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After a hectic couple of weeks at work, I finally have a few minutes to sit down and review what’s been happening in the world.

Aaaannnndddd… it’s a dumpster fire.  But an intermittently entertaining one.

I just now caught up to the most counter-intuitive news of the month, which blew up when it turned out that an investor in exercise equipment maker SoulCycle had given a fundraiser for Trump, and the tolerant left hit him with a torrent of abuse and boycott threats.

That’s not the counter-intuitive part.  Because there is nothing more intuitive than outraged leftists getting offended that someone who disagrees with them is investing or running a business or going out in public or expressing an opinion or breathing.

The counter-intuitive part is that Michael Moore (D-irigible) came out with a statement that he will no longer use SoulCycle.

Which gave me several thoughts:

1. Is Michael Moore actually self-aware enough that he’s making a self-deprecating joke? If so, that’s pretty funny, and thus the opposite of his usual insufferability.
2. If he actually did use Soul Cycle, sweet merciful crap! What would he look like if he had NOT been working out?  He looks like he’s always posing for a “before” and a “WAY-before” picture.
3. Is it possible that he was shorting Soul Cycle stock and then announced that he had been a customer, thus making a quick killing in the market? If so he’s got CO- or Silber-like investment chops.  (To go with all the pork chops! HA!)

 

The Trumpkin has been tweeting up a storm as usual, and he’s giving me a mix of agita and hiccups.  When he takes to late-night, serial tweeting, he reminds me of an 85-pound person firing an entire clip from a heavy machine gun on full auto.  The first bullet might hit his target, but after that it’s holes in the ceiling and upstairs neighbor’s exploding microwave and splintered door frames and glancing blows off the downstairs neighbor’s toupee and shattered shower tiles and RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

But just as I want to slap him, he lands a shot like a professional comedian.  Consider his comment when anti-Semitic nasty piece of work and jihad-enthusiast Rashida Tlaib pretended she wanted to go to Israel only to see her dear old granny who will likely be dead soon.  When Israel agreed to let her do so, she had a change of heart, and said, “No thanks, I’d rather hate Jews than see my grandma.”

Trump’s response, after rightly pointing out Tlaib’s hypocritical grandstanding: “The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!”

That’s some top shelf burn right there – I don’t care who you are.  Nicely done, prez – but please, more aimed shots and less “spray and pray!”

 

Elizabeth Warren continues to be a delight.  She recently repeated the race-baiting lie that Michael Brown “was murdered by a white police officer.”  But the Obama DOJ issued an exhaustive report four years ago, the key findings of which are that Brown was a large, violent, African-American male who was justifiably shot by a cop because Brown was assaulting him.

To me, the key parts of that story are “cop justifiably shoots attacking thug.”

To Grandma Squanto, the key parts are “black guy murdered by white cop.”  She ought to be ashamed of herself, and the violent, “Ferguson effect” backlash that racial arsonists like her helped to create.

Speaking of Warren-related atrocities, have you seen the video of her trying to dance earlier this week at an event in MN?  Yikes.  But before you laugh at her, consider that she may have been having a grand mal seizure brought on by a potent combination of political hatred and utter lack of skin pigmentation.

Also, although she may appear to the naked eye to be what scientists would call “an old cracker lady,” can you explain why it began to rain heavily as soon as she started to dance?

I didn’t think so.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Old Joe Biden appears to be losing it.  He has confused recently-defeated Brit PM Theresa May with beloved but long-dead Brit PM Margaret Thatcher (peace be upon her), he’s stated that RFK, JFK and MLK died in the late 1970s, and he’s said that poor kids can be just as talented as white kids.   He also said that he prefers truth over facts, and chocolate over vanilla and Big Foot.  Then he called his wife “mommy” and asked her if the mailman has come yet, because he’s waiting for his order from the Columbia Record and Tape Club, which went out of business when the only thing Obama was president of was the Choom Gang.

And that was all before lunch on Wednesday.

Also, he’s got a double-digit lead over the rest of the Democrat Z-Team.  Sooooooo… good for him, I guess?

 

I mentioned a while back that I was going to write a zippy little political obituary for each of the Democrat candidate as they drop out one by one, and now I’ve got a challenge: What does one say about John Hickenlooper?  Other than, “Who?”

Okay, his goofy name was a little entertaining.  “Hickenlooper/Buttigieg” would have made for funny bumperstickers.

Other than that, he had more support than Eric Swallwell, but less than Marianne Williamson.  (And you can look that last sentence up in the dictionary, under “Damning with faint praise.”)

We salute you, Johnny Hickenlooper!  You are the radon of Democratic politics: your presence is colorless, odorless and impossible to detect.

 

Did you catch the Dimmest Cuomo’s ™ Master Class in “How to Ensure that You are Forever Stuck with a Nickname You Hate?”

I love that the big dope decided to fight what he sees as an anti-Italian stereotype by… wait for it… getting in a guy’s face, dropping a dozen F bombs and threatening to kick him down the bleeping stairs.  The only thing missing was a warning that if the other guy didn’t shut up, he’d soon be sleeping with the fishes.

We get it, Cuomo.  You can handle things.  You’re smart.  Not like everybody says, you’re not dumb.  You’re smart, and you want respect.

Now put on your Gilligan hat and go out to the boat, Fredo.  Rocko will be out in a minute.  Because that’s the way pop wanted it.

 

Finally, as regular readers know, some of my favorite stories are the ones about stupid criminals.  In the past, for example, I’ve written about oft-arrested rapper Yung Mazi, who bragged that he was bulletproof shortly before being shot to death, and about the robber who took four guns away from a TN homeowner whose house he was breaking into, only to get shot by the fifth gun the man had in the house.  (As one does, in TN.) (Go Vols!)

One great sub-genre of the stupid criminals story is the incredibly stupid denial to the cops.

For example, when a guy is pulled over and the cops find drugs or guns in his car, he always says they are not his.  Which is sometimes pretty plausible, if he hangs around with the kind of miscreants who are always leaving their guns or drugs lying around.

If the gun or drugs are under his seat, maybe less so.

The funnier ones are when the cops find the contraband in one of his pockets, and he says something brilliant like, “These aren’t my pants!”

Well step aside, army of idiot criminals (and, coincidentally, large slice of the Democrat voting base), because you have officially been topped.

I give you the story of young Ms. Ashley Beth Rolland, 23, who was recently arrested in Louisiana.  A man with whom she’d been staying for a week accused her of theft, and the cops picked her up and searched her.  They found, and I quote, “a clear plastic bag with approximately 1 gram of meth and $6,233 in cash.”

Did they find that stuff in her car, you ask?  They did not.

Did they find it under her seat?  No. (But… sort of.)

Did they find it in her shirt pocket?  Nope.

Because this is a family column, I’m going to say that they found it… secreted in her person.

And yes, the operative pronoun here is not “on,” it is “in.”

Not as in, “I’ve got a song in my heart,” or “Deep down inside, I’ve got a little something called grit.”

I mean, “in” as in, “Let’s play a spirited round of ‘Democrat President and Young Intern.’  Today’s episode: “Where Did I Leave my Cigar?”

When you look at Ms. Rolland’s booking photo, I think you’ll be surprised.  She’s pretty attractive, with a rough-around-the-edges Olivia Wilde vibe to her.  At the risk of being look-ist, I would not have expected that.  If you showed me a lineup of mug shots and asked which of these gals is most likely to be carrying a mortgage down-payment on her, without the benefit of a purse or pocketbook, I would not have picked out Rolland.

All that being said, Ashley Beth Rolland is not a hero because of her crime.  She’s a hero because of her brilliant response to the accusations of the cynical police.

When the female officer had… I’m going to say “extracted” … the contraband, Rolland said that “the illegal drugs were not hers, and she did not know how they got there.”

How would you like to be her defense lawyer?  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… um… this is not what it looks like.  Well, maybe it is.  But you know how some people don’t trust banks?  Well my client REALLY doesn’t trust banks.  So….”

Avenatti/Rolland 2020!

Before I start today, I wanted to mention two brief stories about our Europe trip that I’d missed in my column last week.

Please forgive me though, because I don’t want to turn into the obnoxious, elitist jerk who goes on and on about having gone to Europe.  (“You simply must see Paris in the summertime.  The escargot are to die for!”)  We took a cost-saver tour, and the only thing that makes me a little big-headed is that I rubbed elbows with a bad-ass nonogenarian who pissed in Hitler’s bathtub(!)

Anyway, when we saw the armory in the tower of London, we came across two suits of armor made for Henry VIII.  (And you know the original Henry must have been a money-maker, because there were 7 sequels!) (And he had his own Herman and the Hermits song.)  One was much portlier than the other, and when I read some material on it, it turns out that both had been made for him in adulthood, but the second had been made 20 years after the first.

