Author: martinsimpsonwriting

As you read this, I’m on the way back to Florida from Tennessee.  A day after my mom’s mini-stroke, she had another one, and spent Thursday night in the hospital as a precaution.  So I drove up to spend some time with her, arriving just as she got back from the hospital.

I had a great time with her, my sister and brother-in-law.  Mom once again bounced back quickly, and was walking around and taking care of business, albeit with a little weakness on her left side.  She was in great spirits, though her speech is still a little slurred, especially when she’s tired.  Her prognosis is good; her blood pressure is lower again, and the tests she had done show no brain damage.  She’s meeting with the doc on Tuesday, to follow up and set up some speech therapy, and maybe some physical therapy too.

But we laughed as much in the last 48 hours as we ever have.  We talked for hours, about everything, and my sister and I developed great comic impressions of mom’s slight speech slurring.

I know: that sounds terrible.  Maybe you need to know my family, but mom laughed until she was crying, and all three of us had to catch our breath multiple times.  The only normal one there was my bro-in-law Jimmy, and he just shook his head, watching us carrying on like lunatics.

There’s nothing like family, and I appreciate the good wishes and prayers you all have sent along for mom this last week! 

So this column will be a little shorter than usual, because I just have a few notes on stories that I saw before I got the news and headed north on Friday.

First up, the Miss Universe pageant was recently bought by a dude who thinks he’s a woman, and the contest was won last year by another dude in a dress.  Which is great, because people are really ready for unattractive guys to elbow aside actual women – with their yucky feminity and their .7 waist-to-hip ratios – in beauty pageants.   

Annnnnndddddd… they’ve filed for bankruptcy.  The boy/girl boss says that the pageant is experiencing a “liquidity problem.”

I’m no international beauty pageant expert – although my wife and both daughters could win a series of them – but I don’t think they’ve got a liquidity problem, but a rigidity problem.  

As in, half of the “girls” in the last bathing suit competition had visible erections.

Next, it’s been said that “violence is never justified,” which is a companion-piece to the bromide, “War is Never the Answer.”  That last statement is obviously wrong.  For example, when either, “Hitler?” “Hamas?” Or “Communist Invasion?” is the question, then war is the best answer, 3 out of 3 times.

Similarly, violence is often a solution – and even the optimal response – if you or someone around you is being attacked or menaced.    

An illustration of this truth could be found last week in the student band section at a Texas Southern football game.  I know, it’s a cliché because it’s true: just like drug cartels and biker gangs, college marching bands have a fearsome reputation for their routinely horrifying acts of violence.

This story was no different. 

So the marching band is playing in the stands, and some moron is relentlessly heckling a tuba player in the middle of a song.  Because, I guess, tuba hecklers gotta tuba heckle?  The jerk is holding some kind of a beverage (I’m guessing not orange juice) and he’s screaming in the face of a dedicated tuba-ist.  (Tuba-er?)

After at least a solid minute of this in the video that I saw (and for all we know the heckling could have been going on a lot longer at that point), the intrepid tuba-nator – without putting down the tuba, mind you – threw four right jabs of varying quality.

None of those punches would make an onlooker think that maybe a retired Mike Tyson has joined the tuba section at Texas Southern.  But in Tuba Man’s defense, you may have noticed that no heavyweight fight in history has featured two big guys trying to turn each other’s lights out while carrying a tuba in their off hand.

Though if that’s ever done in a pay-per-view, I’m in!

Anyway, the fourth jab laid the heckler out flat.  (The non-orange juice may have been a factor.)  And  my man on the tuba got right back into the song.  (“Where was I?   Oh yeah… blat blat, blat blat, etc.”)

The story says that the incident is being investigated… I hope as part of an evaluation process for potentially awarding the tuba guy with the Texas Southern version of a meritorious service medal.

But for now, I salute you, Texas Southern Tuba Player. 

And if I may suggest a new motto for the school’s tuba section: “Tex-Southern Tubas: Playing some brass, and handing out naps!”

Finally, you’ve probably seen the story about the fed-up guy in Panama who shot two arrogant environmentalist narcissists who had been blocking a freeway for many days, at a cost of $80 million per day in lost revenue, in addition to putting people’s lives in danger who might require medical help. 

Tragically, the two road-blockers died, and the shooter is likely to face heavy consequences.  And while the kind of entitled idiots who engage in these kinds of stunts deserve a butt kicking, they don’t deserve to die. 

But I think that this incident makes a larger point: when government purposely does NOT do its fundamental duty of enforcing law and order, the people will eventually be forced to do it, and many people are not going to like the results. 

This is an extreme example, but we’ve seen others, as when leftists and corrupt media (but I repeat myself) attacked and smeared Kyle Rittenhouse as the embodiment of a white supremacist vigilante.   Never mind that they were 180 degrees wrong, as usual – Rittenhouse was no vigilante, and the four violent criminals he shot in self-defense were all as white at Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher). 

But he never would have been forced to shoot those creeps if the Dems who ran Wisconsin and Kenosha hadn’t totally abdicated their responsibility to protect law-abiding citizens and their property from marauding mobs of violent leftists.  Those mobs did all kinds of damage to Kenosha homes and businesses in the days leading up to Rittenhouse’s famous degenerate-eradication incident, and the cops did nothing to stop them.

So the next night, when they were doing it again, some citizens resisted, in acts of completely justified self-defense. 

If our corrupt and negligent government continues to do more of the same, expect more of the same from law-abiding citizens, especially if the police are made to stand down in the face of the anti-Semitic thugs – to pick just one example – that we suddenly find among us.

If they keep it up, they’re going to find themselves confronted with an army of Rittenhouses and Texas Southern tuba sections, and they are not going to enjoy the outcome!

Hamas delenda est!    

I’m back, people!  If you read my column yesterday, I was pretty down about Trump running away with the nomination, and then likely to lose to Newsom next November (in my humble opinion… and worst nightmares).

Then I got a call from my sister in Tennessee, saying my 85-year-old mom had a stroke yesterday. 

It turned out to be a very minor one – she had a blood pressure spike to 190s over 140s, and gave us a scare – but she was back to normal within a half hour.  She’s got some new meds and my sister is watching over her and keeping her hydrated, and she’s got an appointment with her doc on Monday, and we’ll be up to see her ASAP.  (Sooner, if it’s warranted.)

You can see a pic of my adorable mom with me (from maybe 10 years ago) on my homepage at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  She was a great wife to dad, and is a great mom to my sister and me, and she’s living right.  Her early-stage Alzheimer’s is starting to rob her of parts of herself, but she’s enjoying her life and she’s not afraid to die, knowing that she’ll be with Christ, and my dad and her folks, and that my sister and I will be along shortly.  (That circle will be unbroken, is what I’m trying to say.)

And suddenly I can see all of the political sturm und drang in perspective, and grant it its proper importance. Which is: some, but not that much.

So I’m going to get back to one of the things God made me for: mocking idiots and their bad ideas.  In fact, I’ve got four good news points to send you into the weekend with a smile on your face:

1. Israel is kicking the crap out of Hamas, and that’s enraging bad people all over the world, including on our campuses and in our House of Representatives.

As of 11/8, Hamas has lost control of northern Gaza, as Israel has opened temporary corridors allowing thousands of Gazan non-combatants to flee from the north.  Israel has been bombing terror tunnels and stacking up terrorist bodies, including a number of high-profile commanders responsible for major parts of the cowardly massacre of unarmed civilians on October 7^th. 

An unknown number of “Palestinian” “civilians” have also been reported killed, but those numbers are always inflated by lying Hamas mouthpieces.  Of those who actually have died, many were undoubtedly Hamas terrorists, and many others were their supporters.  (Quick tip: If any of the dead were those who celebrated the 10/7 massacres and spit on or otherwise defiled the bodies of the raped and murdered Israeli women paraded through Gaza’s streets, they bought their ticket, and now they’ve taken the ride, and good riddance to bad hummus.)

The blame for the remainder of actually innocent Palestinian dead lies entirely with Hamas, who has been purposely committing the war crime (cited in three different articles of the Geneva conventions) of using civilians as human shields. 

Lovers of freedom everywhere should be celebrating the fact that so many Hamas terrorists and commanders are now in hell, where demons are administering pitchfork suppositories left and right. 

There’s still a lot left to do, though, in Israel and here. Because a mob of terrorist-supporting “Palestinian” protestors stood outside the White House and tried to climb the fence there (i.e. INSURRECTION!) If the Dems had any moral consistency, they’d be screaming, “Fire at will to protect our precious democracy!” Meanwhile, their cowardly jihadi allies outside the WH were screaming, “Allahu akbar.” 

You may remember that delightful bloodthirsty slogan from when the 9/11 terrorists screamed it as they flew planes into the World Trade Center, or when other terrorists screamed it as they sawed Daniel Pearlman’s head off, or when other terrorists screamed it when they raped and slaughtered Jewish women and children a month ago, or when…

You get the picture.  Also, other pro-Hamas scumbags climbed up on a statue of Ben Franklin and draped a filthy keffiyeh on his head.  That’s the terrorist headpiece worn by terrorizing terrorists as they howl, “Allahu akbar” and murder children to celebrate every “Genocide Tuesday” and “Intifada Wednesday” and—

You get the picture.  Can I ask why we don’t have cops in the streets, using shotguns to fire beanbags into the groin of any Hamashole who tries to vandalize statues of our founders?  (Talk about “aim small, miss small,” by the way.)  And why don’t we have capital police using belt-fed weapons to clear the White House fence of hateful attackers? 

Are we running short on shotguns and machine guns?  Because if so, I’ll bet the fine denizens of CO nation could start a Gofundme and raise some cash for that purpose in short order.    

And while I’m dreaming up a wish list of anti-terrorist actions, did you see the stories of the top three Hamas bosses who are worth a collective $10 billion?  They’re living luxurious lives in mansions and extravagant hotels in Qatar, Turkey and elsewhere, while the “Palestinian” people live in (mostly self-imposed) squalor.

