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I could easily spend this column talking about all the stuff that has immediately started going terribly wrong with the fledgling Biden administration. 

For example, Hacky Psaki™ is already drawing ridicule from even the far-left media, for her constant refrain of “I’m going to circle back on that.” to even the simplest questions.  AOC is telling fabulous tales of that time she was almost killed because she was four blocks away from a building where a handful of idiots wearing Viking horns broke in and took selfies and made scary noises. 

And after nearly four years of explicitly inciting their mouth-breathing followers to physically attack all elected Republicans, the Democrats in congress are gearing up to impeach a former president because he supposedly incited some of his followers to violently attack Democrats… in a speech in which he literally said, “March down to the capitol and patriotically and PEACEFULLY protest.” 

As I say, I could easily talk about that stuff. 

I could, for example, compare the Biden administration getting out of the gates to the start of an ill-fated horse race.  One in which the gun sounded, spooking several of the horses into throwing their riders and then trampling them to death, while several of the other horses sprang forward, collided with each other and went down in a cacophony of snapped fetlocks and equine screaming, and in which the lead horse, just as it was breaking away from the pack, somehow burst into flames. 

Even though horses are normally pretty reliably known to not be the least bit flammable. 

I could write about that stuff, and much more.  But I’m not going to.  Because it’s a Monday, in the mid-winter of our discontent, and I want to focus on something positive, in the form of three public figures I admire.   You might not be surprised that one of them is a thinker and writer.  But the other two are from very unlikely fields: one politician, and one actor.

When it comes to professions, even the famously low-status ones don’t strike me as worse than politicians.  I’ve bought several cars from used car dealers that weren’t total lemons.  I’ve employed a few lawyers over the years, and none of them tried to double-bill me for time they spent with hookers.  Speaking of which, even though – and I cannot stress this enough – I have NO first-hand experience with hookers, I’ve been told that they at least allow one to do to them what our politicians routinely do to us.

But let’s not let the 95% of terrible politicians give the other 5% a bad name. 

And one of those 5% is the governor of my state, Ron DeSantis.  A veteran, military lawyer and congressman, DeSantis just barely won in 2018, defeating far-left incompetent Andrew Gillum.   

In a lot of ways, DeSantis’ election was the opposite of the heartbreaking razor-thin losses in 2020, in which equally terrible far-left creeps like Ossoff and Warnock and Biden and Harris managed to win.  And in the ensuing two years, the judgment of the voters in electing DeSantis has been richly rewarded. 

Though not especially telegenic or charismatic, DeSantis has demonstrated the positive qualities of Trump – he governs like a conservative, is impervious to leftist criticism, and doesn’t back down from any political fights – while avoiding the negative characteristics of Trump.  He’s not bombastic, and he’s disciplined, and he aims his fire at the real opposition, rather than at his own feet. 

And the results speak for themselves.  When the MSM were shrieking that Florida would soon be a covid deathscape – and never mind those blue states, where wannabe-dictators destroyed their economies, oppressed the working class and churchgoers, and produced death rates much higher than Florida’s – DeSantis stood his ground.  He trusted the citizens to assess the real risks of the virus, and take appropriate precautions, and run their own lives, free from enforced micro-management from a bullying government. 

To pick just one almost laboratory-perfect example, consider the two Disney theme parks in America.  The one in deep-blue CA, ruled by Ken-Doll Newsom and an arrogant army of leftist poke-noses, has been closed for almost a year.  Tens of thousands of employees have been unemployed, millions of children’s Disney vacation dreams have been dashed, and the streets of Disneyland have been occupied only by tumbleweeds.

And they are partially charred tumbleweeds, since half the state has been intermittently on fire, thanks to suicidally stupid, far-left mismanagement of forests and the electrical grid.

Florida’s Disney park, by contrast, re-opened in early July, after only 4 months of closure.  For those of you without a calendar nearby, that’s around 7 months ago.   And you’d better believe that if there were mounds of bodies stacked up like cordwood all over Orlando because of the great covid Disney die-off, the MSM would be shouting that story to the rafters.  (By the way, “The Great Covid Disney Die-Off” had the worst box office of any Pixar production ever!)

But alas, there was no horrendous Florida corona-pacalypse.  Only hundreds of thousands of employed people, hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the hands of Floridians and their well-run state government, and millions of happy children.  Oh, the humanity! 

And the last half-year has only seen the wisdom of electing DeSantis become more obvious.  He oversaw a clean and well-run election, and by 11:00 on election night, the world knew who won in Florida.  He has stood up to big tech censorship, and almost alone among GOP pols is aggressively fighting back against the dishonest, power-hungry censors who did everything they could to tilt the 2020 electoral playing field.    

And how has his narrowly defeated leftist rival been conducting himself since the election?  Well, he’s been hard at work, studying and making political connections, and preparing himself for another run.

If by “hard at work” you mean “getting caught in a seedy hotel room with a male prostitute and a dazzling array of illegal drugs.”  I am not making that up.   When the cops arrived, the hooker was overdosing on meth, and Gillum was nude, intoxicated and vomiting in the bathroom.  (In other words, he was truly the “Florida Man” you’re always reading about in the tabloids.)

Because Gillum is a Democrat, and graduated from the “Bill Clinton School of Honest Confession,” his statement was a classic example of the genre.   Gillum said, “I was in Miami last night for a wedding celebration when first responders were called to assist one of my friends.”

Because who amongst us doesn’t traditionally celebrate weddings by ingesting a festive cocktail of drugs and alcohol, and ending up naked and puking on a hotel bathroom floor, after paying one of our “friends” to have sex with us?

Let he who is without sin among you cast the first vomit-flecked meth rock!  

The actor I admire is Denzel Washington.  He’s the type who is always worth watching, even if he’s in a movie that isn’t great.  And most of his movies are very good, usually with a moral center, and  without a political axe to grind.  In a time when half the movies go out of their way to insult and slander conservatives and religious people, I haven’t seen Washington do that.

He’s been outspoken about his Christian faith, and though he supported Obama, he’s been very circumspect about politics, pointedly not insulting conservatives or bashing Trump.   In the leftist-dominated, censorious atmosphere of Hollywood, I usually assume that anyone who doesn’t wear his leftist principles on his sleeve is likely a closet conservative.

That assumption got some support from an interview he recently gave to the lefties at Yahoo Entertainment. When asked about how he sees cops and the military, he said, “I have the utmost respect for what they do, for what our soldiers do, [people] that sacrifice their lives. I just don’t care for people who put those kind of people down. If it weren’t for them, we would not have the freedom to complain about what they do.”

Not too many years ago, that would have been a typical sentiment, mouthed even by the celebrities who didn’t believe it, just out of social and career pressure.  Today, sadly, it takes courage to say it, and I admire Denzel for doing so!

Finally, Thomas Sowell is 90 years old, and a national treasure.   A skilled writer and a clear, logical thinker, Sowell has written more books than the entire Island of Misfit Toys that is the Biden administration has read.  He’s written about taboo topics like race and politics with a combination of erudition and blunt, honest common sense that is well nigh irrefutable.  So the left virtually never tries to refute him, preferring either to ignore him, or smear him.

The latter is made considerably more difficult because Sowell is black, but that doesn’t stop the charlatans who make a living fanning racial flames. I can only imagine the kind of courage it takes to be a black conservative, especially when your first name is Thomas!  I’m sure the racial arsonist leftists all think they’re brilliant when they roll out the “Uncle Tom” charge against him.

