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In large part because I am mature, and keep politics in their proper perspective – i.e. I recognize it as something which should never occupy too much of our time and energy, and as a sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying cavalcade of elected narcissists who reflect the manifest failings of us, the muddle-headed electorate – things have been looking up for me lately.

After a month or so of physical therapy, my meniscus is back at Olympic-athlete level, my family is healthy and happy, the weather is starting to get cooler, and football season is in full swing.  And because I live in the best country in the world, I don’t have to lose sleep over things that have kept most of humanity awake at night for most of human history, and I take for granted so many blessings that I can’t count them.   Thanksgiving will be here before you know it, and I’m feeling grateful already.

For example, the Democrat debate last week made me super grateful.

I’m grateful that my eye isn’t filling up with blood, and that I’m not perpetually on the verge of losing my dentures, and that none of my offspring is a drug addicted ne’er-do-well who left his wife to play a sickening game of Clinton-and-the-intern with his dead brother’s widow.   Like Joe Biden.

I’m grateful that I’m not suffering from a deadly combination of restless arm syndrome and empty brain syndrome, like the Skateboarding Doofus.

I’m grateful that I’m not Spartacus, or Yang the Merciless, or Julian “wishes he were Fidel” Castro.  Because, just look at them.

 

This is how strange the world is:  Trump has somehow lost his last three press conferences, and yet he’s won the last 6 Democrat debates, hands down.

Look at the people on that stage.  Amy Klobuchar has the charisma of a piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.

Kamala Harris has the intellectual dexterity of a thicker piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.  She wants to prevent a president from being able to use Twitter to speak to the American public.  She wants to use the Justice Department to “pre-clear” any law that the legislature would pass on abortion to stop it from going into effect. The climax of her rhetorical attack on Trump was – I am not making this up – “dude gotta go.”

And if you thought that she couldn’t say anything more stupid than that, she would only reply, “hold my comically over-sized ganja spliff and watch this,” and proudly recite a challenge that she recounted giving to Brett Kavanaugh.  She defied him to name any criminal charge that sought to control men’s bodies.  To which he was apparently too deferential to reply, “How about rape to start with, you dimwit?  Followed by ALL OF THE OTHER ONES!, since you need to use your body to murder someone, or rob someone, or make an obscene phone call, or drive your car off a bridge and then leave Mary Jo Kopeckne to drown in it while you go shopping for phony neck braces.   Also, are you under the impression that a baby in the womb is ‘a woman’s body’?”

And Kamala didn’t have the worst night, because that honor belonged to Grandma Squanto.  Everybody took shots at her, and she looked ridiculous as she contorted herself into pretzels to avoid giving an obviously truthful answer to the question about whether her obscenely expensive plans would require middle class tax hikes.  As she continued to duck and dodge, it almost looked like – for the first time ever – she got a little red in the face.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Only two of the Dems looked even intermittently good – Mayor Pete and Tulsi Gabbard – and then primarily because they looked comparatively moderate and reasonably smart.  On the other hand, in the middle of that crowd, Chairman Mao would look comparatively moderate, and Forrest Gump would look reasonably smart.

 

As bad a week as the Dems on stage had, CNN’s week was worse.  First, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas came out with several recordings, one of which featured CNN boss Jeff Zucker urging his staff to keep focusing on impeachment, no matter what else happens in the news.  As the head of a purported “news” network, Zucker – who I pointed out earlier looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses — is supposed to at least pretend to behave in an even-handed, unprejudiced manner.  Of course he is nothing of the sort, and he does nothing of the sort, as anyone who has watched his network already knows.

Still, it’s fun to watch the truth laid out there, so that Zucker can squirm and twitch like he just got hit with a giant hammer.

I really admire O’Keefe, but his repeated successes should shame our entire MSM.  As a young kid with a dream and a cheap camera, he’s been able to expose one corrupt leftist institution after another, while the entire bloated, over-compensated army of MSM hacks stumbles around in the dark.

Sure, if a nobody like Joe the Plumber dares to ask Obama why he wants to slap the middle class with ruinous taxes, the MSM is all over that story, and before you know it, they’ve interviewed a girl whose pigtails he pulled during recess in pre-school.  They also track down the Kentucky high schoolers who smiled at a crazy Indian activist who was trying to provoke a fight, and they find decades-old emails from the Iowa fan who donated a fortune to a children’s hospital.  And if you want someone to sniff out a flatulence joke made by Brett Kavanaugh’s buddies in a high school yearbook, they’ve got you covered.

But if a Democrat president is banging interns two at a time like Fredo doing cocktail waitresses, the MSM is mum.   If another Dem president uses the IRS to go after his political enemies, or gets caught on a hot mike promising Putin to remove armaments from our NATO allies who might use them to resist Putin’s aggression, the MSM marvels at his “scandal-free” administration.  If Joe Biden coerces a Ukrainian pol to fire an administrator who is looking into Biden’s son’s $50K per month no-show job – not to mention his shady ground-floor investment in a porn site called SWILF.com  (the S & W stand for “Sibling’s Widows”), the MSM no habla Ukranian.

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Thumbkin hates the Trumpkin.  But he also loves him some Grandma Squanto.

So as soon as the debate is over, CNN had multiple spokes-hacks grilling the other candidates about why they went after Land-o’-Lakes Lizzie.  These are just a few of the actual examples from the post-debate questioning:

Van Jones to barely-mirror-fogging Klobuchar: “Is there something that you’re aware of now, you’re seeing the ascendance of Elizabeth Warren, and some of these other ideas that have you afraid?”

Fredo Cuomo to mayor Pete: “Warren was a target for you and others. Why?”

Dana Bash to Mayor Pete:  “Why — I have a question specifically on Senator Warren’s answer to you on Medicare for all and how she’ll pay for it. But just broadly. Why did you think it was so important to go after Senator Warren tonight in a way that you haven’t before?”

Yes, you creeps!  Why on earth would you ask pointed questions to the front-runner in the race that you are trying to win?  What do you think this is, a competition for votes or something?!

When Tapper finally got the chance to interview Warren, he said, “I have to say based on the amount of incoming going your way, it seems like whatever the Democratic voters think, your colleagues think that you’re the frontrunner. Do you think any of the attacks that you faced tonight were out of bounds?”

I am not making that last question up.  That’s the kind of hard-hitting journalistic question that General Tom Thumb’s foot soldiers tossed at their Cherokee champion: Do you think that the attacks on you were unfair?

Can you imagine living on a planet when any of those cretins would ever ask any GOP politician such a disingenuous softball of a question?

“Mr. Republican nominee, did you think it was fair when Joe Biden told black people that you’d like to enslave them again?”  “Hey, Generic Conservative, do you think it crossed the line when every Democrat in the House called you a Nazi and a fascist?”   “Yo, Orange Man Bad, would you say it was legitimate when we allowed a succession of lunatics to use our airwaves to accuse you of treason and call for your execution?”

 

CNN’s week might have been even worse, if ABC News hadn’t stepped on a bias landmine that drew attention away from CNN.  In their rush to report how badly things are going in Syria – which had been a bucolic paradise for several millenia, until Trump got elected and ruined the world – they aired some footage of a vicious firefight, which they described as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town.”

Even for people who have gotten all their knowledge of armaments from watching The Dirty Dozen, the Rat Patrol and Saving Private Ryan, that description didn’t seem right.  Because as everyone knows, bombs go “wooooooooooooooo KA-BLAM,” whereas machine guns go “rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat-tat,” with an occasional bullet-whistling sound thrown in.  The footage sounded like the latter, rather than the former.

Alas, as it turns out, the video wasn’t from Syria.

“Big deal,” you’re probably thinking.  “So the footage was from Kurdlvania, or Turkey, or Iraq.  All of those places over there are pretty much alike.”

Au contraire, my gullible friend.  The footage was actually from… drum roll… wait for it…

Kentucky.

Not “Kentucky” as in, “Kentucky province, Syria.”  “Kentucky” as in, “right next to Tennessee.”

The geniuses at ABC couldn’t tell the difference between one of the biggest armies in NATO bombing civilians in the Middle East, and cell phone footage of a bunch of hillbillies blasting away with machine guns near Louisville.

I haven’t been to a prestigious J-school like those trench-coat-wearing wanna-bes, but the following details MIGHT have made me suspicious:

1. Do that many people really have Southern accents in Syria?
2. Weren’t there a suspiciously high number of powder blue t-shirts with a big “K” on them being worn by Kurdish civilians?
3. Would ISIS members be quite so likely to holler, “Yee hah! I bet they heard that one prit’ near all the way over to Paducah!”
4. Is there quite that much kudzu in the arid regions of Syria?

 

Nice job, media.  Really.

 

Avenatti/”Dude gotta go” 2020!

 

It’s been another good news/bad news kind of week, and I’m going to get the bad news out of the way first: the Kurds are in the process of getting screwed, and it looks like the Trump impeachment circus is going to be with us for quite some time.

I will not claim to be an expert on all things Kurdish.  I couldn’t even find Kurdlvania on a map.  (I know that’s not the name of their homeland.  I’m not actually that uninformed.  But I’m damn close.)  And I am as annoyed as anyone else to see a bunch of empty talking heads on all of the networks bloviating about how there’s an obvious solution for all of the Kurds’ problems, and of course Trump is blowing it.  (Or conversely, Trump is totally crushing it, and everyone else is wildly wrong.)

But what little I know about the Kurds is enough to know that there is no obvious solution to their problem.  Why?  Let’s try this hypothetical.  Say you wake up tomorrow morning, make yourself a cup of coffee, and walk out onto your front lawn and look around you.  And you find out that during the night, your neighbors have all disappeared, and they’ve been replaced by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

That’s right.  You’d spit your coffee all over yourself, race back inside, throw the deadbolt and head straight for your gun safe.

