect that no outsiders could understand.

But men are almost half of the population, and we’re not particularly mysterious.  A thousand hack comics have done a thousand cliched bits about the limited set of interests – in addition to the aforementioned football and pickup trucks – that most men have: ancient Rome, World War II, action movies, women with a .7 waist-to-hip ratio and who like men, and 2-3 items from the following list: fishing, hunting, MMA, booze, cigars, and guns. 

Even when it comes to politics, we’re pretty predictable.  Give us lower taxes, law and order, free speech, merit-based rules, men kept out of women’s sports and spaces, and the right to shoot criminals who try to victimize us, and we’re good. 

Did you notice some of the stuff NOT on that list?

Jazz hands, crazy wives, tampons in men’s bathrooms, struggling to load a shotgun as if you’d never seen a shotgun before, and abandoning your National Guard unit right before you’re supposed to deploy with them to a war zone.  

Oh, and you know what NO pick-up driving, football-watching white guy would EVER seek from a theatre-kid, Temu Midwestern guy weirdo in a million years? 

“Permission” to vote the way we want to.

Which leaves only one thing we agree with Tim Walz about: he’s a knucklehead.

From Greece comes a new entry in the “Stupid Criminals” category:  

I have not kept up on a lot of current events in Greece, but apparently they’ve got a problem with crime, just like everywhere else.  Some of that problem comes from radical leftist groups who think that using violence to achieve their political ends is justified. 

Unexpectedly!

One such group calling itself Revolutionary Class Struggle – I hereby subtract 10 points for lack of originality – has recently decided to start bombing public buildings such as train stations.  One of their suspected members, a 38-year-old woman with a criminal record, carried out another bombing last Saturday morning.  

Her target was a bank building’s ATM.  She was apparently a firm believer in the old Greek saying, “Αν θέλετε κάτι να γίνει σωστά, κάντε το μόνοι σας.”  (“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”)

Because she took the bomb to the bank herself.  Unfortunately for her, just when she got to the site, she experienced the heartbreak of premature detonation.  She was carrying the bomb in her hands when it went off, and was so badly wounded that she was rushed to a nearby ancient amphitheater, where she died dramatically on stage.

Just kidding.  She was taken to a hospital and died there.  

No security video from the ATM has been released, but I’m guessing it sounded something like this:

“iii laos, enomenos, den mporei pote na ittithei – mpoum!”

Translation: “The people, united, can never be defeat—Boom!”

Followed by: “och!  ta car mou!  metaniono amesos gia tis apophases mou!”

Translation: “Ouch!  My hands!  I immediately regret my decisions!”

You may be wondering, “Martin, do you think your old Greek professor would be proud of you using English-to-Greek translation software to make fun of a leftist Greek terrorist getting blown up by her own bomb, instead of translating Aristotle, or the New Testament?”

Fine.  You got me.  I’m a complicated man, and though I love Greek philosophy and the New Testament, I’m also not above enjoying a little Three-Stooges-style illustration of the “you reap what you sow” verses.   

Especially when it comes at the expense of a would-be terrorist who apparently knew as little about bombs as Tim Walz knows about shotguns.

And just like the citizens of California, and New York, and Illinois, and other blue states and cities all over the world, that Greek gal learned a valuable, universal lesson: leftist plans tend to blow up in your face!

Okay, that’s it for my Monday column. 

Over the next several days, I’m going to post a few columns that are unusual for me.  I’ve been corresponding with several lefty friends, and one of them challenged me on the question of rule of law, and what I think of Trump’s defying SCOTUS in getting Kilmar back from El Salvador.  I gave him my thoughts, but also pointed out the many ways that Biden (and Obama) have defied the rule of law and the courts.

I then got to thinking about the nature of SCOTUS, and the ways in which its past and recent actions could potentially lead to an actual “constitutional crisis” – unlike the faux ones that the left imagines every time Trump does something they don’t like.

The result is several columns’ worth of my more-sober-than-usual thoughts on the courts.  I’ll be interested in seeing what many in CO nation think of those, and especially what any lawyers here may add, in terms of corrections and explanations…

Hamas delenda est!

The Final April Moron of the Month Nominees (posted 5/2/25)

Now that May is here, it’s time to complete the April Moron of the Month nominations.  For this final round, we have three nominees from the southern division.  Next week I’ll put the four “winners” from all divisions up to a full vote of CO Nation.

Our first nominee today arose during the raging debate about whether Trump should be allowed to do what all presidents before him were allowed to do – i.e. deport people who came here illegally.  In their zeal to jump on a political grenade, and thus cling like grim death to the 5% side of a 95-5 political issue, the Dems scoured the countryside to find what I’ve called “a self-detonating hero.”

First they picked Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Hamas activist at Columbia.  But since he was here on a student visa, he wasn’t a good pawn for the Dems who were trying to scare Americans that American citizens could be deported next.  So they went looking for an innocent, sympathetic American citizen whom Trump’s Gestapo illegally deported…annnnnndddd… they couldn’t find one. 

Because they’re lying, and Trump isn’t deporting squeaky clean seminarians who are also American citizens. 

So they eventually landed on Kilmar Abrego Garcia and said, “Close enough.  He’s married to an American citizen and has a couple of citizen kids, so we’ll call him a ‘Maryland father’ and lean in on the pathos.”

This struck many elected Dems as a great idea, and one of them elbowed his way to the front of that low-IQ pack.  This man, and today’s first nominee, is Senator Chris Van Hollen, a man so bland that even a political junkie like me could not have recognized his face or his name a month ago.  (And I remember that Senator Flat-Top from Montana who just lost was named Jon Tester.)

If you had put a gun to my head in March and said, “Tell me who Chris Van Hollen is or I’ll blow your head off!” I would have immediately started flop-sweating and guessing. 

“Um, the black guy who’s reasonable about 10% of the time?” (No, that’s Van Jones.)

“Uh, the great Irish singer?” (That’s Van Morrison.)

“Okay… that space thing?” (You mean the Van Allen Belt?)

“The classical pianist?” (That’s Van Cliburn.)

“Just shoot me already!”

And, scene.

Anyway, this mediocre man took one look at Kilmar the tattooed wife beater (allegedly) (but c’mon!), and saw his big chance.  He ran in front of the cameras and began to pontificate.  “Donald Trump’s midnight kidnapping and subsequent illegal deportation of my constituent Kilmar cannot be allowed to stand!  I am going to go to El Salvador myself, and demand to see him!”

And the reporters all looked at each other.  Then one said, “And you are?”

And Van Hollen drew himself up to his full height – probably 5’5”, though I haven’t checked – and said, “Senator Chris Van Hollen!”

After a long moment of blank stares, one reporter pointed to him and said, “Ooh!  Were you the drummer, when Eddie was shredding on the guitar and Roth was the front man?!”

“Um, no.  That was Alex Van Halen.  I’m Chris Van Hollen.”

And the reporters gave a disappointed groan.  “Awwww.”

But they soon realized that they might be able to use what’s-his-name to hurt Trump, if it turned out that Kilmar had been tortured in El Salvador.  So they encouraged his delusions of relevance, and followed him south. 