As an egalitarian American, it made me feel a little schadenfreude at Henry’s expense.  We regular folks tend to struggle with weight gain and loss as we age, but the worst ramification is that we have to donate or toss our skinny pants or fat pants from time to time.  But although Henry was the immensely powerful monarch of a great empire, endowed with access to anything he wanted — including the power to have troublesome exes beheaded when they became annoying (sweet, sweet consolation of 16^th century divorce laws!) – he still had to battle the “coronation 15.”

And because his fancy clothes were made out of long-lasting armor, great crowds of people get to traipse through his armory centuries later, and point like Nelson (the Simpson’s character, not the hero of Trafalgar), and say, “HA, HA!  Henry was a pudgy potentate!”

By the way, that’s why my will stipulates that at my death, all of my suits of armor will be melted down and re-cast into a statue of Cassie the Wonder Dog, gazing mournfully at the grave of her beloved master.

The other thing that I hadn’t mentioned is that my world-class wife surprised me at the end of our trip, by booking rooms in an Elizabethan manor house for our last night’s stay in England.  We had mostly stayed in reasonably priced hotels to that point, but Gatwick is far away enough from London that she was able to get us rooms in a place built in 1580 for not much more than a good hotel room in central London.

As a guy who’s rehabbed a few houses over the years, I really loved that place!  The interior doors were solid wood almost four inches thick, with old box locks that took skeleton keys to open them.  Almost all of the interior woodwork and much of the leaded glass windows were original, and the grounds were all sculpted hedges and English gardens.  It was a great place to spend our last night in England, and even though marriage isn’t a competition, my wife is somehow winning.

(If you’d like to see a picture of the place, you can check out Martinsimpsonwriting.com.)

 

Okay, on to some other scattered thoughts.

The bit of my last column that got the most reaction was the part where I chose my pronouns and adjectives (thee/thou, brilliant, handsome).  And by the way thank you all for not pointing out that my chosen adjectives aren’t exactly spot on, since I’m average-looking at best, and less than Einstein-ian in the IQ department.

That’s what I love about CO nation – you are blackbelts at the suspension of disbelief in the service of a joke!

But of course my point was that I’m a lot closer to being both brilliant and handsome than a biological male is to being a “she” or “her,” and ultimately it does no favors to someone suffering from gender dysmorphia to pretend otherwise.  The “list your pronouns” issue – though well-meaning, on the part of many liberals — is part of a larger leftist strategy to achieve political goals by using language to obfuscate/battle/re-shape reality.

And, as a side benefit, it tends to drive those of us in the reality-based community nuts!

Euphemisms – even well-intentioned ones – also work this way, and today’s elite left have raised euphemism to a misleading art form.  The prime objective of “Planned Parenthood” is to prevent parenthood.  The practice of preventing reproduction by aborting children is “women’s reproductive health.”  Non-citizens who came into the country illegally are “undocumented citizens.”  The top earners who pay the lion’s share of the taxes – roughly twice the percentage that they earn, per capita – are “not paying their fair share.”

War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength. (hat tip to Orwell)

Translucent Elizabeth Warren is “Native American.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher).

I could go on.

The point is whoever controls the language, tends to control political battles.

I’m reminded of a joke that is attributed to Lincoln, though I’m betting it’s apocryphal.  It goes, “How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?”  The listener says, “5.”  Lincoln says no.  “Four.  Because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

To class things up even more (though Lincoln is no slouch in the quotable wisdom department), I’m also reminded of a few lines from Hamlet.  When he’s telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Denmark feels like a prison to him, they say that they don’t think so.  Hamlet replies, “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

Because Shakespeare is a freaking genius, there is some truth to Hamlet’s double-edged reply.  Because our attitude indeed shapes our emotional state, anyone can make a prison of Denmark; the glass really can be half empty or half full, depending on our outlook.

On the other hand, Hamlet is either crazy, or pretending to be so (lit critics differ on this point), and in one clear sense he is obviously wrong.  He is not in a prison, though his grim, tragic outlook makes it feel so.

I can’t help but think of the young, impressionable Americans – I hope it’s not too many — who fall under the influence of leftist thought leaders, and end up with a correspondingly distorted view of the world.  They live in the freest, richest, most opportunity-laden country in the history of the world, but when they look around, they see a hellhole of racism and sexism and bigotry.  They enjoy freedoms and comforts and security that kings and emperors could never have dared dream of even a few centuries ago, but they feel like victims, vulnerable and hopeless.

They have been taught since grade school that a tail is a leg, and now they feel like they’re surrounded by five-legged predators who don’t exist.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Lighten up, little AOC followers!  The world’s not going to end in 12 years, and you’re not being persecuted by a shadowy white supremacist cabal.  And assuming you don’t vote in a raft of socialists in the next several elections, your lives are not going to be nasty, brutish and short.

 

Let’s end on a happier note, and one that always makes me smile: stories of hypocrites being hoist on their own petard.

Already in the last month we’ve had Grandpa Socialist Sanders get caught not paying his campaign drones the $15 wage that he’s been hectoring the rest of us to pay for several years now.  (HA!)  And we’ve had Ol’ Joe Biden – purveyor or racism accusations galore – getting caught saying that – I’m sure you’ve seen this fantastic quote – “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” (HA!!)

When I first heard that quote, I immediately thought of the greatest character on tv today: Ron Swanson.  If you haven’t seen Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness yet, drop everything and google that and watch it.  I’ll wait.

My favorite square on the pyramid is the one that’s as tongue-in-cheek funny as Old Joe’s latest gaffe is unintentionally funny: “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor.”

Which brings us to Sarah Silverman, someone who I think is actually a pretty talented comedian, when she can pull her head out of her politics.  Which, sadly, is not that often lately.  She’s been an outspoken leftist, of the “Trump is racist and conservatives are terrible and anyone who doesn’t agree with me is horrible” type.

Which means that she’s not been funny for a while.

But those days are over, because I just saw an article about why she lost a recent movie role.  According to lefty Brit paper The Guardian, she was fired because of a 2007 skit she did in which she wore blackface.  The original skit was intermittently funny, and involved her getting into an argument with an African-American guy over whether Jews or blacks have had a harder time, resulting in an experiment where she went out in blackface to see “how the other half lives.”

Not the most original concept in the world, but she handled it well.  And the whole point of comedy is that you should be able to poke fun at everyone.  But more than a decade after that sketch, when she was on the verge of starting what she called a “sweet part” in a movie, the producers found out about the old skit and fired her.

To which any compassionate, empathetic person could only respond, “BWA HA HA HA HA HA”… let me pause to get my breath – “HA HA HA HA!!!!”

Is that situation really worthy of a “BWA,” 10 “HA”s, and four exclamation points, you ask?  Yes. In fact, if it weren’t for my mild, adult-onset asthma, I would be tempted to add another “BWA”, many more “HA”s and at least two more exclamation points.

Because it’s not just that a hypocritical leftist racist-baiter should get a karmic come-uppance.  But the way she reacts is perfect, archtypically lefty: convinced that right wingers are to blame, with not a smidgen of self-awareness.

She says, “It was so disheartening.  It just made me real, real sad, because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right.”  Which is ridiculous, because she didn’t kill somebody in Reno just to watch him die.  She did a comedy sketch 10 years before the p.c. police declared that no racial joke can ever be funny again.

She certainly has the self-flagellation move down pat, saying, “I cringe at material I did 10 years ago.”

But don’t think that she is actually accepting the blame for this.  Let her explain who is really at fault.  “I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it,” adding that she dubs it “righteousness porn”.

First of all, I cannot think of a worse type of porn than “righteousness porn.”  Ugh.

Second, “it invaded the left,” did it Sarah?  Like maybe it came from outer space?

Look at her verbs.  “Invading the left,” makes leftists passive victims.  But then the right “mimicked it.”  It didn’t invade or infect or contaminate the right – in which case the right would be victims, too.  No.  It invaded the poor, victimized left, and then the evil right wingers picked it up and took it from there.

She closes with the most unintentionally perfect summary of the leftist mindset possible: “It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone.  It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.’”

Yes, Sarah!  It’s EXACTLY like that.  If only we could figure out what group started this awful political correctness that has turned on you, and caused you to lose a sweet job.  Because then maybe we could see to it that people with the mindset that started this trend could be made to suffer the consequences.

Oh, wait.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Avenatti/Silverman 2020!

So while I was in Europe, soaking up the culture and meeting cool Kiwis who went to Europe to chew gum and urinate in Hitler’s bathtub (and they’re all out of gum), leftists in America were going all Thelma and Louise, fighting over the steering wheel and mashing the gas pedal as they raced toward the cliffs of insanity.

Exhibit A: Humans are rarely confronted with social experiments having conditions so perfect that they could have been designed in a laboratory.  But when we are, we should learn from them.

One such example was the division of Germany into east and west after WWII.  One group of people – with the same history, language, culture, everything – was artificially split, with half living in a free market/capitalist west, and the other half living in a totalitarian leftist-governed east.

Fast forward 30 years and West Germany has BMWs and functioning institutions and a clean environment and adorable Nena singing about 99 Luft Balloons, and East Germany looks like Baltimore or Detroit or any other leftist-run city.  The lesson couldn’t be more obvious: allowing statist, command-and-control leftists to run your society results in disaster.