Other than Israel (and if you don’t see Israel as our best ally in the region, I shake my head at you in disdain), the Kurds have been our only reliable allies in the Middle East.  They are tough fighters, and they’ve responded to our calls since the first Gulf War, fighting with us or parallel to us in a lot of locations for a number of years.

I don’t mean to romanticize them.  They’ve fought primarily because they are surrounded by evil scumbags like Saddam Hussein and Assad and the Iranian mullahs and Erdogan, and it’s been in their best interest to fight with us.  They’re mostly Sunni Muslims, and I’m sure they’ve got a lot of the societal dysfunctions inherent to that region.  At the same time, to the extent that we will ever have any presence or influence in that region – and complete withdrawal and isolationism is a tempting but utopian pipe-dream — we are going to need to choose allies from among the available options in the region.

And pacifistic Jeffersonian democrats don’t last long in their neighborhood.

You don’t have to be Sun Tzu or Von Clausewitz to know one basic thing: if we screw our allies, no one is going to want to be our ally in the future.   And it looks like we are screwing the Kurds, by abandoning them.

Again, I don’t see any perfect solutions.  The American public has no appetite for a lot of American boots on the ground in the Middle East, fighting for other peoples’ interests.  I don’t either, and I think Trump’s heart is in the right place about that.  But that’s not the only other option other than abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered.

We should at least arm the Kurds to the teeth, and give them any air or logistical support that we can.  I’d like to see us do more of that around the world – give the Poles, Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans the armaments to allow them to give Putin a huge fight if he’s tempted to encroach on their territory; give Taiwan and Hong Kong and maybe Japan the same kind of strategic support against Chinese aggression; and give Israel and the Kurds the ability to defend themselves, and deter the Erdogans, Iranians and ISIS of the world.

If any country or people won’t fight for themselves, we shouldn’t fight for them (or maybe even with them).  But if they are our allies and are willing to fight for their own freedom, we should give them our moral and political support, and a boatload of weapons.

Yikes.  I guess I can do a little bloviating on my own, can’t I?  But I just hope we don’t see the Kurds getting destroyed, while Trump pulls an Obama (i.e. talks tough but does nothing).

 

The other bad news is the Dems’ impeachment circus.  But I’m already exhausted by that.  I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I’m going to try to ignore it as best I can, but I’m reasonably hopeful that if the “whistleblowers” and wildly over-played charges are as transparently bogus as they so far appear to me, the public will take it out on the hypocritical left, and thrash them at the polls.

 

Moving on to the good news, I have three feel-good stories: an Iowa “journalist” opens a can of kharmic whup-ass on himself, Ilhan Omar files for divorce from Ahmed II, and Grandma Squanto is caught lying about herself again.

You’ve probably heard about the Iowa story already.  Carson King is a regular Joe watching a football game, holds up a sign asking for Busch beer, and ends up getting $1 million in donations.  Then, because he’s a better man than me, he donates all of that money to an Iowa children’s hospital.  He becomes an instant celebrity, and everybody’s happy.

Everybody except a social justice warrior nitwit named Aaron Calvin, who works as a “reporter” for the Des Moines Register.  I did 90 seconds worth of looking into the story, which was enough to discover that Calvin has written for such leftwing echo-chambers as Buzzfeed and some other one exactly like Buzzfeed, and that he (and I’m guessing just a bit on that pronoun) looks to be about 2% more masculine than Rachel Maddow.  And just so you know that he’s a serious journalist, he’s written about white privilege.

So Calvin looks into Carson King’s social media history, and finds some posts he’d written when he was 16.  Shockingly, the 16-year-old’s posts were not erudite dissertations on Proust.  They were, instead, sophomoric references to an unfunny tv comedian who says crude things.  But to be fair to King, he likely was a sophomore when he was 16, so I’m not even sure that “sophomoric” is an insult.

In fact, I was called “sophomoric” many times when I was in 8^th grade, and again in my freshman year.  I naturally took those as compliments.

Anyway, Calvin knows a world-shaking story when he sees one, and he wrote a hard-hitting story that crapped all over the guy who just donated what is likely the only million dollars he’s ever going to see to a children’s hospital.  Thankfully, while the corporate weasels at Busch immediately denounced Carson’s ancient tweets, the general public lashed back at the Des Moines Register, and at Calvin.

While the backlash was going on, some intrepid fellow looked at Calvin’s own social media past.  And wouldn’t you know it, the gender-amorphous little leftist poke-nose had written a few offensive things himself.  Things like dropping the “n” word – and I don’t mean “narwhal,” which is a damn fine word, and appropriate for all occasions – all over the place.  And wishing that the police would be [a verb that starts with an “f” and can be either transitive or intransitive], and demonizing the Christian types who voted for Trump in spite of his moral failings.

Hilariously enough, the last tweet he’d written before those that focused on Carson King was a re-tweet of a lefty article in the New Republic which praised the outing/condemning of people for their old social media posts.  The title of that article?  “The Cancel Culture Con.”

HA!  You know the rest: Aaron Calvin loses his job because of his old tweets.  HA! And again I say HA!

Calvin had only been hired at the Des Moines Register in February.  So I guess you could say that his Iowa newspaper career was nasty, brutish, and short.

And yes, that’s a bank-shot Calvin and Hobbes joke that I am not ashamed to have made!

 

Next, up Ilhan Omar.  Mother to Ilwad.  Wife to at least two Ahmeds that we know of, one of whom is likely her brother.  (Ilhan to Hunter Biden: “Oh, so you think you’re so transgressive, just because you ran off with your brother’s widow?  Well hold my hummus:  I ran off with my brother!”)

She  has now filed for divorce from Ahmed 2: Electric Boogaloo.  (See my column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com from June 28^th, in which I explain the twisted matrimonial history of Omar.)  Apparently she had been carrying on an affair, and the heart wants what it wants.

In her case, does the heart want to destroy America?  I’m pretty sure it does.  Does it also want to smite some infidels?  I’ll let you be the judge of that.  But it definitely wants a third Ahmed, or at least a third Ahmed-adjacent type.

I’m not usually one to see the bright side of divorce, especially when there are kids involved.  But there is at least one silver lining here:  Boogaloo, you have definitely dodged a scimitar with this one.

 

Finally, Lizzie Warren is back in the news for another lie that she has repeatedly been telling about herself.

Is it the one about that time she ran off with a boy from a neighboring tribe, and they took a canoe down the Father of Waters for a romantic honeymoon?  It is not.

Is it the one about how she got mad at her folks, and went off into the woods and gathered all of the necessary materials, and built her own tepee from scratch? It is not.  (To quote a scowling old white lady:  You didn’t build that!)

This tall tale is one she has been telling on the campaign trail for years, and always with the same lines.  When she was a young teacher fresh out of school, she was offered a second-year teaching contract, but when the principal found out she was pregnant, she was fired. Because, sexism.

You can see video of her delivering that story with great conviction, over and over and over again.

The only problem is that there is also video of her from the early 2000s, explaining to some earnest interviewer that she voluntarily took a couple of years off from teaching to have that baby and another.

There are also records from the school board that was involved, proving that they offered her a second-year contract, and when she turned it down, they were disappointed to lose her.

You’ve got that right.  After decades of lying about being discriminated against because of her race, it turns out that she has also been lying about being discriminated against because of her sex.  What’s the over-under on her hitting the leftist victim sweepstakes trifecta, by claiming that she has also faced brutal discrimination because of her lifelong lesbianism, which I’m guessing she’ll make public in…. 3… 2… 1…

At this point, what can you say about this woman?  Other than, “Grandma Squanto speak with forked tongue!”  #wemustneverstopmockingher

#seriously

#never,never,ever!

 

Avenatti/Ahmed 3 in 2020!

Politics has seemed a pretty small and petty arena this past week. I’ve been reminded again and again of all that is repugnant in politics: the hypocrisy and vanity and low character of politicians, and the corresponding flaws in ourselves, as we vote these knuckleheads into office, and overlook the flaws in our own side, while we exaggerate those in the leaders of the other side.

The leftist elite always provide fodder for much-deserved mockery and ranting, as well as much schadenfreude-y entertainment for me.  But the GOP are no big prize either, as they proved when they had both houses and the White House for two years, and managed to not try to get control of the border, or cut the budget, or definitively repeal and replace the “You-Can’t-Keep-Your-Doctor Dumpster-Fire Health-Care Monstrosity Act of 2009.”

And I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Trump.  He’s an out-sized character, with out-sized flaws, including some especially obnoxious ones.  But I’ve never really been able to get too far down on him, partly because most of his flaws seem like misdemeanors – his juvenile braggadocio and ego, his lack of discipline and too frequent blowhard-y tweets – and partly because his opponents are virtually always SO MUCH worse.

But Trump’s congratulatory tweet to the thugs who run the leftist slave-state of communist China on the 70^th anniversary of their bloodthirsty kleptocracy was a low point.

The 20^th century was the bloodiest in history, and dictators had to slaughter overtime to even get noticed  If there were an Olympics for mass murder, Hitler would have barely made the medal stand, taking the bronze for his national socialists, behind Stalin and his soviet socialists.   But leading the pack with a death toll of around 65 million were the ChiComs and their “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  (Pol Pot might have been more murderous than the big three, in terms of per capita deaths.)

While China’s totalitarians are not still killing at the pace they were in the old days, they’re still an oppressive, leftist dictatorship.  Their bullying of plucky little Hong Kong should outrage us all, and the bravery of the protestors should inspire us.  They are risking prison or worse, and flying our flag while doing it, because they understand the greatness of our country and its message better than most of us seem to.

I’ve been heartened to see Trump getting at least intermittently tough with the Chicoms on trade, and he’s pushed back on them more than any recent president.  But no conservative should ever have been able to congratulate that oppressive regime, even though much diplomacy seems to involve that kind of moral relativism and unmerited politeness.

