Author: martinsimpsonwriting

Lessons from LA in How Leftists Distort Language (posted 1/15/25)

The fire story has brought attention to many issues that conservatives have been warning about for years – the dangers of catering to an extremist environmentalist fringe, incompetent leftist government – as well as some I’d never heard of, such as the “expanding bullseye effect” that CO posted about yesterday.

While there are obviously many contributing factors to the disaster, one that has deservedly gotten a lot of attention in the last several years is getting even more now: the DEI priorities that led to so many incompetent people ending up in crucial positions in the LAFD.  

Thankfully, amongst all of the green flags popping up in the late, flailing stage of the Biden/Harris administration that culminated in Trump’s re-election, most people now seem to be decisively rejecting DEI.  But it’s a shame that it took this long, or that it’s necessary even now to explain to some people what’s wrong with DEI.

I think it’s hung around so long partly because leftists are experts at using language to obscure painful realities.  Sometimes euphemistic language arises out of good intentions, and in limited circumstances, it may even be helpful.  If calling someone “retarded” sounds harsh or insulting, then substituting “mentally challenged” and eventually “special needs” is compassionate.  Moving from “crippled” to “handicapped” was probably good. 

But even in those cases, there’s a tendency to go too far and try to deceive yourself and others by eschewing clearer language in favor of comforting euphemisms.  When some advocates tried to move on from “handicapped” to “handi-capable,” it didn’t take, because it was too obviously an absurdly positive spin that edged into deception.

When I was a young miscreant in the 1970s, many schools made a terminology switch from calling underperforming kids “slow learners” or “remedial students” to those who “progress at their own speed.”  It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t change the reality.

And because kids are semi-feral a-holes in need of civilizing, six minutes after the new term was rolled out, playgrounds were ringing with taunts of, “Ha ha!  Billy progresses at his own speed!”

In politicians’ hands, such euphemisms quickly degenerate from well-intentioned to deceitful.  If you can get people to think of illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” and then “undocumented Americans,” you have deceived them. 

If you can transform “vagrants” “winos” and “bums” into “the homeless” and then “the unhoused,” you can squeeze billions out of naïve leftist voters for your pet causes. 

The same phenomenon happened in the mid-1960s, when a plan for “compensatory” or “remediating” discrimination soon became known as “affirmative action.”  “Discrimination” sounds bad, but taking “affirmative action” sounds bold, and forward-thinking.  It’s got “affirm” right there in the name!

It was initially sold as a tiny bit of favoritism, used only in the rarest of circumstances, to break what was essentially a tie between two nearly identical candidates for a job or a scholarship.  In reality, it pretty quickly became a huge thumb on the scale which required draconian quotas and giving some groups a multiple-standard-deviation boost in test scores or GPAs over the general population.

And the word “quota?”  No bueno.  Supporters soon were forced into verbal gymnastics, insisting, “We don’t have any quotas.  Only goals and targets.”

Fast-forward a few decades, and the detrimental results of affirmative action had become so obvious and the program so unpopular that it could no longer be sustained. So the lefty elite said, “Okay, we had good intentions, and we tried, but our plan is a failure.  So we’re learning from our mistakes, admitting error, and dropping it.”

HA!  I kid. 

They actually flew their private jets to a hidden mountain lair near Davos (Because: climate change, shmimate change.) and engaged in a two-week brainstorming and re-branding retreat.

And then came out with… you knew where this was going… Diversity, Inclusion and Equity!

Then someone pointed out that that spelled “DIE.” 

And George Soros said, “Schiff!”  And had several subordinates killed, and all of the posters re-printed and the web sites edited.

And DEI was born. 

Annnnddddd… the president of Harvard is a dimwitted plagiarist, a dude who dressed like Captain Kangaroo’s homely wife is Assistant Health Secretary, Kamala is VP, and LA is burning to the ground.     

Just like affirmative action before it, DEI is a lose-lose-lose proposition. Those being discriminated against obviously lose, but so do the “beneficiaries” of the discrimination, who are stigmatized with the suspicion that they didn’t earn their position, even if they did.  Also, when they get artificially boosted into a position for which they are not qualified, they fail.

And the larger society loses, because it ends up with less qualified people in government, academia and some businesses.  Sometimes the effects are just aggravating, as when mediocre professors get tenure, or when you get terrible service at the DMV.  But sometimes you get petite firefighteresses who can’t carry a Pomeranian puppy out of a burning building, and people die.     

For 30 years, my dad worked with twenty guys on street crews for the Northern Illinois Gas Company.  Everybody there worked in two-man teams in which partners rotated every 2-3 weeks or so.  Everybody was trained and periodically tested on their various tasks, and if job applicants failed welding or equipment operating tests, they didn’t get hired, or else were let go.

Responding to an affirmative-action push, the company hired two women to join the street crews.  Both women were stronger and more sturdily built than most women, and both were pleasant people and did their best.  One was better at welding and machinery operating than the other, but in those areas, both were roughly equivalent to at least the lower half of the guys. The most physically taxing part of his job was jackhammering.   

But neither of them had the body mass or upper body strength to work a jackhammer. The two-man teams would split the jackhammering duties, and generally, the younger or stronger of each pair would do a little more than half.  But whenever a guy was paired with one of the women, he knew that for the next 2-3 weeks, he’d do all of the jackhammering.  Toward the end of my dad’s career, he’d had a few back injuries, and he dreaded the rotations with a female partner.

He ended up retiring a couple of years before he wanted to – with a lower pension than he would otherwise have had – because he couldn’t get medically cleared to work on a street crew anymore.  I can’t say for sure that that was partly due to the company’s affirmative action/DEI hiring policy.  But the fact that it’s even a possibility illustrates the problem.         

In his documentary with Dennis Prager called “No Safe Spaces,” the great Adam Carolla told a story about his experience as a would-be LA firefighter.  (I taught that documentary as part of my “Analyzing Propaganda” course in the last two years of my teaching career, and it was always gratifying to see that most students found the doc persuasive, even though many of them were little libs.)

Right after high school, Carolla applied to be a firefighter, and he was told that there was a long wait for white male applicants to get an appointment to take the required exam.  He went to work on construction sites, and SEVEN YEARS later, got a letter inviting him to come in and take the exam. When he was waiting in line, there was a short, petite female of color next to him. 

He asked her when she had applied, and she said, “Wednesday.”

Carolla makes the point that he would have been a great firefighter.  He was young and strong, and had the kind of physical courage edging into foolhardiness typical of many young men. 

Carolla never got the chance to be a firefighter, but he has done very well for himself in the intervening years. But the citizens of LA lost a very qualified firefighter – and many other hundreds or thousands like him – because their political leaders valued identity politics and DEI double standards over the lives and property of Californians.

Hopefully, after these fires are put out, they will have learned their lesson, and will vote accordingly. 

If they STILL don’t wise up, they’ll once again get what they’ve been voting for, good and hard. And hot. 

Looking Forward to Monday, & Praying for LA (posted 1/13/25)

As we enter the last week of Joe Biden’s interminable presidency, he’s providing more and more reasons to celebrate his departure.  Between pardoning scores of criminals, selling as much of the border wall as he can, and giving temporary amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegals whom the American people just voted to deport, he’s adding salt to the gaping, infected wound that is his presidency. 

When he was called upon last week to say some comforting words to the people of LA who are suffering through the most devastating wildfires in many decades, this is the closest he could come: “The good news is… I’m a great grandfather, as of today!”

Good lord!  The man’s narcissism is thicker than the smoke hanging over LA.  I’m surprised that he didn’t say, “My heart goes to all Californians who have lost a loved one in the fires.  You know, I lost my son Beau in a devastating wildfire, too.  Let me spend the next hour telling you about my pain.”  

But his life isn’t the only thing on Biden’s mind lately.  A CNN story last week detailed that Biden and some of his aides are worried that Trump won’t give him a state funeral when he dies.

Which confused me, because unless I’m mistaken, he had his state funeral last week.  I remember that flags were at half mast, and there were eulogies and everything.  I thought the mortician did a pretty good job, because Biden looked about as lifelike as he has during his presidency.  Not good enough to go with the open casket, in my opinion, but I’m not the one who makes these decis—

Wait, my crack researchers just handed me a bulletin.  Apparently that was Jimmy Carter.  According to this, he was the oldest ex-president in US history, dying at 100.  But I guess he’ll lose that title when Biden becomes an ex-president next Monday, at the age of 118.

But Carter still looked better than Biden last week.  So he’s got that going for him. 

Speaking of Carter, I thought I was the only one who thought it was weird that John Lennon’s “Imagine” was played at his funeral, until I saw a lot of commentary about it. 