The media wing of the Democrat party was offered a similarly instructive test in the form of two near-simultaneous events.   In separate mass shootings within 36 hours of each other, two evil and possibly mentally ill (but definitely evil) jackasses shot a ton of innocent victims.  One killer left copious evidence that he was mostly a right-winger, and the other that he was a left-winger.

Here was the MSM’s chance to shine.  If they were even minimally honest, they had two viable options before them: either argue that the killers alone were responsible for their actions, regardless of what political views inspired them to act, or argue that the pols on both left and right were at least partially responsible for inspiring these nutballs.

And, of course, they chose option C: the “right-wing” killer was triggered by Trump’s terribleness, and Trump and all conservatives are responsible for his evil actions.  But what about the leftist killer, who gushed about his love for Grandma Squanto and Screaming Socialist Grandpa Bernie?  His actions were Trump’s and conservatives’ fault too, somehow.

The MSM are thoroughly dishonest and immune to shame, and they have earned the contempt of decent people everywhere. Fox and the conservative media found on the net and elsewhere are far from perfect.  But if you believe ANYTHING you see on MSNBC, CNN or the big 3 networks, you should undergo a concussion protocol and be put into conservatorship until you are no longer a threat to yourself or others.

 

Exhibit B.   The FBI’s reputation has been battered once again.  In the wake of the exposure of James Comey, Strzok and Page, and doddering Bob Mueller and his army of faceless partisan Dems, it was hard to imagine that any insider could inflict a worse black eye.

But then former FBI agent Frank Fugliuzzi – whose name sounds like something made up by a lazy, anti-Italian sitcom writer – took to MSNBC, but only after asking a cameraman to hold his beer, and his copy of Mein Kampf.  Frankie noted that Trump ordered that flags be flown at half-mast to mourn the dead in the recent shootings, and then he argued that Trump has ordered them to be returned to their normal position on August 8^th.

Therefore, Trump is a Nazi.

While that might seem like an Evel Knievel-ian logical leap (“Hey Martin,” you may have asked, “Can you spell Evel Knievel’s name correctly, and also turn it into an adjective?”  Done and done, my friend.), F-squared has a solid explanation.  It seems that “H” is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and among cultist Nazis, the number “8-8” signifies “Heil Hitler.”

So Trump obviously planned for the two losers to go on shooting sprees in early August, so that he could order flags to be lowered then, so that he could order them to be raised later… on August 8^th!  8/8.  Get it?

Hey, on a related note, do you know what members of the animal kingdom are the most sympathetic to National Socialism?  (And no, it’s not anti-Semitic lemurs.  That’s too obvious.  Hang your head in shame for even guessing that.)

The answer is the octopus.

As Frank Fugliuzzi could tell you, an octopus has 8 limbs.  So when two octopi get together, put on a Marvin Gaye record, and make some sweet cephalopod love… the obvious number involved is 8-8, and the result is a veritable nautical Nuremberg!  Do you think it’s a coincidence that the top Nazis were famously enthralled by tentacle porn?  Duh! Wake up, people!

Okay, that got a little weird.

But not as weird as Exhibit C: the Democratic Socialists convention that took place in Atlanta last weekend.

By now you’ve heard all kinds of hilarious details that arose from this cavalcade of misfits. How they unironically call each other “comrade” in 2019.  The way they all agreed to do “jazz hands” rather than applauding, so that those among them who are hyper-sensitive to sound wouldn’t be tormented by… clapping.

But the most entertaining detail for me was when one beta male asked that people not talk amongst themselves, because he is easily triggered by background noise.   But he started his mewling statement with the words, “Guys, can we…”

So naturally some loon in the cheap seats said, “Can you NOT use gendered language?  If I hear the word ‘guys’ one more time from Comrade Patriarchy up there, I’m going to clap my hands, which will send you into a seizure that leaves you curled up on the floor in a fetal position!”

I paraphrased that a bit, but I believe I caught the essence of it.

But I left out something crucial.  This is how the beta male began his statement: “Um, guys, first of all, James Jackson, Sacramento, he/him…”

This “giving your pronouns” practice is a grammatical offshoot of the “gender is a social construct” anti-scientific goofiness that has recently become required thinking on the left.  But it’s also indicative of the leftist mania for controlling people in general.  If you’re a baker, you must be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding.  If you’re a pro-life employer, you must be forced to pay for your employees’ abortions.  And you can’t put salt on that, or buy a drink in a cup that’s too big, or drink it with a plastic straw.  Etc.

But the absurdity involved in “choosing your pronouns” allows the left to do some especially satisfying linguistic bullying.  When a person stands before you, and he’s built like a Clemson starting strong safety, with a beard as thick as a whale omelette, and he tells you that his pronouns are “she” and “her,” that’s an intimidation move.  It’s meant to force you to either meekly say something that you know is not true, or take the social and political consequences of “traumatizing” someone from a protected victim group.

Even a year or two ago, this would have been so absurd that no one would take it seriously.  But now it’s mandatory, and an emotionally satisfying way for pinched, humorless scolds on the left to virtue signal.

Case in point, re: humorless scolds — Just a few weeks ago, Liz Warren changed her campaign website to include “she/her” as her pronouns.  If I had any talent at computers, I’d hack into her website and add, “Her noun used to be ‘papoose,’ but now it is ‘squaw.’”  #wemustneverstopmockingher

In fact, I’d like to take a page from the lefties’ handbook.  If they can choose their own pronouns, I should be able to choose my own parts of speech.

So I have.

For my pronouns, I’m going Old Testament: “thee/thou/thine.”   From now on, my adjectives are going to be “brilliant” and “handsome.”   And I’ve chosen my adverb, too: “breathtakingly.”

Also, my title is henceforth, “Your Excellency.”

I can’t wait to get emails from my lefty colleagues at work, so I can correct the hell out of them.  Within a week or two, I’m going to bully them into sending inter-office emails like this:

“To: Martin Simpson

From: Whomever

“Your Excellency,

I wanted to touch base with thee about thy breathtakingly brilliant memo of last Monday, as well as how breathtakingly handsome thou appeared at thy presentation at the weekend conference.  Could I stop by thine office to meet thee for a few minutes later today?”

In fact, I think I might also start picking other peoples’ titles.

For my co-workers, I like the sound of “Thy Humble Servant.”

Avenatti/Jackson 2020!

Well, I’m back from Europe, although the time change has thrown me for a loop, so I’m still not sure whether I’m afoot or horseback.  But I’ve never been one to let a little disorientation keep me from offering a few thoughts.  I won’t go into an exhaustive travelogue, but I thought I’d mention some highlights.

We spent 3 days in London first, which obviously wasn’t enough.  I saw the usual bucket list of sites, but the Tower of London was a particular favorite, and contained one surreal moment.

We were in the White Tower, and I’d just read a plaque telling how Richard III had imprisoned 2 princes there who were never seen again.  Of course my thoughts went to Shakespeare’s play about the famously hunchbacked Richard.

So I turn from the plaque and bump into a guy with a hunched back!

Of course I don’t mean any disrespect to what I’m sure PC rules would have us refer to as “a member of the differently-postured community,” and God bless anyone with any kind of physical deformity.  But that freaked me out.

My wife noticed the odd look on my face, and said, “What?”

I nodded toward the guy, who was leaving the room ahead of us, and whispered, “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.”  She just stared at me blankly and shook her head, not being as big of a Shakespeare fan as I am.

When she shook her head and turned away, I had a thought that has occurred to a lot of people who passed through that tower in the last 900 years: Tough room.

 

Amsterdam is beautiful, but I hadn’t anticipated how much the legal red-light district would depress me.  The booths themselves just looked like empty rooms to me, since (as I may have mentioned in earlier columns) all other women became invisible to me when I met my wife.

Even when I was single, and still retained the ability to visually perceive other women, I was never tempted by the idea of going to a hooker.  (Other than when I watched Rebecca De Mornay at the height of her powers in Risky Business.)  (Giggity.)

But even if I had been, I’d guess that part of the thrill would be the forbidden frisson of illicitness of the whole thing, a sense of having gotten away with a naughty indulgence.  But government-sanctioned and regulated sexual misbehavior sounds like the most soul-less, un-thrilling experience since Kamala Harris hooked up with creepy old Willie Brown in exchange for a government job.

Plus, if I had just finished with a woman and then saw a license on the wall, auto-signed by Chuck and Nancy and assuring me that she was healthy as a horse, I would sprint to the nearest de-lousing station and then seek out the most comprehensive round of antibiotics known to man!

We took a boat ride past some impressive castles on the Rhine, and saw the cathedral at Cologne, before traveling through Switzerland, which was as beautiful as advertised.  We took a cog train to the top of Mt. Pilatus, overlooking Lucerne, and later took a boat ride on Lake Lucerne.  We ate fondue and listened to some mountain horn-blowing, and saw the amazing speared-and-dead Lion of Lucerne carving in a granite wall, and I couldn’t help thinking of Aslan. (You may have guessed that C.S. Lewis is one of my top few favorite writers.) (He should be one of yours too, IMHO.)