I’ve always loved the stories of how the Mossad sent hit teams all over the world to kill the evil terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and I’ve read dozens of fictionalized versions of those kinds of hit squads giving terrorists their just desserts.

Is it too much to hope for that some teams of Israeli special forces bad-asses are even now being deployed to terminate those Hamas billionaires?  And if they are, can I please request that they throw at least one of those monsters off the top of a mile-high hotel in Dubai, just so the last thing the terrorist hears is, “Now you know how it feels to be a gay guy in your awful cities!”  

2. In other happy news, high-profile leftists all over the country are reaping what they’ve been sowing.

For example, a few years ago evil gnome George Soros funded the election of leftist New Orleans DA Jason Williams, who promptly started declining to prosecute 65% of all criminal cases in NO.  Shockingly, car thefts increased 104% in 2022. 

And then, last month, as Williams was walking his 78-year-old mother to his car, two thugs carjacked them at gun point.  Thankfully, his mom was unhurt.  Unfortunately, he didn’t get even the light pistol-whipping that his own corruption called for.  Still, he’s now a crime victim and he lost his car, so that’s a start.

For another (hilarious) example, a hateful “Palestinian” racist woman in Indiana – I’m not saying she’s related to Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, but I’m not saying she’s NOT related to Tlaib or Omar – intentionally drove her car into what she thought was a synagogue, telling the cops that she did it on purpose, because she’s a black-hearted anti-Semitic piece of crap.  (I’m paraphrasing.) (But not by much.) 

What’s hilarious about that?  The building she damaged actually belonged to a skeevy group of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of racist black loons who put the Star of David on their clubhouse, which then attracted one of their fellow rabid Jew haters to mistakenly attack their den of stupidity. 

If only all involved had been present and heavily armed, they could have opened fire on each other, and made this the feel-good story of the fall!     

3. Speaking of opening fire, we’ve still got the 2^nd amendment, and armed thugs are getting shot down or run off all over the place.

For example, an unassuming little Vietnamese guy identified only as “Tien” owns a pawn shop in Texas. (Yes, I spent the last half-hour trying to come up with some kind of comic reference for that.  The closest I came was, “Tien easy pieces” or “Tien Little Warrens,” but couldn’t make those work.) (Still: #wemustneverstopmockingher) He’s got Vivek’s hair, and a passion for sellable gold and jewelry. 

Recently two armed thugs came into his store.  (MSM accounts don’t mention their race.  So guess.  Then watch the video, and give yourself a gold star.) As soon as they got inside, they pulled their guns.

But Tien was packing, and he fired first.  Because: Texas!

Tragically, neither would-be thief was perforated.  But they both fled, leaving a trail of urine (and, I’m guessing, Democrat mail-in ballots?). 

When Tien talked to a reporter afterwards – I like to think he did so after blowing smoke away from the barrel of his pistol – he said, “I think the cash business, the gold business, seems to be an easy target for them, or so they think.  But it’s not.”

Ooh, I got it!  “No need for Tien Commandments, because Tien only has one: DON’T SCREW WITH TIEN!”  Boom!

An even happier story happened just before Halloween in a suburb of St. Louis, when Javion Bibby and Ronnie Jewett (undoubtedly two more of those super-dangerous white supremacists the late Joe Biden was always warning us about) put on ski masks and tried to carjack a citizen who turned out to be armed.

Aaaannnnnddddd… Javion’s a speed bump and Ronnie runs away, and then is caught by the cops, and now faces murder charges, since his buddy got killed during a crime he participated in.

Hat tip to the local Democrat justice system, who saw to it that even though both criminals were violent recidivists and part of a dangerous carjacking ring, they were out on the streets to practice their hobby of multiple bullet absorption.  Well done!

4. The partial manifesto written by the Tennessee murderer who targeted a Christian school has been leaked, and that’s a very good thing.  Because it revealed what our censorious leftist elites always try to hide: the killer was a textbook example of toxic leftist beliefs.

She was a sexually confused “transgender” Christophobe, a hateful anti-white racist, and a big believer in the class hatred that typifies the Left ever since Marx.  She ranted about the “little blonde crackers” whom she slaughtered, and about their “white privlage” (so close on that spelling!), and their “fancy khakis… backpacks…and [cars].”

The story is so sad, but a tiny silver lining was that the cops on the street were so much better than their bureaucrat bosses, who have covered up and lied about the killer’s motives.  Fortunately, while she wrote, “Ready to die,” the TN cops were commensurately ready to kill her. 

If only it could have happened quicker.       

Finally, I’ve got a book recommendation for CO nation.  If you haven’t read Elmore Leonard’s novels before – or watched the great tv series Justified, based on them – you’re in for a treat.

I’ve been re-reading several of them lately, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.  The guy writes amazing dialogue, and as a writer, he’s who I want to be when I grow up.  (I know: I better hurry!)  The protagonist of Justified, Raylan Givens, appears in Pronto and Raylan.  I’m just finishing the latter now, and it contains four separate plotlines that would each be enough to sustain a great novel, and the writing is like cut and polished diamonds: every word is perfect.  

And once again, I’m struck at the unfairness of life.  Elmore Leonard is dead, as is Vince Flynn, Robert B. Parker, Tom Petty, John Prine and my dad, among others.

Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky is 100-something, Joe Biden is still alive (sort of), Liz Warren is still on the warpath (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and Bernie Sanders is still… doing whatever it is he does. 

And Nancy Pelosi – the Botoxed Bakenrenef  (you try pulling an alliterative name of an ancient Egyptian that goes with “botox” out of your arse, you think it’s so easy) – has now outlived dozens of Pharaohs, thousands of kings and emperors and shoguns, and 40 US presidents.  And she continues to haunt our nightmares with her horrifying rictus grin.   

On the other hand, my sweet mom is still alive, and Hamas murderers are dropping like flies.  So we’ve got that going for us.

Have a great weekend. Go Israel!  And still and always…

Hamas delenda est!

As I draft this on Wednesday afternoon, I’ve been looking through analyses of yet another GOP under-performance in another set of off-year elections yesterday, as well as the latest from the Trump trial, and am feeling considerably less than cautiously optimistic about our chances next year.   

I’m not going to watch the GOP debate tonight, because life is too short to spend time watching the prospect of the party stumbling forward into a replay of the loss in 2020.  I’ll watch the shorthand analysis of the debate from some political commentators I trust, or at least as much as I can stomach of it. 

Perhaps you fine folks in CO nation can buck me up and show me where my following thoughts and analyses are wrong?  Because I really hope that they are!

1. Trump’s chances next year: 

I fear that the bogus and infuriating trials that the corrupt Dems will be putting him through this year and next are going to make him susceptible to the Lenny Bruce syndrome. 

Full disclosure: Bruce was before my time, and from what I’ve seen of his old recordings, he wasn’t my cup of tea, and his material hasn’t aged well.  But he was widely influential on generations of comics who followed him.

At the height of his fame Bruce became embroiled in an obscenity trial.  His last months of gigs (he overdosed at 40) were famously depressing, because he took to obsessively focusing on the ebbs and flows of his trial, going so far as to read trial transcripts on stage.  Audiences became restless and turned away, for the obvious reason: a comedian’s job is to make people laugh, and regardless of the merits of his case (obscenity and speech laws changed dramatically not long after), they weren’t there to witness legal battles.

I’ve said it many times: the four cases against Trump are completely partisan hackwork, and the fact that they are even happening is an indictment of the outrageous corruption in our courts and media.  (The only charge among them that is legitimate at all is the “he disclosed classified documents,” and that is only the case because Trump threw away the presidential get-out-of-jail-free card by confessing his guilt on tape – “I could have declassified these as president, but I didn’t.” – in an act of undisciplined foolishness.) 

That being said, if the past month is any indication, we’re going to see a ton of Trump in and out of court and ranting at and about witnesses, judges and the rotten system.  It’s likely that just about everything he rants will be true – just as the charges against Lenny Bruce didn’t stand the test of time – but that’s not going to help him in a general election.

People go see a comedian because he’s supposed to make them laugh.  Persuadable voters support a presidential candidate because they want him to win and govern well.  I don’t see how obsessing over trial transcripts on stage is going to advance that goal.

My overall take on this election is far from unique: every Dem and GOP nominee – regardless of who it is – starts with around 40-43% of the vote, and elections are won by winning the persuadable non-hardcore base voters in between those two set-in-stone voting blocs. 

Biden is a uniquely awful candidate, presiding over a horrifically dysfunctional and unpopular administration.  If he remains the candidate, the best strategy for any GOP nominee is to keep the focus on Biden.

Trump is a uniquely polarizing candidate, eliciting near-worship from his committed base, and the fiery hatred of 1000 suns from everyone on the center left, and too many in the mushy middle.  If he is the candidate, the best strategy for any Dem nominee is to keep the focus on Trump. 

Trump is constitutionally unable to stay out of the spotlight, even moreso now that he’s going to spend months on end in court, and will likely focus much more on his own legal persecution than on Biden’s manifestly disastrous presidency.  

Biden, on the other hand, is constitutionally unable to appear, um,  biologically viable. (He’s shuffled off this mortal coil!), which means that staying out of the limelight is right in his wheelhouse. (There’s no place farther from the limelight than a coffin in a White House janitor’s closet.)

That’s the route he took in ’20: hiding in the basement and making minimal appearances or speeches.  I expect he’ll do the same this time around, including refusing any debates with Trump, since Trump refused to debate in the GOP primaries.

In fact, Biden’s argument on that point would be even stronger than Trump’s.  Trump said that he is so far ahead of the other contenders that they aren’t even legitimate rivals, and he’d have nothing to gain by debating them (sadly, it appears, fact check: true).  But Biden can easily claim that Trump isn’t a legitimate opponent (the MSM will do their best to bolster this lie), and claim (correctly!) that he has a lot more to lose than to gain by debating Trump.