Carter was a lifelong Baptist, and his mourners were serenaded with an atheist song?  I wrote about that song early in my CO columns; I think it’s a lovely tune, but the message is half-baked commie/utopian crap.  (Everyone “living for today,” with “no possessions” leading to “all the people sharing all the world?”  That’s been tried all over the world, and it always works out the same way: a few thug party bosses become billionaires, and the rest of the people end up in misery, gulags and graves.)

I can’t think of anything more dispiriting at the funeral of someone who at least considered himself a Christian.  There’d be as much dignity in back-to-back renditions of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” 

And if they were going to pick a Beatles’ song, wouldn’t “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” have been just as good? 

I hesitate to write about the main story in the news right now – the LA fires – because they are still going on, and the loss of life and property is unutterably sad.  With strong winds predicted to pick up again tomorrow, the death toll and staggering losses will surely increase. 

If anyone reading this has loved ones directly affected by the fires, please stop reading this.  I don’t want to inadvertently add to anyone’s pain while this disaster is ongoing.  But it’s weighing on my mind, as it is on most people’s.

In one sense, seasonal fires in California are examples of the kind of natural threats that all regions face.  Northern states have brutal and sometimes fatal winters, the Midwest and other regions have tornadoes, the South and part of the Atlantic seaboard have hurricanes.  Earthquakes and droughts and floods affect many areas at one time or another. 

But there’s also no denying that good or bad governance can have either mitigating or exacerbating effects on all of these.  Ron DeSantis has been a great blessing to Florida, handling the frequent hurricanes masterfully.  He has picked great personnel, and leads from the front, preparing for the storms ahead of time and overseeing fast, coordinated restoration and relief efforts afterwards.  (And he never goes to Ghana during hurricane season.)

The politicians in New Orleans have offered an opposite example.  Riven by corruption and incompetence, they’ve diverted federal money intended for flood control measures into their own and their friends’ pockets for decades.  When a storm is on the horizon – with almost a week’s notice of its arrival – they bumble around, stepping on one rake after another, and their residents pay the price.

Ray “School Bus” Nagin (D-isorganized) earned his nickname during Hurricane Katrina, when he had a citizenry that included many thousands of poor and infirm people trapped in the path of the storm, and also a fleet of hundreds of school buses – sitting in below-sea-level New Orleans parking lots – at his disposal. 

Naturally, he connected those dots, added up 2 and 2… and got 427.  He twiddled his thumbs for days as the storm approached and then hit New Orleans.  When the storm was over, hundreds of residents had died, many thousands had been trapped in their homes and endangered, and the school buses ended up under water and ruined.

But when it comes to incompetent a-holery, Nagin had nothing on Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the woke leadership of LA’s Dem establishment.  Many fire victims are already pointing fingers, but a full accounting won’t be possible until after the fires are put out and the extent of the damage has been assessed.     

But it’s already clear that foolish policy choices have turned what might otherwise have been a few typical fires into this epic disaster.  Newsom celebrated the removal of at least four dams holding water that could be used in fire prevention, in service of questionable environmental concerns.  The closest reservoir to the Palisades had been drained before the fire started.  Traditionally common forest management practices (regularly clearing away dead vegetation, clear cutting areas to provide firebreaks, etc.) have been discontinued in recent decades.

CA residents have also voted based on priorities that most of the country – even many California Democrats – have now started to reject.  Hiring based on identity politics, and valuing DEI goals over competence has produced painful results.

The LA fire chief was hired two years ago with glowing praise for her genitalia and gender preference, and she quickly said that one of her top priorities would be hiring more female firefighters.  One of her senior assistants – and head of a DEI Bureau – is also a gay female, and she is the one who said that people want cops and firefighters who “look like them.”  She also shrugged off concerns that a female firefighter might not be able to pull someone from a burning building. 

But even when mostly blue Californians voted reasonably, their leftist politicians betrayed them. Residents voted for a $7.5 billion water infrastructure act in 2014; $2.7 billion of that was supposed to build water storage reservoirs.  Ten years later, nothing has been built, and the city is on fire.

Meanwhile, LA Mayor Karen Bass is another winner.  Last week she was hard at work, making sure that the fire didn’t jump the Rocky Mountains, spread across North America, jump the Atlantic Ocean, and then start burning up the lush forests of Ghana. 

Before you bad mouth her, I will point out that there are no reported fires in Ghana right now.  So, yeah.    

Other CA Dems have done no better.  Newsom is smart enough to say that he’ll streamline building permits and curb his state’s famously tortuous regulations to allow rebuilding (I’ll believe it when I see it), but dumb enough to blame Trump, and local officials, and climate change, and probably Russian disinformation.      

I saw a brief video of Maxine Waters, and was about to send thoughts and prayers, assuming that she must have been caught in the fires.  But then I remembered that that’s just how she looks.  (She’s not called “Melting Face Maxine” for nothing.) (Okay, so far I’m the only one who’s been calling her “Melting Face Maxine.”  Which I think is just more evidence that I’m ahead of the curve.)

She made a statement which began with, “I’m not into the blame game,” before she began blaming people.  The primary culprit, according to the Wigged Wonder?  The evil 1% of rich people, who don’t pay their share of taxes, and thus deprive California of the money they need to prevent wildfires. 

By the way, this year’s California budget is $297.9 billion.  With a “B.”  Which is enough to provide billions to illegal aliens, and billions for mentally ill and/or addicted homeless people, and billions for a high-speed rail project that so far has not actually laid a single rail.  And tens of thousands of dollars for Gavin Newsom’s hair gel and featureless-Ken-doll-crotch-moisturizing ointment (don’t ask.) 

But not enough to keep LA from burning to the ground.      

One meme summed up the idiotic policy preferences in a nutshell – LA County: 72 genders, 0 working fire hydrants. 

One final fun fact: Karen Bass – whom nearly 100,000 Californians have now signed a petition to recall – was reportedly one of the top three contenders for Biden’s VP pick in 2020.  Once he’d promised to pick a black female, the three prime candidates were Susan Rice, Karen Bass and Que Mala. 

Rice was tainted by her previous selling of various failed Obama policies, so much so that she had to withdraw herself from consideration for SecState after Hillary left.  Karen Bass is Karen Bass. 

So Que Mala got the nod. 

In retrospecticus (obscure Simpson’s reference for the win), Biden should have picked Bass, for several reasons: 

1. She couldn’t have done any worse than Que Mala. 

2. She couldn’t have enabled the LA fires if she was in the White House.  (Most of the buildings in DC are stone monuments, which are very hard to burn down, no matter how incompetent you are at fire stuff.) 

3. He could have sent her to Ghana a lot, and that would have pleased everybody but the Ghanians. 

Lesson learned.

Okay, one week left.  Pray for LA.

Lefties Aren’t Giving Up, But They’re Not Winning – Especially in Florida (posted 1/10/25)

Well, it’s only 10 days until this madness ends, and the comic buffoonery just keeps coming at us.

Grandma Squanto, for example, is riding scout on some of Trump’s cabinet nominees, especially Pete Hegseth.  She got out front with a 33-page letter detailing all of her many objections to him.  For example, she’s really freaked out by his scary Christian tattoo, taking her cue from some nitwit who associated the tat with “right-wing extremism.”  Which, I’m pretty sure, is just another word for “Christian” in her mind. 

She wrote, “We cannot have a [SecDef] whose fellow servicemembers feel concerned enough about to report as a potential insider threat.”  Got that?  One quivering, low-T military desk-rider got his/her gender non-binary onesie over its head because of Pete’s icky tattoo, and now he can’t be in the defense department.

I’ve heard of a “heckler’s veto” before, but this is the first time I’ve seen a “hysteric’s veto.”  That’s not the way you run a military, Liz.

I get it, though.  The defense department is very triggering for her.  (Or I guess in her case, very “bow-stringing”?) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  After all, her ancestral people have a pretty lousy win-loss record against the US military. 

I mean sure, they won at the Little Big Horn, but other than that…

Warren also has her deerskin panties in a bunch (#neverstop) because of Hegseth’s criticism of DEI idiocy in the military.  “I think we all know that the Founding Fathers wanted above all that we should judge each other by the color of our skin.  Which, as you can clearly see in my case, is a glorious, deep red.”  (#nevernevernever)

Okay, I made that quote up.  But I think I accurately conveyed the gist of her ridiculous argument.

Meanwhile, the used-to-be-funny Jon Stewart has tacitly admitted what terrible candidates Brandon and Que Mala were, but he still felt obligated to praise how virtuous she was when she presided over the Ceremonial Stating of the Obvious, i.e. the certification of Trump’s victory. 

Steward couldn’t resist taking a shot at Trump in the process, saying how smoothly democracy can work when “you don’t act like a little bitch when you lose.” 

Um, Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams are probably watching, Jon.  As well as the dozens of Democrat congresscreeps who protested and came out against certifying that Trump had won in 2016.  Have a little empathy for crying bitches everywhere, why don’t you?