There is much to admire about Switzerland and the Swiss, and their famous neutrality has been a wise course during most of Europe’s wars.  But their behavior during WWII rightly taints their reputation.  To be neutral in a conflict when the Nazis are on one side is unconscionable. To in effect collaborate with the Nazis and provide safe haven for much of their stolen loot is egregious.

But to spend decades after the war resisting attempts by Jews and other victims of Hitler to recover their property from Swiss banks should shame the nation.  (FYI, a great book on that history is The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead.)

We spent two days in Paris at the end of the trip, which let us start to scratch the surface.  We took a boat ride on the Seine at dusk, arriving back just as the Eiffel tower was lit up.  The next day I saw Napoleon’s tomb and the adjoining military museum, while my wife and daughters saw some frou-frou art elsewhere.

Not that I’ve got anything against art.

Except for modern art, which is uniformly terrible.  Firstly, because it violates Simpson’s First Rule of Art: If I can do it, it’s not art.

Secondly, because it doesn’t look anything like what it is supposed to.  If you paint a horse, and not 1 of 100 viewers can guess what it is, you are the Liz Warren of painters.  (That is, you are claiming to be something that you are definitively NOT.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

For example, here is a conversation that has never happened in the history of the world:

Regular Person: “Hey Michelangelo, why did you think it was appropriate to paint a platypus being chased by a leopard with Stegosaurus horns on a church ceiling?”

Michelangelo:  “That’s God, reaching out to Adam at the moment of creation.  And get away from me.”

Thirdly, the pretentious titles.  It would be bad enough if I had laid out a blank canvas on the floor, took Cassie the Wonder Dog into the middle of it after I’d dipped her bushy tail into paint, and had her roll over a dozen times, and called the result a Work of Art.

But if I then titled the result, “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” you would never stop slapping me.  And rightly so.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  I really enjoyed the trip, and look forward to going back again.  But ironically, one drawback was that amazing things – statues, cathedrals, castles – suffer from proximity to each other.

During our Rhine cruise, we saw 11 castles that were between 400-900 years old.  If any one of those were in my home state, it would be the coolest structure there. (Except maybe for Wrigley or Soldier fields.)  But after a few hours on the Rhine, you’d turn a corner and say, “Oh.  Beautiful old castle #8.  Cool.”

As a lover of language, it was great to hear the various accents and expressions of Europeans.  It turns out that nothing is cooler than little kids yammering to their parents in adorable English or French accents.  And in London, I learned that the Victorians had called the first elevators “ascending rooms,” which made me love Victorians even a little more.

I also had a very cool encounter with a plain-spoken Swiss farmer.  He and his father have a dairy farm in a small alpine village, and our tour guide had arranged for us to get a horse-drawn cart ride around their farm in small groups.  The farmer’s son who took us around was probably in his mid-30s, with broken but understandable English, and a stoic grit that I recognize from the farmers in the Illinois towns where I grew up.

As we rode around the outskirts of town, he told us about a terrible flash flood that had hit the town in the early 1600s, destroying most of the buildings and killing a lot of villagers.  Afterwards, some local power-players from the Hapsburg empire – and he said “Hapsburgs” the way my grandpa would refer to the Japanese who bombed Pearly Harbor – scapegoated some alleged local witches for causing the flood.  “They murdered a number of women, and children too.”

Those words hung in the air for a moment, in our otherwise idyllic evening in the Swiss village.  And then he said, “It is a hard story,” and turned back to the horses.

A half hour later, during a stop by the town’s church, I was talking with him about the close-knit nature of the village, and he pointed to a nearby house.  A good friend of his lives there, and his 20-something daughter (one of the most talented yodelers in Switzerland, he told me) took a short motorcycle trip with her boyfriend to the Italian side of the alps two weeks ago.

While there, an Italian driver hit and killed the girl, and her father is now inconsolable.  After the two of us stood looking at the man’s house, he said, “It is a hard story.” And he turned and called his adorable four-year-old daughter, who rode seated next to him and held the horses’ reins, talking to the animals softly in Swiss German as they took us back to our hotel.

The coolest guy I met on the trip was actually taking the tour with us.  He was a New Zealander who I guessed was around 80.  But as we talked during our third day together, I found out that he will turn 94 on Christmas Eve.  When I asked him if he’d been to Europe before, he said that he had fought his way from Sicily up through Italy and into Germany when he was 19 years old.  I asked if he’d been at Monte Cassino, and he said that his unit arrived a few days after the Germans had retreated from there. I peppered him with questions about the war, and he answered me, but in a very low-key, modest way.

A few days later we were all eating together in Paris, and I asked him if his unit had been there during the war.  He said that they hadn’t gotten that far west, because France had already been liberated by the time his unit fought their way up through Italy, and then into Germany.  He said that they had an order change that sent them to Berchtesgaden, and I blurted out, “Did you see the Eagle’s Nest?” (Hitler’s mountain-top retreat there.)

He said he had.  His unit was arriving just as an American unit was leaving.  He asked a few of the GIs if they’d destroyed the place, and they told him that they hadn’t, but they’d liberated some of Hitler’s wine collection.  He said that he and his friends had heard rumors that Hitler might make a final stand there, and they’d hoped to be the group that captured or killed him.  But he killed himself several days earlier in Berlin.

I asked him what it was like to see Hitler’s private retreat, and what he felt when he got there.  In a deadpan delivery, he said, “We were all mad that Hitler had committed suicide. So we looked at the views and walked through the rooms, and then I drank a bunch of Hitler’s wine and I pissed in his bathtub.”

As a military history junkie, I was bowled over.  I had been talking with the guy for five days at that point, and asking specifically about his experiences in the war, and he tells me that as an afterthought.  If I hadn’t specifically asked about it, he wouldn’t have told me about it at all.

That shocks me.  If I had peed in Hitler’s bathtub, that would be how I introduced myself for the rest of my life: “Hi, I’m Martin Simpson.  I pissed in Hitler’s bathtub.”

If it was a social situation to which my wife had accompanied me, I would introduce myself and then my wife.  And then I’d point to my baseball cap, which I would never take off, and which would have embroidered on it, “I pissed in Hitler’s bathtub.”

The next day, when our bus got to Calais and we had to get out and be questioned by English customs officials before taking the ferry to Dover, I was right behind him in line. When it was his turn to step forward, I nudged his shoulder and said, “Tell them you pissed in Hitler’s bathtub. They’ll let you right through.”

That was one satisfying laugh to hear!

I’ve been catching up on the American political news that I’d missed, and will write another column in a few days.  But even though our internet was spotty over there, I did have a few people bring up politics. An Indian cabby in London, upon hearing that I was an American, said that he likes what Trump is doing very much.    And a guy from Hong Kong on our tour said that while he doesn’t care for Trump as a person, he really like’s Trump’s policies, and thinks he’s the right man to have in the White House now.

So according to my highly scientific poll of 2 people who brought it up, Trump’s policies have a 100% approval rating in Europe.

And that poll is at least as valid as anything you’ll hear from the petrified forest of blockheads at CNN and the MSM.

Avenatti/Williamson 2020!

I’m posting a quickie lightning-round column today, because tomorrow my family and I are leaving for Europe.

This March was the 30^th anniversary of my marrying WAY up, and after only a couple of years of my wife dropping increasingly obvious hints that she wanted to go to Europe, I had the brilliant idea that we should go to Europe.  So we’re going to spend 11 days, starting in London, and then going through Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France.

My 21 year old daughter is already something of a world traveler, but this will be the first time my wife, younger daughter and I have been to Europe.  In fact, I just got my first passport last month.

As a history and literature junkie, I am especially looking forward to spending time in the British Museum and Imperial War Museum.  I’m going to look at the Bayeux Tapestry and some early volumes of Shakespeare and Milton and a bunch of other dead white male geniuses – and some female ones, too.  I’m going to see the Globe theater and some castles, as well as some cool sites in Belgium and France.  If any French waiters or Belgians are rude to us, I’m going to ask if they speak German, and hope that they say no.  Because I will then say, “You’re welcome.”

Another upside is that I won’t be following American politics as closely for those 11 days, which will likely spare me much idiocy from the Democrat “Dirty Two-Dozen” and lower my blood pressure.  On the downside, I am going to have some serious Cautious Optimism withdrawal.  I will check the site when I can, but I know that I’m going to miss a lot, and I’ll definitely miss the chance to rant in these friendly confines.

I will also miss Cassie the Wonder Dog, of course.

So before I go, here’s a few tidbits I’ve noticed in the news this past week:

1.Bernie Sanders’ campaign was hit with accusations of hypocrisy from some of his campaign workers because they aren’t being paid the $15 minimum wage which he is campaigning to force into law.