Obviously, a candidate in a very tight race has a lot more incentive to duck debates – if he can get away with it – than someone with a big lead.

And if Trump tries to generate righteous anger to shame Biden into debating, he’s going to be accused of rank hypocrisy.  (Once again, sadly: fact check true)  Unfortunately, that’s a weapon that he put in the Dems’ hands, and I won’t be surprised if they use it, even if Biden isn’t the eventual nominee.   

2. The results yesterday:

 It’s not fair to blame Trump for the nationwide GOP losses yesterday – as never-Trumpers are itching to do – but I also think that two of what I think are three contributing factors are bad signs for him, though always-Trumpers will fight that assertion tooth and nail.

First, it looks like abortion once again hurt us in OH and elsewhere, and I don’t know how to react to that other than throw up my hands in frustration and even despair.  It’s hugely disheartening to see how many people will eagerly perform a cranial-rectal inversion on themselves to avoid facing the clear truth that late-term abortions are infanticide. 

Not to mention how many leftists and moderates insist that the federal government must dictate 98% of our life choices (what kind of car we can drive, what kind of lightbulb or toilet or stove we can buy, whether can protect ourselves with a gun, what schools our kids can go to, etc.), yet are horrified by any legal authority preventing them from aborting a viable baby in the womb.  I don’t get it, and all I know to do is pray for them, and keep trying.

But this abortion issue is probably one that favors Trump’s more moderate position than it does DeSantis’ 6-week ban.  (I think the RDS take is the morally correct one, but it appears to politically hurt us, even though we could largely mitigate that by clearly messaging it correctly.)

A second problem was the way the Dems out fundraised and outspent us.  IMO, Ronna Romney-McDaniel (I for one won’t let her drop that “Romney”!) has once again botched the primary tasks of an RNC head, i.e. supporting strong candidates and raising tons of money.  

And while spending isn’t everything – wisely spending is important, and candidate quality matters, as when Hillary vastly out-spent Trump in ’16 and got her adipose hindquarters handed to her anyway – it certainly helps, especially when deployed on get-out-the-vote infrastructure.  And Ronna did not do that.  Again!

She is another head-scratcher for me, re: Trump.  I think he endorsed her for the job in 2016, and I know that he endorsed her to stay in the job after the ’18 mid-term losses and the disappointment in ’20.  Then, after the dismal failure in the ’22 midterm – when Harmeet Dhillon challenged her – Trump stepped aside and let them “fight it out” without his endorsement. 

I don’t get that.  Dhillon famously supported and defended Trump in the aftermath of the ’20 election, so he couldn’t say she’d been disloyal.  

One of the things I like about a businessman brand is that if somebody isn’t doing a good job, he fires them.  (Unlike in our gov’t, where failures keep getting promoted.  See: Biden, Joseph Robinette.) So after Ronna performed so badly in 3 consecutive election cycles – the last one disastrously so! – I don’t understand why Trump didn’t support Dhillon.

And thus we have yesterday: one more very winnable slate of elections in which the RNC head raised less money than the Dems, and we once again underperformed.

Not Trump’s fault, but not the best moment of another hand-picked endorsement of his, either.

As to the high-profile KY governor race, I don’t agree with Trump critics who blame him for Daniel Cameron’s losing a close race to Dem Andy Beshear.  But I do think that the result should give pause to those who may have over-estimated the power of Trump’s endorsement, too.

I don’t follow KY politics closely, so I could be wrong about this.  But I’ve been reading a writer at RedState who calls himself “Bonchie” (? Come on, man!) and who usually gives a pretty honest, conservative bounce on issues that I do follow.  He’s not a Trump-basher, but his take is that Cameron seemed to over-rely on Trump’s endorsement: 

“If you lived in Kentucky, you were bombarded with ads and social media posts that centered on one thing and one thing only: Being endorsed by Donald Trump. In fact, Cameron began his general election campaign by taking a shot at Ron DeSantis, who had endorsed one of his opponents, proclaiming the “Trump culture of winning is alive and well.”

“Cameron didn’t spend the waning weeks of his campaign being his own man, making a forceful case to voters. Instead, he spent it talking about a Trump tele-rally and releasing videos from Trump while emblazoning “Trump-endorsed” on every piece of media he could find.”

Again, I don’t think you can say his loss is Trump’s fault; in fact, Bonchie’s take is more a critique of Cameron than of Trump.  But Cameron appeared to be an attractive, young, black candidate in a red state in a time when the Democrat party label is at low ebb nationally, and he was in a neck-and-neck race.  Yet Trump’s endorsement didn’t put him over the top.

By the way, I mean no offense to my always-Trump friends here, but admit it: if Cameron had won, Trump would be tweeting and truthing and shouting from the rooftops that his endorsement was the deciding factor in Cameron’s historic, beautiful and earth-shaking victory.   (Now that Cameron lost, I’d bet my house that Trump will be saying that the outcome had nothing to do with his endorsement.)

Having said all that, I will end on the encouraging note of some recent polls that show Trump having a lead in 6 of 7 battleground states against Biden.  I still don’t think that Biden has more than a 50/50 chance of being the Dem nominee, and I know that trusting polls – especially a year out! – is foolhardy,

But at this point, I’ll take any glimmer of good news from wherever I can get it! 

I’ll try to shake off this gloom, and come back with a column with my usual tomfoolery tomorrow.

Hamas delenda est!

Because crooked politicians have been up to no good, as usual – creeps gotta creep – I could write my usual Monday column on their sleazy behavior.

I could write about how Sam Bankman-Fried, probably the largest donor to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle, was convicted on a raft of fraud charges, which the execrable MSM managed to report on without ever mentioning his huge donations to Democrats.

Or I could write about how Stacy Abrams (D-irigible) says that anybody who doesn’t like Que Mala is both racist and sexist.

Or about how the mortal remains of Joe Biden (He’s pining for the fjords!) has been linked to thousands of emails he sent under various pseudonyms (such as Cornpopslayer@aol.com,  Flatline@ukraine.com, and c’monman@whereamIrightnow?.com.)

But I’m not going to do that.  Because for the last week I’ve been in a contemplative mood, and I’ve been struck more and more by how inexplicably shameless our prominent people and public institutions have become. 

Day after day, I see people caught in shocking scandals, and nothing happens to them.  The squad members blatantly support terrorists who have just committed acts so vile they’d make the Nazis blush, and their party – with majority Jewish support in elections – makes no move to censure or expel them.  The president’s son Hunter is filmed taking hard drugs while cavorting with hookers – the videos are available anywhere! – and admitting to scores of felonies, and his dad still takes him to public events.    

On the right, too, we’ve known for almost a year that George Santos is a ridiculous conman and sociopathic liar, and he’s still in congress.  Lauren Boebert is filmed giving a stranger a handy in a movie theater, and nobody says boo.  

So today I have a few rambling thoughts on the subject of shame. 

I’ll be the first to admit that shame can be destructive.  In Victorian times, many people were driven into self-hatred after they engaged in what we now call “Toobin-ing.”  (And if you know Jeffrey Toobin’s biography, that incident probably wasn’t even in the top three behaviors that he has to be ashamed about!) 

In cultures such as Japan, businessmen whose companies have a bad quarter have been known to kill themselves out of shame.  Similarly, one of the darker aspects of social media has been revealed in stories of adolescents whose tormentors bully them online, making them feel ashamed to the point that they commit suicide.  (And for those bullies, Uncle Jesus had strong opinions, involving millstones tied around necks.)

But even though mis-directed or undeserved shame can be destructive, appropriately felt shame is a necessary response – and corrective – to bad behavior.  I believe that we need more shame in our national life. 

It fell out of fashion for a long time, roughly coincident with our loss of a predominantly Judeo-Christian ethical framework.  In its wake came Freud and a therapeutic culture that saw shame mostly as an unhealthy inhibition on our instincts, and something to resist and overcome.   Too many therapists in recent decades adopted a goal of raising a patient’s self-esteem, but they reversed the natural cause and effect involved.

Rather than seeing self-esteem as something that comes as a result of achieving goals and behaving properly, they believe that instilling unearned self-esteem in a patient will then cause him to behave well and become successful.  (Some revealing psychological studies predicted the kind of bad outcomes this approach would produce, when they revealed that one group of people with unusually high self esteem is criminals.) 

A focus on this same kind of self-esteem building in our schools and media has exacerbated the problem by adding two other mutually interacting dysfunctions: nurturing and rewarding a sense of victimhood, and medicalizing most bad behavior.

You can see the results everywhere.  When a criminal is caught, he immediately starts playing victimhood bingo: the deck was stacked against him because of his race, or his sexual orientation, or his poverty.  He never knew his dad, and his mom was never around, and all of the influences in his neighborhood were negative, and he was high or drunk when he committed his crimes, and he had a low IQ. 

There’s a little bit of truth in all of those points, but they all avoid the central truth of personal responsibility. 

Lots of people of all races grew up in bad neighborhoods, but most of them didn’t become career criminals.  Lots of people are poor, but they don’t become thieves.  Lots of people have low IQs, but they just run for congress. 

Rapists will tell you all about how women treated them badly and rejected them (Join the club, buddy.), and about their “disease” of sex addiction.  (Oh, you find women attractive and want to have sex with as many of them as possible? That sounds contagious!).  Obese people will tell you about their screwed up metabolism and food addictions. (Donuts and ice cream taste amazing?  The hell you say!)

Lazy people will self-diagnose their chronic fatigue syndrome, and bad students their ADD.

All of these diagnoses are lacking the same thing: an appropriate sense of shame, and the possibility of changing your ways and overcoming your flaws that come with it.

If you look in the mirror and see a victim of food addiction, sex addiction, chronic fatigue and poor impulse control, you’ll likely feel fine about yourself, and maybe seek a disability check for these conditions.

On the other hand, if you look in the mirror and see a gluttonous, horny, lazy criminal, you’ll likely feel ashamed of yourself.  But if you’ll use that shame at motivation, you’ve got a better shot at becoming the better person you could be.     