On the anny-tray front (I’m still not sure that the FB “fact-checkers” have really been disbanded), I’ve got two stories, one from California and one from Florida.  And the ending of these stories tells you a lot about why people have been moving from the former to the latter.

California first.  The firefighting policies and personnel in LA have received a lot of attention this week, since the city appears to be burning to the ground.  You’ve probably already heard about the head of the LAFD – a sapphic gal named Kristen Crowley – on account of the glowing press she received for becoming the first LGBTQ person to hold her position.  You won’t be shocked to learn that she’s a big fan of DEI.

Naturally, she hired an Assistant Fire Chief (and, I’m not making this up, head of the DEI Bureau) who is a rotund African-American woman named Kristine Larson.  In a recent video, she stated one of the common, patronizing tropes of DEI enthusiasts: that when people call for a firefighter (or cop, or presidential candidate), they “want someone that looks like you.” 

Does anyone really believe that? What if you’re a wheelchair-bound Indonesian octogenarian lady and your house is burning down?  Are you hoping to see a wrinkly firefighter roll up and over your threshold in her wheelchair, completely out of breath, so that you can both have a nice chat about pronouns while you burn to death in your wheelchairs together?

I know what you’re thinking.  “Martin, she could not possibly say anything stupider than that!” 

Au contraire, mon frere.  Because Larson then said, “Hold my nasal cannula, and watch this.”

And she raised the obvious objection that any sentient mammal would have when faced with someone advocating choosing firefighters not because they are physically capable of fighting fires, but because of the color of their skin and the nature of their genitalia.

She imagines a citizen saying, “Is she strong enough to do this, or you couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire?”  In a sane world, she’d pause for a minute, then began to sweat and blush, and say, “Holy crap.  That’s a great question!  My position on this has been embarrassingly stupid.  I hereby resign from my job.”

But this isn’t a sane world.  It’s Los Angeles.  So what Kristine Larson really said was, “To which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’”

That’s a real thing that she said.  If people are trapped in fires, the Assistant Fire Chief thinks that they’ve gotten themselves into the wrong place.  And she’s very disappointed in them. 

I have no words.   Except, “Idiot!”  And, “Moron!”

And, “Great job, Democrat voters of LA and California!” 

So LA has hired and given power to this woman, and her similarly wokified boss, and who knows how many others like her.  And LA is now the World’s Biggest Dumpster Fire™. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Meanwhile, in Florida, an equally gender confused oddball posted an obnoxiously creepy celebratory video about how he had tricked the evil state of Florida into giving him a driver’s license that listed his sex as female.  He explains that he “lost” his driver’s license, and then took in his passport that identifies him as a woman, thus forcing them to give a replacement license that says he’s a woman.

Just from watching the video, you know the kind of rich fantasy life this guy has, because he also becomes giddy at the thought that Ron DeSantis must be running around in a rage and defecating on himself because his will has been thwarted by this stalwart gender warrior.

First, that’s Joe Biden you’re thinking of, and he’s going to be gone in 10 days!

Second, the state of Florida’s reaction was 24-karat gold!  When some people in Florida’s DMV saw this guy’s video, they quickly sent him a letter thanking him for bringing to their attention the loophole he had exploited, and notifying him that his incorrect license had been invalidated.  They pointed out that they are now investigating other such cases, and will ensure that nobody else is able to follow his example.  The letter also hinted that he might be looking at charges, since falsely claiming that you’ve lost your license in order to get a fraudulently altered replacement would be considered a felony.

The envelope also contained his new, valid driver’s license, which correctly identifies him as a male.  To which any compassionate person can only have one reaction.  Which is… HA! HAHA! HAHAHAHA!

Actually, since it’s a new year, and one of my resolutions is to become a kinder and gentler Martin, I will honestly say that we should pray for confused people like this guy.  If he’s got actual gender dysmorphia, that’s got to be a horrible illness, and we should hope that he gets the treatment that he needs. 

Even if he’s just following some kind of social contagion, he still has to be deeply unhappy, as anyone who dedicates his life to fighting against reality is bound to be.  His obnoxious and disturbing behavior aside, it’s pitiable that he’s placed so much emphasis on getting official documents that wrongly label him, as if that has any effect on the reality of who he is. 

Really.  Can you imagine getting giddy with childish excitement when you temporarily trick some state agency into confirming your dishonest statement about yourself on a document?  That would be like a childless man ordering a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug from Amazon, and then shrieking and running around like he just won the lottery when he unwrapped it beside his mailbox. 

So as much as I might initially enjoy watching his celebratory video, followed quickly by learning his getting a karmic beat-down, I feel bad for the poor, deluded guy.  Because I’ve got news for him: getting bitch-slapped by conservative reality doesn’t make you a woman. 

Just ask Tim Walz, Jon Stewart, Robert DeNiro, Michael Moore, Rob Reiner, or Justin Trudeau.

Okay.  Justin Trudeau might be the exception that proves the rule. 

10 days left, people!

More Good News, Plus a Throwback to January of 2021 (posted 1/8/25)

I wasn’t planning to write another column today, until Mark Zuckerberg made his amazing about-face yesterday, admitting that content moderation on Facebook had “gone too far” and announcing that he’s going to “restore free expression” on the site.

First I pinched myself, to prove that I wasn’t dreaming.  Then I checked the calendar, to confirm that it’s not April Fool’s Day.  Then I re-read his statement, specifically the part where he says that he’s getting rid of his armies of blatantly biased “fact checkers.”

Then I went outside and crouched down low, scanning the skies above me to be sure that there were no flying pigs swooping low enough to collide with me.   

But no.  I wasn’t dreaming, it’s not April first, and there were no porcine aviators darkening the skies over our great country.   A famous and influential censor has apparently seen the error of his ways, and is repenting.

I don’t know whether Zuckerberg has actually learned from experience and had a change of heart, or is only tactically retreating in the face of a free speech ascendancy that’s been energized since November 5th.  (I’m generally cynical about lefties who gain a “newfound respect” for free speech.) 

But the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t really matter.  The end result is more free speech, and that’s a very good thing for our nation, and even better for conservatives.  Because our ideas are better than leftist ones, and when both are allowed space in the public square, ours thrive and theirs wither. 

This also comes at a particularly good time for me, because as regular readers may know, after an eight-year run on the CO site with no Facebook warnings, in the last month I’ve gotten two “offensive speech” warnings, and had two of my columns pulled from this site.

In addition, several of my columns were slapped with ridiculous FB critiques.  For example, when I discussed the fact that “climate change” isn’t going to roast or freeze us all to death within the next 18 months, FB kindly put a text box at the bottom of the column – and on every response and comment! – saying something like, “To learn the truth about climate change, go to climatechangewillkillusall!.gov.”    

But those joke-blockers were as ham-handed as any know-nothing Soviet apparatchiks, and I assume that anyone with an above-AOC-level IQ knows that such “corrections” are absurd. 

And as far as the hate speech strikes and possible banning, the vaunted FB algorithms have proved no match for the brilliant subterfuge of my cunning plan to use… wait for it… pig Latin!  (It’s like the way the US Army used Navajo code-talkers in WWII, only more juvenile.)

Thus, my comments on “ranny-tays” have flown under the radar.  (And no, no matter how many times I’ve been tempted, I haven’t had to deploy the “o-gay uck-fay ourself-yay” yet.  Because I’m a gentleman.)  

Anyway, Zuck’s retreat is good news, and another green flag that things are turning around.  He specifically said that he’s going to end the fact-checking “completely,” replacing it with a “Community Notes” model that Elon uses on Twitter/X. 

Which is another win for me, because I expect that my columns will be getting a mountain of community notes, along the following lines: “This guy is always right!” And, “How does he do it?” and, “We should probably sell all that we have, give it to the poor, and follow him.” 

So with the 20th only 12 days away, we may end up testing Trump’s prediction that we will get tired of winning, saying, “Please, please, it’s too much winning!” 

Finally, since people seemed to enjoy yesterday’s throw-back excerpt from one of my columns from the dark days of January 2021 – new readers apparently weren’t aware that I can write the hell out of an inaugural poem, for example – I decided to close with another blast from the past.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out my WordPress site (Martinsimpsonwriting.com), you should give it a look.   If you click “subscribe” there (it’s free), you’ll get an email letting you know when I’ve posted a new column.  It also includes archives of my old stuff, which means you can go back and re-live the ecstasy of January 2017 or the agony of January ’21.    

Many people say that the entire collection is an example of wisdom literature.  Like the book of Proverbs, or the Analects of Confucious, or the Kama Sutra.

Well, not the Kama Sutra.  If you’re getting THAT out of it, you are really reading it wrong!  

Anyway, here’s another throwback excerpt from 1/12/21, when I was desperately seeking any silver lining in the dark cloud of the impending Biden administration:

“The Dems are such horrific politicians that they are going to over-reach and alienate all but their hard-core base, and to the extent that we can have even fair-ish congressional elections in the future, they should be sailing into a serious repudiation in the mid-terms, a la Obama’s 56-seat House bloodbath in 2010.