To which any reasonable person would respond with a spit-take, followed by howls of breath-depleting laughter.  Because there is nothing funnier than a 100-year-old man being caught flat-footed by basic economic facts that most of us first encountered when we opened a lemonade stand at age 6, or started a lawn mowing business in junior high.

Even funnier was Bernie’s team’s response: the pay raise to a morally-acceptable rate is going to force Bernie to cut workers’ hours.  In other words, “Hey little proto-socialists, we’ve heard your righteous demands, and we agree.  Starting Monday, you’ll be working less.  Sure, you’ll be getting a much smaller paycheck, but just think of the social justice!  Which I’m sure that your landlord will accept in lieu of rent.  Now let’s get out there and bring our message of class envy and economic dysfunction to the entire country!”

Just a few months ago Bernie was questioned about his three homes and his millionaire status, and he had an epiphany that if you write a best-selling book, it’s totally cool if you receive giant wheelbarrows full of cash for it.  And now he’s learned that raising the minimum wage beyond a market level hurts workers.

Who ever expected that the learning curve would be so steep for someone at the dawn of his second century on the planet?

2. The Trump vs. the Squad donnybrook (and yes, I’ve been looking for a chance to use the word “donnybrook”) has turned out pretty well for Trump. I thought his initial tweets – go back to your own country, and etc. – were strategically dumb, unforced errors. But the Democrat and MSM reactions were so wildly exaggerated and unhinged that they appear to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Of course they accused Trump of racism, but that card has been so overplayed that it has lost all its power with any but the most partisan leftists – and they were already lost causes.

In the two weeks before they called Trump racist, various lefty elites and Squad members had called Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden racists.  Now, Nancy might be a barely animated mummy from the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Joe might be a low-energy codger who doesn’t know what year it is, but neither of them are racists.  In fact, years of labeling everybody except obviously racist leftists as racists has turned the Dems into the Person-of-Indeterminate-Gender who Cried Wolf.

The best thing about the back-and-forth insult-fest is that it has raised the profile of the squad, and increasingly welded them into the public mind as the snarling, ignorant face of the Democratic party.   Nancy and Joe are smart enough to know how disastrous that is, even though they don’t seem to know how to stop it.  AOC and her fellows are polling right down there between wisdom tooth removal and testicular cancer, and if Trump can cast 2020 as a choice between him and them, he’s got at least a puncher’s chance at re-election.

Ben Shapiro may have said it best: the only thing Trump has to do to win is to just shut up and point to the terrible Democrats, but he just can’t seem to do it. And the only thing the Dems have to do to win is to just not be crazy, and they definitely can’t do that.

3. At the risk of triggering Zack Ford and his cocklaphobia – which, I swear to you I am not making this up, means a fear of hats – I’m going to put on my wizard hat and make a few predictions about what is likely to happen on our domestic political front while I am gallivanting about Europe:

• AOC is going to say something hateful about American attempts to protect our borders, or America in general, or both.
• Ilhan Omar is going to say something hateful about the Joooos, and the MSM will perform a cranial-rectal inversion so that they can claim to neither see nor hear her.
• Purple-haired hateful soccer star “What’s-her-name” is going to move into the second and then third week of what should be a remaining lifetime of total obscurity.
• Grandma Squanto is going to remain as white as the love child of Icelandic oddball singer Bjork and Swedish tennis star Bjorn Borg. (And that baby would of course be named Sven Bjork-Borg, or something very close to that.)

(And that baby would STILL look like Yaphet Kotto next to Elizabeth Warren.) #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Finally, I came across an article on the fine website Legal Insurrection that pointed me to a short piece in Esquire, written by someone called Charles Pierce.

Yes, Esquire is a train wreck of a leftist website.  And yes, after reading Pierce’s piece, I now have an answer to the eternal question, “Is it possible for someone to type three paragraphs of absolute tripe while he or she has his or her dress up over his or her hysterical head?” (Spoiler alert: yes.)

Pierce discusses the impact that Trump is having on the judiciary by appointing a raft of conservative judges to every court with an opening.  And despite the third-rate quality of his thinking, he still manages to write one of the most satisfying sentences of 2019 so far:

“The conservative effort to salt the federal judiciary with larval Scalias is devastatingly close to completion.”

First, from your stupid lips to God’s ears, Hawkeye.

Second, “larval Scalias!”  I haven’t felt such a warm contented feeling in my chest since the first wave of morphine hit me in the hospital after my appendix burst.

Third, I would pay any price to attend a concert in which the Meth Gators opened for The Larval Scalias.

Keep your chin up, CO Nation, and I’ll be back from exotic foreign lands before you know it.

And don’t forget: Avenatti/Ford 2020!

I read perhaps the perfect summation of what it means to be a woke leftist in Town Hall last week.  The article is called “Sad Clown: Progressive Reporter Unfriends Old High School Pal Over a MAGA Hat.”

The title pretty much gives the plot away.  But the details are worth savoring.  It seems that a Think Progress reporter (and yes, I read “think” in that title as ironic, too) named Zack Ford is the open-minded leftist who was shocked when he came across a picture on FB of a high school friend of his celebrating Independence Day, with her daughter on her lap.  Worse, she was wearing a MAGA hat.

How does Che McWoke-ington react to that offensive image?

He says, “I really disagree with her political choice, but I’m not the boss of her.  As a committed leftist, I always mind my own business, so I’m going to wish her a happy Fourth, and continue our friendship for the rest of our lives.  The end.”

HA!  I kid.  He did pretty much the opposite of that.

After noting that “she and her family are evangelical Christians,” [Gross!] he explains that they had spoken respectfully in the past, and he had even stayed in her home.  But now she has crossed the line, because wearing that hat “violated this accord deeply.”

Isn’t that the way you discuss differences of opinion with your friends?  In terms of “accords” which must not be “violated”?  “Hey Ribbentrop, your inexcusable wearing of a St. Louis Cardinals hat has broken the social contract between us!  If you don’t apologize and burn that hat immediately, I’ll never speak to you again, or my name isn’t Fred Molotov!” (Yes, that was a timely Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact joke.  You’re not going to get that kind of top shelf humorous reference in your average Stephen Colbert monologue!)(Also, Molotov had a sinister Russian first name that I am not going to waste my valuable time looking up.)(Hence, Fred Molotov.)

Ford next went through a series of oh-so-deep thoughts.  First, “It’s not just a hat.  It’s a symbol of all of the oppression and injustice the Trump administration is responsible for.”  Okay.  That might sound stupid, if it weren’t backed up with a lot of solid evidence.  To wit: “It’s an endorsement of caging kids, banning Muslims, firing trans people… and the fascist military display that graced the National Mall last night.”

Great points, all!

Except that the caged kids pictures were taken when Obama was president, and Trump never banned Muslims, or fired trans people.  And that fascist parade featured two tanks and a couple of military fly-overs (as virtually every national parade and major SEC football game has featured since we figured out how to fly), as well as a non-partisan patriotic speech that even dullards like Ford couldn’t point to as objectionable.

But Ford is not dissuaded by such petty details as these.  No!  He is going to bless his old friend with his wisdom, in a teachable moment: “I explained all of this to my old friend.”  Insert a bunch of insulting smears about how that hat is an offensive symbol of all that is wrong with humanity.  “It’s unacceptable to me to be subjected to that symbol from someone with whom I hypothetically have mutual trust.”

Did you catch that?  Her choice of headwear is not to be accepted!

You may be starting to think that this dope takes himself a wee bit too seriously.  And the beginning of the next paragraph will not dissuade you from that impression: “I gave my friend an ultimatum. I told her I wouldn’t unfriend her so long as she apologized for wearing the hat and promised me I wouldn’t have to see it in my feed again.”

He’s giving his old friend an ultimatum — about her hat!

And the way he threatens to unfriend her suggests that anybody would logically regard that action as tantamount to being eternally damned. “If thou dost not repent of thy sartorial choice, I will cast you into the outer darkness, where my non-friends weep and gnash their teeth.  Thou art become like lukewarm water, which I must spew out of my mouth!”

Lighten up, Edsel.

Unfortunately, his benighted friend was foolish enough to object to his threat.  “When she claimed I was trying to police her beliefs, I corrected her, pointing out that my conditions only regarded the hat, not her position on any particular issue.”  See?  She can still cling to her stupid, deplorable, ungood thoughts – she just can’t wear the hat.

Did she modestly stand corrected and beg his forgiveness?  She did not.  “When she claimed that she’s equally offended by the Pride flag, I corrected her again, explaining that objecting to a symbol of inclusion is in no way comparable to objecting to a symbol of exclusion and that she was making a false equivalency.”

Thank God she has him there to correct all of her stupid wrong thoughts.  Also, FYI, this guy has the lefty buzzwords down pat.  As in, “I’m ‘inclusive’ in the way that I totally refuse to accept your hat, whereas you are ‘exclusive’ when you object to my gay flag.”

This genius goes on, adding a little theological twist: “Anyone reading this is free to wear a MAGA hat, but you can’t both wear a MAGA hat and claim to “love thy neighbor.”  First, thanks for granting us the freedom to choose what we wear.  Second, that sound you heard is not thunder – it’s God, face-palming himself over this guy’s misunderstanding of virtually everything.