You know the rest.  Van Hollen flew to El Salvador, bloviated for the cameras, and eventually got to go on a dream date with everyone’s favorite Maryland man.  

They stared deep into each other’s eyes, while Van Hollen stroked Kilmar’s hand — although that may have been to try to cover up the gang tattoos – while Kilmar whispered in a throaty Spanish accent, “My turn-ons are long walks on the beach, giving my wife a pop when she gets a little mouthy, and human trafficking.  My turn-offs are the rule of law and Hulk Homan™.”

It was a PR disaster.  (Unexpectedly!)

Within two weeks, Van Hollen went from total unknown, to vaguely recognizable opportunist, to political poison.  When several elected Dems with ten-cent heads followed in his footsteps and flew to El Salvador a few days later, the party leaders had a fit.  Hakeem Jeffries had to make a humiliating public statement: No more going to El Salvador, you morons.  

Our second nominee is an old favorite: the Pale Pawnee, the Translucent Tonkawa, the Land o’ Lakes Butter Maiden come to life… Grandma Squanto Warren!  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

She might have qualified based on one tweet alone, from April 21st.  She was responding to Trump’s announcement that student loan repayment was going to re-start, after 5 years of using covid as an excuse for embracing dead-beat borrower status. 

This was one of Trump’s most popular actions, and a smart politician would have kept her powder dry on this one.  Or I guess in her case, her arrows quivered?

But not “Ghost Dances with Entitlement.”  She fired off this tweet: “This decision is all about punishing student loan borrowers.  Instead of lowering costs, Trump wants to take money out of your grandma’s Social Security check.”

What can you even say about that?  Other than, “Shameless!” and “Feh!”  Insisting that borrowers pay what they owe is “punishing them?”  And why drag grandma and her social security check into this?

But that wasn’t Warren’s low-light of the month.  Because that came in the podcast interview she did with a guy named Sam Fragoso — and if you haven’t seen it, you should. 

Fragoso comes across as a non-threatening presence – he’s got the vibe of somebody who might be halfway through a transition, and I’m not sure which direction he’s going in.  But he has enough integrity to at least push back when Warren is obviously lying.

The topic was Biden’s mental condition, and when Fragoso asked if she regretted saying that “Biden had a mental acuity” and “a sharpness to him,” Lizzie tried.  After an awkward pause, she said, “I said what I believed to be true.”

When Fragoso gently followed up, “Do you think he was as sharp as you?” it caught her by surprise.  She let the mask slip for a moment, and almost laughed at that absurd idea, before salvaging a careful, “I…said that… I had not seen a decline.”

A few seconds later, she gave it the old war-path try: “The thing is… he… Look. He was sharp, he was on his feet, I saw him, live event—”

Fragoso once again showed more integrity than the MSM hacks she is used to dealing with, because he interrupted her with a little sarcasm: “Senator, ‘on his feet’ is not praise!  He can speak in sentences is not praise.”

And Liz visibly crumbled, shaking her head and grimacing guiltily.  “All right.  Fair enough, fair enough.” 

Her surrender couldn’t have been more clear if she had recited the last lines of her ancestor, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce’s famous surrender speech: “Hear me, my chiefs; my heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Of course, she’s a phony politician, and her interviewer is sympathetic to the leftist cause.  So when she followed with the lamest rhetorical escape attempt – saying, “The question is… what are we going to do now?” Fragoso said okay, and let her move on to talking about how the Dems are going to resist Trump. 

But for that brief, shining moment, she looked as dumb as she had when she proudly announced that her DNA test proved that she was Native American

.0000023 % Native American!

My final nominee is a departure, in that it is not an individual, but a group: the baristas who work at a small, upscale chain of Minnesota coffee shops called Café Ceres. 

Last fall, the coffee-slingers at all four locations voted to unionize, and then started a six-month negotiation.  Though they ended up earning in the range of $25-30 an hour with tips, plus 80% coverage of their insurance premiums, that was not enough.  They also demanded “a role in managing the business” including deciding where the chain sourced its milk, and the right to wear pro-Hamas pins at work. 

Annnnddddd…the owners said screw it, and closed the business.  (Unexpectedly!)

To which the only reasonable response is one firm blast from the sad trombone (Wah, wahhhh!), followed by a chorus of, “Ha! HA! HA HA!  HA HA HA!”

The denouement of this episode of “FAFO Comes to Breakfast” was a hilariously tone-deaf and delusional press release from the entitled workers, after they discovered that the real minimum wage is zero:

“We bargained with the company for 6 months, fighting them each step of the way to include immigration protections, fair wages, healthcare, and to secure DEI values…. We’re devastated…. We’re now faced with the harsh reality of finding new work and making last minute plans to stay secure.” 

You mean that your employer wasn’t eager to put up with your stupid DEI values, just for the privilege of trying to manage a group of surly employees who “fight them every step of the way?”   The hell you say!

They’ve got one thing right, though: they are now facing harsh reality. 

And if they can actually look in a mirror, and learn from this experience – throwing the pro-Hamas pin in the trash would also be a good move – it might not be too late for some of them to avoid that particular circle of Dante’s Inferno that they had been heading for.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Circle of the Bitter, Entitled, Leftist Cat Ladies.

Because as their former employers and boyfriends who dodged that bullet warn anyone willing to listen, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter there!”

Okay CO nation, place your votes…

…and Hamas delenda est!

My Report Card on Trump’s First 100 Days (posted 4/30/25)

Though I got too busy to respond to the comments on Monday’s column, it’s clear that Michelle Obama has advanced out of the semi-finals in the Moron of the Month competition.  And let me thank you all for your votes, and your kind comments.

However, when I mentioned that I am not going to succumb to the requests to post nude selfies on my website in a desperate attempt to boost my subscriber count, some of you – a hurtful number, to be honest – insisted that you wouldn’t want that anyway.

Jennifer England Land was typical, posting, “Here for the words not the nudes.”

Nice try, Jennifer, but I know all about reverse psychology, and I’m not going to fall for your sneaky ploy.  I’ve spoken with your husband, and we both agree that you need to take a cold shower and focus on the political humor. 

Now if I can just repeatedly snap my fingers and remind everyone in CO nation that my eyes are up here, I’ll continue with my report card on Trump’s First 100 Days.   

To celebrate the fact that the Cubs have not yet been mathematically eliminated from this year’s playoff race, I’m going to say that I think Trump is batting around .750 right now, which is the best since Reagan by a long shot, and roughly .749 better than Biden.   

(It’s hard to assess a comparable batting average for Reagan, because the political game was so different in the 1980s.  We weren’t the brokest nation in history, owing $36 trillion; there were only two genders, and a “tranny” was in your car, rather than in a library reading books to toddlers; and the national Democrats hadn’t completely taken leave of their senses.) 

I’ll break down the good Trump and the bad Trump, starting with the bad, in the spirit of following a little medicine with a whole lot of sugar.  If any of you are always-Trumpers, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs.  Or better yet, you might want to read them, and get some constructive criticism from an ally who really wants to see him succeed.  

I think that Trump has only made three wrong moves of any consequence so far.  The most important is his flawed tariff roll-out, because it has potentially the biggest impact, since perceptions of the economy tend to bleed over into overall perceptions of an administration.