Biden has one orthopedic shoe in the grave, and Kamala is a human toothache, and all of the faces of the national Democrat party look like the Elephant Man’s family reunion, morally speaking.  They are not going to wear well.

If they were even room-temperature smart, they could do much more damage by posing as unifiers and throwing a few, pitiful bones to the spineless GOP members who always seem happy for even the most meager of scraps.  Instead, they are so driven by their own malice that they can’t help themselves: they’re going to double-down on their frothing hatreds, and pursue their “enemies” (i.e. half of the country).  Anyone who is not a completely lost cause is going to be repelled by that.”

Okay, so I missed the optimistic mid-term projection.  The only red wave we had was in Florida and (oddly enough) New York.  But as for the rest of my predictions?

I think I can say, as Willie Brown said after he “interviewed” Que Mala for her first job in politics…

Nailed it!

12 days and counting, people…

A Flashback to a Very Different Inauguration… in January 2021 (posted 1/7/25)

I’ve mentioned in several recent columns that whenever I’m feeling a little down, I can always cheer myself up by watching a few videos of election night coverage in 2016 and in 2024. 

But last night, as I was thinking about how miserable we all were four years ago, it occurred to me to go back and read some of my columns from January of 2021, just to remember how grim the beginning of Biden’s reign was, as we prepare to celebrate its end.

What I found is that even while they were funny in parts (unexpectedly!), there was a lot of dread just beneath the surface.  And that makes our current happiness all the sweeter.  Since many readers may not have been following the CO site four years ago, I thought I’d share a few excerpts with you this week, starting with part of my column from 1/25/21: 

“I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t watch a minute of live tv on inauguration day, because I knew what I would have seen if I’d watched.  A sickeningly obsequious media, a doddering old man slurring his way through a string of banalities projected in very large print on a teleprompter, and some of the worst people in North America elated by the triumph of a noxious ideology over the imperfectly realized but heartfelt ideals of our great nation.

Though it felt more like a Lamentations kind of day, my thoughts actually went to the famous passage from Ecclesiastes (or, as Joey Gaffes calls it, “eckle-stopholeese. Sorry, expialidocious.  You know, you know the thing.  The one right before the Palms.”):

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

And for me, Wednesday was a time to mourn, and a time to cast away stones, and a time to vow to lick ‘em tomorrow.  Also a time to watch 8 hours of HGTV shows on the DVR, and to drink Scotch, and to mourn some more.

So when I woke up Thursday – mostly sober, with a yard full of stones, and knowing how to renovate a cramped and tired single-story into an open floorplan with a chef’s kitchen and a farmhouse sink – I cautiously dipped into a few podcasts and websites I trust, and got a glimpse of the tragicomic farce that was the inauguration of Joe Biden.

I was sad to see that once again, so many violent conservatives raged out of control, showing grave disrespect for a new president’s inauguration.  Here are some excerpts from the Reuters story I read on Thursday:

“Black-clad activists among hundreds of demonstrators protesting Biden’s swearing-in clashed with police a few blocks from the White House, in an outburst of violence rare for an inauguration.  At least 217 people were arrested in the melees, police said.

The burst of civil disorder followed a fierce presidential campaign that left the country divided.  In the violence, knots of activists in black clothes and masks threw rocks and bottles at officers wearing riot gear, who responded with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades as a helicopter hovered low overhead.

At one flash point, a protester hurled an object through the passenger window of a police van, which sped away in reverse as demonstrators cheered.  Multiple vehicles were set on fire, including a black limousine. A knot of people dragged garbage cans into a street a few blocks from the White House and set them ablaze…”

Oh, I’m sorry.  Those were not actual quotes from a real Reuter’s story about Biden’s inauguration last week – they were actual quotes from a real Reuter’s story about Trump’s inauguration 4 years ago.  (The only edit I made was changing Trump’s name to “Biden” in the first sentence.)

Thanks to the MSM’s egregious bias, I’d forgotten that that even happened.  This January 6th is a day that will go down in infamy because of the Democrat-lite violent actions of a few hundred bonehead Trump supporters, but there will be no comment on millions of leftists looting and rioting for 6 months all across the country.

Don’t forget it: in the very first hours of the Trump presidency, violent leftist thugs were already committing assaults, arson and property damage, and hundreds had to be arrested.

But some goofball wearing Viking horns broke into a government building, so we had to have a grim, militarized inauguration in the middle of a mostly empty capitol.

That being said, the mood was just about appropriate to the sadness of what was happening.  Though the MSM lickspittles declared that there were no cheering crowds only because of covid, does anybody really believe that?

Or is the more logical explanation that NO ONE is enthusiastic about Joe Biden, and he couldn’t draw a crowd to save his life?  (Which explains why all summer, when leftists were turning out by the tens of thousands for daily “We hate America!” riots and “Criminals are our heroes!” rages, Biden was talking to dozens of misfits and misanthropes in a series of strip mall parking lots, and being continually startled when they honked their horns each time he made it through a paragraph without collapsing.)

There were barricades, and empty streets, and some terrible slam poetry.

And by the way, you can track America’s decline through the quality of poetry associated with presidents.  Walt Whitman wrote four poems about the death of Lincoln (among them “O Captain, My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) that are still worth reading today.

Gifted poet Robert Frost read his poem, “The Gift Outright” at JFK’s inauguration.

Over 30 years later, mediocre poet (at best) Maya Angelou wrote a mediocre piece for Bill Clinton’s inauguration.  It is justifiably forgotten now, but I remember banal repetitions of “a rock, a river, and a tree.”  Poetry interpretation is subjective, but my take was that Slick Willie liked to take his interns to picnic at a river, where he was hard as a rock, and they ended up climbing a tree to get away from him.

But I’m more of a prose guy, so that might be way off.

Anyway, Biden’s inaugural poem was delivered by an unknown young woman, and of course the media is now swooning over her, and she’ll probably get rich and famous over this “poem.”

But, to paraphrase a line attributed to Dorothy Parker, this isn’t a poem to be set aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.

Here are three consecutive lines from the poem, chosen at random:

“We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.

And the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it.”

Off the top of my head: “the belly of the beast” is a tired cliché; “beast” and “peace” don’t rhyme; “just is” and “justice” don’t rhyme; the third line changes verb tense in a way that doesn’t make sense.  (By the way, my last sentence rhymed better than anything in this terrible poem.)  Also, there is no referent for the “it” in the last line – what can that line possibly mean?

On the other hand, “knew it” and “do it” at least rhyme, even if they are stupid.

Good lord!  At the rate we’re going, if Comma-la manages to get re-elected in 2024, her inaugural poem is going to start with, “There once was a man from Nantucket.”

I know that some of you are probably thinking, “Sure, Martin, you may be a hilarious genius, an amazing father and husband, and a role model for us all, not to mention a fine figure of a man.  But you’re no poet, and you probably couldn’t do any better.”

To which I say, hold my Scotch and stand back, as I compose a poem – live, right now, this very minute — that is more fitting for the inauguration of Joe Biden than the actual putrid poem above:

Ode to Joe

C’mon man, he’s got a plan.

Look fat–  don’t question that.

You know, the thing,

Ring a ding ding.

He defeated Corn Pop

Zippity boop bop.

Don’t give him a quiz:

he don’t know where he is.

Stay in your lanes

Or he’ll put y’all back in chains.

Even Frank Luntz

Knows he’s a dunce.

Boom!  Admit it: you feel pretty foolish right now for doubting me.  Because that poem has all the hallmarks of deathless verse: the lines all rhyme, it works on multiple levels, and it contains a subtle allusion to Frank Luntz.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, our long national nightmare, just getting started….

Finally, in a move that I’m afraid sets the table for much more of the same to come, a few hours after Joey Gaffes signed an executive order mandating that everyone wear a mask on federal land, he went to the Lincoln Memorial.  Which is on federal land.

And what was Joey wearing?  No, not a vacant expression.

Well, yes.  That’s his look.

 But let me rephrase that: What was he NOT wearing?  If you guessed “pants,” you probably had a 50/50 chance of being right.  But in this case, it was a mask.

When a reporter called out, “Where’s your mask?” Biden leapt and spun around, startled, and said, “Who are you?  Where am I?”  When he noticed the statue of Lincoln out of the corner of his eye, he leapt in the opposite direction, and said, “Who is that?!  And why is he so huge?  Oh no!  Am I shrinking?!”

When an aide explained that he was not shrinking, and that the giant statue was of Lincoln — and then that it wasn’t a statue of Lincoln, Nebraska, but of Abraham Lincoln — Biden visibly calmed down.

Until a reporter called out, “You just made it illegal to be on federal land without a mask.  But you’re on federal land, and you don’t have a mask.”