Our nation’s institutions are shot-through with this same kind of pathological and destructive shamelessness. 

Journalism can be a noble profession, with an ethical code that stresses finding and telling the truth as conscientiously and completely as you can.  So why are most members of our media such shamelessly lying hacks?

Reporters from our most prestigious papers won Pulitzer prizes for writing endlessly about the Russian hoax which turned out to be completely false.  None of them produced any soul-searching mea culpas, and none of them returned their Pulitzers.

For several years they wrote about covid: that it naturally originated from bats or pangolins, or possibly bat/pangolin orgies; that masks and six feet of distance and new vaccines stopped it dead; that new treatments which were first used 15 minutes ago were scientifically certain to have no negative long-term side-effects; that Fauci was a saintly truth-teller.

None of them resigned in disgrace, or admitted how they’d gotten everything so wrong.  Many of them are gearing up for lockdowns and mask mandates again, just in time for next year’s elections.

Our FBI and intelligence agencies used to be widely respected, but they’ve spent several years covering up obvious crimes of leftist politicians, while lending their imprimatur to ridiculous conspiracy theories about pee tapes and Steele dossiers.  Dozens of “intelligence officials” pimped out their own credibility to lie about Hunter Biden’s obviously authentic and incriminating laptop being a Russian fake.

Our universities used to be the gold standard for scholarship.  A degree from an Ivy League school connoted respect and the promise of career success.  Academia stood for free speech and free inquiry; science degrees brought technical innovation and life-improving advancements; liberal arts programs transmitted an appreciation for the great accomplishments of the West.

Now I wouldn’t send Cassie the Wonder Dog to an Ivy league school, even if she got a free ride, and even though she’d be a shoo-in for valedictorian.  Our liberal arts programs have been contaminated by tribal hatreds, fashionably contemptuous political dogma, and a disdain for America and the West.  Even hard sciences are being corrupted by idiotic identity hires who argue that math is sexist and physics is racist.  The good people trying to do honest scholarship are fighting an uphill battle against armies of mediocre social engineers. 

Our politicians used to be— Okay, check that.  Politicians have always been eyed with some distrustful wariness, and rightly so.      

But I’m old enough to remember when parents would tell their kids, “You could someday grow up to be president!”  If I heard that now, it would be damning with faint praise at best, and fighting words at worst!

Okay, that’s a lot of ranting.  But I’ll end with this modest proposal: let’s start bringing back shame.

Let’s follow the lead of that apple-eating bad-ass Canadian politician, and shame every “journalist” who tries to ask a loaded, dishonest question.

Let’s make a list of journalists who ran with Hamas’ lies about the hundreds of dead children at the Gaza hospital that was never hit by an Israeli rocket, and whenever they ask any question about Hamas’ war, require that they first admit their mistake and apologize.

Let’s bombard university presidents and regents with demands to denounce Hamas, and their own students’ anti-Semitic vandalism and attacks on Jews, and put pressure on those who have been donating to their endowments if they won’t.   

So many of our elites have been acting shamelessly, and if their consciences have become so cauterized that they’ve become numb to shame, let’s help re-train them to feel it.

It will be good for them, and good for the nation and its future. 

Hamas delenda est!

Now that I’m back home and into the normal swing of things again, I’m going to briefly mention a few stories that I hadn’t gotten to, before moving on. 

First, I really like what I’m seeing out of Mike Johnson as Speaker so far.  His first official move was a hat-trick:

–he supported Israel (which is manifestly the right thing to do)

–he put up a stand-alone bill that split the aid to Israel off from yet more aid to Ukraine (which I don’t think is necessarily wrong, but which requires much more scrutiny)

–and he proposed a perfect way to “pay for” it (nothing in DC is truly paid for by anyone other than taxpayers) by taking the unspent cash that was earmarked to hire 87,000 more locusts – er, IRS agents – to harry and harass said taxpayers. 

To top that off, he got a dozen Dems who aren’t insane enough to have “I love Hamas” tramp-stamps to sign onto the bill.  So now the Dems in the narrowly divided Senate will have to go on the record by either passing the bill or passively aiding Hamas.

And when an aide wakes the Cadaver in Chief (He’s joined the choir invisible!) and reads the now-bipartisan bill to him, Biden will face a dilemma:

“Do I do the right and popularly supported thing, even though it gives the GOP a win and angers the jihadi, Jew-hating, pro-atrocity wing of my party, or do I…  do I…  you know.  You know the thing.  What was I…….. Anyway…”   

But I still don’t care for Matt Gaetz, who is very lucky that the bonehead GOP’s three-week rake-stomping contest ended with them accidentally making what so far looks like a good pick for Speaker. 

IMHO, it was the height of hubris for Gaetz – who has a mixed record on conservative issues – to let his personal pique at McCarthy lead him to overthrow a reasonably effective GOP speaker in a narrowly divided House with no plan or alternative speaker in mind to replace him. 

Whoa!  Before any of my more always-Trumpy comrades throw rocks at me, I ask you to remember two facts:

1. Gaetz voted with 100% of the Democrats and against 96% of the Republicans on that issue.  (As bad as many in the GOP can be and often are, they have NEVER collectively been as terrible as the wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes up 100% of the Dems in congress.)

2. McCarthy was Trump’s hand-picked choice for Speaker, getting his full-throated endorsement earlier this very year.  So unless you’re suggesting that Trump would disloyally throw his former ally under the bus, or that he exhibited poor judgment in an endorsement—

Oh, wait.

The only other thing that I wish would have come out of the speaker fight was raising the bar on the number of GOP votes required to throw a speaker out.  It’s a recipe for continuing chaos to allow only a tiny rump caucus of 4% of GOP members to topple a Speaker.  If you can’t get at least a quarter or a third of your party to support you (and your Democrat allies) in an overthrow, you need to think twice.

This time it was supposedly 5 “conservatives” who took down the speaker.  (I’m not buying it, especially since the most conservative members, including Roy and Massie among others, voted to keep McCarthy.)  But we all know that there are way more than 5 mushy GOP moderates in the House. 

Do we REALLY want to give a tiny number of those people the ability to throw out our Speaker anytime they get mad about anything at all?        

Second, Jamaal Bowman took a plea and paid a fine for pulling a fire alarm in a lame attempt to stop a House vote.  Sure, that’s a ridiculously lenient punishment for trying to disrupt the legitimate functions of the congress, which the left has been telling us since 1/6/21 constitutes high treason and insurrection, and is thus worthy of years in prison.

But we can see to it that this incident will eternally besmirch his reputation. 

Now Bowman has joined the ignominious ranks of Democrats whose obituaries will begin by referring to a solitary moment in their lives of such sublime stupidity and/or dishonesty that they will be a laughingstock forever.

He takes his place beside Hank Johnson (D-uh), the dope who feared that adding more personnel to our military base in Guam might make the island tip over,

…and Eric Swalwell, the idiot who fell for Fang Fang the Chi-Com who promised to love him long time,

…and Liz Warren, the winner of “Miss Cherokee Cheekbones of 1976” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Third, a Canadian member of Parliament (and, God willing, the future replacement for Black-face Trudeau) with the ridiculous name Pierre Poilievre provided a textbook example of how to wrong-foot a simpering, bad-faith, leftist “journalist.”

The biased hack rolled out the usual dishonest question-framing: many people say that you’re an extremist populist who is taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book, and appealing to voters’ emotions with ideological language, blah blah blah.   

But P-squared didn’t let him get away with any of it, challenging every bogus charge:

Hack Journalist (HJ): Many people say…

Double-P (DP): What people?

HJ: I don’t know, some people.

D-P: Well you asked the question, don’t you know who?

HJ: homina homina. They say you’re a populist—

D-P: What do you mean by that?

HJ: I guess that you use emotional language—

D-P: Like what?

HJ: I guess like “left wing” and “right wing”—

D-P: I never really talk about left and right.

HJ: Anyways, they say you’re taking a page out of Trump’s book—

D-P: What page?  Can you give me a page?

By the end, the poor jerk was left stuttering and staring at the ground, and when P-squared finally asked him exactly what his question was, all he had left was, “I guess, why should people vote for you?”

It was an “emperor has no clothes” moment for the interviewer, and the exposure was NOT a good look for him. 

And Pierre did it all while casually eating an apple! 

That doesn’t sound very impressive, but when you watch the video, it is incredibly cool.  He ate that apple the way tough guys in old movies used to smoke a cigarette: it simultaneously gave him something to do with his hands, and a way to demonstrate an insouciant disdain for his opponent.   (It reminded me of an old joke: “Don’t smoke, kids. …unless you want to look really, really cool!”)

The only thing the apple didn’t allow him to do was blow smoke in the guy’s face.  But I guess he could have finished the apple at the same time he finished off the “journalist,” and then beaned the guy in the head with the apple core. 

All of our candidates should study that video, and then start carrying an apple with them everywhere, waiting for the chance to rhetorically de-pants the first lefty smear-artist who tries to ambush them.    

Speaking of morally ugly self-exposure, it’s been instructive to see how completely academia has revealed itself to be a home to some really terrible, anti-Semitic terrorism enthusiasts and bigots.  From tearing down posters of kidnapped Jews to screaming genocidal slogans to attacking Jewish students on the streets and in libraries, the academic left has revealed their rotten core more effectively than a thousand conservative jeremiads could ever have done.

Regular readers will know that I retired from academia a year and a half ago, and look how it’s plummeted downhill since then!  I’m not saying that my leaving was the lynchpin moment that led to this academic catastrophe.  But I’m not saying my leaving was NOT the lynchpin moment, either. 

But either way, we should do our best to remember this month, and bring it up whenever a clot of professors start to lecture us on the sins of the West or the virtues of their blinkered multiculturalism.

October 7^th should be as shameful a day for them as National Fire Prevention Day is for Jamaal Bowman, or Indigenous People’s Day is for Lizzie Warren.  (#neverstopmocking!)