“You can’t both wear a MAGA hat and claim to respect me or millions of other Americans.”  Don’t get ahead of yourself, there, Mr. Ford.   NO ONE respects you, and it has nothing to do with their choice of clothing.

As this bonehead is wrapping up his comically pompous screed, you’re probably thinking, “I can’t believe this guy didn’t play the other “greatest hits of leftism” theme: I’m a victim!”

You might want to sit down to read this next part: “My decision today to unfriend this individual was no simple purge; I am significantly emotionally wounded.”

There it is!  If we were playing BINGO on a card full of leftist clichés, Ford just dropped G-4, and Hans Landa just clapped his hands and said, “Oooohh, that’s a BINGO!”

When I first read that, I couldn’t help but think of my dad, who worked for the gas company.  One time when I was a teenager, he came home with his face wrapped in gauze, with holes for his eyes and mouth.  He had been working on a gas service in a ditch beside a house, and he lit his welding torch in a spot where the gas was supposed to have been turned off.  A roiling fireball went up the side of the house, scorching the siding.  My dad had closed his eyes tightly at the moment of the ignition, and he had deep crow’s feet around his eyes for almost two years afterward.  He had to put ointment on his forehead, he had spots in his vision for the next day or so, and my mom had to trim his beard to cut away the hair that had been singed.

He went back to work the next week.

Guess what he said at supper that night?  “I’m significantly emotionally wounded!”

HA!  I kid again.

He actually said that he was thankful to God, that it could have been much worse, that it was his own fault for not double-checking that the gas had dissipated from the ditch, and that he was very lucky to have a beard that protected most of his face.

I had THAT guy as a dad.  Thus I am the well-rounded Renaissance Man you see before you, a working dog, not a show dog, and a contributing member of society.

If Zack Ford somehow manages to have children – and I think the smart money is on “nope” – they are likely to be emotional hemophiliacs who live in a bubble and are allergic to everything.

Anyway, Ford is almost done: “Here was someone with a happy, clean, healthy child on her lap openly praising the man who has torn apart families and won’t even give kids soap. And when asked to choose between a hat that embodies that evil and someone she’s known half her life, she chose the hat.”

Good lord!  I don’t know that woman, but I still know that choosing that hat over this colossal wuss had to be one of the top 5 decisions that she ever made.  Also, she is a saint, if only because she knew Zack Ford for half her life and still managed not to give him the beatdown he so obviously deserves.  I mean, emotionally speaking.

Take it home, All-Knowing Zack: “My final words to her were: ‘Every time you wear the hat, you remember you lost a friendship over it. Every time.’ I know for sure I’ll now think of her every time I see a MAGA hat, and I’ll fear its corrupting power even more than I used to.”

This guy is the purest distillation of everything that is wrong with young leftists; he’s a nauseating combination of arrogance, unearned moral certainty, inflexible judgmentalism and a delusional view of the world and himself.

So… Avenatti/Ford, 2020!

Long-time readers of this column – and if that’s you, God bless you!  You’re the kind of people that this country needs more of – will know that most of the feedback I get is positive.  “You’re a hilarious genius!”  “My IQ goes up every time I read you.” “Your writing has saved my marriage.” “I want to give away my worldly possessions and follow you!”

That kind of thing.

But I do get negative feedback from time to time.  Most of that is the usual leftist repartee.  “You’re a sexist, racist, fascist homophobe,” and other examples of the human equivalent of those great apes whose most cogent response is to throw their scat at anyone who crosses their paths.

But the remainder of the critiques usually boil down to one thing: your pieces are too long!

When I first started hearing that, I dismissed it as the whining of those with a Youtube attention span.  I wondered whether these people would heckle Tolstoy at the local coffee shop.  “Hey, Leo, thanks for War and Peace.  I needed a big heavy door stop at home.  You couldn’t write a novella, just about War?  And then, maybe if that does well, a tight little sequel about Peace?”

Then it occurred to me that I was comparing myself to Tolstoy, whose quill pen I am obviously not fit to carry!  And I remembered that CO and Christopher Silber and many in CO nation regularly write pithy little pieces and responses that succeed like a professional bank robber: they get in, they get out, and nobody gets hurt.

So I’ve resolved to write some occasional shorter pieces, in a sort of “lightning round” format.  Although you may have noticed by now that I’m about 30 sentences into an explanation of how I’m going to write more concisely….  D’oh!

So, the lightning round:

1. Let’s get this out of the way: Elizabeth Warren is as white as Iceland during a snowstorm. #wemustneverstopmockingher

2. I haven’t written anything about journalist Andy Ngo getting assaulted by a bunch of Antifa creeps a couple of weeks ago, mainly because I’m a Christian, and seething with rage and typing obscenities in ALL CAPS doesn’t feel like the most “turn the other cheek” kind of action I could take.

In fact, you know one difference between Christ and me?  (There are a few.)  I don’t think He ever fantasized about coming up behind three masked cowards as they prepared to fracture the skull of an out-numbered little Cambodian-American gay guy, taking a batter’s stance, and knocking each of them unconscious with a Louisville slugger.  And I can’t see Him then gloating, “Oh, He went YAHHHHDDDD with that one!” like the Bear Jew in Inglorious Basterds.  (Also, do we not have rubber bullets anymore?  Is that not a thing in 2019?  If not, I know we have tasers, and those have hilarious results, with the bad guy locking up and then toppling like a redwood onto the concrete.)

3. Did you hear that Leana Wen is out as the head of Planned Parenthood only 10 months after she took over the job? (And if not now, Wen? HA!) Which should surprise no one, because her tenure lasted longer than three trimesters, but that’s never stopped the fine folks at P-squared from dropping the axe. Or scalpel, or scissors, or whatever.  Anyway, sorry about that Wen, but I guess you just weren’t viable.

4. I’ve got to write more later on the idiotic, hate-filled “Squad,” but for now, I’ll just mention the juvenile inanity of that nickname. It’s something that some self-conscious, cliquish and not-too-bright junior high girls would make up for themselves.

First it made me think of The Mod Squad, a tv show whose name I can forgive because it was the late 60s-early 70s, and everything was terrible.  (Plus, a young Peggy Lipton.  Giggity.)  Then it made me think of Suicide Squad, which I can forgive because it was about a bunch of comic book characters, none of whom want to be in congress.  (Plus, a young Margot Robbie.  Giggity giggity.)(I mean, if I had ever noticed her.)(Which I haven’t, since all other women became invisible to me after I met my wife.)(But still, if you put her in those shorts and pigtails, swinging that baseball bat into the mush-filled skulls of some Antifa members, I am so subscribing to that pay-per-view!)

So I refuse to call these anti-American miscreants “the Squad.”  In fact, since they’ve been rhetorically defecating on our country since they arrived in congress, I hope that everyone will start calling them “the Squat.”  You’re welcome.

5. While Trump’s “go back where they came from” comment was ham-handed and ill-advised, IMHO, I do understand (and agree with) the sentiment behind it. Xenophobes do sometimes use some variation of that phrase as a knee-jerk response to even valid criticism. But on the other hand, it speaks to an instinctive – and justified – reaction to people who come from elsewhere and then run down the place they moved to.

When I came to Florida from Illinois to go to grad school, I saw a similar sentiment on various license-plate frames and t-shirts: “We don’t care how y’all did it up north!” Now that I’ve been here for decades, I totally understand.  If everything is so great in New York, why did you move down here?!  Could it be that your leftist policies turned NYC into an open-air asylum where the greedy leftist government taxes you on both inhalations and exhalations?   Hence: Go back where you came from!

6. Finally, I saw a headline that raised my expectations sky high, because it warned of, and I quote, “meth gators.”

My first thought was: great name for a garage band.

My next thought was that some drug dealers have found an amazing new way to protect their stashes.  I’ve always hated (and Cassie the Wonder Dog wholeheartedly agrees) the way that those criminals abuse several big dog species – pitbulls especially, but sometimes Rottweilers or German shepherds – to turn them into vicious sentries.  The idea of using meth gators to keep your rival gangs at bay seemed like a perfect solution!

First, because Gators are not Man’s Best Friend, but soul-less apex predator dinosaurs, so they don’t need to have their sweet and loyal nature perverted to do their work.  Also, the idea of a bunch of violent criminals turning up in emergency rooms and morgues with gator-bite-sized chunks missing from their buttocks, abdomens or faces seems like a leap forward for society.

So imagine my disappointment when I read the story, and learned that is it about a Tennessee police department warning people not to flush drugs, to prevent them getting into the aquifer and creating the titular “meth gators.”  Even more disappointing, scientists discounted that idea, and the only example the department could provide of a “methed-up” animal was – and I am not making this up – “a caged ‘attack squirrel’ who was believed to have been given methamphetamine to keep it aggressive.”

So another dream of mine is dashed.