Biden once again leapt in fright, and said, “Where am I?  What?  Who are you?”

The reporter said, “I’m a reporter, and you’re breaking the law by not wearing a mask.”

And Biden raised his hands and felt his wrinkly, unmasked face, and shouted, “Ahhh!  Arrest me!”

Then Dr. Jill took him by the hand, and pulled him toward the stairs.  “Let’s go home.  You need to get a good night’s sleep so you’ll be ready to get up tomorrow and start wrecking the country.”

And, scene.

Look on the bright side, people: we’ve survived 5 days.   Only 3 years and 360 days more.

Avenatti/Hunter Biden 2024!”

Remember the sick feeling in our stomachs back then, CO Nation?  Well now we’ve survived 3 years and 352 days.  Only 13 more to go!

Remember: JOY cometh in the mornin’ (…of the 20th)!

Satisfying Certification, Terrible Medal of Freedom Choices, & a Few Suggestions for Trump (posted 1/6/25)

My good mood throughout the month of January continues today, when Que Mala will have to grit her teeth and preside over the certification of the election of Donald J. Trump (the “J” is for “Joke’s on you, sleazy Dems”), a ceremony I expect to be blissfully cackle-free. 

It’s supposed to be snowing in DC tomorrow, which could provide a great visual backdrop, since falling snow often lends drama and beauty to an event.  (As those of you who have been well-raised may remember from Wilbur Marshall returning a fumble for a touchdown in blowing snow when the Bears beat the Rams for the NFC Championship on January 12th, 1986.  Obviously.)

I’d love to see Trump and his entourage re-create Jimmy Stewart’s ecstatic jog through snowy Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.  He’d come down the capitol steps doing that ridiculous Trump dance, then shout at the over-sized buildings lining the streets.  “Hello, Department of Whatever! Get ready for budget cuts!” before stopping outside of Schumer’s office and banging on the window.  “Happy Certification Day, Mr. Potter!  I mean, Mr. Schumer!”

And then he’d get to the White House Oval Office (because Biden wandered off and left the door open), where everybody would pile in around him.  JD, Elon, Melania, the whole crowd.  And then someone’s phone would ring, and JD’s daughter would say, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings, Hunter snorts a line of coke off a hooker’s behind.”

Okay, that got away from me there at the end.  But you get the idea: everything is looking up!

However, even amidst the joy of the long-overdue departure of Biden and the Bidenettes, ol’ Brandon is doing everything he can to quash my good mood.   

For example, I’m a lot less happy about the Presidential Medal of Freedom I’ve got hanging in my closet, now that Joey Gaffes has started handing out them to people he thinks deserve them.  (I already put my Nobel Peace Prize in a shoebox when Yassar Arafat won one.  And don’t get me started on the voting irregularities involved in the People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive contest!  Sure Clooney looked okay in 2006, and Hugh Jackman in ’08.  And I get it, Chris Hemsworth was Thor.  But for me to get bumped down to runner-up not once, not twice, but thrice?!  Bah!)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.    

Biden handed out more of the awards last week, and sure, not all of them went to bad people.  I mean, Michael J. Fox and Magic Johnson are okay, and Denzel Washington is great.

But consider these “winners” who have received the award from Biden’s cold, dead hands:  Cecile Richards (Planned Parenthood boss who presided over 3 million abortions during her tenure); Lionel Messi (pro soccer player); Hillary Clinton (sexual-harassment-enabler and hideous shrew); Bill Nye (propagandist for non-scientific drivel); and George Soros (real-life Bond villain and vile hater of democracy and all things good). 

I know what you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it too.  How low can Biden go?  A pro SOCCER player?!

HA!  I kid.  But if I told you that I’ve made a list of 5 reprobates, and the LEAST objectionable one on the list was a pro soccer player, you’d know how bad that list is.

But let’s not get caught up in the malicious thrashings of the Biden administration’s death throes.  Let’s look at just a few of the good things we can expect to see starting January 20th:

1. A clear message is going out to all hostile nations that there’s a new sheriff in the White House.  There is a specific way I’d like that message sent, but I know it’s not going to happen.  Still, picture this scenario:

Xi Jinping is having a birthday party for one of his granddaughters in Beijing, and one of the balloons gets loose and floats upward.  The girl cries out, and Xi starts to reassure her that he’ll get her another balloon.

But before he can, a drone rises from behind a nearby treeline, and a brief chatter of machine gun fire pops the balloon.  Everybody scatters, and Xi’s security knocks him to the ground and covers him, as his cell phone rings.  He answers it. 

“Hello Xi, this is President Trump.  Let me explain what just happened.  That was our drone that shot down what I’m sure you’re about to tell me was your granddaughter’s balloon. And maybe it was.  But the last time you launched a balloon, the very stupid man who used to be our president let it float all the way across our country, spying the whole time.  Well those days are over, my diminutive friend.”

“I’m announcing a new policy right now.  I call it my ‘Shoot Down All the Chinese Balloons’ Policy, and it’s going to be fantastic.  People are already saying it’s the best balloon policy they’ve ever heard of.  The people love Trump, and they love this new policy.”

“Also, I’ve heard that you’ve gotten very angry when some of your people pointed out that you look like Winnie the Pooh.  So I’m going to call you Winnie the Ping from now on.  Or possibly Winnie Ji Ping.  I’ll run it by JD and Melania, and let you know.”

“In the meantime, no more balloons, Winnie.  I mean it.” 

And, scene.

2.  Before the election I wrote a policy wish list for Trump, and it included getting rid of birthright citizenship.   Since the election he’s brought that topic up, so I’m hoping he’s got some lawyers studying it and coming up with a plan as we speak.

3. I’d also like to see him mandate the use of E-verify in all states by all employers, using whatever means at hand to enforce it.  This is a federal service that’s been around for almost 30 years; employers can use it to verify a job applicant’s legal status to work in the US.  Right now only 10 states have made it universal and mandatory, while 11 others require it only from government contractors.  Trump should require it in all 50 states. 

According to Gateway Pundit, a 2016 study found that illegal immigration rates fell by as much as 50% in the states that require all employers to use e-verify.  The current estimate is that around 75% of illegals are in the labor force, and if they are forced out of jobs, they’ll self-deport, as over a million did in the 2008 recession. 

Incentives shape behavior, and the ability to work here incentivizes illegal immigration. I’m no lawyer, but I think Trump can use incentives to deploy e-verify nationwide.  I’d use the model the Feds did with the 55 mph speed limit: states who wouldn’t enforce the limit received no federal highway funds.

I’m hoping Trump takes that approach with sanctuary cities and states, and with e-verify: if you won’t cooperate on enforcement, we’ll redirect some of your social spending money to bring in Tom Homan to do the job you’re refusing to do.  And if you try to stop him, he’ll arrest and charge you. 

I’ve got some more ideas, which I’ll post later in the week. Tren de Aragua delenda est!

The Dangerous Temptation of Self-Flattering Lies (posted 1/3/25)

I know that the start of a new year is actually just a date on the calendar, without any magical significance of its own.  And I know that we can always, at any time of year, pause and take stock of what has gone well or poorly in the past, and resolve to make changes in behavior and direction accordingly. But it feels more natural to do all of that at the beginning of January.  

And this year more than most, I’m savoring a real feeling of renewal.  I’m looking forward to the new year in ways that I haven’t since the darkness of the Biden term descended upon us like a plague of morose fatalism mixed with the constant, dull ache of societal dissolution, accompanied by gastric distress and existential angst.

It seemed like every time I turned around, there was a demented old man shaking his fist and screaming at me as he repeatedly tripped over things that are normally un-trip-over-able. And homely men pretending to be homelier women at that time of the month. And a dyspeptic old white lady pretending to be a Cherokee princess (#evenin2025wemustneverstopmockingher), and Nancy Pelosi (#Aiiee!themummywalksamongstus).

And always, ALWAYS – from KJP and the legacy media and every national Dem (except sometimes Fetterman) – the lying about everything, which insulted our intelligence and challenged our gag reflexes. 

And now, all of that is set to go into remission for a while, and I couldn’t be happier. 

In fact, I’ve probably watched 30 hours of online videos of various lefty talking heads gloating before the election about how Que Mala was going to stomp Trump and all of his evil minions, and then whining and crying in the glorious aftermath.  And not just because it is great fun.

Okay, mostly because it is great fun.  To watch the arrogant get humbled, the certain get confounded, and the hateful get Hillary-slapped by reality?  That feels so good that it just might cure cancer. 

And because I love Shakespeare and all edifying drama, I often watch those videos thinking of one of our great thespian’s greatest filmed moments (Arnold as Conan, of course), when asked what is best in life: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their men who identify as women.”     

But beyond offering hours of schadenfreude-tastic good times, those videos have reminded me of a more serious point, too.  Because those videos demonstrate the baffling inability of so many reasonably intelligent people to answer the two questions that they seem desperate to answer:     

Why did Kamala lose, and why were we so wrong about that outcome?