In the past Trump has used the element of surprise to his benefit before, especially in a military context.   “Is he going to take out Soleimani, or the top guy in Iran, or Putin?  Who knows?  But maybe.  So they better mind their business.”  But economic unpredictability doesn’t work as well, and needlessly screws with the kind of free-market investors and businesses whose lives conservatives should be making easier rather than harder.  

It’s unsettling that Trump seems to regard trade deficits and non-reciprocal tariffs as equivalent –they aren’t – and that he has unnecessarily treated our allies as harshly as he has our enemies, by hitting everyone with tariffs, including those who have little or no tariffs against us.

Having said all that, I think he’ll adjust course, and we’ll end up with at least marginally better deals with almost all nations within a year or so.  But when we need to get so much done in a very short time, our speed and efficiency is hampered, and everything is made harder when markets are roiled and the public is more sour about the overall economy than they had to be.

I think his second mistake was his handling of Ukraine, though I see that as a quasi-push.  He’s way better than Biden, and we needed to put Zelensky in time out and stop shoveling mountains of cash into Ukraine with no accountability.  But saying that Ukraine started the war is a lie, and a dumb one. 

Zelensky has a lot of flaws, and the Ukraine is corrupt and flawed too.  But Putin is an evil, mass-murdering KGB thug, and he started the war.  Going softer on him than you do on Ukraine hurts the chances for peace.  And going from promising, “I’ll end the war on day 1,” to “If Putin doesn’t come to the table, we’re walking,” is not a good look – and it’s what Putin wants anyway!

Trump’s third mistake is a result of his first: he contributed to the election loss of the solid conservative Pierre Poilievre in the Canadian election on Monday.  I’ve seen some conservatives blast claims that Trump is responsible, but they are only partially right.  Ultimately, of course, Canadian voters are to blame if they reject a good conservative for a lousy leftist one.

But several months ago, Poilievre was up by 20 in the polls, and an almost certain winner.  Trudeau and the liberals had been in power for 10 years, and had produced terrible results.  (Unexpectedly!) Trump or no Trump, the liberals’ chances of victory were improved by Trudeau’s resignation, and the fact that Mark Carney came in and did the two things most likely to produce a leftist victory: he reversed an unpopular leftist policy (axing a “green” gas tax) and shamelessly lied about his agenda.

But it wasn’t just Trump’s tariff battle that hurt Poilievre; his bluster about making another country our 51st state would arouse a sense of patriotism and resentment in the citizens of any nation, and it did here.

I love having Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador, and it would have been great to have a third strong conservative running a country in this hemisphere, especially in the closest country to us, geographically and financially.   And while this will hurt Canada worse than us, it’s still a senselessly missed opportunity. 

Okay, assuming the always-Trump contingent of CO nation has restrained themselves from burning me in effigy… I don’t just LIKE everything else Trump has been doing – I LOVE it!

Closing the border and deporting Biden’s 10 million illegals was the most serious challenge facing him, and Trump has been knocking both of those out of the park.  Hulk Homan™ is a superhero, and Stephen Miller is a dead-eyed killer of would-be troll journalists.  And the Democrats are earning their record low ratings by spooning with the worst tattooed gangbanging thugs they can find. 

Government waste and corruption had come to seem like an inevitable fact of life, but DOGE is making great progress, and will hopefully continue to apply to it the most powerful antidote of all: public exposure.

As an academic, I’ve been tortured for years by the blatant bias and arrogance of the smug left that has dominated our universities since before I was born.  But in just a few short months, Trump has fired volley after volley at the Ivory Towers, and now he is rolling the most ominous of his siege engines into place: federal dollars and the tax exemptions without which the anti-Semitic and anti-American narcissists inside cannot hold out for long!

Trump’s biggest weakness in his first term was inexperience, especially when it came to picking good personnel, and understanding how deeply embedded the human ticks of the deep state were in every government agency.  Now he knows so much more about both, and has upped his game immeasurably.

Just about every cabinet member and appointee has been a clear improvement over those in his first term, and he’s made innovative use of the weapons that the Dems left for him.  Rather than having to create something like DOGE from scratch, he repurposed Obama’s “Department of Governmental Efficiency.”  What had been a lie and distraction in Obama’s hands is now a battle axe in Trump’s, and he’s been cleaving dead weight from the bureaucracy like Arnold in a Conan movie.  

He similarly repurposed Biden’s CBP One app, which was formerly used to facilitate illegal entry into our country, and is now being used to warn and encourage those illegals to self-deport.  He also transformed the forgotten Roosevelt Reservation – a narrow strip of land along our southern border from the Pacific to Texas, established by TR in 1907 – into a “national defense area.”   This had two fantastic effects: it allowed the use of our military to supplement civilian border control forces, and it added enhanced criminal penalties for those who cross it illegally.    

The good news is coming in so many areas that it’s hard to keep up with.  Bobby Kennedy’s MAHA is off to a good start; the pulling back on counter-productive solar and wind farms and the ramping up of oil, natural gas, nuclear power and even cleaner coal is all great.  Getting rid of DEI and corrupt NGOs won’t just save us money, it will prevent the damage that that money was doing. 

On so many fronts, the “FA” phase is over, and the glorious “FO” phase has begun!

I’m still frustrated by how many delays are being caused by the illegitimate lawfare going on all over the country. But as the Dems and their arrogant, far-left judges keep going farther and farther, they are (hopefully!) only speeding up the day when a maddeningly reluctant SCOTUS is forced to move.  And since I’m an optimist, I have to believe that we’re going to win most of the battles ahead of us: the president has to be the one in charge of the executive branch, and the supremacy clause has to mean that federal enforcement is going to trump illegal sanctuary city efforts, and civil rights and Title IX rules have to trump the Jew haters on campus and women haters in women’s sports and spaces.

During the 47 years of the Biden administration, I constantly had to limit my exposure to current events, because it was so depressing to see the damage the left was doing to my country.  But now I can’t wait to get to the computer in the morning, and start scrolling through the mostly good news of the day, and good omens for the future.

Because I really do expect that as we head into mid-summer or so, the good news stories are going to start cascading.  The first trade deals are going to start to be signed, which will settle and then encourage the markets.  New manufacturing will either ramp up or start – chip-making in AZ, car-making in IN, power plants to replace failing solar and wind and to meet demand everywhere.

The court rulings are also going to start to come out, and those should have an excellent snowball effect.  There are probably a dozen TROs stopping Trump from cutting spending and firing unnecessary employees in multiple executive departments, and another dozen saying he can’t withhold federal funds to enforce federal laws, and many dozens saying he can’t deport illegals without years-long trials-of-the-century for each illegal.   If and when SCOTUS finally rules correctly on one case in each area, each precedent will cause many lawfare dominoes to tumble. 

The principle of “pour encourager les autres” – for the encouragement of others – will magnify each win, and create more momentum.  The two radical judges now facing charges after committing pro-illegal felonies, the various morons who have gotten caught vandalizing Teslas, the jihadi-enthusiasts on student visas who have now been kicked out – all of those are cautionary tales to all but the dumbest of the troublemakers.