Having said all that, the national Democrats are so much worse!  The measurement system does not exist which can plumb the depth of their unrelenting terribleness!

Consider the case of Hunter Biden and his dad.   Sure, Trump often seems to speak bloviation as a second language.  But Joey Gaffes is freaking fluent!  Trump may brag about his crowd sizes and his perfect conversations with heads of state, but have you ever heard him go on and on about how he vanquished the Dread Gangbanger Corn Pop with just a steely expression and a length of chain?   Has Trump ever talked any bigger than Plugsy McBloward when he bragged to an audience about how he threatened to withhold US military aid and forced the instant firing of a Ukranian prosecutor who was looking into his son’s manifest corruption?

Speaking of his son, how much has our unbiased media done to report on his background?  How many average Americans know that young Hunter’s resume consists of lines like “cocaine enthusiast and frequent arrestee,” “did a one-month stint in the Navy before being kicked out because of the Navy’s judgmental intolerance of cocaine enthusiasts” and “betrayed his wife by carrying on a sexual relationship with his dead brother’s widow?”

You read that right.  Of all of the women in all of the world with whom he could have cheated on his wife, he chose his dead brother’s wife.  Good lord, even Ted Kennedy didn’t take a run at Jackie O after JFK got killed!

I hope.

But hey, maybe I’m being too hard on Hunter.  Maybe there’s more to him than being a degenerate, addicted, quasi-incestuous widow-jumper.  For example, he must be pretty smart, considering how many high-powered jobs he’s had.  He probably double-majored in physics and classics, before going on to get his doctorate in Ukranian energy production.

Well, he did go to Yale and get a law degree.  Which I’m sure had nothing to do with his powerful dad.  And he did get a job with a huge bank… which coincidentally had contributed to the Corn-Pop-Slayer’s political campaigns.  And he did get that $50K per month job as a consultant to a Ukranian energy company.   And before you ask, yes, I said $50k per MONTH, not year.

Maybe Hunter is smart after all.  Because he found a way to get paid $50K per month consulting on energy issues for Ukranians, despite his knowing nothing about energy except how much of it is required to run back and forth between your bedroom and your brother’s widow’s bedroom, and his inability to find Ukraine on the map.

Fun fact: to her fans in Ukraine, my Aussie shepherd is known as “Cassie, the Wonder Sobaka.”  Because “sobaka” is the Ukranian word for “dog.”

Congratulations!  You now know more Ukranian than Hunter Biden does.  Please provide your banking information so that Ukranian oligarchs can deposit your first monthly payment of $50 large by November 1^st.

 

But it’s not just the Bidens.  First the Dem hypocrites accused Trump of colluding with the Russians when it was actually the DNC and Hillary who paid for a phony dossier put together in part by Russian spies to hurt their political opponent.  Then it was the Bidens who got a pass from the Dems when they shook down Ukranians for their own political gain, right before the Dems decided that Trump’s alleged shaking down of Ukranians for political gain was an existential threat to our country.

Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (mmmkay?) is outraged that Trump would allegedly ask a foreign official for dirt on his political opponent.  But that very same lying, bug-eyed creep is on tape – you can easily find it and listen to it with a quick online search – with a guy whom he thinks is a Russian insider peddling a salacious tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel.  The Russian is actually some shock jock pranking the hapless Schiff-for-brains, putting on a thick Yakov Smirnoff accent to tempt him with video of “naked Trump.”

Listen to Schiff’s eager gullibility as he desperately tries to secure the non-existent dirt on his political opponent.  Which he now says is the worst thing you could ever do.  Even worse, presumably, than banging your brother’s widow.  (No, I cannot get over that.)

 

You can’t make this up.  It’s like God has created the karmic equivalent of the plagues of Egypt for the Democrats to torture themselves with.  Falsely accuse Trump of colluding with the Russians, then get revealed as Russian-colluders.  Accuse him of extorting the Ukranians, then get exposed as Ukraine-extorters.

When you are certain you’re going to win the White House, spend a month before the election pre-emptively braying that anybody who does not accept the election outcome would be an un-American threat to all that is good and holy.  Then fast forward three years, and find yourself pitching the fourth door-stop volume of your projected 23-volume book series, “Reasons that We Cannot Accept the Legitimacy of Trump’s Election.”

Use accusations of sexist piggery against Roger Ailes and Trump, only to turn around in time to see Weinstein, Franken, Charley Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keilor et al – not to mention our former Intern-Fondler-in-Chief — falling like dominoes all around you.

Call out some obscure GOP elected official for having worn blackface decades ago, only to learn that all but two members of the Democrat party in Virginia have old pictures of them in blackface.  And those two posed in Klan hoods.

Bah!

One of the main reasons I’m a conservative is that I want a government that is as small and least intrusive as possible.  I’d like to live in a world in which politicians have so little power that I can afford to go about my business and ignore the small-minded, ignoble games that they play.

Weeks like this last one remind me of just how right I am.   Which is always nice.

Avenatti/Schiff 2020!

Well, it’s time once again to say a fond farewell to one of the legions of Democratic presidential candidates.

This time, the dearly departed is physical giant/moral little person Bill De Blasio, who declared the end of his candidacy on Friday, to an audience of six empty plastic chairs and a folding table with uneven legs, in a lost luggage area near the bathrooms in a bus terminal in New Jersey.

Why would I kick De Blasio while he’s down, you might be asking yourself?

Have you seen how tall that guy is?  It’s very tough to kick him properly UNTIL he is down.

But that’s not the only reason.  My thesis today is that Bill de Blasio might be the purest distillation of all that is wrong with the elite left today.

Before I continue, let me reiterate that I know a lot of very fine people who are Democrats.  A few are family, some are friends, some are work colleagues.  Most of them are attracted to the ideals of a traditional, blue-collar Democrat party that once stood up for workers against larger societal forces, combined with a desire for such worthy ends as protecting the environment and fighting discrimination, goals that most conservatives (whether those Dems realize it or not) share, and would be happy to make common cause around.

Those are good people, and it’s a shame to see us becoming alienated from each other in these polarizing times.

But that’s not the people I’m talking about.  Bill de Blasio has no more in common with those folks than he does with conservatives.  He’s an archetypal lefty elitist, and I think it’s worth considering the markers of his genus, because while he may have limped ignominiously off the stage, there are many others of his type left, and one of them is almost certainly going to be the Dem nominee for president.

So let us consider my list of six identifying characteristics of lefty elitists:

1.They reflexively falsify their own identity in some crucial way.  Sometimes the fakery has to do with personal habits, as when Ted Kennedy pretended to be sober, and married, and a Catholic.  Other times it involves matters of class origin, as when Al Gore pretended to be a humble dirt farmer… raised by a millionaire civil rights-opposing Senator, and spending his childhood in a swanky DC hotel suite.   Sometimes it involves a make-believe ethnicity, as when an Irish rich kid named Robert Francis Patrick Declan Macmanus Houlihan O’Rourke poses as your quasi-Hispanic border-town buddy “Beto,” or when the whitest lady in the western hemisphere gets an academic job because she claims Indian ancestry on the grounds that she watched a lot of F-Troop reruns and had several Siouxsie and the Banshees records.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Bill fits that bill.  First, because his first name isn’t “Bill,” it’s “Warren.”  Second, because his last name isn’t “de Blasio,” it’s “Wilhelm.”  The story is that he was often called “Billy” as a child.  But then again, as a child I was often called “Carlos Danger” as far as you know, and you don’t see me adopting that nom de pol as an adult.  (Thanks for ruining that option, Anthony Weiner!) Also, he supposedly adopted his mother’s maiden name as part of “embracing his Italian heritage” at age 22, becoming Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm in 1983, and then “Bill de Blasio” at age 41.

The “embracing an Italian identity” part sounds believable, but call me cynical.  I think for a two-faced pol like would-be Kaiser Wilhelm, that change likely had at least as much to do with getting away from a German moniker that would do more harm than good in the atmosphere of identity politics in NYC.  Sure, a German name can come in handy if you’re making pianos, brewing beer, selling a well-made luxury car, or angling for command of a panzer division near the Polish border in the summer of 1939.

But when you’re up against one leftist candidate from the Black Panther Party and another from La Raza in the early 21^st century?  Not so much.

 

2. They build hypocrisy into every policy. Elitist lefties want to keep little people from owning guns, while they retain their armed bodyguards. They want to force regular folk to send their kids to sub-standard public schools, while sending their own kids to private schools.  They want to make the little people return to using trains or bicycles — or maybe oxcarts – while they fly private jets and are then driven around in SUVs with a carbon hoofprint of Hillary-esque proportions.  They want to show compassion to criminals by releasing them into your neighborhoods, and generosity to downtrodden voting blocks by giving your money to them while keeping their own fortunes in trusts that are beyond the tax code’s reach.

Again, Warren fits the bill.  He wants to disarm little people who haven’t committed any crimes, and who might live in dangerous areas where the protection that guns can provide might literally be the difference between life and death.  Meanwhile, he makes his speeches – and goes to his office, and to the gym, and to public events, and home – while surrounded by bodyguards who carry licensed guns.  He opposes or slow-walks approval for charter schools, and he’s done his best to shut down gifted programs in the public schools.  Programs like the ones that his own kids attended, coincidentally.

 

3. They prefer utopian feel-good plans, while neglecting the common sense/good governance front. They don’t maintain infrastructure, don’t fill potholes (unless you count San Francisco’s plan to fill potholes – and streets — with human feces), and preside over crime running wild. California spent billions on a now-defunct bullet train and established elaborate networks of sanctuary cities and welfare support programs for illegals, while managing to be out-performed by the 15^th century French Rat-Catchers unions in the crucial metrics of preventing typhus, smallpox, and the bubonic plague.  (LA’s new tourism motto: “What happens in LA, stays in LA!  Except for the ebola.  That you’ll be taking home with you.”)