I’ll end on a happier note, as is my wont: in three of these United States, conservatives are on a roll.

In Florida, DeSantis (the most principled and consistently conservative governor and prez candidate) has won another court victory over the ACLU in his battle to ensure election integrity and fight voting fraud. 

In Wisconsin (according to a Gateway Pundit story you should check out), the GOP is pushing a raft of voting integrity measures: permanently banning illegal absentee ballot drop boxes; requiring proof of citizenship to vote; preventing partisan Clerks from illegally “curing” improperly cast absentee ballots; and removing nearly a half-million names of voters who have moved, died or are otherwise questionably registered to vote.

These are the kinds of arduous, unglamorous tasks required to root out the increased corruption in our recent election cycles, and every state and national GOP body should be pursuing them as hard as they can!  I hope that Trump will also use his bully pulpit to highlight and support these efforts, because complaining (justifiably) that the election was rigged last time is a hell of a lot less effective than actually doing something tangible to stop the steal next time!   

In fact, we’ve seen the results of that kind of work in Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial win in Louisiana.  Landry was widely expected to get a plurality but not a majority in the “jungle primary” there, requiring another runoff election.  But he won an absolute majority, giving the GOP a victory over the only Dem-held governor’s office in the deep south.

One factor was Trump’s endorsement of Landry, in a deep red state where that helps a lot more than it did in less-red states in the last several cycles.  Another factor was Landry’s strength as a candidate (unlike, say, Herschel Walker in GA, or Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in PA).  Perhaps as important were smart GOP efforts (led by former Trump campaign officials) to both target voter research and ads, and encourage early voting the way the Dems have been doing in recent cycles. 

More please!   

Hamas delenda est!

I’m back from my trip north, and I can honestly say that while I missed CO nation and following this site every day, it’s also been nice to get away, and walk in some woods, and hang out with family for a while, ignoring all of the Hamas-holes and other political weasels infesting our national life. 

In the middle of the visit, the two cousins and I took a meandering trip from central Illinois up into Wisconsin. We drove north and west on small country roads, through fields of dry corn and soybeans being harvested, and patches of woods that were at peak color.  We ended up following the Rock River for a while, near Dixon (hometown of Ronald Reagan, peace be upon him), and hiking through some wooded hillsides surrounding a huge concrete statue of Black Hawk, or at least an idealized Indian figure named after him.

[Insert your own joke featuring a non-idealized, non-Indian figure like Liz Warren here.] [#wemustneverstopmockingher]

Just south of the Wisconsin border we spent an afternoon in the hometown of my favorite under-rated president, US Grant.  We toured an interesting little museum there, and had a great time in that picturesque little town.  From there, we followed the Mississippi River up into Wisconsin.

We stayed one night in Prairie du Chien (which sounds a lot better than “Dog Prairie”), then crossed the Mississippi into Iowa the next morning and stopped at Effigy Mounds National Monument, a forested area covering almost four square miles of high ground overlooking the river.  We hiked up into some woods where the leaves were so yellow they almost hurt your eyes, and enjoyed some great views.

From there we drove to Pike’s Peak, Iowa, which provided more great views of the valley where the Wisconsin River flows into the Mississippi. Which reminds me…

Regular readers may remember my travelogue of our trip on Route 66 from Chicago to LA several years ago, during which one of the linguistic themes that arose involved various “devils.”  A crazily crooked bridge in Missouri was called “Devil’s Elbow;” a funky museum of barbed wire (the “devil’s rope”) in Texas; dirt devils swirling across the floor of a desert valley in Arizona; more pot smell (“the devil’s lettuce”) than you’d expect in Oklahoma, and so on. 

Well one theme that popped up during this trip – arising from how many small towns have very familiar names – was “not that one.” 

For example, in Illinois we drove through or by Oregon (not that one), and Compton (definitely not that one).  In Iowa we were very close to Harper’s Ferry (not that one), and we saw Pike’s Peak (not that one).  In Wisconsin we passed by Sparta (not that one) and Oregon again (still not that one), and at the beautiful capitol building in Madison, we saw a cool statue of a bad-ass Norwegian guy named Hans Christian (not that one) Heg, who came to Wisconsin in the 19^th century, and died fighting slaveholding Democrats at Chickamauga on September 16^th, 1863.

As always, traveling brought many small delights.  I saw a perfectly named liquor store in Prairie du Chien – where, if you over-indulged you could end up… dad joke landing in 3…2…1… sick as a chien (sorry).  It was called, “Pour Decisions,” and my compliments to the owner.

In an old building in La Crosse, a restaurant’s neon sign had the words “lousy service” – also in neon – below it.  So don’t complain that all advertising is false advertising.    

During our drive along a river road up through Wisconsin we stopped at four different sites marking battles in the Black Hawk War, a typically poignant tale of tragic events that seem like they could have happened a thousand years ago, rather than unfolding over just five months in 1832.  One site’s marker reported 10 dead on both sides in one encounter, and I couldn’t help but think that that is just a typical couple of weekdays in Chicago.         

We were lucky enough to hike along five different rivers: the Illinois, Vermillion, Rock, Apple and Mississippi.  (The Mississippi is the biggest – surprise! – but I think the prettiest might be the Rock.)  And even though I love Florida, there’s something about Fall in the north that always gets to me.  After we came out of the woods at Effigy Mounds, the wind momentarily picked up, and all around us yellow and orange leaves filled the air like a heavy snow, and I was right back in childhood.

All of the sensations are so familiar.  A brisk chill in the air and the occasional sounds of birdsong and smells of woodsmoke nearby.  Walking along a sun-dappled path, the tannic acid scent of a carpet of fallen leaves crunching underfoot, and I’m thinking of trick-or-treating in a plastic Captain America mask (the rubber band holding it on my head snaps off by the fourth or fifth house!), and half-forgotten hayrack rides that ended in drinking hot apple cider and roasting marshmallows. 

And all of it the sweeter because of the knowledge that it won’t last long.

When I first read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 later in life, the first four lines immediately rang true, despite the archaic verbiage: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

I first read that when I was relatively young, and aging was a theoretical concept for me.  Now that I’ve entered my 60s – I can’t believe it either! – the final couplet hits like a hammer blow: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” 

Yes! 

And ouch! 

And then I got back home, and started catching up on events in our country and in the Middle East, and I couldn’t help but think of Shakespeare again, and the lines from The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Of course the jihadis are screaming about their precious human shields – er… children, and about Israeli “war crimes.”  (Because I guess no one has explained to them that accidentally killing civilians who are used as human shields in front of legitimate military targets is NOT a war crime, while using civilians as human shields to protect military targets IS a war crime?)

And of course Hamas sympathizers around the world and in our own cities and campuses are lying their heads off and chanting from the genocide hymnbook.  (“From the river to the sea, we will make the land Jew-free!”)

And of course the MSM “journalists” are covering themselves with shame, as per usual.  They’re calling terrorist cowards “fighters” or “resistance,” and churning out as much false moral equivalence as they can.  Poor KJP – she favors the fairer sex, so don’t pay attention to what a dullard she is – even had to backtrack after she responded to a question about the festering anti-Semitism being revealed in the West and America with an oblivious, “Yes, we’re as worried about rampant Islamophobia as you are!”

The false story about the “Israeli” “attack” on a “hospital” was pitch perfect, and we need to make sure to bring up that novelty exploding cigar of a narrative every time our lying media and lefties (but I repeat myself) get hysterical about Israel fighting back against Hamas.

For several days, empty/talking heads all over the world repeated the breathless morality tale of how the evil Jews “intentionally” rocketed the hospital, leaving a mountain of “500” “dead” “Palestinians” – who by some miracle were all women and children.  Many commentators even used the fact that the rocket “killed” “so many” as evidence that it had to be from the Jews, because only their rockets could cause that much damage.

(I’d go on, but I have now used up my weekly quota of scare quotes.) 

Then it quickly came out – documented six ways to Sunday – that the rocket was fired by Hamas, that it didn’t hit the hospital but a parking lot next to the hospital, and that it killed only around 10-50.  (And I’m willing to bet that at least some of those casualties – while they likely have the genitalia of small infants – were actually big, brave Hamas terrorists.)

Other than that, they got the story exactly right!  

Ugh. 

Given all that, and even though Biden served up his usual mush of stuttering, slurring equivocation, he at least mumbled a few of the right talking points, and we’ve got some carriers in the Gulf. Which is about the most we can expect, given what a low-down, chien-faced pony soldier (HA!) our Cadaver-in-Chief is.

It’s good to be back, and I’ve missed you, CO nation.  And I trust that in my absence none of you have forgotten…

Hamas delenda est!

Today I’ve found a few silver linings in the ongoing Hamas story, but first I’ve got a crime story.

This tale takes place in Tennessee, where a mother of three got pulled over by cops, was allegedly armed, and when the cops got up to her window, they shot her a lot and quickly, killing her.

I know what you’re thinking, if you’re a regular consumer of the MSM: red state TN, white cops, poor black lady shot for driving while black, right? 

Oops.   Turns out the lady in question was a pale-skinned blonde gal who was as white as Lizzie Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and the two officers appear to be black. 

I know what you’re thinking now, if you watch MSM news: Okay, so now that it’s a white lady who got killed by black cops, the entire white racist MAGA establishment is out to lynch both of those cops for harming a blonde hair on the dead lady’s head, right?

I refer you to Dr. Evil: How about NO!

First, you wrongly referred to lynching, which is what the Democrats used to do to black folk when they were running things down south.  Second, after an investigation, the cops aren’t being charged.  Third, the local community, white and black seem to be just fine with this outcome.

In fact, other than the races involved, this story hits all of the same notes whined about by leftist BLM racial arsonist types when they launch a dishonest smear job on innocent cops, but the only one whining now is the dead gal’s boyfriend. 