If you haven’t read Sowell, you really owe it to yourself.  The Vision of the Anointed and A Conflict of Visions are personal favorites of mine, but you can’t go wrong with anything Sowell writes.  In addition to the cogent analysis, you’ll find bon mots on every page.  He is a smart, brave adult in an academy full of blinkered, cowardly juveniles.  

Reading Thomas Sowell is the anti-dote to reading trendy hucksters like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi “gesundheit” Coates or Robin DiAngelo.  In an interview or debate, when he’s given a tough question, there’s one reply I’ll guarantee you will never hear Thomas Sowell utter:

“I’m going to have to circle back on that.”

Avenatti/Ta-Nehisi 2024!

A lot of terrible things have happened throughout history in the month of January.  Hitler seized power in January (1933).  So did Castro (1959).  So did Pol Pot (1976).  The space shuttle Challenger exploded (1986).  Nancy Pelosi was born in Mesopotamia (2213 B.C.).

Saxons called January the “wolf month,” because hungry wolves would come into their towns searching for food this time of year.

So, yeah.  That’s January.  Many horrible leftists seizing power, fiery explosions, and ravenous predators coming to town to torment regular folks and scavenge their resources. 

Sound familiar?

But I’m not going to talk about that depressing stuff.  Because I’m a cautious optimist, and an Ameri-can, not an Ameri-can’t.   And because we need to laugh at the many small stories that can sometimes escape our notice.  Stories like these:

1.Alec Baldwin’s wife’s hilarious self-owning.  

I generally find Alec Baldwin to be a charming and talented comic actor.  Until he opens his mouth about politics.  Then he reveals that he’s a gigantic horse’s Schumer. 

But it turns out that his wife is even more unhinged.  For years she has been pretending to be a Latina, writing about how she first came to the US from Mallorca to attend college, speaking with an unconvincingly intermittent Spanish accent – once feigning a struggle to remember the English word “cucumber” – and calling herself “Hilaria.”

But it turns out she was born in Boston, from a family who traces its American roots to before the Revolution.  And her real name is “Hillary Hayward-Johnson.” 

“Oh,” you are probably thinking, “Of the Sinaloa Hayward-Johnsons?”

Sadly, no.

What is it about white leftists that makes them want to pretend to be ethnic minorities?  If it’s not blue-eyed blonde Rachel Dolezal perming her hair and faking her way into a leadership position in the NAACP, or blue-eyed blonde Elizabeth Warren waxing nostalgic about her youth spent riding bareback across the plains in her buckskin dress (#wemustneverstopmockingher), it’s Hillary Baldwin reminiscing about holidays spent wearing a sombrero and whacking at a – how you say? – pinata.

How much respect would I lose from all of you if I suddenly adopted the phony-as-Comma-la persona of exotic Latin lothario “Martino,” with my smoldering good looks and theek accent?   

A lot of respect, I’m guessing.  But never fear: I would never squander the bond I’ve built with you on such ridiculous contrivances.

And that’s why I’ll always remain your plain ol’ exotic white lothario “Martin,” with my middling looks and perfect Midwestern accent.  You’re welcome.   

2. Tacoma cop earns the “French Connection Good Driver Award” for running over a few violent idiots who were begging to be run over. 

If you haven’t seen the video yet, you should.  It’s the same story that unfolded many times this past year, when peaceful rioters would attack some innocent motorist in a car, pounding on the roof, smashing windows, and jumping on the hood.  And then, sometimes, the driver would (gloriously!) hit the gas and go all “Smokey and the Dimwit” on the rioters, tossing them into the air as he drove to freedom.

Sorry.  That’s “bandit.”  “Smokey and the Bandit.”

There were two novel twists in this story: 1. The vehicle involved was a police SUV, which it turns out has the additional heft required to dish out some serious Darwin-award-winning justice to any brain-dead biped who stupidly made a frontal assault on it. And 2. This time, the violent crowd had gathered to engage in super-dangerous street racing, rather than the usual leftist hobbies of hating America, tearing down statues, and vandalizing property. 

On the bright side, after dozens of bogus anti-police accusations, we finally do have an example of a cop being race-ist.  (Boom!)

One violent thug chose stupidly enough that he ended up falling in front of the car as it justifiably sped away, in the process turning himself into a human speed bump.  So trigger warning if you decide to find the video, because that image is hard to watch.  Also, the audio is irritating, with repeated screams of profanity and unjustified anger from the mob.  

On the other hand, you could watch the video the way I did: Turn the sound off, and create your own soundtrack.  As speed-bump-boy starts whacking on the car, sing softly to yourself, “I’m breakin’ rocks   in the [pause] hot sun; I fought the law, and the law [pause] THUMP-THUMP!”

3.  In an omen of what’s to come in the disastrous next four years, Joey Gaffes fired the White House usher on inauguration day.  A few hours later, after he’d been sworn in, Biden and non-doctor Jill waved to a crowd and dramatically turned to the White House doors… and then stood there like addled mopes.

Because they’d fired the usher, one of whose duties was to open doors for them.

They stood there for a long, confused time, before someone finally opened the doors.  The video I saw was shot from an angle that partially blocked the door, so I can’t be sure that Biden spent that time repeatedly pulling on the door that needed to be pushed.

But c’mon man.  You know that is what happened.

4.  Biden’s new political hack press secretary Jen Psaki – and if I’m the first one to call her “Hacky Psaki,” I trademark that term, right now – gave a frighteningly clueless answer to a question about whether the WH is concerned about the Game Stop stock-shorting panic.

I’m sure you’ve all read CO’s insightful discussion of that, and thus know more about it than Jen Psaki ever will.  This particular reporter asked what the WH plans to do, and ended with “…and have there been any discussions with the SEC about how to proceed?”  

Psaki’s response, which I swear to you I am not making up: “Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her, and often questions about the market we’ll send to them.”   

It’s times like these when I wish I could get within 100 miles of a WH press conference.  Because if I were in that room, I’d do my best to ask the next question: “I just re-read the transcript of my colleague’s previous question, and I was surprised to see that it was not ‘Can you give us a genitalia census of the Biden officials who will be dealing with this stock market instability?’ Since that is the question you answered.” 

“And by the way, I’m sure we all send our congratulations to Janet Yellin on what we assume are her absolutely top-notch lady parts.  Now, getting back to the question of what you numbskulls are planning to do about the stock shorting issue?”

5. In one more glaring example of breathtaking media bias, Kamala Harris’ step-daughter Ella Emhoff has signed what is being called “a ludicrous modeling contract.”

Sorry.  That’s “lucrative modeling contract.”

Now Emhoff is a civilian, and I’m no head-turner myself, so I’m not going to attack her for accepting that contract.  But a quick search will reveal a dozen pictures of her. 

If any of those pics were put into a photo line-up with the driver’s license photos of a dozen randomly chosen women, and if a group of people were offered $1,000,000 to pick the professional model from that line-up…? 

Let’s just say that I would not be reluctant to put up the million.

Remember: Melania Trump is a world-class smoke-show – and, literally, a SUPER MODEL! — and as First Lady was not given a single magazine cover, let alone a modeling gig.  

But Ella Emhoff is now a professional model.

Well done, main stream media!

6. Finally, Dr. Fauci has taken his campaign to be the least credible doctor since Jill Biden to another level. 

In a January 25th interview,  Fauci explained that since one mask catches some droplets, it is “only common sense,” that two masks would catch even more droplets. 

To re-cap, last March Fauci said that we should not wear masks.  By May, he said that we should all wear a mask.  Eight months later, he is saying that we should all wear two masks. 

I’m no mathematician, but a few quick calculations tell me that by a year from this Christmas, Fauci will be telling each of us to wear 14 masks.  