De Blasio is totally sympatico with the downward trends in NYC, many of which (to be fair to him) he inherited, from ignoring crumbling subway infrastructure and rising crime, while micro-managing what size drinks and how much sugar New Yorkers can consume and through what kind of straws.  My favorite of his idiotic notions was his push to ban steel and glass skyscrapers.  In New York City!   Even though I never wanted to live in a huge city, I always saw skyscrapers as incredible achievements, emblematic of human ambition and abilities.

Not Big Bill.  He knows better than us that such gaudy buildings are too often just tributes to the egotistical people and companies who built them.  Plus, they’re terrible for the environment, somehow, with the climate pollution and the global warming.  So get on board with his vision, and in no time Manhattanites will be living in mud huts and yurts, saving tons of energy by not walking to their non-existent jobs.  Soon they’ll cut their carbon footprint even further, when they make the de Blasio-approved decision to stop respirating – and thus exhaling all of that nasty carbon dioxide into the air – by the simple process of starving to death.  Hoorah!

 

4. They tend to fail upward in their political careers. It’s a familiar pattern: an elite leftist becomes mayor and runs a city into the ground, then becomes governor and mismanages his state, and then becomes a candidate for national office. You don’t have to look far for examples.

Spartacus Booker went from a disastrous stint as mayor of Newark  (whose motto is NOT: “A well-governed paradise on earth!”) to representing New Jersey in the Senate (whose state motto is NOT “Come for the low taxes, stay for the Absence of Corruption!”), to running for president.  Pope Pete went from running South Bend (motto: “Tired of Indiana’s low homicide rate and lack of racial tension?  Come to South Bend!”) to running for president.  Skateboarding Doofus spent 6 years in the House with zero accomplishments, then spent a record amount to lose a Senate seat.  So he’s naturally running for president.

But Bill de Blasio might out-do them all as the most flaccid example of the Peter Principle known to history.  He’s continually underwater in his poll ratings in New York state and city; last month’s poll had him at 26% favorable and 57% unfavorable, for a net negative of 31.  And that’s in a heavily blue state, where Donald Trump only has a net negative of 27!  His presidential support never got to even 1%.   Perhaps the most telling stat of all: in that August poll, he was hands down the single most unpopular political figure in the entirety of New York!

And remember: Chucky Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Anthony Weiner and Al Sharpton can all be considered political figures in the state of New York.

As best I can tell, de Blasio’s finest mayoral achievement has been the emotional boost he’s given to 92-year-old David Dinkins, who until recently looked to be taking to the grave the title of Worst Modern Mayor of NYC.

 

5. They are extremely arrogant — It’s a hallmark of elite leftists that they know better than we do how we should live our lives. They’ll tell us what we can buy, what kind of car we can drive, what we can do with what was formerly considered “our property,” who we can hire at and what rate, and etc.

And Bill de Blasio was always at home in that world.  In the June debate, he gave us the most accurate and pithily distilled example of the leftist attitude toward the world in one quote:  “There is plenty of money in this world, and there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that.”

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

 

6. They are intrinsically unable to learn from past mistakes. After a century of trying socialism in dozens of countries all over the globe, and reaping a bumper crop of poverty, oppression, misery and gulags, let’s give it one more try. After the latest mass shooters broke 27 existing gun laws, passing the magic 28^th is going to do the trick.  After 50 years of tax increases produced less revenue to the government, and tax rate cuts have produced more economic growth… we need another massive tax increase.

Here again, Wacky Warren has established his bona fides.  He started out in the 80s as a big supporter of Nicaragua’s murderous revolutionary Sandinista party, and even after that socialist experiment dissolved into disaster, he was still calling himself a democrat socialist years later.  He got early jobs in campaigns of various leftist stereotypes come to life, from Dinkins to Charlie Rangel to Hillary Clinton, and advocated for a myriad of leftist policies that never seemed to work.  So naturally, when he came to office in a deep blue state that deeply wanted him to succeed… he followed the same failed policies over the same cliff.

Somehow, the fusillade of negative feedback produced by decades of terrible decisions has never managed to pierce the thick cloud of unwarranted self-regard with which he’s surrounded himself.

Sound familiar?  I’m looking at you, Grandma Squanto, and Crazy Bernie, and Joey Gaffes.

 

Let us end with the traditional farewell haiku:

 

Disastrous mayor

Approved by no New Yorkers

Tall as he is dumb

 

Avenatti/Wilhelm 2020!

So I watched some excerpts from the Dems’ debate last week, which is all I could take.

Once again the top of the bill was frontrunner Joe Biden.  (And boy, does that description tell you a lot about the strength of this field!)

His debate performance was uneven.  To his credit, he looked less crazy than most of the people surrounding him on stage.   (But then again, Marianne Williamson has managed that, too, so I’m not sure that that’s such a high bar to get over.)  On the other hand, he came dangerously close to having his dentures come out on stage.  Considering that in the last debate his eye filled up with blood, I’m almost afraid to watch his next debate.

Best-case scenario: he pulls out a 19^th century ear trumpet to try to catch what one of those whippersnappers are saying next to him.

Medium-case scenario: He tumbles sideways from behind his podium, then lies on the stage smacking at his medic alert bracelet and muttering, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Worst-case:  the ear trumpet, the fall, and then incontinence.

Anyway, when I saw that, I started to feel sorry for the old guy.

Until I remembered that just a few years ago, he told a black audience that Milquetoast Mitt Romney and the moderate GOP — the team so spineless that they can’t even take their own side in a fight – were “gonna put y’all back in chains!”   And I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore.

Especially when he came up with his best line.  When someone asked him about how to deal with the achievement gap between black and white children, he jumped in with advice that only a young hipster like himself could dish out: “Play the radio… make sure the television” (here he closed his eyes, trying to correct himself and struggling for the right words), “excuse me… make sure you have the record player on at night… the, the… phone…”

That last collection of words – you grammarians out there may have noticed that it’s not a sentence – is not my hilarious send-up of the former Vice President’s speech.  It is a verbatim transcript of one of his answers.

Let’s do a close reading of it.  First he says to play the radio – the way, for example, my dad used to tell me that his dad and some of his friends used to sit in a semi-circle around a radio, listening to Jack Dempsey lose a heavyweight fight to Luis Firpo.

In 1923.

Then he says, “Make sure the television…” before catching himself, and realizing that maybe the best advice for children who aren’t doing well in school is NOT to watch more tv.

But no problem.  He’s got another cutting-edge example chambered and ready: “…make sure you have the record player on at night.”  Because kids these days love nothing more than spinning the hot new Benny Goodman platter, and doing the Charleston with their best girl all night long.

I probably shouldn’t disclose this.  But I’ve got a super-secret contact in the Biden campaign, and he told me that during Biden’s rehearsals for the debate, his original answer to this question was even worse, and it took his campaign brain trust several hours to talk him into going with the radio and record player answer.

His first pass at that question:  “Kids need to blow off steam, and take a break from the pressure.  Maybe they’ll want to take a metal hoop out into the street, and roll it up and down the block with a stick that they use to steer it.  Or they could climb onto one of those new-fangled bicycles with the giant wheel in front and the tiny wheel in back, and ride it down to the general store and get some penny candy.  If they’re older, they might want to take the horseless carriage downtown to catch a vaudeville act.  And don’t forget your friends who are stuck in an iron lung because of their polio; stop by the sanitarium on your way to catch a Negro League baseball game, and crank up the Victrola and leave it playing right by their head, so that they’ll have some entertainment, too!”

With all of that top-shelf Biden to choose from, live socialist Julian Castro managed to look more hapless than dead socialist Fidel Castro, when he waded in on Biden with an attack about his slipping mental state.  Incredibly, he chose the only time all night when Biden was correctly stating his position.  The other Dems onstage turned on Castro for his classless attack… until their anonymous spokes-weasels reinforced the message after the debate about how Joe really seems to be slipping lately.

Amy “Hillary 2” Klobuchar’s high point was when she correctly pointed out that page 8 of Bernie Sander’s health care bill calls for ending private health insurance as we know it.  Earlier, Bernie had proudly claimed, “I wrote the damn bill,” and Klobuchar responded that, “I read the damn bill.”  In a rare fit of lucidity, Pope Pete then said, “The problem with that damn bill you wrote… is that it doesn’t trust the American people.”

Then he launched into a fiery sermon entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gaia,” with its warnings about how anyone who disagrees on environmental or tax policy, or for what occasions one should be forced to bake cakes shall surely be cast into a lake of unquenchable fire.  And also have OHSA and the ACLU descend upon them with fuuuuurriious anger.

Kamala Harris managed to remind voters of one of Hillary Clinton’s most disturbing personality quirks: laughing maniacally in a manner psychotically disconnected from anything even remotely humorous being said.   Harris’ perplexing moment came when Biden pointed out that it would be unconstitutional for a president to unilaterally declare that the 2^nd amendment is null and void, and forcibly take away Americans’ guns.

Harris’ response?  “Instead of saying ‘no we can’t,’ let’s say, ‘yes we can!’   AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!”   The only thing missing was “CAW CAW CAW!” at the end.

Skateboarding Doofus gesticulated his way into another cringe-worthy admission, as he responded to a gun-control question with a shouted, “Hell yes, we’re going to take away your AR15!“   The trained seals in the audience cheered, and some of the dopes on stage supported his claim.   But all across America, professional Democrat pollsters and reasonable Democrat voters vigorously face-palmed themselves into unconsciousness, their last thought being, “For 25 years we’ve mocked all GOP claims that we want to come and take Americans’ guns away….”