Perhaps most importantly, when millions of illegals see the NGOs and sanctuary programs that used to support them ramping down, and ICE ramping up, and their countrymen getting caught and deported, they’ll start to self-deport. 

If we can settle some of the tariff uncertainty and continue the progress in so many areas, I think that although our House and Senate majorities are very thin, there’s even a decent chance we can avoid the historic pattern of a president losing the House and/or Senate in the midterms! 

If all of that happens, plus our wandering CO returns to us, our future will be bright indeed!

I leave you with two last thoughts:

No means no, Jennifer.

…and…

Hamas delenda est!

Third Round of Moron of the Month Candidates (posted 4/28/25)

As the end of the month nears, it’s time for the next elimination round in our April Madness “Moron of the Month” competition, featuring the Northern Division.    

We begin with Michelle Obama, nominated for the newest narcissistic dumpster fire episode of her struggling podcast.  She opens strong, by simultaneously playing the race and victim cards:

“We don’t articulate, as black women, our pain.  Because it’s almost like nobody ever gave us permission to do that.” 

Now I’m not going to pull a Lizzie Warren, and claim that though I appear to be a white guy, I actually identify as a Cherokee warrior, or a black woman.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher) Because that would be stupid. 

And I can’t claim an extensive and far-reaching knowledge of black women in general.  But from what I’ve seen and experienced, I know that if somebody asked me to identify an ethnic and gender cohort who are known for being shrinking-violet, passive types, I would not instinctively say, “Black women!”

In fact, if you asked me to name which gender generally tends toward a stoic, not-wear-their-pain-on-their-sleeves behavior, I’d say males. 

If you pushed me to choose the most stoic ethnic group among women, I’d say Russian women, though I’m not sure why.  I just picture them sitting in a crumbling, freezing apartment, wearing clunky shoes and an itchy, heavy dress the texture of a horse blanket for people, at a wobbly wooden table with legs that are different heights, sipping from a bowl of ice-cold beet soup, and not complaining. 

But even if I could be convinced that women in general, and black women in particular are loathe to complain or share their pain, I would still never believe that Michelle 0-freaking-bama ever displayed that tendency.  Because she has been complaining non-stop since the day she walked onto the national stage.

There’s a reason that her secret service code name was “Scowling Wookie.”  True story.  (By the way, Barack’s code name?  “Pete Buttigieg.”  You know why.)

If you still doubt me – and how dare you? – listen to this excerpt from a few minutes later: “As black women, we are so easily labeled as angry and bitter!” 

She said, angrily.

Holy cats.  If I never hear someone preface a statement with their race and gender again, it will be too soon. But if you insist on doing the tired old, “As a [insert defining modifier here] [insert second modifier here]…” at least bring some variety to the table!  For every 100 “As a Hispanic woman…” toss in an occasional “As a third-degree Mason with an extra finger on my right hand…” or “As a philatelist with eyes that are slightly different colors…” 

Have some consideration for the listener, you boring, identity-politics hack!

Also, gosh Michelle, I wonder how YOU ever got stereotyped as angry and bitter?  I’m sure it was unrelated to you saying that until your annoying husband got elected, you’d never been proud of your country.  And I’m sure it had nothing to do with the bone-jarring hits you used to dish out when you roamed the middle as a blitzing linebacker for TCU. 

I’m almost convinced that she acts like this because she believes that Americans like their first ladies the way they like their coffee: bitter and black.

Let’s skip ahead in the transcript a few minutes, and see what new topic she’s onto now:  “…that the first label they put on us, as black women, is that we ARE angry…” 

Ugh.  Really?  Okay, let me skip forward say, 20 more minutes.  (By the way, I just looked at the red bar on the bottom of the screen, and this episode goes on for an hour and 9 minutes!  Good lord!  To anyone who’s ever complained that my columns are too long, hang your head in shame!) 

Okay, dropping the cursor on the red bar again…now: “…and going to therapy, just to work all that out.  Like, what happened that 8 years that we were in the White House?  What did that do to me, internally, my soul.  We made it through.  We got out alive!  I hope we made the country proud.  My girls, thank God, are whole.  But what happened to ME?”

Man-oh-manischevitz!  “What did it do to me internally?!”  That’s something people who survive a mine collapse ask!  “We made it through? We got out alive?!”  That’s what guys said after the Bataan Death March.

I’ve had enough.  I’ve heard that her podcast is doing very poorly, and I can see why.  But I checked, and this insufferable woman has got 149,000 subscribers.  For a new podcast featuring someone as famous as she is, that’s lousy.

But if I can borrow a phrase from Michelle, how do you think that makes ME feel?  Even though I’m not a celebrity, I’ve been producing top-notch columns for you people for 8 years, and my WordPress site (Martinsimpsonwriting.com) has only 276 subscribers!

And before you remind me that if I’d only give in to the constant stream of requests to post some tasteful nudes of myself, I’d quickly have way more than 149K subscribers, I will tell you all for the LAST time: I want people to subscribe to my site for my mind, not because I’m a tantalizing bit of eye candy!

What I’m trying to say is that, as a white, male, hilarious genius with a firm jawline and a dusting of mild, adult-onset asthma, I think…

Oh, forget it. 

On to the second MOM candidate: Ben and Jerry.

Regular readers will remember that I wrote about the lefty ice cream company in late March, when their TDS-suffering CEO Dave Stever was fired by Unilever, the giant corporation that bought B&Js 25 years ago. 

Now they’re back in the news, because Ben and Jerry (or Mao and Jerry, or Ben and Lenin) are mad, and they want to buy the company back from Unilever.  They’ve been trying to gather investors, but it seems like the old commies are having difficulty finding capitalists to join forces with them. 

Unexpectedly!

The stories I’ve seen about the attempted buy-back point to a very odd arrangement, in which Unilever has owned the company for decades, but still had a relationship with B&J that involved tolerating their customer-alienating politics, and contributing $5 million a year to the Ben and Jerry Foundation, which advocates for causes like defunding the police, keeping men in women’s locker rooms and white people out of “positions of power in society,” cheerleading for abortion, and returning the US to the Indians who had stolen it from other Indians just before whitey got here.   

After years of increasing tension, Unilever has finally lost patience.  They told B&J that the business is not for sale, announced a July name-change to The Magnum Ice Cream Company, and issued an ultimatum that before they would continue to contribute to the B&J Foundation, they’d require an audit of it.

Ben and Jerry seem strangely unenthusiastic about that idea, perhaps because they’ve handled their foundation with all the competence and honesty with which the Clintons handled their foundation, or Jeffrey Epstein handled his Epstein Foundation for the Support of Wayward Under-Age Girls.

The WSJ summary of the story says that, “After tolerating decades of radioactive politics, Unilever appears keen to decontaminate Ben and Jerry’s.” 

That sounds about right.  Let’s give the final word – the final laughably clueless and self-indicting word – to Ben Cohen: “Ben and Jerry’s is a company with a soul.”

Yes it is.  And you literally sold that soul to a ginormous corporation for a king’s ransom 25 years ago, you capitalist pig in a Stalinist sheep’s clothing. 

I hope the new flavors from your brand are “Reagan Rocky Road,” “Elon Musk Mint,” and “Ayn Rand-berry,” and that you choke on them.   