On the other hand, if we can put some R&D money into creating methed-up attack squirrels with a taste for the flesh of Bloods, Crips, biker gangs  (or – and I’m just running this idea up the ol’ flagpole — Squat members), that would not be the worst use of government funds I’ve ever heard of.

Avenatti/Epstein 2020!

Although I’m enjoying all of the entertaining feuding going on within the Democrat party, and between the Dems and Trump, I have a few thoughts about a story from last week that combines several of the things I hate most in the world: soccer, entitled young adults with ridiculously colored hair, and economic illiteracy.

I am speaking, of course, of the US Women’s soccer victory in the World Series of Soccer, or the Triple Crown, or whatever it’s called.  (If you just spoke out loud the correct name of the competition they won, you should be ashamed of yourself for having so poorly spent your life that you know the name of the Super Bowl of soccer.  We’re all going to be dead relatively soon, and you wasted some of your precious time – time that could have been spent reading a Shakespeare sonnet, or listening to Tom Waits singing, “Martha,” or drinking a chocolate milk shake – following soccer.  Hang your head in shame!)

Early on in their quest for the Stanley Cup – or whatever obscure trinket one “wins” for being good at soccer – the US women’s team was getting a lot of international condemnation for their “ugly American” behavior.  Apparently they beat a few very weak teams lopsidedly, and gloated over each run scored – I’m not up on the details of each game/match/bout/whatever, because each time I started trying to research the details, I fell into a sound sleep.

Most of the time, I’m not one to worry too much about what the international community thinks about American behavior, especially since “ugly Americanism” often means whipping the locals in sports or a world war.  But lefty “citizen of the world” types usually lose sleep over such things, and cannot stand to think that the Belgians or the Wakandans might be turning up their noses at us.  Which might account for why we didn’t hear so much about the US women’s soccer success early on in this year’s tournament/round robin/googly/whatever.

But when it turned out that one of our most prominent players is an anthem-hating, gay, leftist, Trump-despiser, the MSM jumped on the boredom bandwagon and made the Master’s of Soccer the biggest sports story of the year.

So I read a story about this woman, who is named Megan Rapinoe.  She looks like a young Tilda Swinton, with purple hair and a perpetual smirk. My first thought was that this is a youngster in her early 20s, and she is probably going through a phase that she will grow out of.  You know that she went through a goth thing in her sophomore year, and she’s got a few weird piercings, and she calls her step-dad “Brian” just because she knows how much that bugs him.

Then I found out that she was 34 years old!   Good lord!  When I first read her list of grievances, it sounded like a manifesto scrawled in purple ink by a teenager who just discovered Sylvia Plath and Howard Zinn, and finally knows the truth, man.  “Amerikka was founded by old white men to protect their money and to keep down women and people of color and the differently abled.  Also, male football players are paid way more than female soccer players!”

It was this last point – that female soccer players are woefully underpaid compared to their penile-American counterparts — that especially irritated me.  (I’d say “triggered me,” but I’m not a narcissistic undergrad with the mental fragility of a delicate porcelain mouse.) Because the equal pay mantra has been taken up by a lot of lefties, celebrities and MSM empty heads, and it is so dumb that it makes my teeth ache!

Of course, it’s no surprise that leftists don’t generally know much about economics – if they did, many of them wouldn’t be leftists.  (Some still would.  Because if you haven’t been reasoned into a position, you cannot be reasoned out of it.)  And you don’t have to try hard to find recent examples of absolute economic ignorance being spouted by nationally prominent Democrats in recent months:

• Bernie and the other socialists claim that removing the profit motive will produce inexpensive, high quality health insurance for all, with no rationing or wait lists.
• Various Dems think that doubling or tripling the minimum wage would help all unskilled workers, without causing any negative effects at all.
• AOC thinks that if NYC gives Amazon a tax break worth X million dollars, that means that NYC writes a check for that amount to Amazon from taxpayer funds.
• Elizabeth Warren thinks that she’s an Apache princess. (I know, that’s not an example of economic illiteracy at all.  But #wemustneverstopmockingher)

 

I would wager that not 10% of the Congress – and way fewer Dems – could explain even relatively straightforward economic fundamentals such as moral hazard, or the tragedy of the commons, or the Laffer Curve.

But this ain’t that! It’s a little basic supply and demand, and the kind of simple math that even Paul Krugman could do without taking off his shoes.

Rapinoe’s essential point is that the US women soccer team has been more successful than the men, so they should be paid at least the same or more.  She was thrilled that after the victory, many in the crowd chanted “equal pay,” and booed the head of the soccer organization, whoever he is.  She gave an interview calling on the organization to increase women players’ pay, saying, “It’s time to take it forward to the next step. A little public shame never hurt anybody, right? I’m down with the boos.”

She’s basically arguing that the women nag and browbeat the men running things until they cave in and give the carping harpies what they want.

Way to fight those gender stereotypes, Megan!

There are at least two ways to look at this issue, both of which quickly destroy Rapinoe’s position.  I’ll call one the “context-less judgment” test, and the other the “butts-in-seats” test.

The first would involve removing all context – in this case, the gender of the players – and rewarding whoever are the best players with the highest pay.  In other words, have the women’s pro soccer team play the men’s pro soccer team, see who’s better, and pay them accordingly.

A sane person might say, “But men and women are different.  Men are physically bigger and stronger, and they’d destroy the women.  That’s ridiculous.”

And as a fellow sane person, I would agree.  But good leftists like Megan Rapinoe and the Democrats in congress and the MSM could NOT agree. Because they’ve been telling us for years that gender is a social construct, and men and women are NOT different.  This would be a great chance for them to put their money where their genitalia are.

Wait.  That didn’t sound right.  But you know what I mean.

We don’t have to hypothesize who would win such a contest.  Because in 2017 a team of under-15-year-old boys played a scrimmage against the US Women’s Soccer team, and beat them by a score of 5-2.  To be fair, some have pointed out that the women likely didn’t play all-out because they were preparing for a tournament, and didn’t want to risk injury.  Still, do you think an NBA team – even one playing at half-speed, to avoid injuries – could ever come close to losing to some talented teen-age girls?  Or, for that matter, to the best WNBA team?

I don’t mention any of that to denigrate the women’s athletic talent.  But the same principle would hold true in almost every sport.  The best male college (and often, high school) players – in tennis, soccer, basketball, baseball, wrestling, track, golf, etc. – would dominate the best female pro athletes in the world.  Because men and women are different.  (This report brought to you by Commodore Obvious.)

And since those under-15 boys get paid zero dollars, while the US women are paid millions, wouldn’t that mean that the women are wildly over-paid?

No, it wouldn’t.  Because of the “butts-in-seats” test.

In even a quasi- free market economy, pay rates for jobs in sports, entertainment and the arts are based on how many fans pay for the product.  Two bands might put identical amounts of work into creating an album; if one bombs and one’s a hit, the latter is paid way more.  Two actors might work equally hard on two movies; if fans stay away from one movie and see the other one, one actor gets paid way more.

I learned this painful lesson first-hand.  In my late 20s, I wrote 5 novels.  They were competent but not great – I think I’m a better writer now – and I was able to interest two different agents, but the novels ultimately didn’t sell.  I put several thousand hours into them, and earned a total of zero dollars.  At the same time, Stephen King and Tom Clancy also wrote 5 novels each, and they earned millions from theirs.  Because millions of people were willing to buy them.

Did you hear me whining about how unfair life is, or how the publishing world is biased against ruggedly handsome young unknown authors?  Did I try to shame the government into paying me for writing books that nobody wanted to buy?

You did not.  Because I’m not a purple-haired, leftist, gyno-American goon.

In the past year, men’s soccer competitions have raised $6 billion, while women’s games have raised $131 million.  According to my golden abacus, that means that the men’s teams brought in around 45 times as much as the women’s did.  If Rapinoe could put some more butts in seats – and be less of a giant arse in interviews – she would be earning a piece of a much larger pie.

Rapinoe herself seemed to acknowledge the real root of the problem.  When she was being interviewed by cute little guy Rachel Maddow, Rapinoe was asked what fans can do to support the fight for equal pay.  Her answer undercut her entire “blame sexism” argument: “Fans can come to games…. [W]e have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games. You can support that way. You can buy players’ jerseys, you can lend your support in that way. You can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket holders.”

Everything she said was true.  The bottom line is that almost none of us want to watch soccer, and fewer than that want to watch women’s soccer.

I call that an encouraging sign of the health of our culture.

Did you wake up the last several days to find that life seemed emptier, somehow?  That the sun is shining a little less brightly, that food has lost its savor, that your affection for your spouse has dulled a bit?  That my writing seems a little less entertaining or hilarious?

That might be because Eric Swallwell has dropped out of the Democrat presidential race.

But probably not.  Because even Mrs. Swallwell and whatever little Swallwells there may be were not excited about his candidacy.

Don’t despair, though, because as non-entity Swallwell was dropping out, billionaire Tom Steyer was getting into the race.  Which means that the declared Democrat candidate count holds steady at 138,756 candidates.