Grandma Squanto played it safe, staying away from saying anything that she was really thinking.  The closest she came to danger was when a moderator peppered her with questions about whether her Medicare for All socialized healthcare plan would necessarily result in a huge middle-class tax increase.  (Everyone from Inuit children in igloos with no tv reception, to coma patients kept alive only by machines, to single-celled organisms in the depths of the Marianas Trench shouted, “Of course it would!”)

But Big Chief Purses Her Lips in Disapproval (#wemustneverstopmockingher) ducked and dodged and refused to give a straight (no offense) answer, insisting only that middle-class people need not be concerned with taxes, but only with “total cost.”

Which, every sentient being in our solar system knows, will skyrocket if we put geniuses like Sanders and Warren in charge.

 

But enough about yet another cavalcade of Dem hopefuls beclowning themselves on a debate stage.  I want to end by talking about the most fantastic story of 2019, and maybe of this century so far.

I’m referring, of course to the epic tale of “Big Joe Biden vs. the Dread Gang Leader Corn Pop.”

If you’ve not heard this story, you must drop everything and Google it right now.  It’s a story that Biden included in an autobiography over 10 years ago, and that he’s been retelling over the years.  The video version I saw was from some kind of speech that Joey Gaffes was giving to an audience of mostly young black people around a pool where he had apparently worked as a lifeguard, shortly after the earth cooled.

Anyway, Joe is a lifeguard in a pool on the edge of the ghetto, a job he took so that he could get a better understanding of black folks.  (I’m not kidding.)  And gang leader Corn Pop makes the mistake of getting up on the diving board on Big Joe’s watch.  Joe lets us know who he was dealing with:  “Corn Pop was a bad dude.  And he ran a bunch of bad boys.”  (Um, Joe, old white guys aren’t supposed to call adult black males “boy.”)  Joe points dramatically at Corn Pop and says, “Hey, Esther.  Off the board, or I’ll come up and drag you off.”

Because that’s straight out of “Dealing with Gang Bangers 101:  Open with an Insult, preferably by calling him by a Woman’s Name.”  Oddly, Corn Pop did not like that, and said that he’d be waiting for Joe with some of his homies (not a word that Joe chose, but I so wish it was!) with straight razors.  Joe takes a little rhetorical detour to explain the straight razor to his audience of extremely bored black teenagers who are showing zero interest in this old blowhard white guy telling self-aggrandizing fairy tales in their midst.  Quoth Joe, “In those days, remember the straight razors, you’d bang them on the curb, get ‘em rusty, bang ’em on a rain barrel, get ’em rusty.”

Now I’ve seen straight razors in old movies, but no, I don’t “remember” them.  And I can’t understand why banging them on a curb, or on a “rain barrel” – by the way, did you say this story took place in the 1960s or the 1860s? – would make them rusty.  Or why you’d want a rusty blade in the first place, if you intended to use that blade as a weapon.

But never mind.  Joe takes a six foot length of chain to meet Corn Pop, but first he apologizes for calling the guy “Esther,” explaining that he was referring to Esther Williams.

Who was a lady swimmer in a bunch of old movie musicals from the 40s, and therefore super-relevant to young black gang bangers.  Hence such famous rap songs as “I’ve got 99 problems but Esther Williams Ain’t One.”

Luckily for Corn Pop, the hardened, streetwise thug was so touched by Joe’s apology that he closed his straight razor, and he and Joe called a truce, and Joe lived to become an ancient old windbag who wants to be president.
My favorite part of the story is the gangster’s name.  “Corn Pop” is a perfect, right-out-of-central-casting name for a minority gang member… if you’re an old white guy who watched a lot of late 60s and early 70s cop shows, like Mannix and Banacek and Hawaii 5-0.

You just know that if any of his listeners had trolled him by asking, “What were some of the other bad dudes in his gang called, Grandpa Joe?” Biden would have said, “Well, there was his crazy sidekick Frosted Flake.  And his enforcer, Captain Crunch.  His right-hand man was Raisin Bran, and his best girl was Sugar Smacks.”

Ugh.  Trump has given his critics plenty of ammunition by his often juvenile braggadocio – his crowds are tremendous, his wall is going to be the biggest, most beautiful wall ever – but he’s got nothing on Joe Biden.

And it seems like the Democrats are absolutely determined to choose a candidate – either the old white lady in Redface, or Joe the Fantasizing Plagiarist – who makes Trump’s tall tales look like stoic self-effacement by comparison.

Avenatti/Corn Pop 2020!

As I write this, the Democratic debate is going on.  I’ve not watched any of it yet, because life is short, and I value my stable blood pressure and my sunny outlook on life.

But I will watch the “highlights” (and yes, you may take those quotation marks as ironic) later, because I love my country, and one of these knuckleheads may be elected to lead it, and I probably should find out what they said.  But not until after I’ve had some scotch, and some smart people I trust have had a chance to dig through that small mountain or manure to find the closest thing to a pony in there.  I’m looking at you, CO, and other prominent COers, and also Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan and Steven Crowder, and anyone else who is willing to take one for the team, and watch the interminable yammerings of the dementia of Democrats who are vying for leadership of the free world.

In the meantime, I am going to share with you what I’ve learned in the last week.

First, I learned about the meniscus.  Which, contrary to what I believed a week ago, is neither an ancient Greek philosopher and satirist (that was Menippus), or the comically elongated snout of some ridiculous-looking vertebrates (that’s the probiscus).

It is, in fact, a small bit of cartilage in the human knee, and its main function is apparently to turn an athletic, deceptively youthful-looking middle-aged man with catlike grace and agility into a pathetic, Bernie Sanders figure, hobbling around as if he is in his late 100s.

I partially tore the meniscus in my right knee, is what I’m saying.

The origin of the problem was likely over a month ago, when I spent my first day in London walking around 17 miles, after which my knee was strangely sore, and stayed that way for the last 6 weeks.  I would have brought it up during that European trip, but I spent part of that time hearing one of my traveling companions, a 93 year-old Kiwi whom I may have mentioned earlier, tell how he landed in Sicily, fought his way up through Italy, eventually climbing a Bavarian alp so that he could drink Hitler’s wine and pee in his bathtub.

After hearing that, I somehow didn’t want to say, “I walked up a flight of stairs in the Tower of London, and now my knee hurts.”

So, I did as my father before me — and his father before him – did.  I sucked it up, and did not complain or cry to my godfather that Mr. Woltz is never going to give me that part, and I don’t know what to do.  Nope.

I acted like a man, and did not seek treatment until a minor problem became much worse.

Then, after I spent a month transforming from an Olympic athlete into Abe Vigoda, my loving wife lovingly slapped me on the back of the head, and lovingly said, “You’re walking like Bernie Sanders, you moron.  Go see a doctor.”

So this week I did.  And now I’m scheduled for some PT, and a steroid injection into my knee, and some time in a rakishly fashionable knee brace that drives the ladies crazy, no matter how much I insist that I’m happily married, and keep your hands to yourselves, and my eyes are up here!

The moral of the story is that I’ve always known that we take some of the best things in life for granted.  The love of a good woman.  The forgiveness of a benevolent God.  The second amendment, which gives me the sacred right to shoot Beta O’Rourke in the face if he ever bursts through my door, his gangly arms flailing, hollering about taking my guns away.

To that list, I am now adding a pair of painlessly functioning knees.

Also, the blissful ignorance I lived in until last week, when I thought that Meniscus was an ancient Greek philosopher with a comically elongated nose.   Good times, gone too soon.

 

Speaking of excruciatingly painful things that degrade one’s quality of life, how about that Democrat town hall on climate change last week?  Which, if I’m not mistaken, ended only this afternoon, just in time for the Dems to get together and torture us with another debate.

Actually, the town hall was 7 hours long, yet somehow managed to feel longer than the war in Afghanistan.

I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t watch that whole thing, either.  On account of my above-mentioned appreciation for the shortness of life, and the value of healthy blood pressure.

But I did watch some excerpts, and yikes!

First of all: 7 hours.  Of politicians talking!  About climate change?!  Which average voters rank near the bottom of urgent issues.

Second, their proposals sound like something that a team of political consultants would work around the clock to come up with as part of a list of positions NOT likely to win anyone any votes.

We can’t eat cheeseburgers, or fly in planes, or use straws that don’t turn into a cardboard-paste choking hazard after three sips.  Our utility bills need to be at least $1000 a month.  And if we drive a car, it must be an electric-powered Smart Car.  (Which made me think: if I had the choice of hobbling to work on one crutch with a shredded meniscus, or have two healthy knees but be forced to drive there in a Smart Car, which would I choose?)

(I’m thinking!)

Consider some of the damage the Dem candidates did to themselves:

Klobuchar (the only Hillary left in the race, now that Gillibrand is gone) said that she’d get rid of all coal plants.

Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher) saw heap big trouble with nuclear plants, which she would ban.

Spartacus said that he’d ban offshore drilling, and fossil fuels generally.

Which, taken together means that we better get used to running our power grid on good intentions, wishful thinking and narcissism.  Plus solar for a few hours on sunny days, and windmills when it’s breezy.  Great.

Joey Gaffes said that the Green New Deal is just peachy, and “deserves a lot of credit.”  Forty-eight seconds later he noted that 85% of the problem is caused by other countries, which (he did not say, but which is obvious) the Green New Deal would not affect at all.   Hearing that, God reached His invisible hand down and touched Joey’s plug-ridden, liver-spotted head.  And his left eye filled up with blood, and he said, “Goodnight, Tokyo!” then waved and walked off stage, and over to a young camerawoman, and put his hands on her shoulders, and softly kissed her neck until she ran screaming from the hall.

Which, spoiler alert, was nowhere near Tokyo.

Not to be outdone, Kamala “bury her in a Y-shaped coffin” Harris promised that one of her first acts as president would be to abolish the filibuster and ram through the Green New Deal.    Also, Trump is a fascist dictator because he likes to act unilaterally.