The many partial answers are as painful as they are obvious: Que Mala was a terrible candidate.  Biden/Harris’ policies were far-left, and therefore produced terrible results.  (Unexpectedly!)  Most Americans don’t want open borders, and the crime, costs and chaos that come with them.  Most Americans know that chromosomes exist, and that putting on some ruby slippers and clicking your heels three times while making a wish doesn’t change that.

I could go on.  So I will.

Most Americans saw through the leftist gaslighting on virtually every subject for four years.  They also remember that Trump was president already, and that he wasn’t a Hitlerian fascist who destroyed the world.

Almost Biden’s entire cabinet and administration – and this goes double for his celebrity endorsers – had SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index™) numbers that would tempt the most Quaker-adjacent pacifists among us to wade in and start handing out naps like Mike Tyson at the height of his powers.

Also, like Jacob Marley at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Joe Biden was dead to begin with.

And yet, even with that gigantic Bingo card full of winning answers staring them right in the face, most of the leftists who are trying to figure out why Que Mala lost – with the partial exceptions of Van Jones and Bill Maher, and maybe a handful of others – are failing completely. 

Because they cannot resist the most powerful force in human psychology: the comforting balm of self-flattering answers that demonize your opponents, while holding yourself blameless.

Rather than acknowledging what a black hole of spineless vapidity Kamala was, they blamed the sexism and racism of American voters for rejecting her.  (How do they explain why Trump was on track to beat Biden even more lopsidedly, despite Brandon’s corpse-y pallor and maleness?  They don’t.)

Rather than admitting that the open-border disaster was ongoing and obvious, they insisted that the border was secure, and anyone objecting was racist.

Rather than admitting that the “Inflation Reduction Act” produced skyrocketing inflation, they said that Trump had left Biden an economic mess (with his 1.5% inflation).

They cheered, “You go, girl!” when ranny-tay “f*male” Olympians were winning pole vault competitions without using a pole.

Their mental blinders are so restrictive that they can’t see who Trump really is, or who conservatives are, or who they themselves are.

I’ll cite one specific example: a NYT op-ed this week from eccentric bloviating oddball James Carville.  (I remember Rush calling him “Snake Head” 30 years ago, and at age 80, Carville has only gotten Snake-Headier.  The man is difficult to look at.  Although I’ve got to admit that that thick gumbo accent of his is kind of fun.)     

Carville says that in his pre-election certainty that Trump would lose, he forgot his own message from the Clinton days, that “it’s the economy, stupid.”  That over-simplification already overlooks so much else that was obviously at play this year (the border, weakness abroad, lefty disdain for traditional America, wokeness, etc.), but he doesn’t even see his pet issue clearly. 

He brags that inflation is “subsiding,” gliding right past the fact that things cost almost 25% more now than they did four years ago, and that even though inflation has dropped from 9 to 3%, that’s still twice as high as when Trump left office. 

Instead, he focuses on a common self-flattering explanation: “perception [of the economy] is everything,” and the Dems “have flat-out lost the economic narrative.”  No, Sneaky Snake, you guys didn’t lose the economic “narrative” – you damaged the economy!

It’s an argument that crops up over and over again: “our policies are great, but people just don’t understand how great they are.”  Which means that either the people are too stupid to recognize your superior ideas (simultaneously flattering to you, and insulting to the people), or the evil conservatives have fooled them (through misinformation, disinformation, or possibly hypnosis). 

Either way, the voters and the GOP are deeply flawed, but the Dems are just fine the way they are. 

Carville is equally wrong about the Dems’ negative focus on Trump – which Carville himself was hissing and frothing about until around 9:00 on election night.  But now he says that the voters didn’t care about Trump’s “indictments…[or his] anti-democratic impulses.” 

Again, the only interpretation of that issue that will make Serpent-Boy and his political co-religionists feel good about themselves is to assume that the indictments, convictions and Trump’s “fascism” have all been substantiated, and the voters are morally deficient enough to be unbothered by them.  

After eight decades on the planet, Carville apparently still cannot conceive of something that most average people instinctively know: the lawfare, indictments and convictions against Trump were transparently illegitimate, and the Dems are the ones who have been “anti-democratic.”

Trump is no more a fascist than AOC is a Mensa member, or Jussie Smollett is a victim, or James Carville is a warm-blooded mammal. 

Here’s the rub, though, as Shakespeare said. (Or was it Arnold?) It’s easy for me to mock the lefties for having this preening, self-justifying arrogance, especially after the blessed electoral butt-kicking that they just received.

But the truth is that this tendency is a part of the human condition, and we fall into it too.  If we don’t always do it all of the time, we all do it some of the time, and we are all susceptible to it most of the time. 

If I don’t get the promotion, the boss is an idiot.  If I try day-trading stocks and lose my shirt, the market is corrupt.  If a few students give me bad teaching evaluations, it must be because they are dullards who don’t appreciate hilarious genius professors.  If a woman turns me down for a date (this never happened, but I’m saying hypothetically), she must be a lesbian.

Sometimes those assumptions are true.  After all, there are bad bosses, crooked businesses, dimwitted students and lesbians in the world. 

But it’s also possible that we’re wrong.  And when we are, we need to recognize it, and avoid the self-flattering – and self-defeating – posture the lefties have adopted since 11/5.  The red flag to look for?  If every single thing that happens – in our personal life, career, or politics – 100% confirms our priors, we’ve taken a wrong turn. 

As the Dems stagger into 2025, they are providing us with an invaluable example.  They’re learning all the wrong lessons, and studiously avoiding looking at what they’ve done wrong, and how it has led them to their sorry current state. 

Let’s resolve that in this new year, we will learn from the mistakes they’re repeating.  Because doing that is a lot less painful than learning from our own mistakes.

And, sure, a lot more entertaining, too. 

Hamas delenda est!

Looking Forward to the New Year, While Enjoying the Last of the 12 Days of Christmas (posted 12/31/24)

I hope that you all had a great Christmas!  I’m still enjoying the holiday, since the 12 Days of Christmas don’t end until January 6th, with the Feast of the Epiphany.  This January, I’ll be combining the religious and the secular, when I celebrate the Feast of the Righteous Schadenfreude on the 20th.

If the bourbon holds out, I’ll probably compose a speech for the occasion.  I’ve already got a title (“Our long national nightmare is over!”) and a first line (“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this Orange sun…”)

We had Christmas here at home, with both of my wife’s brothers and their wives coming over.  Among my favorite gifts were two coffee mugs: one with a pic of Trump and Vance on it (from my wife), and one from my liberal brother-in-law with the words, “I love when I wake up in the morning & Donald Trump is President.”

You know my bro-in-law is a good egg when he’s willing to go against all his instincts to buy that mug for me!  I don’t know if I could have brought myself to buy him a Que Mala mug if 11/6 had gone horribly wrong.  (And if I did, it would probably have been sarcastic and mean-spirited.  Like, “Nice job!  You’ve ruined everything.  Thanks for destroying the country!”)

My wife, daughter and I drove up to Tennessee the day after Christmas to spend four days with my mom, sister and her husband, and we really had a great time, even though there was a melancholy undertone because of mom’s progressing Alzheimer’s.  She is still herself, and sweet as can be, even as time has become a winding current that she enters and emerges from unpredictably.

Not long after we arrived, she asked me when her brother Joe was going to get there.  (She’s the last survivor of four siblings, and Joe’s been gone for almost 10 years.)  My sister tells me that at least a couple of times in the last month, mom has come out of her room early in the morning, nicely dressed and worrying that she’d be late for work.  One morning she said she hoped she hadn’t missed the bus for school.   

But her maternal instincts are still there, as strong as ever.  Regular readers may remember that after she’d had a small stroke last year, my sister had told her that she’d sleep in mom’s bed with her for the first several nights back home, since she was still unsteady on her feet and would need some help getting to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

By bedtime mom had forgotten the conversation, and as Rhonda was tucking her in, she had to remind her that she was sleeping in her bed that night.  Mom said, “Oh, okay.”  After a pause, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”

Each night we were there, mom got up after she’d gone to bed, and pulled a bunch of blankets out of her closet and carried them out to me, asking if we were going to be warm enough.  Two nights she did it twice, 10 minutes apart.  The last time, as I was putting her back into bed, she looked unhappy with me.  She whispered, “Who was that woman in your bed?”

Because I’m still basically a child, I said, “How can you expect me to remember all of their names?” 

For just a moment she started to scowl, but then her expression changed, and she slapped my hand, saying, “Oh, that’s Karen.  I know!”  And she giggled like she used to when I was a kid, and she was a young mother. 