In addition to not being a mathematician, I am also not a physician.  But I put my magical wizard hat on and did a little cogitating, and I’ve come up with the invention that is going to win me the Nobel Prize for medicine: the Simpson Droplet Impermeability Membrane, or SDIM.

Here’s my thought: Obviously, a cloth mask only catches some droplets.  But you know what would catch ALL droplets? 

That’s right: a plastic bag.  

And before you can object, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m one step ahead of you. 

“Martino,” you were thinking, “your plastic bag idea is pure genius!  But once you pulled the bag over your head, couldn’t some droplets still escape from underneath the bag?”

Of course they could.  And that’s why deploying the SDIM consists of more than just putting a bag on someone’s head.  (If you just thought of a joke involving Ella Emhoff, I am very disappointed with you.)

No, the SDIM is a MSCTS (that’s right: a multi-stage, contagion-thwarting system).  Which is why the bag comes with a sturdy plastic zip-tie. 

The rest is obvious.  Unfold the plastic bag and pull it down over your head, tugging the bottom of it down around your neck.  Then cinch the zip tie firmly, just above your Adam’s apple, and lie back and enjoy the peace of mind that comes from the complete absence of deadly covid droplets.

A sensation of light-headedness and the graying of your vision tells you that it’s working!

I am so confident in the efficacy of the SDIM that I give you this guarantee: no one who uses the SDIM will ever die of covid, even though mendacious government bureaucrats will probably say they did.

Avenatti/Hacky Psaki, 2024!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to Joe

C’mon man, he’s got a plan.

Look fat–  don’t question that.

You know, the thing,

Ring a ding ding.

He defeated Corn Pop

Zippity boop bop.

Don’t give him a quiz:

he don’t know where he is.

Stay in your lanes

Or he’ll put y’all back in chains.

Even Frank Luntz

Knows he’s a dunce.

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

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

Two more details struck me about inauguration day:

Remember when Tucker Carlson mispronounced Comma-la’s name, and a thousand leftist dimwits assailed him as racist for making such a heinous mistake? 

Imagine my amusement when I heard the audio of our most mediocre Supreme Court justice — Sotomayor — swearing in that fake-laughing goon as VP.  Because you guessed it: she pronounced “Kamala” incorrectly, the same way Tucker did.

Who would have guessed that such a wise Latina woman would turn out to be such a vicious, horrible racist?  I say we move to impeach immediately.

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

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

Well, yes.  That’s his look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, scene.

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

Avenatti/Hunter Biden 2024!

You may remember that a while ago, I wrote a column about trying to maintain an internal locus of control, rather than an external one. 

For those of you who are new to this site – and if so, Welcome to a civil port in what looks to be a brutal, oncoming political storm! – those are old psychology terms that refer to whether you see most of what will ultimately shape your life as more within your control (hence an “internal locus”) or beyond your control (i.e. “external locus”). 

Obviously, all of us face some factors that are beyond our control, from genes and levels of family function or dysfunction to national and international events.  But all of us have a huge amount of control over our lives, through the choices that we make. 

Choose a life partner poorly and you will likely end up thrice-divorced, bitter and broke.  Or even worse, locked in a loveless marriage with some joyless harpie like a certain former first lady I could mention (CAW CAW!), or with a faithless, intern-chasing horndog who deserves her. 

Manage your money wisely – live beneath your means, delay gratification, save money for retirement consistently, etc. – and you are much less likely to need to rely on the promises of feckless politicians to support you.

As I argued in my earlier column, we’d all be better off if we focused on what we can control in our lives, rather than on what we can’t.   In addition to this attitude being more psychologically healthy, I’d argue that it’s also inextricably intertwined with a conservative world view.

Dozens of conservative sayings and attitudes tout the value of self-reliance (even as we all know that complete self-reliance is an unreachable ideal) and controlling the control-ables: “You’re never too poor to clean up your yard.” “Tend your own garden.” “If it is to be, it’s up to me.”  “Pray like everything relies on God, but work like everything relies on you.” 

Leftists, on the other hand, are grand wizards (and if the hood fits, wear it!) at conjuring up external loci of control.  The system is corrupt.  The patriarchy won’t let women rise.  America is inherently racist, sexist and homophobic.  I’m poor because some rich guy stole the money that I never had from me… somehow.  The little man can’t get ahead.  

Though I hate to slander the Three Stooges with this comparison, the motto of the Democrat leadership of the country for my entire lifetime comes straight from Curly (without the comedic value): “I’m a victim of soy-cumstance!”

I think I can probably speak for most of CO nation when I say that we’ve been mostly happy warriors, opposing leftist encroachments and policies, cheering conservative policies no matter where they come from, and tending our own gardens.  We don’t lose sleep thinking of schemes to impose our wills on leftist Americans who disagree with us.  We’d rather not know what they’re up to in the bedroom, or anywhere else.  We don’t want to listen to their “music,” and after the last several years, we don’t want to watch their movies or tv shows either.  And if they want to lecture us during sporting events or award shows, we’ve learned to do without those, too.

We just want to be left alone.   

That resolve will surely be tested in the coming months, as an arrogant, hateful, power-hungry left takes control in DC, and does everything it can to extend that control over as much of the lives of the American people as it possibly can. 

The most disheartening thing about this perfect storm of an election season is that losing by such heartbreakingly close margins in a few states (especially the senate races in Georgia) has drastically increased the difficulty of escaping from the toxic leftism that these boneheads are going to be excreting in all directions.

Before November, it was devastating to be an Illinoisan or Californian or New Yorker, and to watch as bad leftist governance slowly destroyed your home state.  But when you had finally had enough, you could re-assert your internal locus of control, and vote with your feet and escape from the Pritzgers and Newsoms and Cuomos, as many millions of Americans have done.

But now, the threat is that if the Dems have their way, they will do to the rest of us what they’ve done to their hollowed-out home states.  They’ll bail out the greedy kleptocrats in Chicago, NYC and LA with the taxes of red states who’ve balanced their budgets.  They’ll forgive the loans of entitled unemployables who majored in grievance studies, while penalizing those who worked their way through school, or who skipped the beer pong tournaments and went straight to work.  They’ll reward those who came to the country illegally, and buy their votes with the confiscated earnings of those who have played by the rules.

Before you lose hope, though, remember what a bunch of incompetent dopes these people are.  They are not good at their jobs, their belief system is delusional, and the world is NOT going to conform itself to their plans.  Half of the country opposes them now, and after a year (or less) of their ham-fisted and ugly bullying, more people will.

They are sowing stupidity and dysfunction, and when the crop starts to come in, they will not enjoy the harvest.

For now, we’ve got to hunker down and ride this out, because it’s going to get worse before it gets better.  They have achieved some temporary success at censorship, and at slandering everyone who disagrees with them, but that cannot last.  We need to take care of ourselves and each other, and hang tough, and resist their plans without lowering ourselves to their level.

A lot of conservatives are pointing to the bitter political divisions that have revealed themselves in the last several years as evidence that we may be heading for another civil war.   While I can’t go that far, I have to admit that it’s not easy to see how an increasingly totalitarian and hostile left can ultimately co-exist with a “free speech, free minds, free markets” conservatism. 

However, I’m holding onto my optimism. (I admit that this is made easier for me because of my Christian faith, a belief that not all people of good will share, obviously.  But for me, knowing that there is an ultimate External Logos of Control [boom!] helps.)  Because when I find myself getting melodramatic about the threat caused by Joey Gaffes and his army of arschaffen, I like to remember the words of one of my favorite Republican presidents, U. S. Grant, at a darker moment than we now face.