Our last nominee is Mother Jones, for their April 12th story entitled, “Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs are Environmental Villains.”

I’m as shocked as you are by this.  Because I can’t believe that moldy old Mother Jones is still around, either! 

But it is, and apparently it hasn’t lost a step since its halcyon days of 57 years ago, when it was advocating for Timothy Leary, Ho Chi Minh, and hairy armpits on women.   And now that Nixon is dead, those lefty fossils have turned their ire on the real existential threat: dogs!

I probably don’t even have to tell you what they hate about God’s greatest gift to mankind, because you can already guess.  They claim that “the environmental impact” of dogs is “more insidious than is generally recognized.”

I’ll bet.  Since considering anything about dogs “insidious” is ridiculous.

You should reserve the word “insidious” for only the worst of the worst things in life.  Like communism, pedophilia, or the increasing popularity of soccer.

Not dogs, you idiots! 

They say that dogs “pollute waterways.”  But do you know what else pollutes waterways?  Skinny dipping with your super-gross white-guy dreads, Mother Jones writers!

They say that dogs disturb and kill shore birds.  But consider this, shore birds: Dogs don’t have wings, and you do!  So either flap your freaking wings and fly, or else be a lazy but tasty snack, Jonathan Livingston Seagull!

They don’t like the carbon dioxide that dogs produce…but I can’t help but notice how all the lefties at Mother Jones continue to obnoxiously inhale and exhale, while ignoring the agonal breathing of Mother Earth.   

They object to the environmental damage caused by dog feces, and yet they don’t have anything to say about either the human feces that covers their Mecca, San Francisco, or the fact that their president pooped on the Pope.  Which is probably why he died recently. 

I mean the Pope, not Biden. 

Or do I?

The article does mention a few benefits of dogs, including their contribution to the physical and mental health of their owners, and also their “vital roles in conservation work, such as in wildlife detection.”  Leave it to Mother Jones to make even a compliment to dogs sound pointless. 

“Wildlife detection?”  What does that even mean?  And I thought you just said that dogs are often detecting the hell out of shorebirds, and that that was a very bad thing?

I don’t need to defend dogs, but I will touch on a few benefits anyway.  They’re beautiful, loyal, and in the case of Aussie Shepherds, majestic and brilliant.  They can chase down and maul criminals and terrorists.  They can detect drugs, but then refrain from snorting all of those drugs and getting addicted and end up picking up bags of cash from corrupt foreigners to give to their awful politician fathers, like some laptop-losing degenerates I could mention.

They’re also great for the health of your children.  Because by carrying gross stuff into your house and then romping with your kids, they strengthen the kids’ immune systems, and prevent them from turning into frail bubble-boys raised on participation trophies and trigger warnings, and then either dying young because they touched a peanut, or – worse – turning into an obnoxious soy-boy DNC Vice Chair. 

Dogs are better than many people, and all of the staff at Mother Jones, and if there’s not a feasible way to release some of the first newly non-extinct dire wolves into their offices, I have a Plan B.

We tell them that we have a new breed of dog that is carbon-neutral, non-feces-producing, non-polluting, and gluten-free.  And then we introduce them to…wait for it…

Robot Flamethrowing Dogs! 

Please register your choice of the Northern Division options in the comments.

Hamas delenda est!

Return of the Dire Wolf, and of Students Paying their Own School Loans (posted 4/25/25)

First up, you probably saw the story a week ago that scientists in Texas have brought the dire wolf back from extinction.  And I’m all for it.

Not because I understand it, exactly.  The reports say that the Texans “used cloning and gene-editing” from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull, and then took blood cells from a living grey wolf (which is supposed to be the closest living relative to a dire wolf) and genetically mixed that with the old DNA.  Then they transferred that to an egg cell from a domestic dog, and then the embryos were transferred to surrogates for gestation and birth. 

Okay, now that I wrote that all out, it sounds very weird.  It also sounds like the result would actually be a dog/grey wolf/dire wolf mixture, rather than an actual pure, de-extinctified dire wolf.  (And yes, that should be a word.)

I’ll grant you that there are a few reasons to worry about the results.  For one thing, I’m pretty sure that Nancy Pelosi was created out of DNA from the teeth and skulls of various ancient Egyptians, mixed with the DNA of Lenin, and of a particularly dishonest used-car salesman.  And look what a disaster she turned out to be!

Plus there are the obvious, ominous Jurassic Park analogies.  Though I think I speak for all of us when I say that I’d much rather have a small pack of those hissing dinosaurs that killed Newman (from Seinfeld) running around, than just the one Nancy Pelosi.

On the other hand, bringing back an extinct wolf from 10,000 years ago is an impressive feat, and we optimists can find bright sides in it, too.  I mean sure, we could end up with the wolf equivalent of terrifying hissing dinosaurs, or a horrifically mummified nightmare of a Speaker of the House.  

But we could also end up with super-wolves that could help clean up the swamp.

Am I saying that we should release a pack of hungry dire wolves into congressional office buildings, then bar the doors from the outside and turn up Tom Petty’s album Hard Promises in our ear buds so we wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming?

I’m saying that we should have that conversation.

Also, “dire wolf” has got to be one of the best names for any natural creature, right up there with the Black Widow spider and the Venus Flytrap.   

I mean, “wolf” is already cool.  But “dire?” Are you kidding me?  That’s like the animal equivalent of naming your Russian leader “Ivan the Terrible,” or the pirates naming their chief  “The Dread Pirate Roberts.”

I looked up the derivation of the name “dire wolf” – because: me – and found that the Latin name is canis dirus, which means “fearsome dog.”    Which is AWESOME! 

And also a coincidence.  Because regular readers will know that my Aussie shepherd Cassie’s most common honorific is “the Wonder Dog.”  But a lesser known title of hers – most often used when an Amazon driver comes to the front door with one of my wife’s thrice-hourly deliveries – is “the Fearsome Dog.”  (“Cassius dirus.”)

True story. 

Anyway, even though I’m glad that the dire wolf is back, I hope that you all know that this fine animal’s re-emergence will not distract me from my focus on the most pressing of all canine or canine-adjacent developments. 

I’m speaking, of course, of our society’s urgent need for the fast-tracking of production of the first line of defense against future antifa, BLM, or pro-Hamas rioting mobs: the Robot Flamethrower Dog!

Trump’s re-election and Hulk Homan’s™ presence on the national scene have bought us some time.  But we need large numbers of RFDs, and we need them soon!

If I were in charge, I’d put Elon on that immediately.  He could start alpha testing with two RFDs roaming around every Tesla dealership.  I’d suggest using the video footage from the Tesla cameras to create a series of pay-per-view events. 

And before anyone else horns in on this fantastic idea, I hereby copyright the series name: “Apex Predators vs. Beta Males: The Culling of the Woke™”

In other feel-good news, Linda McMahon brought down a folding chair of reality on the heads of delinquent college-loan borrowers on Monday, announcing that as of May 5th, the feds will officially resume collecting on its defaulted federal student loan portfolio. 

Student loan payments were paused as part of the CARES ACT – passed by congress and signed by Trump in March of 2020, at the beginning of covid.  Although congress mandated that borrower repayment re-start in October of 2023, the Biden cabal ignored that law just as they did so many others.  