Bernie Sanders reached the intellectual high point of his 14 decades in public life, when he answered a question from Anderson Cooper about whether he’d reverse Trump’s decision to let people decide what kinds of lightbulbs they want to buy.

Bernie said, and I am not making this up – Google it if you don’t believe me – and I quote, “Duh!”

Pastor Pete covered himself in glory, too.  He said, “This [fighting climate change] is the hardest thing we will have done — certainly in my lifetime. This is on par with winning World War II. Perhaps, even more challenging than that.”

And he knows what he’s talking about, because he’s guided South Bend through 3 heavy snow storms, and the Great Garbage Strike of ’17!  Move over, Eisenhower, Pistol Pete is in town to save the day!

The only thing he’s right about is that the GND will outstrip WWII in at least one way: it’s going to be a hell of a lot more expensive!

Ugh.  The big Democrat winner of the night was Eric Swalwell, who was spared the indignity of embarrassing himself by his wise choice to drop out of the race in total humiliation a month earlier.

Avenatti/Swallwell 2020!

My thesis today is that we have lost our freaking minds.

Not every single one of us, obviously.  I mean, I’m writing this masterpiece, and you are reading it and nodding your head in agreement, so the two of us are good.

But everybody else?  They have either lost it, or are in the advanced stages of losing it.

And I don’t just mean the obvious crazies, like Joe Biden.  Right this minute he’s in the District of Columbia in 2019 having some vegetable soup that an aide prepared for him, and spilling most of it on a bib which that same aide put on him.  But he thinks he’s in Vermont, and that he’s still vice president, and that he marched with Martin Luther King in 1987, and this lobster bisque doesn’t taste quite right.

Or Don Lemon, who thinks he’s a journalist.

Or Chris Cuomo, who thinks he’s Michael Corleone, and why does everyone keep calling him “Fredo”?

Or our president, who could earn a black belt in judiciously targeted trollery, but instead thinks it’s a great idea to fire off an entire full-auto clip of free-associated tweets in all directions, because suburban soccer moms love that stuff!

Or Robert DeNiro.  (Enough said.)

No, I’m talking about nearly everyone else in our society.

“Do you have any evidence for such a wild claim, Martacus?” you are probably asking yourself.  Or, I guess, you are asking me.

Unless your name is “Martacus.”  Which would be weird.

Well thanks for asking, faithful reader, because I have only one bit of evidence, but I think it will be more than enough to prove my point.

It is this story from Campus Reform —  https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13661  — about how all across our great nation, colleges are scrambling to get rid of their horribly offensive mascot names.  At first I wanted to give the colleges the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe there are still some left-over offensive mascots, from back in the bad old days.

I mean, if U Mass still has “The Virulent Anti-Semites” mascot, I am against that.  I am also unhappy with The Portland Pedophiles and the Washington State Ted Bundys.  Not to mention the Boise Bidens.

But no.  Here is the list of “controversial” mascots listed in the story, none of which I am making up:

The GW “Colonials.”  Because how terrible were those colonials, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor just because they didn’t want to continue bending the knee to their English overlords?  Ugh!

By the way, this university is called “George WASHINGTON University”!   And it’s located in WASHINGTON, D.C.!!  But we cannot have it associated with any colonials!

Next up: the University of Denver “Pioneers.”  Because, I guess, most pioneers were red-state workaholics who clung to their god and their guns, and shockingly few of them were gender-fluid disabled people of color.  So begone!

Cal State Long Beach “Prospector Pete the 49er.”  The sin here is that those old miners were greedy for gold.  And greed is terrible!  At least according to the Cal State Board of Regents — who took a break from holding taxpayers upside down by their ankles and vigorously shaking them until enough cash fell out of their pockets to provide a raise for anti-American profs who have been enduring brutal 7-hour work weeks for a salary barely into the six figures — long enough to vote to condemn the greed of long-dead prospectors.

The University of Wyoming Cowboys might be the most offensive, because they launched a successful campaign touting their mascot last year, with the motto, “The World Needs More Cowboys.”  Which it manifestly does, judging from the reaction of at least one mewling professor, whose complaint I swear to you I am not making up:  “the word ‘cowboy’ invokes a white, macho, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, U.S.-born person.”  (And if you conclude that this professor necessarily wants more non-white, effeminate, non-male, handicapped, homosexual foreign nationals in our country, you would not be wrong.) (Also, good luck, future Army Ranger and Seal Team Six recruiters!)

Finally, with too many universities to mention, comes the most offensive of all: Native American team mascots of all shapes and sizes.  No more Indians, or Warriors, or Chiefs. Or Braves.  Or Seminoles or Sioux or Mohawks.

Or Fightin’ Warrens.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The only two examples I’m almost willing to concede to these goofballs are the Washington Redskins and the U of Illinois mascot Chief Illiniwek.

“Redskins” is rough, I’ll grant you.  But now that these hysterics have made such an issue of it, we have to hold onto it doubly hard, just to avoid appeasing these loons.  Plus, “Washington” doesn’t seem so bad now – when compared to “redskins” – does it, you whiny oppression-studies professors?!

And the Illini Indians have the most unfortunately unimpressive tribe name ever.  And then they steered into the skid by naming their chief “Illiniwek,” which is the sound made by a TB patient with hay fever when he simultaneously coughs and sneezes.

But come on, Illinoisans.  Don’t throw the Blackhawk out with the Illiniwek!  (It’s a cliché for a reason.)

Speaking of Blackhawks, would any goalie ever feel the same fear up his spine if Stan Mikita was skating full speed toward him, with a “Chicago Pacifists” jersey on?  Okay, maybe he would.  But that cool Blackhawk image was still the icing (HA!) on the cake.

Fun fact: Stan Makita was from Slovakia, and he was deaf.  And yes, the Deaf Slovakians would make a great punk band name, and an even better team name.  Naming your team The Deaf Slovakians would be an offend-your-administrators two-fer, and they would immediately convene a meeting to try to push through “The Hearing-Impaired Peoples of Eastern European Origin” counter-proposal.  (And just try working THAT into a fight song.) (I mean, if fight songs hadn’t already been banned on grounds of toxic masculinity.)

In fact, “Deaf Slovakians” would also make an amazing army name.  Because when the Deaf Slovakians are marching on your border, you know that they will not listen to your cries for mercy. (HA!) And do some Biblical scholars believe that when the Deaf Slovakians meet the Color-Blind Slovenians on the field of battle, we will know that Armageddon is upon us?

Well, no they don’t, actually.  Did that idea come to me because I sometimes daydream of Melania Trump – in thigh-high black leather boots and a shining gold breastplate, naturally — leading a Slovenian army into battle?  Um, yes.  Yes it did.

Wow, I just went down a rabbit hole, didn’t I?  So where was I?

Oh yeah. Indian team mascots.

Lighten up, you perpetually offended jerks!  How can you not see that it is a compliment to have a mascot named after you?  We choose mascots because they embody admirable qualities.  We pick animal mascots that suggest strength – lions and tigers and bears – not ones that we look down on.  (That’s why there are no Washington Weasels – except in congress. Boom! – or St. Louis Skinks, or Rapid City Remoras.)  We choose occupations that we at least used to be proud of – there were Houston’s Oilers and Pittsburgh’s Steelers, not Houston’s Oligarchs and Pittsburgh’s Pimps.

And we chose Indian mascots because we admire warriors, and respect chiefs, and would like our children to be brave.

 

Finally, if you fancy yourself a compassionate leftist who sympathizes with the downtrodden and wants to solve our society’s problems, God bless you.  But do you really think that changing team mascot names should be your top priority? Have you not noticed that you’ve been running a lot of cities for decades, and they are not doing super-duper well lately?

Have you heard that San Franciscans are paying $2.3 million for a two-bedroom with no parking on a street down which they have to wade through an ankle-deep soup of human waste and dirty syringes?

Are you aware that Detroiters have to run serpentine from one burned out building to another to get to work, like it’s Beirut in the late 70s?

Do you realize that when mothers in Baltimore hear “back to school sale” they think about shopping for child-sized Kevlar vests in a variety of gang-graffiti-tagging-resistant colors?

Wake up, wokies!   If you win the next election and then tank the economy, finish off the last vestiges of quality public education, drive out anyone who pays taxes or wants to start a business, and then start a race war by imposing reparations and discriminating against some people because of their skin color, the voters are not going to be assuaged because you’ve passed House Bill 328 to change the name of the 49ers!

Can you PLEASE try putting out all of the raging social fires that you’ve started, before voting on the motion to change “firemen” to “firepersons”?!

Avenatti/Social Justice Warriors 2020!

First off, I have to apologize for a mistake in my last column.  After I’d made a joke involving Ben & Jerry’s re-named Neapolitan ice cream and three Democrat presidential contenders – I know, that old cliché – I returned to explain it afterwards.  Mostly I did that to get in my obligatory #wemustneverstopmockingher reference, but I made the mistake of saying that I didn’t want any CO readers to miss the joke.

And many members of the CO nation objected, saying that of course they didn’t need the explanation to get the joke.   Don Douds may have put it best, asking if I thought the CO audience was the Huff Po audience, or something?

Ouch!  That one stings.  But he’s right.  I should never have doubted this audience.  So mea culpa, and I resolve never to condescend to you folks again.

 

Which reminds me of a joke I heard years ago.  The speaker says, “People say that I’m condescending.” (pause)  “That means…”

I tried to tell that joke to my youngest daughter, when she was around 9 years old, and she unintentionally made it funnier.  She’s a very smart kid, if a little too sarcastic for my taste.  (I know – where could she have gotten that quality from?  I blame my otherwise flawless wife.)

So I told her the joke without telling her that it was the setup for a joke, and before even a beat passed at the end, when she would have figured it out, she jumped in immediately, “I know what that means!”   Perfect!