The first day of the battle of Shiloh (in April of 1862) had been a miserable bloodbath, and among other horrors, Grant had witnessed a cannonball take off the head of an aide standing beside him, and both legs off of another soldier nearby.  That night, he and his troops sat in a drenching rain, listening to the screams of their fellow soldiers having limbs amputated in a nearby cabin.     

Sherman stopped to talk with the future president, saying, “Well Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

And like a bad-arse American cautious optimist, Grant replied, “Yes.  Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”

Remember that, CO Nation!  While there’s a hard rain falling, and it feels like a cannonball has taken our legs out from under us – if not clean off! – we’ve been through worse. 

We defeated the Democrats and freed their slaves 160 years ago.  We’ve beaten national socialists in Germany and international socialists all over the world, and we’re going to outlast this motley collection of octogenarian socialists and racial arsonists and make-believe Indians (#wemustneverstopmockingher) and incompetent ex-bartenders.    

There’s no denying it: we’ve had the devil’s own election. 

Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.

Well, this was certainly some week, wasn’t it? 

I’ve honestly been thinking about you all, and wondering what I was going to write the next time I ventured back into the comforting embrace of CO nation.  As befitting the name of this beloved site, and my own basic nature, I’ve been in “let’s look on the bright side” mode for several months now – something that’s usually not hard for me at all, especially during the Christmas season.

But holy crap, what a devastating sequence of events!  I’ve been casting about for how to even start. 

Maybe with a hat tip to Dickens?  “It was the worst of times, and then even slightly worse times.  And then things somehow went steeply downhill from there.”

I can usually seek solace in Shakespeare.  “Now is the winter of our discontent … made immeasurably worse by this scrofulous pack of congenital liars, racial arsonists, and insufferable, America-hating d-bags…”     

Of course I would usually seek out the Palmist right now… but somehow I just know that as soon as I pick up my Bible, it’s going to open to either Job or Lamentations. 

Or maybe to one of the super-creepy passages in Revelation that foretell the coming of Imhotep Pelosi.  (“And then from within a cloud of stinging insects appeared a hideous harpie, not dead and yet not alive, with tiny red eyes staring from a lifeless, frozen face.  And she rode upon the back of an equally terrible creature, with legs like cedars and ankles like mighty oaks, the hooves of which shook the earth, and the sounds of a thousand crows emanating from her terrifying maw cried out, ‘At this point, what difference does it make? CAW CAW!”)

So, yeah.  2021 is off to a great start, and now I’m like the school kid who lost his thesaurus:  I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how devastated I am.

I know: lame joke.  But cut me some slack, people – I’m just trying to hold it together here.     

Actually, I did see a story that summed up the way I feel, twelve days into the new year.  It happened several weeks after the election, in Kansas.   I think the headline will give you the gist of it:  “A man in possession of methamphetamine was critically injured after falling while racing on his motorcycle, during which he accidentally shot himself.”

But it got even better.  Because the moment after he finished NOT sticking his landing, he was run over by a car.

I quote from the police report:  “While racing, the suspect lost control of his bike and wrecked. During the accident, a weapon in his waistband discharged, striking him in the hip, and he was also struck by another vehicle that fled the scene. He was transported to an area hospital in critical but non-life-threatening condition. A records check revealed him to be a felon, and a large bag of suspected methamphetamine was located in the motorcycle.”

The only way that man could know how I feel right now is if his firearm had discharged into his groin instead of his hip. 

So what can we learn from this, and what can we do now?  

I’ve got a few scattered thoughts, but nothing that feels super useful. 

The worst parts:

1.It’s going to be hard to escape from these leftist idiots.  Because they are totalitarians, they politicize every aspect of life, from sports to media to family life, and like some character out of Grimm’s fairy tales, they poison everything they touch.

When they just controlled blue states, fed-up normal people could a least flee them – and they’ve been doing so.  When the current census is done, NY and CA are likely to each lose at least one house seat and electoral college vote each, due to people voting with their feet.

That could be a healthy process: when a parasite kills its host, the parasite dies, the host fertilizes the land, and the cycle of life can begin again.  But in this case – to extend an unsavory metaphor – too many of the boneheads that infected their original blue states metastasized out into the surrounding states, and now once-healthy states are looking gangrenous. 

2. In the demolition derby of leftist moral offenses, a close second to their omnipresent, bone-deep dishonesty is their unconscionable fanning of the flames of racial hatred.  Nothing infuriates me more than seeing the unending slander against the least racist multi-ethnic nation in the history of the world that continually spews from their whiny pie-holes.

Of course they were at it again in the wake of the capitol riot.  It was bad enough that after 6 months of implicitly cheering on rioting, looting, vandalism, arson and violence from one end of our country to the other, those slimy hypocrites suddenly feigned outrage on 1/6.  (And though it doesn’t need to be said, of course we condemn the people who acted like JV Democrats on that day.  Would that the creeps on the other side could have found a way to express 1/1000^th of that outrage when their thuggish co-religionists were destroying cities all over the place for months!)

But the racist leftists had to haul out their tired, inflammatory accusations, claiming that if the protestors had been black, they’d have been treated much worse.   As if we haven’t just watched millions of ethnically diverse rioters rampaging through a months’-long crimewave, with very few arrests.  In fact, politicians told police to stand down and let them riot, abandon their stations to be burned to the ground, let the rioters set up their own anarchist CHOP/CHAZ, and on and on.   

3. As much as I agree that Trump was his own worst enemy over the last month or so – as are we all, I guess – it’s particularly galling to see the MSM and Dems pull out the idea that because he “raised the temperature” through his reckless rhetoric, he is responsible for 1/6, as are the half of the country who supported Trump.  Because “everyone knew that this would happen.”

I agree that he did raise the temperature, and he shouldn’t have.  But remember when Obama slandered America and especially cops as terrible racists for months and years, and so was naturally blamed by the MSM when a black Obama supporter shot 5 cops in Dallas?  Because he raised the temperature too, and he had to expect that some of his supporters would take action against the cops whom he’d been demonizing, right?

The same way Bernie Sanders was morally responsible for the Bernie bro who went to the congressional softball game and shot Steve Scalise, almost killing him.  After all, Bernie had been demonizing conservatives for years, painting them as greedy exploiters waging class warfare on all the little people just like that loser shooter. 

That’s why Bernie is rotting in jail right now, and Obama was impeached and jailed too.

Oh no, wait.  That never happened.  Because leftists are never responsible for the passions they inflamed.  Only conservatives.  

Urhkkkggluckkk…

There, are you happy now?  You’ve got me choking on my own bile, you leftist hypocrites!

The “best” parts (and never have sarcastic/scare quotes been more justified):

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

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

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

2.  This too must pass.  (Unfortunately, it’s probably going to pass the way a kidney stone does.)  A wise man once said – and no, this time it wasn’t me – that if anything cannot continue, it won’t.  And this kind of leftist insanity cannot continue.  We’ll have a lot of suffering to do in the meantime, and it’s all so heartbreakingly unnecessary, but these dimwits are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.  I just wish they weren’t going to create suffering for so many innocent people along with them.

3. In the long run, if we discipline ourselves, we can let all of this pain motivate us.  We can use Trump’s virtues as a template, and his flaws as a warning.  At his worst, his undisciplined and self-defeating firing in all directions gave ammunition to his enemies, and alienated enough of the otherwise persuadable (if mushy and politically semi-informed) voters whom (in this fallen world) we need to keep elections from being close enough to steal. 

But when he was at his best, he was a cheerful warrior, taking the fight to the left, and he had the thickest of skin, and his many successes should be a lesson for the next generation of conservative pols.  There’s a reason why Trump got so much done, compared to a generation of mostly pale, timid RINOs since Reagan.  And there’s no reason why we can’t match or exceed those successes.