But now, after 5 years of taxpayers who did not take out any school loans being forced to pay interest for people who did take out those loans, the gravy train is ending.  By summer, the FSA will send out notices before beginning administrative wage garnishment.   

Now we all know that many students – especially those who got various grievance studies degrees (“Anti-Americanism, with a minor in Jew Hatred,” “Gay Stuff,” “BS in Women Good-Men Bad,” etc.) – don’t have any wages to garnish.  But as the wailing begins, at least that will be a sobering lesson that may dissuade those who were planning to embark on one of those degree paths.

I’m reminded of an old quote from Edmund Burke, which goes, “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”  Except that I heard it from an old Bible prof at school as, “Pain is the school of mankind…” 

Which rings more true to me.  Because these newly resumed payments will definitely bring pain – hopefully a very instructive and ultimately helpful pain – to the lives of many struggling graduates.

I do feel bad for everyone who was lied to by Biden and the Dems in their vote-buying scheme of offering “loan forgiveness.”  They’ve had their hopes cruelly raised, and they’ve gotten used to budgeting for the last 5 years without accounting for the payments that they will now have to start making. 

Which brings me to closing thoughts on three rotten behaviors that the Left has been getting away with for the last 5 years, and longer.

First, they’ve been wailing about the unfairly high cost of college for years, while at the same causing most of those increased costs.  Because even someone with a Jasmine Crockett-level IQ could tell you that when you hand out school loans like free cocaine at one of Hunter’s hookers-and-blow parties, you’re incentivizing universities to jack up costs.

Second, the Dems have been talking out of both sides of their mouths about college for years: screaming about how unfair and impossible it is to expect current graduates to pay back their loans, while at the same time handing out more and more loan money to those who – by their own admission! – will struggle to ever pay them back. 

Third, the elite left has been yelling themselves hoarse because Trump has been appealing the rulings of far-left lower-court judges who are doing their best to prevent him from carrying out the job of the president, howling that taking those cases to SCOTUS is an existential threat to democracy!

Meanwhile, Brandon unilaterally declared that tenants no longer had to pay rent to landlords during covid, while admitting that his royal proclamation was probably not constitutional.  He did the same thing when he declared that student loans were “forgiven,” with no act of congress or legal justification. 

And when SCOTUS slapped him down, he tried to do the same thing with slightly different verbiage, bragging at rallies that the high court “may have blocked me, but they didn’t stop me.”

So the next time a social justice warrior rants at you about how Trump is worse than Hitler because he’s defying the courts, read the last two paragraphs to them, in a clear and slow voice, so they can follow along.

Then unleash your Robot Flamethrower Dog on them.

And don’t call him off until their nose rings have melted and the blue dye has been burned out of their hair. 

Hamas delenda est!

Two Cheers for Rosie O’Donnell, & Handcuffs for Letitia James? (posted 4/23/25)

I have no central theme today, just a couple of noteworthy stories I’ve seen recently.

I’ll start with an unusual one for me, because it made me heartily say, “Two cheers for Rosie O’Donnell!” 

I can’t give her three cheers.  Because, as I mentioned just now, she’s Rosie O’Donnell. 

But we live in a world seemingly full of blowhard lefty narcissists who always insist that if the next Republican presidential candidate wins, they’ll leave the country.  And then they never do! 

But to her credit, Rosie put her money where her extremely large mouth is, and she actually followed through.  When Trump won, she moved to Ireland and applied for Irish citizenship.  And seriously: good for her. 

Obviously I think she’s off her rocker, politically speaking.  But if she’s convinced – against all evidence after his first term – that Trump is worse than Hitler, and will bring a nightmarish reign of oppression down on America, she demonstrated the courage of her convictions by leaving.  And as odd as this sounds, I think she’ll probably be happier for it.

Because there are millions of her political co-religionists in this country who believe that crap, and I don’t think it’s working very well for them.  You’ve seen them.  And you’ve heard them screaming, at their protests, and in courtrooms, and at various crime scenes.  “Abortions for all!  Death to Jews!  Bring back foreign criminals!  Death to America!  Heterosexual sex is gross!  Pay me not to work!  Screw you, dad!”

Do they seem happy to you? 

I’m reminded of a quote from one of my favorite books, John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  It appears early on, in a scene that is best-known for Satan’s monologue after he’s been cast out of heaven.  (His hubris is summed up: “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”)

Shortly before that famous line, Milton captures an essential truth of human psychology in just two lines: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  

I first read that as an undergrad, and though it stuck with me, it didn’t make a huge impact.  Mostly because I was pre-occupied at the time with weightier philosophical questions.  Questions like, “What’s the chances she’ll go out with me if I ask?” and, “Or her?” and, “Or maybe her?” 

Also, “Why can’t the Bears draft a decent quarterback to save their lives?”

But the older I get, the smarter John Milton gets.  (He’s like my dad in that way, God rest his soul.) And I’ve been around long enough to watch strong-willed people find the silver lining on every dark cloud, and make some hellish circumstances into a little slice of heaven. 

And I’ve seen people like Rosie – and Joy Reid, and Keith Olberman, and Noam Chomsky, and a cast of thousands like them – do just the opposite.  They’re living in the best country in the world, blessed with wealth and opportunities, and surrounded by signs and wonders.  But they find fault wherever they look, and wallow in their own self-created misery.

They look at a shining city on a hill, and see only a Mordor-ian wasteland of sexism, racism and a plethora of politically incorrect phobias.

They look at a flawed, bloviating president who loves the country and is doing some good things, and they see Orange Hitler.  They look at a rich genius who is sacrificing a lot to try to root out waste and fraud, and enable the government to more efficiently serve its citizens, and they see an evil oligarch.    

They look at Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren and they see a racist, hideous crone and a phony white lady pretending to be Sacheen Littlefeather—

Okay, I’ve got to give them those two.  Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. 

Also: #wemustneverstopmockingher

Where was I? 

Oh yeah, Rosie.  She made a hell out of America for herself, but Ireland seems like a cool place to me, so here’s hoping she can make a heaven for herself there.

Apparently two of her grandparents were Irish, but even so, she is reportedly worried because her application for Irish citizenship has not yet been approved.  And I think I speak for all of us when I say…

Oh no you don’t, Ireland!  No do-overs or give-backs!  You gave us Guinness, Liam Neeson, Yeats, and C.S. Lewis, and we gave you Rosie O’Donnell. 

Sure, you made a terrible, terrible trade.  But what’s done is done.  She’s your problem now. 

But to soften the blow, I suggest we start a go-fund-me to get Ireland to keep Rosie, along with any other nation who’s willing to take any other leftist celebrity irritants we can persuade to honor their vows that they would leave America if Trump won. 

If we can pay a great Salvadoran (you say, “Nayib,” I say, “BUKELE!) to take the worst of our criminal illegals, we should be willing to open our wallets to get other countries to take the wretched refuse of our teeming lefties.

Speaking of wretched, I’ve got to end with a great story from Schadenfreude Corner: the tale of Letitia James’ impending criminal charges!