 

It’s time for another political obituary for another Dem who has dropped out of the presidential race.  This time, it’s Kirsten Gillibrand whom we won’t have to kick around anymore.

The character-less NY Senator has always stood for nothing beyond her own personal ambition.  She started her political career as a faux moderate who got an A- rating from the NRA, and she sucked up to the Clintons, back when they actually had power, getting herself appointed to Hillary’s senate seat when ol’ Equine Ankles left to run for president.  (Man, is that fun to recall!  Remember when Hillary was going to canter into the White House, before the Multiracial Messiah jostled her out in the backstretch in ’08, and then Orange Crush poleaxed her at the finish line in ’16?  Good times.)

Then, when the Clintons no longer had power, and the MeToo furies were tearing Slick Willie’s dessicated carcass to pieces in 2017, Gillibrand bravely came out and declared that he should have resigned over the Lewinsky scandal. Even though she’d taken some warm-focus pictures with Bill when she was running for Senate.  Which happened many years after everyone knew that Bill had groped his way into and through the highest office in the land, not to mention that time when he definitely raped Juanita Broaddrick.

Also, if you google those pictures, you’ll see that Bill is hugging Gillibrand, and usually has his hand around her shoulder.  But if you try to tell me that at no time during that photo op did he drop that hand down and squeeze her butt, I will call you a liar, sir!

And now — because when I’m not busy being a world-class husband and father, owner of the finest exemplar of canine virtue (Cassie the Wonder Dog, for new readers of the CO site), and friend to those who have pissed in Hitler’s bathtub, I like to fancy myself a Man of Letters – I’ve composed a final farewell to Gillibrand in the form of a haiku:

Kirsten, flip flopper,

Hillary 2, much too bland.

You let down!  Be gone!

Have I also written an anticipatory haiku for Grandma Squanto, you ask?  I have, even though right now it looks like she might be the last squaw standing from this motley crew of leftists.  Still, here it is:

There in the distance,

Rides a mean old white lady.

Indian? What?!  HA!

 

What’s that, you say?  Encore?

Okay, here’s another one for her:

 

We must never stop

Mocking her, the phony old

Translucent paleface.

 

Man, that’s fun!  I’d encourage all of you to write and submit your own haiku to the CO site.  Remember: 3 lines, with 5 syllables in the first and last, and 7 syllables in the middle.  Go to it!

Finally, I thought I’d share a couple of musical recommendations to brighten your day as you head into another work week after a long holiday weekend.  One of them is light-hearted, the other darker.

The first one is a video of James Taylor and Carly Simon singing a duet of “You Can Close Your Eyes” in their house in Martha’s Vineyard in 1977.  Looking back now, we know that their marriage was doomed, and that they had their own problems as all of us do, and maybe them more than most.

But on that day in 1977, they were at the height of their powers.  They were both tanned and young.  Taylor was good-looking enough that he could pull off that 70s porn mustache, and Carly was radiant, with that over-sized mouth of hers that shouldn’t work, but boy did it!  (A teenaged me was quite enthralled, since I hadn’t yet met my wife, and thus other women were not yet invisible to me.)

And of course their voices are beautiful, separately and together.  Watching that video, I can’t help but appreciate the fact that music is one of the best consolations of life.

Because I’m a Christian, I tend to see such things as occasions for gratitude to a Creator. God created cheetahs to run, and watching them in slow motion makes me grateful to Him for that.  Also, He made Mozart to compose music, and Frank Lloyd Wright to build houses, and Walter Payton to run with a football.

And He made James Taylor and Carly Simon to sing duets.

 

On a related but distinct topic, when it comes to the question of whether He made Bob Dylan to sing, I think the jury is still out!

I really like Dylan, and often find his nasally raspiness endearing, even though I wouldn’t call it technically beautiful.  But he’s obviously written some amazing songs, and lately I’ve been watching a video of one of his songs being performed by two young guys I’d never heard of before.  The song is called, “Not Dark Yet,” and the two guitar-playing singers are Bobby Long and John Fullbright.  It looks like it was recorded in somebody’s house, but they do a great job with that song: strong acoustic guitar playing, and a nice blend of voices that alternate on the verses and sing harmony on the refrain.  One of them wears a cool hat and plays a solid harmonica, and the other guy makes a hilarious Popeye expression when he sings, and I could listen to them all day.

This song has been stuck in my mind lately, mostly because the refrain — “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” — syncs up with a recurring mood I’ve gotten into when I watch too much of the news.

So many trends in our society seem to be worsening.  Most young people are badly educated about American history, and depressingly few of them can name any of the bill of rights, or locate the Revolutionary War, the Civil War or World War II in the right century.   Throughout the West, no countries have replacement-level birth rates, which seems like a fundamental indicator of a lack of civilizational confidence, and of faith in the future.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

More and more American children are born into fatherless households, which may be the most significant single predictor of future poverty and criminality.  Almost half of US adults pay no federal income tax at all, and when a larger majority of the population become consumers of taxes rather than payers of them, how can that not accelerate a slide into social division and dysfunction?  More and more people don’t feel patriotic about our country, and they don’t value even bedrock ideals such as free speech or free markets.

Respect for the rule of law – even considering the necessary caveats about needing to hold the cops accountable when they break the laws they are supposed to enforce – is decaying before our eyes.  Antifa thugs rampage and assault people, and go almost completely unpunished.  The most depressing videos I’ve seen lately are the scumbags in New York dousing cops with water and chasing them from the streets, while the cops cower and retreat.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

Thus, the video of those young guys knocking that Dylan song out of the park speaks to me.

 

But then I catch myself.  Since the beginning of time, old guys like me have been bemoaning the way the youngsters are going to hell in a handbasket.  And even given the depressing facts listed above, we still live in a great nation, in a time of great successes.  Dickens was right: it is always the best of times, and the worst of times.

Sure, terrible leftist candidates have a real chance to win in 2020, and Fredo Cuomo and AOC still have jobs, and there are websites like Huff Po, populated by mopey leftists who aren’t having kids because global warming or white nationalist boogey men will just kill them all before you know it.

But there are also podcasts from Dennis Miller and Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan and Steven Crowder, and there is the Cautious Optimism site, filled with smart and charming people who are way too sophisticated to need a hilarious joke about the new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor explained to them.  The public might not love Trump (and not without reason), but they hold the Dems in contempt, which is right and just.  My daughters are gorgeous and brilliant, my wife has easily advanced to the World Series of Wives competition, and my dog is as loyal as the Royal Lancers.

Also, a new football season has started, and Christmas is coming.

So watch those two videos, and a nature documentary about cheetahs, and get pregnant if you’re able, and write some snarky haiku about the next Democrat candidates to leave the race.  And maybe watch an old classic I’ve mentioned before: Ray Charles and the Jubilation Singers doing “Oh Happy Day.”

Because, as I think about it, it’s not dark yet.

Period.

Avenatti/Gillibrand 2020!

I’ll begin today with a basic political truth: one fundamental difference between conservatives and leftists is that the former tend to want smaller and less intrusive government, while the latter is more totalitarian in their desire for government.  I don’t mean “totalitarian” in the Stalin/Mao sense of slaughtering tens of millions of people in order to achieve the goals of the new Five-Year Plan.  (Although for at least a slice of the radical left, if that hobnailed boot fits, wear it!)

I mean “totalitarian” in the sense of its etymological core: government’s involvement in the totality of a citizen’s life.  Including things like under what conditions we’ll allow you to start a business, and what we think is fair for you to pay your employees or get paid by your employer, and what kind of a lightbulb or toilet or soft drink that we think is good for you.  Also, we’re going to make you subsidize the kind of tv we think you should watch, and the kind of radio we think you should listen to, and the kind of bathrooms that you and your children should be able to use.

That stuff.

Now on the one hand, I can understand why leftists bureaucrats would want that kind of power.  If I were an ineffectual know-it-all who can’t get people to live like I want them to live, I might welcome the chance to bend them to my will through my exercise of governmental coercion.

What I can’t understand is why so many businesses seem to wade into political issues in ways that can’t possibly help them.

I’m not talking about companies whose identities are tied up with their politics.  I understand, for example, why the moonbats at Ben and Jerry’s continually turn out goofy ice cream flavors like “Rocky Road to Socialized Health Care” or  “Booker, Warren and Straw-beto” (formerly known as “Neapolitan”) or “Abort-your-Children Pistachio.”  (Though I didn’t need to put on my wizard hat to predict how bad the sales would be for that last one.)

(Also, Booker, Warren and Straw-beto.  Get it?   Chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.)  (I don’t usually like to return to a joke or explain it, but this may have been my most oblique Grandma Squanto reference yet, and I don’t want it to slip by, unnoticed.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

I even understand Nike, embracing semi-talented America-hating has-been QB Kapernick, since much of Nike’s target audience is a younger and fairly ethnically diverse demographic who don’t yet know what disastrous results leftist government inevitably creates.

That being said, the country is now pretty evenly divided politically, and as our politics become ever more heated, why would any company who wants a broad market for its products choose to wade into politics when it doesn’t need to?

Exhibit A is Gillette, which you may remember from their fall ad campaign arguing that men – i.e. the people who buy the vast majority of the razors in this country — suck.  Their tagline – which I may be paraphrasing, but I am not making up – was “Everything masculine is toxic and terrible and you should be utterly ashamed of yourself if you have a Y chromosome. Now buy our razors you filthy, disgusting animal!”  They also ran an ad featuring a dad showing his “transitioning female-to-male child” (you may know such a person by the archaic term “daughter”) how to shave!

When asked whether such an approach might not be as crazy as outhouse rodentia, CEO Gary Coombe blithely acknowledged that Gillette might lose a few of those male customers.  (“But what about all of the biological females with heavy beards that we’ll gain as customers for life!” this idiot must have thought).  But he was confident: the loss was “a price worth paying,” and he didn’t mind alienating some customers.