I hope that you all are slogging your way through what feels like the dark night of our political soul, and that we’ll be able to support each other, and keep fighting the good fight, even as we know that the next several rounds are going to be brutal.   

My next column, I promise, will be more upbeat. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to try to wrestle this wrecked motorcycle back up while not aggravating my gunshot wound.  Maybe I’ll take just a dusting of my meth stash, for pain management…

I usually like to do a bunch of reading in the downtime around the holidays, and whenever current events seem especially troubling, I like to read history.  Partly because most tempestuous times in the past were a lot worse than our present, and partly because covering several centuries can give you a healthier perspective on the current crop of knaves and imbeciles threatening our peace of mind.      

So last week, as soon as I finished Frank Muller’s great reading of “A Christmas Carol,” I took up a book on the history of Rome in the last 150 years or so before the Republic fell, and the Empire started.  The book is Mike Duncan’s “The Storm Before the Storm,” and if you like history, I’d recommend it.

Roman history has always intrigued me, but I’ve mostly gotten into only the period starting shortly before Christ, when the Empire supplanted the republic, precipitating the long decline and apocalyptic fall.  From the aqueducts to the roads to the countless innovations in architecture and governance and war, the Romans are endlessly fascinating. 

They combined great cultural achievements with a depraved and cynical brutality that is hard to comprehend.  I always think of a moment from the Sopranos, when Tony and a couple of his henchmen are intimidating a Jewish business owner.  When the guy proves tougher than they’d expected, he gives them a little speech about how Jews have always had to be tough, and citing the example of when a bunch of them resisted to the death against a huge Roman force at Masada. 

He closes with defiance, saying, “The Romans?  Where are they now?”

Gandolfini delivers the line perfectly: “You’re looking at ‘em, a-hole.”  As much as “the Romans” bring to mind Cicero and Aurelius and the Colosseum, they also had more than a little of the mafia in them, and that scene always rings true to me.   

And when it comes to languages, Latin has to be on the medal stand.  English is God’s favorite language, obviously (I cite Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the largest vocabulary of any known language by a factor of 5 or more), and German is my recent favorite.  But Latin made the Romans even cooler than they would have otherwise been. 

You can’t beat the personal names: Trajan.  Hadrian.  Tiberias.  (If I’d had five sons, right after Walter Payton Simpson and Antonin Scalia Simpson would have come Trajan, Hadrian and Tiberius Simpson.)  I also love the Roman practice of giving people honorific names based on battles they won or peoples they conquered.  So when your average Scipio kicks some arse in Africa, he comes back as Scipio Africanus.    

Even thousands of years later, the title “Caesar” is so cool that the Germans Germanized it into Kaiser, and the Russians Russified it into Czar.  Plus July and August are named after two Caesars, which had to heady stuff for them. 

If I had a month named after me, I’d be working that into conversations every chance I got.  I’d be saying things like, “I can’t wait for the month of Mart this year.”  And people would be like, “Do you mean ‘March’?”

And I’d say, “No. It used to be March.  But since I whipped Hannibal, or the Gauls, or whoever, it got changed to ‘Mart.”  I would be even more insufferable than I already am.   “I hope you guys enjoy Black History Month, because after that, it’s the month of Mart.  If the Trump vaccine is as powerful as we hope, we’ll be playing Mart Madness again before you know it.  And I guess I don’t have to tell you to beware the Ides of Mart.”

Anyway, in the two centuries since Gibbon wrote his influential The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, it’s been an intellectual parlor game for people to look for parallels between the course of that great empire, and every empire after it.   As I read “The Storm Before the Storm,” I couldn’t help doing the same.  After this painful year of sleazy, dishonest leftists and an unexpectedly inspiring yet tragically flawed leader (call him Trumpicus), one sequence of events jumped out at me. 

Around 90 BC, after decades of wars against various foreign enemies, Rome faced what was later called the Social War, named after a word in Latin meaning “allies.”   We usually think of the Romans as synonymous with Italians, but that was not the case.  As a powerful and prestigious capital, Rome was all-powerful, and Roman citizens looked down on the rubes and deplorables living in the rest of Italy as hicks and nobodies; if they’d had airplanes, they’d have called most of the peninsula “fly-over country.” 

Over many decades, pampered, entitled Roman elitists – think of the Swamp – had been dangling the prospect of Roman citizenship over the Italians. They used them as conscripts to fight wars, taxed them to support the capital’s appetites, and flattered and manipulated them when it was time for elections, before pulling the rug out from under them and tossing them aside after every election or crisis.

They even had Philly-style election fraud.  One faction would temporarily banish the other factions’ voting base from the city during an election, they would cancel elections at the last minute, and more than once, when an election was going against one group, they’d rush in and smash the giant urns that held the ballots.

After one betrayal too many, the deplorable Italian tribes finally rose up against the arrogant elites from inside the Roman “beltway,” and the result was the “social war.”  (Is it a coincidence that “social war” and “culture war” are essentially synonyms?  Nope.)  In the short run, the powerful elites won a ruinous, Pyrrhic victory, which resulted in a lot of dead on both sides, a season of famine, and social and financial instability that led to continual power struggles, until the Republic finally succumbed, and slid into a tyrannical quasi-dictatorship.  The Italians did gain long-promised Roman citizenship within a decade or so, but the loss of the republic spelled eventual doom.

You can read too much into historical parallels.  The Romans lasted nearly a millennium, and we’re still in our awkward adolescence.   They were also a lot more brutal than us; every round of palace intrigue and every political power play ended with the losers being murdered and their bodies dumped in the Tiber.  

If we can thwart AOC and Grandma Squanto, they’re not going to end up floating down the Potomac without their empty heads.  They won’t even have to go back to bartending or sleeping in a tepee in the backyard (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – they’ll just go on the View and give paid speeches to gullible leftists.  

Supposedly it was Mark Twain who said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.  Reading that book over the last week or so, I heard a lot of echoes of the late Republic in our current dilemma.   It feels like our elites — in DC and on both coasts – have been waging an escalating social war on us for years, and now they’ve monkeyed with the ballot urns.

But I don’t think that we’re doomed to Rome’s fate, and I’m not giving up.   It seems like the country has edged up toward the Rubicon this year, but we haven’t crossed it.   Our opponents in the social war are powerful because they have few scruples, but they are not smart, and they are not competent.  They’re a lot closer to Nero and Caligula than Marius or Sulla or the Caesars.      

That’s not a completely happy thought.   But they’re led by avaricious and arrogant dopes, and they have no idea how much they don’t know.  If we can hang on and thwart their worst policies, I think they’ll be fighting viciously amongst themselves within a few months. 

We’ve survived worse than Biden Cornpopicus, and we’ll do so again.

Here’s to 2021 being a better year, and to keeping our Republic!

I hadn’t intended to write another column before Christmas, but I just finished listening to A Christmas Carol again (as I mentioned yesterday), and after a day spent with Dickens and his beautiful prose, I can think of no greater Christmas eve gift than sharing a few choice quotes from him.  I’ve chosen four in particular.

Like all great writers and thinkers, Dickens’ work contains thoughts that have political implications, but he also transcends partisan politics.  As an example, two passages stood out to me as required reading for political partisans on both sides of the aisle.

As free-market conservatives, our side can sometimes become so enamored with the many financial – and yes, IMHO, ethical – blessings of a properly functioning market that we overlook (or even deny) the temptation of greed, in all of its corrosive immorality.  Scrooge is an obvious stand-in for an obsessive capitalism untethered from Christian ethics.