It seems that he’s the one who initially called the cops, because when he tried to confront her about her drinking problem, she pulled a shotgun on him and then got in her truck and drove away.  (Don’t we all keep a shotgun by our bed, just in case our significant other accuses us of having a drinking problem?) (No?  It’s just me and that blonde lady?  Fine!)  

When the cops stopped her – after she led them on a long chase and tried to take off after being stopped the first time – she picked up the shotgun that she kept on the passenger seat – as one does – and pointed it at the cops.

After the cops did the right thing and helped her assume room temperature, the boyfriend gave a media interview in which he said what a great mom and excellent person she was, and how terrible it was that they just shot her down like a dog. 

Okay Chip, then why didn’t you use the power of sweet reason on that excellent mom when she was screaming and pointing a shotgun at you, and disarm her, rather than calling the cops – who you think should have waited to see if she blew one of their heads off before they shot her, I guess?

Look, if Liam Neeson movies have taught me one thing, it’s that you shouldn’t kidnap Liam Neeson’s daughter and force her into a sex slavery ring.  But that’s not relevant right now.

But if Liam Neeson movies have taught me one OTHER thing, it’s that you can easily use your cat-like reflexes to quickly disarm anybody near you.  Especially if that involves snatching a shotgun out of the hands of a drunk lady who looks like Liz Warren’s twin sister.  If you didn’t do that, that’s on you.

I like this story because it so perfectly debunks what whitey-hating racists always say: Cops never shoot whites during traffic stops, and conservatives only say, “We support the police” as a racist dog whistle when cops shoot a black person.

Wrong again, BLM breath! (Hat tip to Johnny Carson from 30 years ago.)  If I can speak for all conservatives – and I think that I can – we say that we support cops when they are forced to shoot criminals purely because…wait for it… we support cops when they are forced to shoot criminals!

Okay, on to the latest in jihadi-cide news.  (I’d like to copyright that term, right now.)

I had heard that the terrorists attacked Israel by land, air and sea on October 7^th, but until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t heard anything about the “by sea” part.  But then I watched some beautiful footage of Israeli boats taking on Hamas boats and swimming terrorists on 10/7, and it was the opposite of what happened on land: instead of facing senior citizens, toddlers and unarmed women, the Hamas-holes (copyright by me, right now) faced trained and armed soldiers. 

And they got the crap kicked out of them.

The footage shows Israeli speed boats blasting away at Hamas small boats, turning them into flaming and sinking wrecks.  Then the speed boats race around in circles, machine gunning swimming terrorists and dropping hand-grenade-sized depth charges near them as they fly by.

The Israelis were calling out to each other, and though the footage doesn’t show any faces, some of the Israelis sound like women.  Which is extra sweet, considering what misogynistic creeps the Islamic terrorists are.

I don’t understand Hebrew, but I like to think that at least some of their shouts translate to, “You’re being killed by Jewish women, you swine!” and “Swim for your miserable lives, mother-frienders!”

Also, I’m a huge fan of one Jew who really didn’t appreciate those who are cruel to children.  In fact, He said, “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” 

So I really hope that one of those bad-ass Israelis with the belt-fed weapons on the boats, when he saw some wounded terrorists bobbing on the waves, said (in Hebrew), “Get me one of those millstones that we keep on board for just this type of occasion.” 

(I know: theologically speaking, most of the orthodox Jewish community doesn’t love JC like I do.  But I’m still holding on to my fantasy of a millstone in a glass case on every Israeli patrol boat, with a sign saying, “In case of dog-paddling Hamas terrorists, break glass.”) 

One other good video released this week came from a Go-Pro camera worn by a terrorist as he roamed through a kibbutz looking for civilians to slaughter.  He’s walking along with one of his child-murdering buddies and they’re chatting back and forth. 

It’s about 3 minutes long and has a happy ending: a gunshot sounds from off-screen, and the guy howls in pain and falls down, then mutters something in Arabic and lets out a death rattle as the camera angle slowly pitches upward, ending on a shot of the blue sky as the terrorist’s body settles back onto the grass. 

I don’t speak Arabic, but I’ve put on my conical purple wizard hat and set it to “translate.”  Here are the results: 

Terrorist 1: I wish there was a toddler or unarmed senior citizen around, so I could demonstrate my bravery by shooting them.

Terrorist 2 (with the Go Pro): I know what you mean, my friend.  I can’t wait until we’re done committing these horrific crimes against humanity, so I can post this video online.  Our friends at Ivy league schools are going to love it!

T1:  Yes!  My favorites are the purple-haired girl-boys!  I mean sure, we’d stone them to death or throw them off a building if they were here, but as long as they’ve over there doing our PR work for us…

T2:  Speaking of that, how hot are Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, by our pathetically low standards!  I’d love to take both of them back to my hovel and make them wear a black tent and hit them every time they tried to talk. 

T1 (agreeing): It’s every jihadi’s dream!  Hey, can you cover me while I urinate?  Oh wait, I left my tweezers back in Gaza.

T2 (gunshot sounds, and he tumbles forward): OUCH!  Oh no, I see Satan, and I can feel the eternal rectal pitchforking beginning.  I regret all my life choices….

And, scene.

In other feckless Europeans news, I saw the headline, “Scottish Leader Promises ‘Sanctuary’ for Palestinians (sic) Fleeing from ‘Terrible Attacks’ in Gaza,” and was shocked.  During my recent trip to Scotland, I found the Scots to be lovely people, and I couldn’t imagine that any of them are terrorist-sympathizing—

And then I saw the “Scottish leader’s” name.  Humza Yousaf. 

Oh.  Could some Scottish authority remind me which side of the Battle of Culloden that Clan Yousaf fought on?  I’m pretty sure they’re the ones with the tartan featuring a Star of David in a circle with a big line through it, right?   

Yay diversity!  Good job, Euro-weenies who can’t see what could possibly go wrong with importing Muslims from all around the globe!

And now the leftists in this country want us to import a million Hamas-enthusiasts from Gaza? 

In the words of Ron DeSantis (please let him be our president!) quoting Dr. Evil:  “How about NO!”

Hamas delenda est!

Thirty-some odd years ago, as I was walking up to my new buddy’s door, he casually mentioned that a Norwegian goddess was staying with him and his wife.  And since I’d always wanted to meet one of those, I tucked my shirt in and told myself not to say something stupid. 

So I walked in, and she was there, and I swear it was like we were both hearing the first 1:25 of Etta James singing “At Last.”  (Stop reading for a minute and pull up that song and listen to it….  Yeah, it was just like that.)

And then I probably said something stupid.  But neither of us remember what, because of that Etta James, love-at-first-sight thing. 

Then a few years went by, and we got married, and we had our first baby.  (For those of you gender studies majors out there, I can explain how that happened later.  But the process begins with, “When a hilarious genius and a blue-eyed blonde smoke-show love each other very much, and they both identify as the gender that they obviously are…”)

That baby girl was born 26 years ago today, and we couldn’t be prouder of her.  We saw her last week, she’s coming back to visit with her husband at Thanksgiving, and we’re going out to see them in Denver at Christmas.

Happy birthday, Katie!

I start today with that story because I didn’t want to write three columns in a row about nothing but bloodthirsty terrorists killing babies that make me think of both of my girls when they were that age. 

Having said that, I’ve got to cover the news of the day, and that news is terrorist-heavy.  So here goes:

On the bright side, I’m loving the amount of push-back that many pro-Hamas moral idiots have been receiving on some campuses.  The Harvard story got better when a Jewish donor encouraged other supporters to send $1 checks to Harvard; since that guy gave $50 million in the past, I think the Harvard-Hamas bureaucrats will notice the difference. 

I also love the guys from Accuracy in Media, who drove a panel truck around the Harvard campus with a sign reading, “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites,” and a digital screen that cycled through the pictures and names of 34 of the student gauleiters – er, “leaders” – who jumped on the pro-genocide bandwagon on October 7^th.  

The students at NYU’s law school had chosen a piece of work named Ryna Workman as the president of their Student Bar Association.  She’s a black female who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns – so already, cuckoo for cocoa puffs – but she apparently also moonlights as a vicious anti-Semite.  Because as soon as Hamas started slaughtering unarmed civilians, she put out a notice supporting “Palestinians” and blaming Israelis for everything.

And then, mirabile dictu, she got a face-full of instant karma.  Before you could say, “Arbeit macht frei,” the SBA started the process of removing her from her presidency, and the elite law firm that had given her a job offer rescinded it. 

Great!  More please!

Meanwhile, in Dearborn-istan, MI, a low-IQ BLM speaker (but I repeat myself) said this actual quote that I am not making up: “This is not complicated.  When you go to a BLM rally you see Palestinian flags; when you go to a white supremacy rally, you see Israeli flags.”

Let’s not dwell on the fact that this idiot thinks the first part – seeing “Palestinian” flags at your rallies – is a good thing.  (The call-and-response chants write themselves: “Who wants to murder babies?”  “We do!”  “When do we want to murder babies?” “All the freaking time!” or “Hey, hey, ho, ho.  Not murdering old people has got to go!”)

He somehow raises the stupidity bar with the second half of his imbecilic statement.  Because I can’t remember the last white supremacy rally I’ve seen.  (Unless you count all of the ones on campuses arguing for affirmative action, which implicitly requires believing that whites are a superior race, due to its premise that no dark-skinned people could ever gain admission to college unless they are given an unearned advantage.) 

But you know what NO white supremacist rally in the history of the world has EVER featured?  A Jewish flag!!  The last serious and influential white supremacy group was the Nazis (if you don’t count the Democrats who enforced their Jim Crow laws until the mid 1960s), and unless the History Channel has misled me, they weren’t exactly philo-Semitic. 

Speaking of Nazis, I think that comparing Hamas to them might be an insult to the Nazis. 

I know, but hear me out.

Though all German military units were fighting for an evil cause and deserved all of the violence that the Allied toxic males rained down upon them, some of them were especially terrible.  The SS, for example, were worse than the average Wehrmacht soldiers. 