No charge against Trump was more bogus than James’ lies about him wildly over-valuing Mar-a-Lago in order to get a more favorable loan rate from banks.  She claimed at one point that Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million, by relying on the low-end of a tax assessment (which are always lower than true market value), even though that assessment was 10 years old, and every real estate expert around said it was laughably low.

Later, she stated that the property should be valued at closer to $75 million, but then in an X post she listed the value as $25 million.  Trump was similarly inconsistent, valuing it in financial statements at between $426-612 million, but also bragging that the real value should be over a billion.    

All of which is moot, because the giant international banks from whom Trump sought the loan always do their own appraisals, rather than relying on biased owners.  Valuation of unique, high-end properties are especially difficult to nail down, but you don’t get to be Deutsche Bank by relying on sellers’ fraudulently high valuations.

All of which is even moot-er, because Trump paid back the loans with interest, and the banks said that they’d be happy to do business with him again.  Many NY lawyers and real estate investors agreed that this kind of a victimless case of a loan taken out and then repaid in full had ever been pursued before.

And now it turns out that lyin’ Letitia is a real estate investor herself, and that she was actually committing the kind of fraud that she accused Trump of committing.  For example, she bought several properties with her dad as co-signer, but falsely listed them as “husband and wife.” 

(Rumors that she learned that trick from an Ilhan Omar “Buy Real Estate With Your Brother/Husband” seminar have not been confirmed.) 

She claimed a property in Virginia as her principal residence, allowing her to get a lower mortgage rate.  Which was problematic, since she could not legally be the Attorney General in New York if her primary residence wasn’t in the state.  Also, the neighbors of the Virginia house reported that they’d never seen James there. 

She also bought a 5-unit building that she fraudulently claimed had only four units, allowing her to… wait for it…get a lower mortgage rate.   

So James was allegedly perjuring her hypocritical arse off, as she was using taxpayer dollars and her powerful position to wrongly go after Trump.

The cherry on top of this delicious schadenfreude sundae is that James’ half-billion-dollar, illegitimate verdict against Trump will eventually be over-turned, and she will almost certainly be convicted of a raft of felony charges.

My hope – sure, you can even call it a prayer – is that those two verdicts will come down around the same time. 

Because if I know Trump, he’ll find a way to be outside the courthouse where James will be led out in handcuffs, holding a gigantic, novelty check for the hundreds of millions of dollars he’d had to put in escrow, being refunded to him after he was vindicated in court.

Hamas delenda est!

“Self-Detonating Heroes” are Plaguing the Dems (posted 4/21/25)

I hope everybody had a great Easter, or Passover, or regular spring weekend.

My theme today is the addition of a new category of stories for this and future columns: The “Democrats’ Backing the Wrong Horse” stories.  In some of these, the elite left chooses as “villains” those who are later vindicated or otherwise come out on top.  Examples would include Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny and the Covington school kids, as well as Trump himself, who overcame lawfare, the Russian hoax and two assassination attempts to win a second non-consecutive term.

But there’s another sub-category that is on my mind today – probably because I’ve spent much of this last week contemplating an actual Sinless Victim (He is risen! Best. Happy. Ending. Ever!) – and that’s the faux victim.  I’m calling these guys the Democrats’ “Self-Detonating Heroes.”  

These are typically chosen for their credentials as righteous sufferers at the hands of the left’s preferred bad guys (cops, conservatives, white people, Americans, etc.), and their stories usually fit the pattern known in journalism as “too good to check.” 

You’ll recognize the common tropes: honor student gunned down by cops for no reason.  Palestinian social worker blown up by genocidal IDF for no reason.  Peaceful protestor arrested for no reason.  Noble immigrant deported for no reason.

A very small number of these stories are valid, but those are the rare exceptions.  When most people hear the initial report, they’ve learned to start an internal countdown to the moment when the story blows up.

The honor student shot by cops… (3…2…1…)… had gotten out of jail (again!) 14 hours ago, was driving a stolen car, and fired at cops with a stolen gun.

The “Palestinian social worker”… (3…2…1…)…was a Hamas member who had murdered several Jewish hippie girls at a music festival, and was wearing a suicide vest.

The “peaceful protestor” … (3…2…1…) … recorded himself setting fire to a police station.

The “noble immigrant” … (3…2…1…) … had been deported twice before and was carrying a duffel bag full of fentanyl and burner phones.

The beauty of these stories is watching the whole rotten scheme blow up in the Dems’ faces, over and over again, without them learning the lesson.  No matter how unlikely the tale, and how often similar tales have left them with gunpowder-blackened faces and burnt-off eyebrows before, they take the bait again.

“Hey, a disgruntled black activist at a super-liberal university says someone spray painted the N word on her dorm room door?  Stop the presses!   Or refresh the website, or whatever.”

Annndddd… she sprayed the slur on her own door.

“Wow, some rednecks hung a noose on a black NASCAR driver’s garage?  Swarm!”

Annnddd… it’s a looped rope used to pull down a garage door.

“Listen to this: some evil nerd hacked into Joy Reid’s computer and posted a bunch of homophobic slurs to frame her!  Alert the FBI!”

Annnddd… Joy Reid posted a bunch of homophobic slurs, because she’s an evil, lying moron.

Perhaps the archetypal example of a leftist Self-Detonating Hero story is happening right now, and stars “Maryland father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

As usual, the Dems should have had their heads on a swivel with this guy.  But once again the bait was too tempting, and when the Trump administration admitted that he’d been “wrongly deported” to the Salvadoran Super Max prison, the left was all over the story like white on Liz Warren. 

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The first red flag should have been Kilmar’s name.  There’s an old Latin phrase – “nomen est omen” – which roughly means that a name can be a sign.  (Famous examples abound, e.g.  once you’ve heard “Anthony Weiner” and “Charles Blow” you know everything you need to know about those dudes.)

Sound out “Kilmar” and you’ve got “kill” and “mar” (meaning “to spoil, harm or injure something or someone.”)  So, yeah.  His best friends were probably “Stab-lacerate Gonzalez” and “Punch-injure Herrera.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect that some devious spy in Trump-world must have searched the records of thousands of illegal gangbangers, and then chose Kilmar as their trap for the Dems.  They looked over his bio, and then hustled him onto the plane to El Salvador, then disregarded President Boasberg’s direct order to turn the plane around.  They did all this knowing the left’s penchant for a sympathetic, underdog David figure, especially when he’s facing off against the orange Goliath!  

So the Dems ran to the cameras and bet big on their new Salvadoran thoroughbred.  “Kilmar is a loving husband to an American citizen, and a father to two American kids, and probably a devout Catholic, as far as you know.  And sure, he’s got a couple of tattoos, but one of them is probably Christ on the cross (it’s very blurry in pictures, so we’re not 100% sure about that).  And he had a judge’s order that he NOT be deported!”

“Ooh, look, his broken-hearted wife is stepping up to the microphone.  Listen as she speaks in a wavering voice about the saintly man whom the Trumpian stormtroopers kidnapped off the street and then sent to Auschwitz II, trampling all of the constitutional rights that he definitely has as practically an almost American citizen!  Oh, now she’s crying!  Are you proud of yourselves, conservative bullies who ripped this loving family man away from his family?  He has kids.  American citizen kids!  Won’t somebody think of the children?!”