The quote that we should all meditate on is a pretty familiar one.  It occurs after Marley’s ghost first confronts Scrooge, who notes that Marley was always a good man of business.  ″‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!‘”

As a landlord who frequently hires and works beside tradesmen, and who serves tenants, I am going to remember that line: the cost overruns on work done, and the late rent payments by stressed-out tenants are merely “drops of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

As our “fellow passengers to the grave” (thanks, Mr. Dickens!) our leftist friends, in their pursuit of (what I hope for their sake they perceive to be) beneficial ends, are prone to over-estimate their own wisdom and competence, and blithely take it upon themselves to run the lives of those they govern.  As a logical consequence of that view, they exempt themselves from the rules that they force upon others.

Sometimes this tendency just means becoming condescending micro-managers of all areas of public life, for which they should be thrown out of office with great force.  But sometimes it means making life-and-death decisions for those under their thumb, as when Chinese leftists use a one-child policy to force abortions by the millions, or when leftist judges release violent criminals who go on to murder innocent citizens. 

Or when, just last week, leftists in the CDC try to sneak their racialist agenda into decisions on how to distribute the Trump vaccine (the MAGA-cine, I suggest we call it), steering it first to less at-risk minority members, because the resulting deaths among more vulnerable white citizens would be morally acceptable.  Because racial justice.

For those leftists who have lost their moral compass, Dickens has a rebuke.

This quote comes when the Ghost of Christmas Present is lambasting Scrooge for his earlier sneering that the poor who would rather die than go to a workhouse should do so, and “decrease the surplus population.”  

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.”

Take that, Paul Ehrlich and George Soros and Margaret Sanger!

But of course Dickens is beyond parochial politics.   He can evoke the depth of regret and the heights of happiness in a few, pitch-perfect words.

He does the former when Marley’s ghost explains the chains that hobble and torment him in the afterlife: “I wear the chain I forged in life.   I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

He does the latter in this quote about Scrooge after his transformation:  “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk— that anything— could give him so much happiness.”

Finally, two more musical notes:

First, I recently came across the Petersons’ version of “O Come, O Come Emanuel” and “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” in one mash-up.  The two songs work great together, with the elegiac somberness of the first giving way to the joyous animal spirits of the second.

If you asked me what I expect to be the soundtrack in the corner of heaven containing my dad’s raucous Kentuckian side of the family, these two songs would be in there somewhere.  Because as much as I love Handel, and Tom Petty, and Tom Waits, and a hundred others, the Platonic ideal of essential music is this:  three beautiful young female singers, two guitars, a mandolin, a banjo and a violin.

On this, I will brook no disagreement.  😊

Second, on the subject of the modern version of the hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God:” as I mentioned yesterday, Luther’s archaic language aside (“and though this world with devils filled/ should threaten to undo us”), his lyrics feel absolutely current to me. 

As I listened to that song again, this point was driven home afresh, when I heard these lines: “for still our ancient foe, doth seek to work us woe.”

Did anyone else read the words “our ancient foe” and NOT think of Imhotep Pelosi? 

I didn’t think so.

Okay, I can’t plummet from the heights of Dicken’s large-heartedness to my own juvenile need to make a cheap joke about Baroness Botox, and end a Christmas eve column there.

So, one last Christmas thought from me to you, courtesy of Charles D.

“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.”

Now get out there and wassail, CO Nation!

It’s hard to describe the schizophrenic nature of this holiday season for me.  Many have noted how our  country seems to be dividing into two camps, with less and less in common between them, and they’ve predicted something akin to a civil war coming.

I’ve resisted those predictions, finding in them the kind of exaggeration and doom-mongering that routinely shows up, especially among older people: the kids these days… everything’s going to hell… in my day, no one would have put up with that.  And so on.

But after this year, it’s not so easy to dismiss the grim signs that our civic bonds have actually been getting objectively, demonstrably more frayed.  The leftists are getting more and more extreme, and more rigidly totalitarian. 

I am obviously biased, but I don’t believe that conservatives are becoming more extreme, or even  moving much to the right, let alone the far right.  We still want the same things we’ve wanted since the Founders fought for a revolution: lower taxes, and more individual freedom, and a less over-bearing and oppressive government.  We value individual freedom, and the constitution, and a colorblind society.    We don’t want to force our will on the leftists who hate us; we just want them to leave us alone. 

Yes, we mourn the damage they’ve done to the places they control.  They’ve turned once-proud cities – beautiful San Francisco, the Motor City, the City of the Big Shoulders, Baltimore and Philadelphia and dozens of others – into filthy, dangerous combinations of the economic vibrancy of Venezuela, the urban beautification of Mogadishu, and the political bullying and corruption of old East Germany.

That’s unutterably sad.  But they seem to be happy with it, as they continue to vote for more of the same.  So what are we to do?  As anyone who has loved an alcoholic or addict knows, we can’t want healing for them more than they want it for themselves.  They will need to hit rock bottom, and we hope to be able to help them when they reach that point.

But in the meantime, we can’t enable them, and we can’t support their habit.  Their extremists seem to be driving their party, and they’re a toxic combination of spoiled rotten, and spoiling for a fight.  And I don’t think they’re going to be happy with the results when they get one.   

Having said all of that, I think Dickens had it right: it’s the best of times, and the worst of times.   Every time I watch a little media or social media that reflects the left’s worldview, and then return to my own life, I feel like I’m getting the bends. 

In their world, Joe Biden is sentient, America is evil, and rioting is good for you, but going to church will kill you.  Also, there’s no reason that spending months banging Fang Fang in a hot-pillow joint running by the Chinese Communist Party should keep you off the Intelligence Committee.

In my world, Christmas carols are playing, and we’re trying to love our neighbors and our enemies, and America is a great nation, who just came up with a vaccine that will save many millions of lives around the world.  (Quick sanity check, from my world: communists came up with a virus that killed millions; we came up with a vaccine that will save millions.  You’re welcome, world!)  My daughter – the newly minted nurse – got her first covid vaccine shot last week, after which she went right back to saving lives, and being the apple of my eye.  (If I weren’t such a classy gentleman, I’d say something like, “Suck it, medical geniuses and talking heads of the MSM, who spent the last 6 months mocking Trump and assuring us that that was not possible!”)

I went down to the Sarasota area over the weekend to visit with extended family, and had a great time.  I sat on the beach for a while, and had some good conversation, and whipped my cousin at cribbage.  I ate some great Greek food for the first time since college; I had chicken souvlaki, and that flaming cheese with brandy on it that I can’t remember the name of.  (I want to say “boom-chakalaka,” but that’s what Bill Murray’s platoon yelled in Stripes.  So that can’t be right.)

I also tried ouzo for the first time.  And the last time.  Because hard liquor that smells and tastes like liquorice is just not right.  C’mon, Greeks – first Dukakis, and now this?!

On the drive down and back, I indulged in one of my favorite Christmas traditions: listening to the late Frank Muller reading Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.  Muller’s voice is perfect, and Dickens is amazing, of course: funny and wise, and continually rewarding the reader with apt images and deft turns of phrase.   

Most of his work benefits from the length and depth of the novels , though reading them requires a commensurate time commitment.  But the Carol is concise, and note-perfect, and I find myself saying favorite lines along with the narrator in a way that I often do when re-watching favorite movies, or some bits of Shakespeare or CS Lewis, or other core favorites.

And nothing gets me into the Christmas spirit more.  I’ll watch several versions of the Carol on tv in the next several days, and I still won’t be tired of them.

I’ll end with one more musical note – and I beg the indulgence of the non-Christians among the CO Nation, for all of the happy Christ/Handel/Dickens talk of late.  (But I have done my best to throw in some “Wang Dang Sweet Fang Fang” jokes lately too, just to earn a few points for range.)