And even among the SS, the einsatzgruppen – paramilitary death squads formed to do nothing but find and slaughter Jews as the Nazis pushed into eastern Europe – stood out as the worst of the worst of the SS.

But with their behavior last week, Hamas showed none of the military discipline and adherence to the rules of war that at least some German soldiers did.  Their actions against women, children and the elderly on October 7^th demonstrated the core character of Hamas: they’re ALL einsatzgruppen!   

I was also surprised – though maybe I shouldn’t have been – by the amount of complaining about Israel cutting off water and power to the Gaza strip. 

I didn’t realize that Israel has been facilitating the provision of water and power there, although that makes sense in light of two facts: Israel’s much greater humanitarian concern for Gazans than Hamas’, and the Hamas government’s spending the lion’s share of incoming funds on murdering Jews, rather than such peripheral projects such as – oh I don’t know – life-enhancing infrastructure for their own people!

(It turns out that many countries have been sending Hamas water pipes to facilitate their accessing the aquifer under Gaza to provide water for their people.  Instead, Hamas re-tooled those pipes into missiles to use to kill Jews.  Because einsatzgruppen gotta einsatzgrupp, I guess.)

And now, in the wake of Hamas’ murderous attack, people expect Israel to continue allowing water and electricity into Gaza?  Did we do that for the Germans in Berlin in 1945?  Did our Republican president Lincoln make sure that the Democrat slavery fans in Atlanta or Vicksburg had clean drinking water in the mid-1860s? 

(For you non-history buffs, the answer – to paraphrase Dr. Evil – is,“How about NO!”)

Anyway, apparently raping and baby-killing is thirsty work.   So cue the sad klezmer music, I guess.  Oh wait: no klezmer music is sad.  So we’ll just stick with the sad trombone for our brave but thirsty Hamas civilian-slaughterers.

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, “You should have provided for your own water and electricity before you murdered our friends.”

That reminds me of another movie reference, to the 1983 film version of Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone.  The movie is worth watching, if you haven’t seen it.  Christopher Walken is the protagonist, and Martin Sheen plays the villain, a politician with serious mental and moral deficiencies.  (Like Biden, only alive.)

In the climactic scene (spoiler alert, if you might watch it), Walken attempts to assassinate Sheen with a rifle, but the wiley pol sees him, and grabs a nearby baby, holding the child up in front of him.  Walken hesitates – because shooting a baby is bad – and a bodyguard shoots him dead.  But in a premonition of the future, we see that Sheen kills himself because his political career is over, since a magazine cover showed a picture of him hiding behind the baby. 

I thought of that scene this week, and wondered if that movie has ever played in Gaza.  If so, I’ll bet the Hamas audience is totally confused by the ending.  “What gives?  The politician hides behind baby so the enemy doesn’t kill him. (tapping his forehead) This is smart.  And HE’s the bad guy?”     

Okay, let me end with two quick good news items.

First, DeSantis continues to be a principled conservative boss!  His answers to Hamas questions were pitch perfect.  When asked if we should import Gazans to the US as refugees, he said no, in the most anti-RINO of terms.  “If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic, none of them believe in Israel’s right to exist.  None of the Arab states are willing to take any of them.  The Arab states should be taking them…”  Fact check true!

He also chartered a flight that brought Floridians in Israel home, and welcomed them at the airport.  Earlier in the week he also rightly called out Trump’s foolish and petty criticism of Netanyahu at this crucial time.  (I’m going to write more about that later, because that was the worst of Trump, and we really need him to be better.)    

Finally, I loved CO’s posting of the story about Israel’s heroic K-9 unit that helped rescue some Jews and kill some terrorists.  I hadn’t seen that story, but it doesn’t surprise me. 

Knowing that Islam teaches that dogs are filthy animals – and as I said in reply to CO’s post, it takes one to know one, you Hamas creeps! – makes it especially satisfying to think of those dogs tearing up some brave Hamas baby-killers before the IDF finished them off. 

This story is more proof of something I wrote a few columns back: there is no such thing as a bad dog, only bad owners.  The Nazis misused German shepherds to patrol the death camps.  Joe Biden’s horrible parenting allowed Major and Commander to turn into secret-service-attacking bad boys. 

But in the hands of the IDF, German shepherds are the best of very Good Boys!

One more sweet irony: 80 years ago, Nazis were using German shepherds to torment Jews.  But this week, Jews were using German shepherds to bring some canine justice to the modern einsatzgruppen.

More please!

Hamas delenda est!

As a card-carrying cautious optimist, I’m trying to seek out whatever tiny slivers of a silver lining that I can find in the aftermath of the horrific Hamas attack.

An obvious one is seeing the big brave leaders of Hamas all hiding in their mommy’s basements and begging for the “international community” (bah!) to save them.  Within 4 days they went from beating their chests to peeing their robes, as the realization sets in that it may be a little tougher to face the Israeli military than it was to slaughter toddlers, oldsters and hipsters at a rave.

I hope that they’re all losing sleep and having a Yamamoto moment: “we’ve awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

A second silver lining is seeing blocks and blocks of Hamas infrastructure in Gaza being turned to rubble.  That one causes mixed emotions, since I know that many kids are going to be suffering there because of the evil actions of their unspeakably terrible parents.  But that’s inevitable: when horrible people do horrible things, their kids end up paying a horrible price.

Still, I’d like to get some “before” and “after” pics of the streets where rabid packs of jihadis were celebrating their cowardly crimes last Saturday and Sunday.  I’d especially like to see the street where those freaks drove slowly along with the half-naked corpse of an Israeli woman in the back of a truck, with males (I won’t call them “men”) spitting on her. 

I hope that that street today is nothing but rubble.   And I hope that some of those spitters are partially beneath that rubble, and that their saliva has been replaced by concrete dust, and that they are slowly choking to death on it.

Okay, I got a little off track there.  Let me try again. 

Let’s see… cautious optimist… silver lining….

Oh, I got one!  In America and abroad, the liars and the congenitally stupid have been revealing themselves in the aftermath of last weekend, and that’s useful.  Too many among us have not recognized their true, vile nature, but they couldn’t help showing it to us this week.   

All of the creepy anti-semitic student groups at Harvard went full Toobin, releasing a statement that solely blamed Israel (!) for the jihadicide on Saturday.  And now many rich guys and influential employers are seeking out lists of everybody in those groups, so they can be sure not to hire them.   Great!

The Democratic Socialists of America did the same, and a bunch of room-temp-IQ lefties are shocked – Shocked, they tells ya! – that they’ve been rubbing elbows with bigoted genocide enthusiasts. 

My favorite was Sarah Silverman, the potty-mouthed and middling comedian who is dumb enough to admit that she was “a proud lifetime member” of the DSA and that she is still a democratic socialist, but smart enough to say, “[Friend] you and goodbye forever!” to the DSA.   

It’s a start, I guess.   

BLM has demonstrated their true colors (you’ll pardon the expression) once again, by claiming to recognize “clear parallels between Black and Palestinian (sic) people.” 

To any sane black person, those should be fighting words, and a grave insult.  But these morons are the same racist, anti-Semitic haters that they’ve always been.  The blackness of their skin means nothing; the blackness of their hearts means everything.

Of course the members of the Squad have covered themselves in glory, too.  I loved watching Rashida Tlaib run from a reporter asking if she had any comment about Hamas terrorists murdering babies.  She wouldn’t comment about that, or about whether she has any second thoughts about the “Palestinian” flag at the door of her congressional office.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Tlaib is as ugly on the inside as she is on the outside. 

By the way, hat-tip to the Babylon Bee for two big stories it just broke:

1. Rashida Tlaib’s “Palestinian” flag just threw her Rainbow LGBTQ+ flag off the roof of the Capitol building, (HA!)  and

2. A GoFundMe account has already raised $5 million to send the Squad to Gaza.  (That’s a cause so worthy that I might even approve of tax dollars being used for it.) 

Any silver linings aside, though, the most maddeningly stupid argument that the left has – and that we’ll surely be hearing more of in the coming weeks – is the accusation that Israel’s retaliation is morally equivalent to Hamas’ initial Satanic attack. 

Two old sayings sum up the moral gulf between Israel and its jihadi opponents:

“If the ‘Palestinians’ put down their guns today, tomorrow there would be no more war.  If the Israelis put down their guns today, tomorrow there would be no more Israel.”

And, in reference to the Hamas practice of using their own civilians and children as human shields:

“Israel uses missiles to protect their children, and ‘Palestinians’ use children to protect their missiles.” 

The difference couldn’t be more stark; there is NO moral equivalence between terrorists and their supporters on one side, and Israel on the other. 

Even in the far less fraught situation of a plain old physical fight, did none of these morons have fathers who taught them the basic rules of fights?

Sure, I was raised in the Midwest in the late 1800s.  But by the time I went to school, I knew that while I wasn’t supposed to start a fight, if someone else threw the first punch, I was supposed to do my level best to throw the last one. 

If you visited my town and saw some bully punch someone on the playground, and when his victim hit him back you had run up and lectured the second kid about how wrong he was to hit back, my entire community would have looked at you like you’d lost your freaking mind. 

But the jackholes at Harvard – and Dearborn and Sydney and London and MSNBC and CNN and many in the Democrat party – don’t know what the fathers in every small town used to teach their sons by the time they were 5 years old. 

But I don’t think those idiots are too old to learn that lesson.  I’d love to see a few working-class males go to a leftist genocide rally, listen to one chorus of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” and then walk up to bullhorn boy and spend about three minutes pummeling him.  Just beat him like a rented mule, and finish the lesson by jamming the bullhorn in an orifice it isn’t intended for. 

And when the crowd started screaming in outrage, the puncher could just hold up his hands and say, “Whoa, whoa!  I call for an immediate ceasefire.  This is the time for de-escalation.  Hitting me would be the moral equivalent of me hitting him, and I know that we all agree that that is NEVER permissible.   Now I’m going to grab a child – or a female with the least body odor in this herd of unfriendables – and hide behind her, and if any of you so much as give me some side-eye, I’m calling the cops and the EU forthwith!”