It’s like watching a loved one walk into a foggy twilight.  With each step, you see less of her, and she of you.  The fog cyclically thickens and thins, and one moment you can look into her eyes and she’s fully present and clear, but you know that with each step, the fog may be swirling or lifting, but evening is steadily advancing.

Still, we really did have a great time.  One of the gifts we got mom was a big puzzle made from a picture of all of us at my daughter Katie’s wedding two years ago.  She helped put the puzzle together with my wife, daughter and sister, but her focus ebbed and flowed.  They left the last three pieces for mom to put in, completing the puzzle, and she loved that.

We played a game of Christmas-themed charades that had us laughing ourselves to tears.  (To get the flavor of the game, you can go to the old picture of mom and me on my site, Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Yes, she’s wearing a party hat and I’m wearing a turkey hat, and it wasn’t anybody’s birthday, or Thanksgiving.  I have no explanation.)

At one point Karen drew the card, “The ghost of Christmas yet to come,” and she chose to do a Yeti impersonation to get to “yet.” (She got up on her toes and did a lumbering walk that was half Frankenstein and half Joe Biden, if he had better posture and longer arms.)  And my daughter got it!

At one point I drew “Holiday Inn,” an old Christmas movie that nobody else had heard of.  So I was reduced to trying to act out a mid-range hotel chain that has nothing to do with Christmas.  (Nobody got it.)  Later I got “Away in a Manger” and for some reason started by indicating it was five words.  When they finally got that one and pointed out that it is actually four words, I counted again, then pointed out that I’m a hilarious genius, not a math genius.

Once when it was mom’s turn, she was laughing so hard that she had to go to the bathroom before looking at her card.  Did I already mention that I am basically a child?  Because I looked at mom’s card – “snowball fight” – and told everyone to yell it out as soon as she started to do anything.

She came back from the bathroom, looked at her card, then put it back down. As soon as she started to cup her hands together, we all yelled in unison, “Snowball fight!!” 

And she looked as shocked as she had been when she momentarily thought I had stashed a mistress in my bed in the guest room at Christmastime!     

We’re back home now, and looking forward to a new year more than I have in quite a while.  I’m still so relieved and grateful for the election results, and I hope that you are too.

Happy New Year!

Feeling the Christmas Spirit (posted 12/23/24)

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for this Christmas season, not the least of which is the good news that has been coming out of Israel lately.  And sure, starting with Jewish stories might not seem to be the most Christmasy way to begin a column.  But God started that way too, and we Christians got one of the top two Testaments ever, plus our Savior out of that deal.  So I’m just sticking with what works.

Israel had a great year, if measured by their righteous smiting of their enemies, and compared to their horrific 2023.   Their highlights included the exploding pagers, then the exploding radios and walkie talkies, and also the killings of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahoo Sinwar, along with most of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

In fact, the only disappointment from the Israelis came in October, when they carried out air raids and targeted strikes against Iran in the wake of the massive missile barrage Iran had thrown at them.   I had hoped they’d take out all Iranian nuclear sites, since the one existential threat to Israel — and the largest threat to the Middle East and beyond – would be the mullahs of Iran with nuclear weapons.

But in the two months since those strikes, I’ve realized how well that strategy worked.  Israel took out literally all of Iran’s air defenses and most of their ballistic missile program.  While I was hoping for more widespread destruction of Iran’s military and leadership, smarter analysts than me have pointed out that taking Iran’s missiles and air force off the map was a master stroke.

Iran is now deterred more than ever, because they know that the next time they start trouble, Israeli jets can strike Iranian targets with impunity.  And with greatly diminished missile inventories – and Israel’s demonstration in October that they can intercept the vast majority of missiles fired at them – Iran can hope for only a token show of force before they suffer devastating retaliation.

That still leaves the Iranian nuclear development threat. But even on that front, the Israeli strikes achieved more than they had appeared to at first glance.  Because a month after the strikes, Netanyahu officially confirmed that Israel had destroyed a key nuke research facility at Parchin.

The extra-sweet twist to that story: because Iran had been lying to the low-T anti-Semites running the UN that Parchin was a non-threatening, basically dormant facility, they are now unable to run to them whining that the Israelis took out the nukes that they had been insisting did not exist!

Oh, the savory delectability of a heaping bowl of Christmas hummus, glazed with a generous dollop of schadenfreude and served with a side of Nelson Muntz-ian HA-HA!   

A summarizing story from late November featured some perfect observations: “The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), earlier this year warned that Iran’s nuclear program has largely run unchecked for the last six years, and it is believed to have increased its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium metals…. But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has warned that Iran’s nuclear facilities should not become a target as Israel ramps up direct operations against Tehran.”

And now, if you’ll allow me a moment to crack my knuckles, stretch my arms, and rotate my head back and forth to get the kinks out of my neck like a bouncer preparing to pummel an opponent, I’ll attempt the rare, four-“unexpectedly” paragraph:

After Iran has been lying about their nuclear program for years (UNEXPECTEDLY!), and the lefty squishes at the UN and the Biden administration had adopted a subservient posture to appease them (UNEXPECTEDLY!), Israel went Old Testament on the mullahs, which worked out well (UNEXPECTEDLY!).  (“Down goes Goliath!  Down goes Goliath!”) And then, with the prospect of Orange Hitler returning to power, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas “tail between his legs” Araghchi “said he was ready to engage in international talks.” UNEXPECTEDLY!

Meanwhile at home, MSM dissemblers are either getting fired or taking pay cuts to keep their jobs.   MSNBC’s already-low ratings have plummeted since the election, dropping by over 60%.  To put that in terms AOC could understand, they’ve lost more than half of their viewers.  That’s literally dozens and dozens of people!

Get ready for the most deserved scare quotes ever:  Their on-air “talent” has either been getting fired, or required to take less pay.  Stephanie Ruhle was offered a pay cut from her current $2 million, and rabid, racist, blonde-hair appropriator Joy Reid – “My culture is not your costume!” says my Norwegian-American smokeshow wife to the Joy-less one – will drop from $3 million.

Which raises the obvious question: How on earth were those two imbeciles earning over a million dollars in their lifetimes, let alone in a single year?!

But it gets worse: Boyish expert in getting everything wrong Rachel Maddow graciously agreed to a pay cut – remember: she does a single one-hour show per week! – from $30 million allllll the way down to $25 million.

While I might be a hilarious genius, I’m no math genius.  But even I can figure out a ratio of viewers to salary, when looking at Rachel Maddow.  (Who, by the way, recently received the most laughably back-handed compliment in history, from a NY Post story.  They called her “MSNBC’s most bankable star.”)

(Not since Jeffrey Toobin’s colleagues told him, “We’ve seen smaller,” has a compliment been so backhanded.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah, Maddow’s viewers-to-salary ratio. I would love to be on the network side of all of these salary negotiations, because they certainly have the whip-hand.  The toughest negotiations are the ones in which the employee has rare and marketable skills, and many suitors wishing to hire them.  Think of a top-notch pitcher who can throw in the 90+ mph range with a lot of control.  If his team doesn’t want to pay him, other teams certainly will.

Now look at Stephanie Ruhle.  Is anyone else on earth elbowing aside competitors to pay her $2 mil?  Or Joy Reid, at $3 million?  I remember my dad saying, when we came across a super-annoying person, “She looks like a long day.”  Well, who needs a low-IQ, racist, long day of a person that badly?

I mean sure, the warped and dessicated Ivy League system will line up for an anti-patriotic whitey-hater to hire and give tenure to.  But not at $3 million a year!   

On an unrelated note, after the new year starts, I’ll be negotiating with CO for an equally reasonable salary of $30 million.  But I’m willing to negotiate down to Maddow-level numbers, even though that pittance would be a devastating insult to me.  

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For the next week I’ll be enjoying my favorite rituals of the season.  I’ll be listening to some Christmas carols in brass, along with A Christmas Carol read by Frank Muller.  (No matter how many times I read him, Dickens endures, and gets better somehow.)  I’ll watch at least one or two versions of A Christmas Carol on tv, along with at least parts of It’s A Wonderful Life.   (If you like Dickens and haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend a recent movie called “The Man Who Invented Christmas” which tells the story of his writing the Carol.)

We’ll go to a Christmas eve service, followed by supper with Karen’s two brothers and their wives.  After a peaceful Christmas day at home, we’ll go up to Tennessee to see my mom, sister and her husband.

Because I’ve been traveling so much, I haven’t had the chance to respond to the comments on my last several columns, but I was touched to hear how many of you have lost loved ones around past holidays.  I knew that my experience of losing my dad at Christmastime wasn’t unique, but I still got choked up hearing that for a handful of COers, this will be your first Christmas without a spouse or loved one.  You’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of many of us here, as you go through the first holiday (always the toughest one) with an empty chair at your table. 

I hope you all have a great Christmas, one in which you savor all you have, and take nothing for granted.