Though it’s not a Christmas song per se, I’ve always assigned “A Mighty Fortress is our God” into the stodgy, old, organ-heavy school of church music that I don’t love.  But when running through a lot of Christmas hymns on Youtube, I came across a contemporary version by a 7-piece group playing in a beautiful church at Cedarville University. 

If you like that sort of thing, the video is worth a watch.  Keeping in mind the caveat that with music, lyrics tend to feel dead on the page compared to when they are when sung, one particular verse really spoke to me, partly because of the dissonance of Luther’s old-fashioned language delivered in a contemporary context:

“And though this world with devils filled

Should threaten to undo us

We will not fear for God has willed

His truth to triumph through us.”

After this year of malevolent riots, frightening pandemic, dishonest politicians, and a bitter election marred by transparent sleaze and bad faith, lines about a devil-filled world threatening to undo us feel like they’re ripped from today’s headlines! 

But I’m holding on to the hope of those last two lines.

Though I’ve said it before, I want to thank you all, COers.  In a tough year like this one, the opportunity to share my thoughts and hear yours has been a consolation and a joy, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that.

If you should find yourself watching any political coverage in the next few days, and feel agitation and rising blood pressure, please take my advice.  Grab your remote, search the listings for one of the many versions of A Christmas Carol, and change the channel.

Then settle back and let the words of a great writer banish the ghosts of Biden and Pelosi, and replace them with the ones you remember so well from Christmases past.

“Marley was dead, to begin with…”     

Merry Christmas, CO Nation!

One of the many contributions to Christmas traditions made by the great German people – about which, more below – is the dark twin of St. Nicholas known as Krampus.  He’s a demonic-looking creature, with cloven-hooves, horns and fangs, and while St. Nick passes out toys to the kids who have been nice, Krampus punishes the kids who had been naughty. 

I don’t know if I’m the first to notice this, but I think the lefties who get elected to national office usually think of themselves as a bunch of Santa Clauses, when they are in fact a horde of repugnant Krampi.  (And if you ever got the chance to see Repugnant Krampi open for Black Sabbath in the early 70s, you know what a treat that was!)

They start out promising toys and treats for the citizens they see as dependent children – “Have some free college and free healthcare, and abortions and reparations for all!” – but the mask soon slips, and their big bag of toys turns out to have been filled with a whole rain-forest’s worth of monkey’s paws. (Three paragraphs in on this one, and I’m already all over the road with the odd references.)

Free college turns out to be an immiserating grievance study degree and terminal unemployability.  Free healthcare turns out to be obscenely expensive, and men have to pay for pap smears while women wait 5 trimesters to get in to see an obstetrician, and every treatment is rationed, and in the meantime, take two leeches and call the ER in the morning.

Abortions are a recipe for regret and loss, and reparations would be the seeds of needless and unjustified racial enmity and social devastation, were we ever foolish enough to start down that road. 

One question I go back and forth on is, “To what extent are the lefties aware of the damage their policies do, and will do?”  On the one hand, most of my Dem friends are primarily well-intentioned, though they are subject to the same temptations to self-delusion and demonizing their opponents as we all are. 

On the other hand, it beggars belief that they can remain unaware of the results of their policy prescriptions, after they have been tried and so thoroughly failed, all around the world.

Their battered-voter syndrome relationship with socialism is just one case in point, with the Chinese spy story being just the latest example.  It’s not just Eric Swallwell who couldn’t resist the lure of that Wang Dang Sweet Fang-Fang.  (I know.  That’s one of my least favorite Ted Nugent songs too, but I’m not mature enough to resist a joke when it’s teed-up like that!)

One leftist influencer after another has gotten starry eyed over one horrendous socialist dictatorship after another. You can go all the way back to shortly after the Soviets started their doomed experiment in repression, starvation, and murderous, progressive good intentions, and you’d already find American leftists lining up to defend the growing socialist death tolls.

Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer for praising Stalin’s glorious leftist vision, while managing not to notice millions of rotting Ukrainian corpses stacked up all over the countryside.  Later, Communist spy Alger Hiss — despite having the name of a Dickensian villain, and reams of evidence against him — never fell out of the left’s affections.  Hanoi Jane did her photo op with the Viet Cong, and one actor and celebrity and leftist pol after another has pimped for Castro; one of them narrowly lost the Dem presidential nomination in each of the last two election cycles, and another is currently running for Senate from GA.   

January 5^th is the 11^th day of Christmas, and we all must do everything we can to encourage the voters of Georgia – and whoever is in charge of aggressively poll watching (as much of a grim joke as that seems to be right now) – to counter the socialist Krampus, and save the Senate.

In one last political note, Joey Gaffes continued his DiMaggio-esque string of consecutive teleprompter sessions with at least one howler of a faux pas, this time when he was announcing another cabinet pick.

Saith the Slurring Scrantonian, “For Secretary of Health and Education Services, I nominate Xavier Bakeria… Busherra, excuse me.”

In that one moment, Biden went for the gaffe hat-trick, making three errors in one sentence.  A sentence which was – this seems almost cruel to point out – written for him on a teleprompter!

First, there is no department called, “Health and Education Services” (he meant health and human services).

Second, Bakeria is either:

1. A dance craze from the 90s which featured hip-wiggling young women, synthesizers, and repetitive chorus of, “Hey, Bakeria!”
2. One of the portly Italian minor characters whom Tony Soprano had to kill in Season 4 – I think his first name was “Bobby.”
3. An STD common among Chinese honeytrap spies; there’s a topical ointment that should clear that right up, but you don’t want that genital bakeria going untreated!

The person Biden was actually nominating is Xavier Becerra (pronounced “buh-ser-uh”).

The third error was when Biden took another shot at it, calling him “Busherra.”  Which sounds like a reference to the time when either Bush 41 or Bush 43 was in office: the Bush era.    

Of course, the main issue is not whether Biden mangled the nominee’s name — that’s going to be happening A LOT!  It’s whether the nominee is a good pick.

Spoiler alert: you know he’s great, because he’s been the Attorney General of California for three years, and that place is running like a well-oiled machine! 

I mean, if the machine in question is engineered to produce wild fires, brown-outs, bankruptcies, rampant crime, and the flight of as many productive people as can get hold of an outbound U-Haul.

So, yeah.  Biden is picking his dream team, and it looks like it’s going to be Krampi, all the way down!

On a more Christmas-y note, I’d like to thank CO nation.  In your reactions to last column’s request for recommendation for Christmas music, you all came through, reminding me mostly of old favorites that I’d forgotten (Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Mannheim Steamroller, the Wyndam series, and more), plus a few that were new to me (the Piano Guys, and various versions of old favorites that I hadn’t heard). 

In the course of starting to work those into my Christmas rotation this year, I remembered a few other favorites of my own.  Sting had an album of atmospheric, winter- and/or Christmas-related songs called “If On a Winter’s Night,” that’s worth a listen. 

Another favorite is not specifically Christmas-oriented: it’s a duet in front of the pope, sung by what looks like a Russian orthodox priest and a young girl, singing the Lord’s Prayer in the language of Christ.  Which – though I think of Him speaking in King James-era English — is actually Aramaic.   The young girl is beautiful, with a sweet voice, but when the male singer comes in… I get goosebumps every time.   

Though I was raised Baptist, I joined a Lutheran church when I met my Norwegian-descended wife, and I’ve come to love a lot of the ritual of our church, none more than when we sing Silent Night by candlelight each Christmas eve.  My favorite part is that we sing one verse in German.