Make that “almost all” customers.  Because oddly enough, this appeal doesn’t seem to have been super effective with the razor-buying demographic.  To the tune of a loss of 5.24 billion (with a “B”) in the fourth quarter.  When you compare that to their previous fourth quarter profit of almost 2 billion, their gender-bigoted leftist posturing has cost them over $7 billion.

To give you an idea of how much that is, it’s more than BOTH the mysterious CO and I earn – TOGETHER – over an entire year!  I know – it boggles the mind.

How are we to respond to this news?

You know how.  Say it with me:  BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!  Add dozens of more “HA”s and exclamation points, until lack of oxygen causes your vision to begin to gray out.  Then recover, and repeat.

My favorite part of this story is watching Gillette trying to spin this gigantic loss.  For example, the company has announced that they will be “shifting the spotlight from social issues to local heroes.”

Yes.  The way the Nazis shifted focus in 1943 from getting massacred in the snow in Russia to running back toward Germany as fast as their frozen feet could carry them.

 

Okay, no column would be complete without a few more gems from the Biden camp over the last 10 days or so.

Gem A came from Joey Gaffes himself (hat tip to Nick DiPaolo), and is actually a two-fer.  When he was in Keene New Hampshire, he talked about what a great state Vermont is.  Not because he’s trying to start an inter-state rivalry between NH and VT.

Because he didn’t know where he was.  He even mentioned what a great town Keene is.  Which means that he knew what town he was in, but didn’t know what state that town was in.

His second beauty was when he couldn’t remember where he’d given an earlier talk.  Here are his actual words, which I am not making up:  “I just spoke at Dartmouth on health care, at the medical school — or not — I guess it wasn’t actually on the campus because people from the medical school were at the….”  Then he paused, and said, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts. I’m not sure whether it was the medical school or where the hell I spoke. But it was on the campus.”

Yikes.  “I’m not sure where the hell I was, or who I was talking to, or what day it was, or what state I was in.  Also, on a totally unrelated note, I am not going nuts.”

As I may have mentioned before, I am not a professional, highly paid political expert.  But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you ever find yourself insisting, “I am not going nuts!” you are not winning.

My other favorite Biden-related groaner came from his wife, Jill.  When she was pitching her addle-minded mate to some lefties who are unhappy that he is not left enough, she admitted that they might not be satisfied with every one of his positions.  But, she said, “You might just have to swallow and vote for Joe.”

Now regular readers know that I am nothing if not a high-class gentleman.  I never wear white after Labor Day, I know which fork which goes with which course, and which wine goes with which entre.   I’m wearing a full tux and tails as I write this in Stately Simpson Manor right now, and yes, I am also wearing spats.  Thanks for asking.

Where was I?  Oh yeah: my classiness is beyond question.  Also beyond reproach.

That is why I’m not going to follow a quote about swallowing and voting for someone with an obvious Bill Clinton joke.  Because I am far too dignified for that.

And also because I know that as soon as you read that quote, you already thought up a hilarious Clinton joke of your own.

But if you think about it, by reminding you of that quote, I inspired you to make that joke.  So while I’ve kept my (white-gloved) hands clean, I would also like to take credit for that joke.

In other words, let’s agree that it’s a testimony to me, that I inspired you to make a hilarious joke, without actually having to come up with that joke myself.

This is as close to a no-show government job as I ever aspire to get!

Avenatti/Biden 2020!

Biden’s most recent campaign ad came out, and it’s about what you’d expect – a gravitas-laden voice-over, a little bile directed at Trump, and a lot of fairy-tale praise for Old Joe’s amazing yet fictional accomplishments during his storied career.  But the best part is the tone-deaf way that the Biden political team decided to name the ad.  It’s called, and I am not making this up, “Bones.”  The first lines are, “We know in our bones this election is different.”

Now I’m not a paid political consultant, or even a small-town country lawyer.  I’m just a humble, salt-of-the-earth snark-master who just so happens to personally know a guy who urinated in Hitler’s bathtub.

But even I know that you don’t want to reinforce your candidate’s vulnerabilities in your own damn ads!  And what is Biden’s greatest vulnerability?

I can hear all of CO nation right now, simultaneously shouting out many different answers: “His stupidity!”/”He helped his crooked son line his pockets!”/“Too white!”/”Super creepy.”/”Gaffe machine!”/ “Flip flopper!”/”Fondler of campaign aids.”/”Can’t find his butt with both hands and a topographical map.”

And you would all be wrong.

Well, you’d all be right, because those are all Biden weaknesses.  But his main weakness is that he’s a doddering old man.  Bernie Sanders looks like a spry, mentally engaged 70-year-old next to Biden.

So what does the Biden brain trust start their ad with?  BONES?!  And the words, “we know in our bones…”

You mean the way a really, really, old, frail person can tell when a storm is coming in his bones?  You mean the way an octogenarian’s doctor asks her if she’s getting enough calcium to support her bird-like, fragile bones?  Good lord!

It’s like Nancy Pelosi starting a campaign with an ad called, “Ancient Egyptian Burial Wrappings.”  Or Skateboarding Doofus O’Rourke starting a campaign with an ad called, “Alpha Male.”  Or Bill Clinton starting a campaign with an ad called, “Fidelity.”  (Come to think of it, “Bones” would not be a good theme for a Slick Willie ad, either.) (“We all know in our bones – and we can’t stress enough that there is no “r” in that word – when a president is fit to lead our nation…”)

Or Elizabeth Warren starting a campaign with an ad called, “The Trail of Tears.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Nice job, Joe Biden.  You have gotten your walker off the starting line very, very smoothly.

 

In other news, my skills with language are being challenged by the fact that two more Dem candidates have dropped out of the race.  Because nothing challenges language skills like needing to write cogently on the subject of when a nonentity does something inconsequential.  But here goes.

Jay Innslee has dropped out of the presidential race, and the sound you hear is an entire nation of 300+ million people not noticing.

Innslee, picturesque Austrian mountain town and site of the 1976 Winter Olympics, announced…  No, wait.  That’s “Innsbruck.”

Let me google “Innslee.”

Oooookay, first off, only one “n” in his name.  Also, “Jay” is his first name, and not an initial that stands for something cool and interesting, like “Jocko” or “Jehoshaphat.”

According to his Wikipedia entry photo, he is “Generic White Guy from the 1991 Sears Catalog Menswear Section.”  Apparently he is also a climate change activist – the hell you say! – and had been in the first two Dem debates, though his only notable contribution was to call Trump a white nationalist.  So, no points for either originality or accuracy.

He officially withdrew on Wednesday night, when he said “it’s become clear” that he didn’t have a shot at winning the primary.

Typical climate change alarmist: he’s absolutely certain of what the exact temperature is going to be 93 years from this coming Tuesday at 4 o’clock Eastern time, but he just now noticed that he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance at winning the Democrat primary.  At least he has a job to go back to: he’s the governor of Washington state.

Which I’ve got to believe has to come as quite a shock to the citizens of Washington state.  Where, Wikipedia tells me, he signed a document calling Washington a sanctuary state.

Of course he did.  Beat it, Innsbruck.

 

Seth Moulton is a different story.  First, he never qualified for either of the first two Dem debates.

Which begs the question: how the hell does someone get outpolled by Jeremiah Inslee and Marianne Williamson?!

Then I read his bio, and the answer became clear.  Moulton earned a physics degree from Harvard, then joined the Marines, and saw combat in Iraq.  He challenged Nancy Pelosi, focused his campaign on national security and caring for our veterans, and warned Democrats about “veering too far left.”

I don’t want to make him sound too good.  After all, he got elected as a Democrat from Massachusetts, so there’s got to be problems in there somewhere.

But he’s a straight, white, Marine veteran who talks common sense and might actually love his country.  So of course he had absolutely NO chance in today’s Democrat party primaries.  More’s the pity for him, and for us.

Goodbye, Seth Moulton – you were too good for the company you were trying to keep.

 

I found my favorite under-covered story of the last week on Don Surber’s fine blog on Thursday.   Just from his title – “Reporter wastes 2 days trying to show how easy it is to buy a gun.” – I knew it would be my kind of story.

The reporter in question is Business Insider senior correspondent Hayley Peterson.  After the shooting in an El Paso Wal-Mart, Peterson decided to go and buy a gun at a local Wal-Mart, to illustrate the grave danger of easily available handguns to our nation.

What followed was the opposite of what she expected.  She ended up going through a DMV-like experience, during which her attempts to buy a gun at Wal-Mart were thwarted at every turn.

First, it was difficult to find a Wal-Mart near her in Virginia that sold guns.  After “hours of googling and calling,” she finally found one.  When she got there, she found that Wal-Mart had a lot smaller selection than local gun stores, that they no longer sell handguns, and that they have stricter requirements than the law requires.  They also have security cameras, and extra training for the handful of employees who are allowed to sell guns.

Having no luck that day, she returned a few days later, only to be faced with a ton of paperwork, insisted on by competent employees.  When they discovered that Peterson’s address and the address on her driver’s license didn’t match, that ended her attempt to buy a gun at Wal-Mart.

To her credit, Peterson wrote the story, and Business Insider published it, even though it clearly didn’t match their preconceptions.  Do I wish that she had ended a little more emphatically, hammering home the moral of the story: guns are not legally easy to get, and people who jump through hoops to buy a gun legally are not the problem? Sure.

But supporters of the Second Amendment are constantly vexed by outrageously biased media coverage, and fact-less slurs from hack activists, as well as the opposition of well-meaning but uninformed people.  Our leftist pols have not helped, to put it mildly.  One of Obama’s most ridiculous pronouncements – out of a crowded field – was his 2016 statement that, ““it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”

Hayley Peterson’s story just demonstrated – again – what a crock of Schumer that always was.  For that, I thank her.

Avenatti/Inslee 2020!