I couldn’t do better than to end with a pitch-perfect Dickensian toast that Dickens gives at the end of the movie I mentioned earlier.  “I wish you all many, many happy Christmases, and friendships, and great accumulation of cheerful recollections, and heaven at last for all of us.  In the season of hope, we will shut out nothing from our firesides.  And everyone will be welcome.”

A Great Graduation, & Positive Signs as the End of the Year Approaches (posted 12/19/24)

I had a great early Christmas with the family, watching my daughter’s graduation and catching up with everybody last weekend.  The best part may have been the most unSimpson-like experience of having VIP seating!

Every year the university gives one Freshman a specific scholarship that pays all expenses (tuition, dorm, food) for all 4 years, plus a six-week study-abroad course in Oxford.  Regular readers may remember that my little sarcastic astro-physicist daughter won that scholarship four years ago. 

She had an amazing time in Oxford, right up until she got a concussion from getting hit in the head by a metal pole while punting past C.S. Lewis’ Magdalen College rooms on the Thames.  (If she had been eating a crumpet while humming “God Save the Queen” during the experience, that would have been the most British thing any American has ever done.)

When my wife picked up our tickets for the graduation, we found out that the scholarship winner’s family gets VIP seating, in the second row center, right behind the spouses of the school’s big shots in the front row, and in front of the faculty. 

My wife got teary eyed when they lead us to the seats, which was sweet to see.  But I just felt like Jed Clampett driving his jalopy up the circular driveway in Beverly Hills.  (How did we get here, and when will someone realize their mistake and ask us to leave?)    

The ceremony was very nice, and we had some good family time for several days afterwards.  We got home yesterday, and I’m going to be heading back down to the Gulf coast to visit a cousin of mine for a few more days, before returning this weekend to get ready for Christmas.  I’ll have one more pre-Christmas column on Monday.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d touch on the continuing stream of green flags I’m seeing in the wake of Trump’s re-election.  (As opposed to red flags – warning signs that something is going wrong – I’m trying to make “green flags” – indicating the opposite – a thing.)

I’m enjoying watching the members of the legacy media still staggering around, their beaks knocked around to the side of their dazed faces like Daffy Duck after he held a bomb that went off.  They’d done everything they could to knock Trump off the political stage, and after his amazing win, they still haven’t figured out if they’re afoot or horseback.

The dullest of them – the competition is stiff – can’t seem to understand that they might be held accountable for their most egregious breaches of journalistic ethics.  Hostile Sunny Hosten has inadvertently started a popular regular feature on The View: the daily reading of the legal notes.

This happens whenever she sprints through the infield of stupidity, into the outfield of cluelessness, across the warning track of dipsh*ttery, and leaps the fence of legal liability, landing on her empty head.  In the booth, network lawyers shriek like the clipboard guy when Ron Burgundy confidently read the teleprompter telling the residents of San Diego to go friend themselves.  (“Oh! Great Odin’s raven!”)

When they come back from commercial, Sunny has to read corrections of her slanderous blatherings, forced on her by ABC so they don’t get sued into oblivion.  (“Matt Gaetz didn’t sexually assault an entire tour group on the House floor.”  “RFK Jr. hasn’t promised to give polio to every toddler in America.”  “Pete Hegseth didn’t shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”)

It’s great fun to watch her force the words out; she tries to read them robotically, but she can’t help grimacing.  The miserable look on her face communicates the corresponding and unending immiseration way deep, deep down in the tiny, compressed cinder of malice where her soul used to be. 

Not to be outdone by Sunny, ex-Clinton hack and pretend journalist George Snuffleupagus climbed up onto a stack of dictionaries so he could look Nancy Mace in the eye during an interview last spring, and then repeatedly tried to shame her for supporting Trump, whom he repeatedly and creepily said had been found liable by a jury for rape.  (This despite the fact that the jury had replied “No” to the first question on the jury form in that sham trial, which was, “Do you find Trump liable for rape.”)

This week his network gave Trump $16 million and a formal apology to settle his defamation suit against them.  George reportedly threw himself on the floor and kicked his tiny feet when he heard that news. 

Luckily for him, ABC must have some real dullards in charge, because they just signed Snuffy to a new, multi-year contract.  Which is good news for the future Trump presidential library, to which the $16 mil of ABC’s settlement has been earmarked.  That thing is going to have more funding than CO’s HQ compound by the time Trump finishes his second term!

It’s stunning that even as the MSM is suffering one mortifying and hilarious defeat after another, many of them seem incapable of learning their lesson.  A great example of that is the clump of biased lefties running Politifact, which fancies itself a “fact-checking” outfit.

Every December they choose a “Lie of the Year.”  I appreciate the magnitude of their challenge this year, since it’s been filled with a cloud of gigantic lies from January 1st to 30 seconds ago.  One would think that contenders for the title would be chosen based on the prominence of the person telling the lie, the overall importance of the lie, and maybe the frequency with which it was told.

By those standards, even in a year as saturated with dishonesty as this one, two big lies would have to top the list.  In second place, I’d put Joe Biden’s repeated promises that he would never, never EVER pardon Hunter, which easily meets all 3 criteria.  It was said by the leader of the free world, it was repeated a dozen or more times in high visibility settings, and since it was used as the basis of hundreds of Dem attacks on Trump (“The moral gulf between Biden righteously accepting the rule of law and not pardoning his son and Trump’s lawlessness is huge!”), it had a huge impact on the election.

But for me, the winner would have to be the omnipresent lie – from every MSM outlet, Democrat official and Dem political analyst/talking head/propagandist – that Joe Biden was in fabulous shape, and totally mentally fit.  Every prominent leftist told it, thousands of times, and it was so patently false that it beggars description. 

And when it was dramatically revealed in the disastrous debate, it imploded an incumbent president’s campaign and forced him out of the race, thereby becoming a contender for the biggest, most consequential lie of this century so far.

So which of those did Politifact choose?  Neither. 

They chose Trump’s claim that the Haitians in Springfield, OH were “eating the pets!”

Okay, Trump was a presidential nominee, and he repeated it a handful of times, mostly when MSM reporters asked him about it, so it could potentially be a contender.  But it may have been a murky combination of exaggeration and lie, because some ducks in city parks were eaten by Haitians, and there were multiple – unconfirmed – accounts of the illegals eating more than just ducks. 

Compare that to the “I won’t pardon Hunter” and “Joe Biden is compose mentis” lies.  Even the most fanatical Democrat can’t dispute that Joe pardoned Hunter, or that Joe is physically and mentally compromised.

But let’s assume that it’s false, and while the Haitians ate the ducks, they didn’t eat the dogs.  In typical Trumpy fashion, the prez used a clumsily (even stupidly) phrased attempt to get at a larger truth: unvetted millions of Third World illegals flooding into small communities create a variety of problems.

I don’t even think you can say that that lie had any important impact.  To the extent that it highlighted the negative impact arising from illegal immigration, at most it added to a perception already held by the vast majority of Americans.  For Politico to choose that lie as more significant than Biden’s top 5 or 10 lies is ridiculous.   

The MSM really has backed themselves into a corner.  If they stick to their propagandistic, leftist ways, their audience will continue to be tiny, and made up of emotionally dysregulated weirdos working on manifestos drawn directly from the DSM-5. 

But if they try to veer back to the political middle, even those weirdos will abandon them.  When Mika and Joe went crawling to Mar-A-Lago to beg the Mango Mussolini to talk to them, almost half of their audience abandoned them.  And that’s 11 people they cannot afford to lose!

CNN has hired intelligent conservative Scott Jennings to try to bring a little viewpoint diversity to their network, which is a risky move.  Just by being not-insane, he has been routinely reducing their far-left panelists to howling rage, and making them look even more ridiculous than they already did. 

That makes for intermittently good television, but how can it possibly work, given the bone-deep bias in the DNA of all of those shows?  Either the new “conservative” hires will quickly acclimate and move to the far left, making their hiring pointless (e.g. Jennifer Rubin and other formerly “conservative” hires at the WAPO or NYT, or the only attractive one on the View), or else they will remain conservative… and mow through the leftist pap on those shows like Sherman through Georgia!

More green flags for January arise from the super satisfying reversals of fate for so many of Trump’s cabinet and governmental nominees.  Medical experts like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary who had been slandered by the Fauci pro-maskers and “vaxes 100% stop the spread” types will now head up medical oversight agencies. 

Border hawks like Tom Homan who were sidelined and frustrated by open-border jerks will now oversee the border. Tulsi and RFK Jr. were dissed and banished from the Democrat party and will now be in positions of authority. 

Of course, the biggest reversal is Trump’s himself, since he went from targeted (literally) “felon” and pariah back to the top of the government.  I can’t help but think of Uncle Jesus’ musings on “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” 

Am I saying He was thinking of this election cycle? 

In the words of an obscure and failed politician whose name I can’t recall, I’m saying that we should have that conversation.

Hamas delenda est!