And then the Mar-a-Lago Mata Hari (old timey spy reference for $100, Alex) began to release successive tranches of details about Kilmar… 

And now, I will put on my conical, purple wizard hat and magically take you into the conference room where the Democrat brain trust was gathered to discuss strategy in the middle of last week.  I’ll keep their identities secret, and refer to them only as Democrat Operatives (DO) 1-6.

DO 1: This is going great!  The walls are closing in on Trump now!  American voters are suckers for a clean-cut immigrant like Kilmar.  By the way, get somebody at MSNBC to double-check his name.  All of those Hispanics have a crazy long chain of names, and a lot of them have a “Jesus” somewhere in there. 

DO 2: Ooh, that would be great!  We could put the word out that all of our reporters should start calling him “Jesus” between now and Easter.  The Catholics would eat that stuff up!

DO 1: Good idea.  And somebody line up some soft-focus photo shoots and interviews with his American wife and kids.    

DO 3: I don’t know, Hakeem.  I’ve heard a story that he had some suspected gang affiliations in the past.  Maybe we shouldn’t over-play our hand on this.

DO 1: Come on.  “Suspected” means nothing. Just more anti-Hispanic racism from the right-wing fascists.  I mean, he hasn’t had any due process at all!  I’m sure that if they had any evidence, they would have put it before a court and-  (He sees DO 4 with his hand up.)  What?

DO 4: Actually, he had an immigration court hearing, and the judge found evidence that he was associated with MS-13.

DO 1: SCHIFF! 

DO 5: What?

DO 1: I’m not talking to you.  It’s just an expression.  Look, it was probably a crooked Trump judge, lying about Kilmar’s gang ties.  We need to insist that the case be appealed to another judge, so—

DO 6:  Actually, it was appealed to a different court.

DO 1 (pause): And?

DO 6: The appeals court agreed.

DO 1: SCHIFF!

DO 5:  Are you using my name as a swear word?

DO 2:  Get over it, Pencil-Neck.  The adults are talking.

DO 5: Adults?  Shouldn’t you be at the kid’s table, Hogg!

DO 1: Shut up.  Let’s not get hung up on those alleged gang ties.  The main thing is that another judge wrote an order saying that he can’t be deported.  So Trump broke the law.

DO 3: Actually, that order in 2019 said that he CAN be deported, but just not to El Salvador.

DO 1 (rubbing his temples): Fine.  But he was deported to El Salvador.  We’ll emphasize that. 

DO 6:  Yes!  He got that deportation hold in 2019.  I’m sure he’s kept his nose clean for the last 6 years, because the Feds would have deported him to somewhere else if he’d gotten in trouble.

DO 3:  Actually, he was stopped in 2022 for speeding and driving without a license.

DO 1: SCHIFF!  Did they take him to jail and tow the car?

DO 3: No. The cop gave him a warning for the expired DL.

DO 2:  Wow.  He must have been one of ours.

DO 1: Anyway, the main point is that he obviously didn’t have anything suspicious in the car with him.  Why don’t we just say he was profiled for “Driving While Brown?”  (He notices DO 3 making a face.)  What now?

DO 3:  He had 8 other guys in the car with him, and they’d been driving for three days, from Texas to Maryland.  And…they didn’t have any luggage.

DO 5: SCHIFF!  (Everyone looks at him.) Now you’ve got me doing it!

DO 1: Okay, let’s not panic.  Lots of poor people don’t have luggage.  They were probably going up north to rejoin their families, or maybe meet some church sponsors who vouched for them. 

DO 3 (looking down):  They all gave Kilmar’s address as their own.  And DOJ just announced that he was picked up for questioning at Home Depot with other MS-13 members.  And Trump just showed a picture of his hands, and he’s got…

DO 1: Don’t say tattoos!

DO 3 (hesitates):  Tattoos.   

DO 2 and 4: SCHIFF!

DO 1: Tell me that they’re at least of his kid’s birthdays, or his wife or his mom’s names.

DO 3: They’re MS-13 tattoos.

DO 1,2,4 and 6: SCHIFF!

DO 2: Okay, forget all that.  We’ve still got his wife.  She’s crying her eyes out on tv.  And since she says that he’s a good man and husband, and since we must believe all women, he has to be a good man and husband. That’s the transitive property, I think.

DO 5: No, the transitive property is when a dude decides that he wants to be a woman, so he spins around and clicks the heels of his ruby slippers together, and says, I’m really a woman, I’m really a woman.

DO 2:  No, that’s the trans property.  I’m talking about the math thing, the transitive property.  It’s from algebra, I think, and –

DO 5: Who are you trying to kid, Davy?  You look like you’re still taking algebra!

DO 2: Pencil neck!

DO 5: Toddler!

DO 1: Everybody shut up!  (He notices an aid come in and hand a piece of paper to DO 3, then step back out.)  We’ve got the loyal, crying wife, and she’s vouching for him.  Our women voters will eat that up, and… (Noticing DO 3 looking extra pale.)  What is it, Liz?

DO 3: DOJ just released a domestic abuse claim the wife filed against Kilmar in 2021.

DO 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6: SCHIFF!

DO 1:  Okay, anybody can have a bad day.  They had an argument, things got a little heated.  We’ve all been there.  But they talked it through and worked it out, and it never happened agai—

DO 3: She filed again six months later.

DOs (all): SCHIFF! 

DO 1 puts his head on the table in front of him.

DO 1 (after a long pause): So we’ve got a bad-driving, human-smuggling, wife-beating, gang-banging illegal alien.  Is that about it?  (Nobody will meet his eyes.)  Okay, so we’ve got to say that it’s not about Kilmar, it’s about due process, or something.

DO 2:  So we shouldn’t call him “Jesus” now?

DO 1: Shut up, Hogg.  Nancy, get Van Hollen on the line.  We’ve gotta stop him from flying down there and making us all look like idiots. 

DO 3: He’s already there.

DO 1 (too defeated to even swear):  Can we at least stop him from meeting with Kilmar?  He’ll be giving Trump a photo-op to hang around our necks for the mid-terms.

DO 3: He’s already met with Kilmar.

DO 1 (mumbling): Of course he has.

DO 2:  Wait, this might still work.  Kilmar is going to look haggard and starved from being in that concentration camp prison.  Maybe he’ll even have some bruises or broken bones! 

DO 1 (perking up):  Yeah!  We can have Spielberg make an ad for us, interspersing shots of Kilmar with shots from Schindler’s List.

DO 2 (excited):  And we can CGI Trump’s head onto that Nazi commander, shooting at Jews down in the camp below him!  We can call the ad, “CECOT’s List.”

DO 1 (seeing DO 3 looking at her phone, and shaking her head): What is it?

DO 3 (holding her phone out so everyone else can see it): Trump just released this video of Van Hollen and Kilmar.  It looks like they’re meeting on a gay speed-date at a high-end hotel. 

DO 1 (moaning): Kilmar looks great!  He looks like he’s gained 5 pounds.

Everybody in the room: SCHIFF!!!

And, scene.

Tune in next week, when Hulk Homan™ releases documents proving that Kilmar helped plan 9/11, before driving across country to shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Hamas delenda est!