Because there is no greater gulf between a song’s message and the language of its singing than the gentle sweetness of that hymn and the dulcet tones of… German!  You haven’t heard audible cognitive dissonance until you’ve heard the harsh, back-of-the-throat, vaguely Beowulf-ian consonants of “Stille… NACHT!  Heilige NACHT!  Alles schlaft, einsame WACHT!”  

But I have a soft spot for most things German — sure, there are a few blots on the record, not the least of which is a certain socialist worker’s party we could all name – and not just because my mom’s side of the family is German. 

Many of our Christmas traditions owe a lot to Germans, and earlier pagan, Germanic types.  The Christmas tree is Germanic, as is the snow globe.  The advent calendar is another German contribution.   In addition to the advent calendar on our wall, and the one with little chocolates in it, last year my wife started another Simpson Christmas tradition by getting me an advent “calendar” consisting of various small bottles of wine for each day of December leading up to Christmas.

Because of my iron discipline and the fact that the bottles are portioned out by date, I am enjoying them all, without risking the possibility that I’ll end up stumbling around and slurring my speech like Biden announcing his new Attorney General pick.

Finally, six years ago tonight, my dad died.

I know, that’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.  And it sounds like the start of a Christmas tale involving spirits and moral lessons, like a variation on A Christmas Carol (which I’m going to write a little about in my next column).

And I guess it sort of is, though without any momentous drama.  I had the great gift of spending a lot of time with him in his last months, and being alone with him at the moment of his death, my mom having gone to bed just a few minutes before. 

And it happened like I imagine it would have happened for the reformed Scrooge: very peacefully, as a fitting coda to a life lived gratefully, and with a calm assurance of where he would be waking up, and that he would be mourned by a lot of people whose lives he’d touched.   

Until he saw them again.   

Because I’m too much the sarcastic, snarky type, I can’t end a column with anything that sweet.  So I’ll just say…

Avenatti/Bobby Bakeria 2024!

Two weeks from today is Christmas, and that always makes me happy.  We’ve finally got some cool weather in north Florida, and my wife and I have put up the tree and decorated the house.  (There’s a new pic up of Stately Simpson Manor at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, if you’re interested.) The youngest daughter got back from her first semester at college. (Is it unseemly bragging to mention that she got a 4.0 GPA in her first semester? It is? Fine.  I’ve got two smart kids, so sue me.)

This season always makes me nostalgic for my Illinois childhood, and the snowy winters that are easy to romanticize when you don’t have to live with dirty snow and sleet that hangs on until the end of March.  These days I always make at least one 4-day weekend trip up to see some snow and some cousins each winter, and I am already looking forward to that. 

In the meantime, I’ve got a two-computer-screen set-up in the home office, and I always have a video playing on the second screen of a winter cabin with snow falling outside and a fire in the fireplace.     

Music has always been a big part of this season for me, too.  I know that many in CO nation are not Christians, so if this stuff bothers you, please skip down a few paragraphs and join me in the secular mockery and good cheer…

If you are a Christian, or someone who loves good music regardless, I have a few recommendations –and hope that you all will have a few for me, because I always love coming across good music.

First, old school stuff:  if you like classical and don’t love Handel’s Messiah, there’s something wrong with you.  We always hear the Hallelujah Chorus excerpt, and there’s a good reason for that: because it’s freaking amazing!  I swear that if I didn’t speak English and heard just that chorus, and someone asked me what that piece was about, I’d say, “Christ, obviously!”  

I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for a 10-year-old flash mob performance of the chorus in a mall food court, which you can easily find on Youtube.  Turn that one up loud.

(By the way, do you notice how, whenever anyone in public is blasting out music, it’s never any good stuff?  It’s always some subliterate, bass-heavy monstrosity with the n-word assaulting your eardrums.  Just once I’d like to see somebody driving down the road blasting some Handel or Bach!)

I also love the old carols – God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Come, All Ye Faithful – preferably done by a brass quartet. 

For some cool, quirky versions of old carols, try Sufjan Stevens and his odd banjo and acoustic guitar versions of “O Come Emmanuel,” “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” “Come Thou Fount,” “I Saw Three Ships,” and, “Once in Royal David’s City.”   He also introduced me to a 17^th century French carol called, “Bring a torch, Jeanette, Isabella.”  His version is really odd, and sounds like it was recorded on a cell phone in the stairwell of a concrete parking garage.  But I love it anyway.

Two years ago when I was looking for some snowy scenery videos, I came across a contemporary singer named Audrey Assad.   She’s got a beautiful voice, and the first videos I found were beautiful, too.  I’d recommend starting with “Abide With Me” and “Even Unto Death,” but a particular favorite of mine is “I Shall Not Want.”  (Joe Biden can tell you: the palmist gets a co-writing credit on that one.)   

But with all of the good memories associated with Christmas, I know that this is also a very sad time for many people.  Nostalgia can be a lot more bitter than sweet, if you are reminded of better times — and  loved ones — that are gone.  My dad died 6 years ago next week, and that has given this season a little bitter to go with the sweet, for me.

This year, politics has added some bitterness to the season as well.  As much as I wasn’t a fan of Trump at first, I came to really appreciate his governance, and his persistence in the face of a relentlessly hostile and petty media.  To see how much good he did in his four years, and to see him (as it appears now) replaced by the Scranton Shuffler is indeed a bitter pill to swallow.

But I think there are real reasons for optimism, even in politics, as we head into 2021, and I’ll be writing about those in coming weeks.  At this time of year especially, I’m reminded of our tendency to invest too much meaning in politics, and to give it too much power to affect our mood, and our view of the world. 

Yes, our politicians have too much control over our lives.  And especially if you live in a blue state where they are especially relentless, you may have to move.  But we all need to maintain an internal locus of control to the extent we can, and realize that our actions in our house are going to affect our lives more than decisions made in the White House. 

Yes, it would be nice if our politicians weren’t a hindrance and an obstacle.  But as obstacles go, they’re pretty pathetic.  Some of them seem truly malevolent – the ghouls running Planned Parenthood, the racists among BLM, the nihilistic thugs in Antifa – but mostly they’re just small people, and boneheads, and broken in ways that, but for the grace of God go we.   

We should be praying for them.  But also doing everything we can to thwart their efforts.  And part of doing that – luckily for me – is mocking them.

So let me end with a story that came out this week, and that you are probably already following.   It’s a story about a Chinese spy and alleged honey-trap seductress who goes by the name Fang Fang.  (She’s the spy so nice, they named her twice!)  She is supposed to have had affairs with two Midwestern mayors.

Which proves an axiom that doesn’t require proof, at this late date: men are stupid. 

Because at least two lumpy guys staying in budget motels and driving city-provided Ford Focuses looked in the mirror and said to themselves, “You know who would really go for my dad bod, and my mayoral clout from running a town she’s never heard of?   An Asian cutie half my age!”

But the icing on this commie-in-a-cocktail-dress story is that ol’ Double-Fang also had her hooks into Democrat numbskull and laughing stock Eric Swallwell.

Let me just put my wizard hat on, and I’ll predict what was on the phony dating site profile that she used to snare Swallwell:

• A picture of her in a schoolgirl outfit with a short skirt, making a peace-sign gesture, for some reason.
• Description: “I’m a sweet, submissive Asian girl, looking for a big American man who understands that America is a terrible country that needs to be fundamentally transformed.”
• Turn-ons: Low IQ, flatulence
• Turn offs: mean people, integrity.’
• And that worked.  On a US congressman! 

And that worked. On a US congressman!

So be of good cheer, because that’s what we’re up against.

Avenatti/Fang-squared, 2024!