Even if I hadn’t had a great dad, I grew up in America, and I know how we’d react if we were in Israel’s position.  If we had a border wall (and we freaking should!) and Mexico sent hordes of terrorists through that wall to rape, murder and kidnap our citizens, or fired rockets into our cities, how would we respond?

I refer you to a couple of former trouble spots called Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Mexico already has a Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), but we’d introduce them to a new holiday called “Semana de los Muertos” (Week of the Dead), followed closely by “Mes de Combustion Ardiente” (Month of Smoldering), and then by “Siglo de Mexicanos Muy Dociles” (Century of Very Docile Mexicans).

In Florida, whenever we have a hurricane, we put plywood over our windows with spray paint saying, “You loot, we shoot!”  And our governor (Man, I hope he is someday president!) and law enforcement supports us.  

That’s right: we will shoot your worthless arse after bad weather events.  And if you don’t go down at first – sometimes even if you do – we’ll shoot you a lot!  And then we’ll let our canines play “fetch the looter ankle bone.” 

If we do that to opportunistic thieves, what do you think we’d do to cowardly micro-phallused Hamas terrorists after what they did last weekend?  (Hint: Cassie the Wonder Dog would have scraps of hang-glider and keffiyeh in her stool for a week!)

Okay, that’s it folks. That’s the closest I can get to a happy, “Keep on the Sunny Side” type of column today.  Have a good weekend, pray for Israel, and remember…

Hamas delenda est!

In my usual Monday column, I try to help start your week with a few laughs by mocking our national political idiots, but I can’t do that this morning.  Like most of you, I’ve spent the last couple of days watching the disgusting, cowardly attacks on Israel by cruel terrorists, and I’ve been vacillating between being heartsick and furious. 

And right now, furious is out in front by a long stretch.   

So since it’s too soon for me to put together a carefully constructed column, I hope you’ll forgive a more disjointed attempt to collect some of the thoughts that have been running through my head this weekend.

The hardest part of my Christian faith has always been the idea of turning the other cheek.  In my more contemplative moments I can see the wisdom of forgiving those who sin against us, and I admire some believers who are pacifist.  I’m glad that Christ is loving and merciful, because I need forgiveness and mercy on a depressingly frequent basis.

But I also believe that there is such a thing as righteous anger, and a responsibility to be violent in defense of the innocent and against those who initiate violence.  The Old Testament “eye for an eye” has always resonated strongly with me.  (In fact, I’m glad that for the Jews, the Old Testament is their ONLY testament.  In the coming days, I wish them good hunting and good, old-fashioned smiting of evildoers.)

I know that over the centuries, the Church has debated the justification of the death penalty, and the context for what constitutes casus belli, and it is that ethical framework that underlies our modern conceptions of war crimes and the sanctions provided by the Geneva Conventions.   

And when terrorists like Hamas violate all moral standards – engaging in terrorism, targeting civilians and non-combatants, murdering captives, not wearing uniforms that mark them as legitimate combatants – they are clearly not entitled to any benefits or consideration of Geneva or any other rules of war.

Along those lines, I’ve always loved the sniper character Private Jackson (played by Barry Pepper) in Saving Private Ryan, because I think he embodied a righteous man in war time.  Early on he wryly says, “Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift, made me a fine instrument of warfare.” 

And as he uses his sniper rifle to shoot the enemy and protect his squad, he recites parts of Psalms: “Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.  My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust.”

I’m not one of those believers who claims to know the mind of God, but my best guess is that He would be pleased with that attitude. 

Very rarely does history provide examples of wars in which virtue is almost all on one side.  Many wars are like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s – bad actors on both sides, fighting for bad reasons, and with routine atrocities on both sides.  In such cases, the wise course for non-involved countries is probably what happened then: a pox on both sides, and stand aside and allow them to keep killing each other. 

Also fairly common is the 60/40 moral mix of most wars.  Examples might be a lot of tribal wars where two aggressive groups clash, or the wars of late Rome vs various Gauls, Franks and Germanic barbarians.  In such cases, both societies are deeply flawed, aggressive and exploitative, etc., but one is usually more in the wrong, if only because they started the war.

Most modern wars also fit this pattern.  The czars of Russia were oppressive, but the communists were much worse.  Pre-Castro Cuba was corrupt, but Castro out-did them.  The Shah of Iran was bad, and his secret police the Savak were brutal, and rightly deserved their comeuppance.  But the weird-beard Ayatollah and his murderous followers were much worse; the numbers they slaughtered in their first months in power far exceeded the victims of the Savak over many years.

But Israel vs. its jihadist, genocidal neighbors is the rare exception.  Yes, Israel is full of humans, and thus sinful in the way all humans and nations are.  But the fashionable leftist insistence that both sides are morally equivalent (or often, that the jihadists are morally superior!) is a damnable lie.

Israel is a democracy and has allowed many Muslims to co-exist with full civil rights in their country.  There are Arabs in their Knesset.  Meanwhile, as Muslim control grew in every Arab country, Jews were increasingly persecuted and killed until the survivors were forced to flee.  Needless to say, there are no authentic democracies amongst Israel’s neighbors, and no Jews on any of their governing councils.

The Muslim countries all have drastically failed the “how’s that working out for you” test.  Beirut was once known as the Paris of the Middle East before civil war broke out in 1975.   Many Arab countries’ women had human rights, including the chance to go out in public while not smothered in a beekeeper outfit.  Their economies were not first-world, but neither were they the dregs of the third world.  Homicidal religion and brutal repression have ruined all of that.

Meanwhile, Israel has been thriving economically, culturally and technologically.  Israelis have more civil rights and freedom than their neighbors, and they’ve created a wealthier and more successful society.  Israelis earn a disproportionate share of patents, Nobels prizes, etc.  (Ironically,  Hitler was defeated in part because the Jews he’d driven out had an outsized role in developing the advanced weapons that eventually kicked his socialist arse.) 

Israel’s modern re-birth was controversial, and when five neighboring countries immediately attacked them, they met violence with violence.  Since then, Israel doesn’t start wars, and when they’re forced into them, they fight much more humanely.  They avoid civilian casualties as much as they can, in sharp contrast to their enemies, who target civilians, and use their own civilians as human shields. 

After Saturday, here’s the least our country can do: immediately stop every dime of aid going to any country who contributes to attacks on Israel in any way.  (Biden should be raked over the coals for having restored aid to “Palestine” that Trump had cut off!)  We should do our best to break and immiserate the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: no trade, no medical aid, nothing.  

We should also immediately slap every possible sanction on Iran, and give Israel any help we can in bombing their nuke facilities, which shouldn’t exist in the first place. 

Two of the saddest things about this tragic attack is that too many people in America and the West are stupid or malicious enough to support the “Palestinians,” and that the majority in Gaza fully support this barbarism.

We should make a full-throated moral case against the “stand-down” appeasement chorus in our own country, and in Europe.  Already at least 57 student groups at Harvard have signed on to a joint statement that begins, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence…” 

In a sane world, we’d immediately expel every one of those idiots, and deport those who aren’t US citizens. (I’d like to think that many of them are foreigners, but I’ve seen enough of our education system to know that that’s probably not true.)  We would also force all American politicians from mayors on up through Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to take a position on this issue, and if they were honest enough to defend their vicious co-religionists, that should make them toxic to most American voters.  (Sadly, not all.)

In the meantime, any companies who have Harvard grads showing up for job interviews should find out if they signed on to that Nazi joint statement, and then blackball them.

One of the worst things about wars is the civilian casualties, but in this case, a disgustingly high proportion of “civilians” in Gaza are going to deserve what they get.  The stats that were posted here on the frighteningly high proportion of Muslims worldwide who approve of jihad and sharia (and all of the gay-stoning, honor-killing, and infidel-exterminating that goes with it) are well established.

And that societal sickness has been on full display for the last 48 hours.  All over the world, Muslims have been celebrating in the streets, just as many did on 9/11.  Not all Muslims (of course), but it’s a huge red flag that entire Muslim communities are doing nothing to stop the ghouls in the streets, including in Western nations where they cannot be said to fear the jihadi governments’ reactions if they went out and opposed the savage celebrators. 

And look at the streets of Gaza, packed with jubilant a-holes, chanting “Allahu Akbar” and spitting on the naked corpse of a defenseless woman the brave, armed jihadis had beaten and then murdered.  When I saw that footage, I found myself fantasizing about a squadron of A-10 “Warthogs” circling the city.  (For those of you who don’t follow military aviation, the A-10 is an ugly, nearly indestructible ground-support warplane that is basically a flying platform for the biggest Gatling gun cannon ever.  Instead of a plane with a gun, it’s a gun with wings!) 

I imagine the first Warthog pilot starting his strafing run down that street, and I’d love to see the faces of those cowardly scumbags as they stopped dancing around that poor woman’s broken body and looked up to see the first of a line of 30 mm shells tearing up the street toward them. 

Ugh.  This weekend has not brought out the best in me.  And I know that Israel is going to face terrible choices, including how to kill all the terrorists who badly need killing, while they are holding Israeli hostages and hiding behind women and children. 

But we know that what we have been doing – restraining Israel, giving aid to jihadist governments and tolerating jihadi-sympathizers in our midst – has brought us to where we are today.  

The moral equivalence argument is not just wrong, and it’s not just naïve.  It’s evil.   As a very old book says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”  The Israelis know that book well, and they know the Psalms of David, too. 

I hope that the Mossad and IDF have done their homework, and know the identities of everybody in Hamas who ranks higher than the foot soldiers.  And I hope they end up killing all of those evil people, in big bunches and individually.  And after that, start on the foot soldiers. 

And all the while, before and during every attack, I hope they’ve got these words on their lips: “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight…”

Hamas delenda est!