As I sat and stared into my coffee — wondering how I was going to go on, now that we won’t have Swallwell to kick around anymore — it occurred to me that it might be fun to write a brief political obituary for each of the Democrat candidates, as they begin to drop, one by one.

So here’s the first in what might end up being a series: A fond farewell to Eric Swallwell.

“After an inconsequential career as a Congressman from California, little-known Swallwell shocked the world when he announced his candidacy for the most powerful office in the world.  Or he would have, if anyone in the world had heard anything about it.  He ran an inconsequential campaign, his greatest accomplishment being to remind voters that Joe Biden is very old – a fact which is not exactly as mysterious as the contents of Obama’s college transcripts.  He was not respected, or even noticed, and he will not be missed.”

 

Speaking of leftist pols who would not be missed, I give you Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson.  If you don’t remember her, she’s the African-American loon who always wears ridiculous cowboy pimp hats, and says very dumb things.  (How can you tell her apart from the rest of the Democrats in congress, you ask?  She’s the one wearing the cowboy pimp hat.)  You might remember her from my discussion of the way she bungled her attempt to accuse Trump of bungling a condolence call to an army widow, posted last January.  (You can read that column by going to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and go back to January 13, 2018 in the archives.)

The latest stupid thing she said may be stupider than the stupid things she was saying last January.  She went to a detention center on the border last week, and when a reporter asked her for her thoughts, this is the best she could come up with:  “Those people who are online, making fun of members of Congress, are a disgrace and there is no need for anyone to think that is unacceptable.”

I know that the double-negative rule can be confusing, especially if your 10-gallon hat is cutting off blood flow to your half-gallon brain.  But the rule is that two negatives cancel each other out.  For example, to say “I’m not going to say that Frederica is not a moron,” means, “I’m saying she’s a moron.”

And that’s what I’m saying.

Her statement actually means that there is a need to think that mocking leftist politicians is acceptable.  Which you know is NOT what she meant to say, because it makes perfect sense.

She goes on to say, “We’re going to shut them down and work with whoever it is to shut them down, and they should be prosecuted.”  She’s probably referring to the Federal Department of Shutting People Down.  You don’t know fear until you’ve heard that the FDSPD is on your trail!

“You cannot intimidate members of Congress, threaten members of Congress. It is against the law in this United States of America,” she said.  Notice how she conflates making fun of someone to intimidating and/or threatening them.

I’ve obviously got a dog in this fight, because if mocking leftist politicians was a crime, I’d be eligible for the death penalty.  But it really is amazing to get a glimpse into the “thinking” (if you can call it that) of this leftist politician.

She’s an outlier in terms of her taste in comical headgear, but I fear that she’s not an outlier when it comes to her disdainful attitude toward the voters, and her own exalted position.  She really does think that not only should she not be criticized, but that it should be a crime to criticize her.

On the other hand, I’m glad that she’s in congress, if only because every time Liz Warren sees her, she almost jumps out of her (super-white) skin.  Because there’s nothing that scares a faux Indian like a faux cowboy.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

 

Finally, I’ve got to comment on the way that Old Joe Biden flip flopped yet again, this time on whether Cory Booker is owed an apology.

When Spartacus first slandered Joe as a racist several weeks ago, Joe showed a little fire in the belly; when a reporter asked him if he’d apologize to Booker, Joe said no way, and suggested that Booker should apologize to him.  But as usual, Joe’s firmly held, bedrock conviction withstood the storm of strongly worded mewlings from a bunch of woke scolds for around two weeks, after which he broke down and groveled, apologizing to Booker.

Did Booker respond with class and maturity?

He’s Cory Booker.  So, no.

He started out saying that he always likes to extend grace to others, so he appreciates Biden’s apology.  Then he spent several paragraphs tearing down Biden: Booker is “frustrated that [Biden’s apology] took so long… and he was “hurt” that Biden’s comments were directed at him.  He said, “I’m sorry we went through all this and I’m sorry he tried to shift blame to me. But I’m grateful. I want to say thank you. We need to extend grace to each other.”

We’ve all heard of the “non-apology apology,” wherein somebody says, “I’m sorry if you misunderstood my comments.”  But now Cory Booker has created the “non-acceptance acceptance,” along with the “graceless extension of grace.”

This exchange lowered my opinion of Spartacus – which I would not have thought was possible – and left me with two thoughts.

First, I’ve mentioned before that CNN hack reporter Brian Stelter looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb, and that CNN hack boss Jeff Zucker looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses.  I don’t know how I never noticed it before, but Cory Booker looks like a brown, giant, dishonest human thumb.

Second, he’s becoming so creepy that I’m having to re-think calling myself Martacus.  I originally did that just to mock him, and then I continued doing it because I like the sound of it, and to continue drawing a contrast between someone making a self-referential joke, and a pompous dope like Booker, who meant his self-flattering “Spartacus” label deadly seriously.

But if he continues getting slimier, I may have to come up with another tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandizing name for myself.

So far I’ve only come up with “The Count of Marty Cristo,” but I’m still working on it.

And, oh yes:  Avenatti/Epstein 2020!

In a post on Breitbart, John Nolte argued that this past week was the worst for the Democrats in 47 years, and when the man’s right, he’s right.

He pointed to 9 examples, many of which involve either current economic strengths that the Left has to deny, or the increasingly far-left positions which the Dem candidates are taking to out-flank each other, most of which clash with the positions of the political middle that both parties try to appeal to in a general election.

Nolte also mentioned the way the Left managed to express their contempt for American patriotism – and on Independence Day, to boot!  First, there was Nike’s idiotic decision to accept Colin Kapernick’s objection to the Betsy Ross flag and pull a line of patriotism-themed shoes.

Sidebar, because I have to get this off my chest:  Kapernick was a talented quarterback, and entertaining to watch, for about a season and a half.  Then he had an injury, and his performance deteriorated, and he was benched.  Then he became a woke racial arsonist and a secular leftist saint, and suddenly everyone – or at least everyone who doesn’t know anything about football – is acting like he is a great quarterback, suffering for his political opinion.

To the contrary, he’s a mediocre quarterback, and he lost his starting position because he played badly.  And as a political thinker, he’s … a mediocre quarterback.  Every statement he’s made over the last 3 years is grounds for performing a concussion protocol on him, and all of his political insight rolled together wouldn’t fill the thimble that Betsy Ross used when she was sewing the flag of a great nation!

Not satisfied with having wiped their posteriors with the Betsy Ross flag, the Leftist elite thought they’d do the same thing with the 50-stars version on the Fourth of July.  They objected to a DC parade, and to our jets doing a flyover, and to tanks, because military participation in a parade is something only evil fascists would stoop to.  (Cut to 37 hours of video footage of military parades under FDR and Truman and Ike, not to mention a sweet little missile-palooza passing in front of JFK.)  They compared the 4^th festivities to military parades from the kind of totalitarian leftist regimes they now pretend to dislike, such as the USSR and Porky Nork’s and the Chi Coms.  They said that no one was going to show up, and that Trump’s speech was going to be a partisan screed.

And then the crowds were big, and the flyovers were cool, and there were 2 tanks, and Trump’s speech did not attack Dems and was pro-American, and the pop music was terrible but the fireworks were great. And regular people enjoyed it.

In retrospect, all of the dire, leftist warnings before the Fourth now look sour, petty and ridiculous.  The same way that Paul Krugman’s election-night prediction that the stock market would plunge and never recover under Trump now looks ridiculous.  And Hillary’s CAW CAW CAWing about how Trump wouldn’t accept the results of the election now looks ridiculous.  And the Democrats’ Jeremiads about how Trump’s election would immediately lead to Holocaust 2 and World War 3 now look ridiculous.  And Snow White Warren’s pretending to be a Choctaw now looks ridiculous.

I know, that last one has nothing to do with Trump.  But #wemustneverstopmockingher.

The Dems’ collective self-inflicted rake-stomping injuries during the Fourth makes that Dem hack who brought the ceramic chicken to a House hearing look like King Solomon.  They’ve found a way to combine the worst aspects of the Chicken Little story with the worst aspects of the Boy Who Cried Wolf story, all wrapped up in the blind narcissism from the Emperor’s New Clothes story.

They’ve become the Naked Ceramic Chicken Who Cried Wolf!

Okay, that sounded better in my head that it looks written down.

Moving on…

Nolte also pointed out the self-destructive way that Joe Biden, after posing as the one sane Democrat of 2019, flip flopped and went far left on every reasonable position he ever had, from taxpayers being forced to pay for late-term abortions, to raising taxes on everyone to ending the deportation of illegals.  That Biden was ever seen as “the sane one” in the first place is a damning indictment of the Dem presidential field.

But Nolte’s column suffered the same fate as any column on Biden’s gaffes is destined to: by the time it appeared, it was already outdated.  Because Plugs McGaffe-Master was at work on brand new, mortifying mistakes.

On Friday, for example, Biden gave an interview with Chris “block of petrified wood” Cuomo, during which he lambasted Putin’s election interference attempts all over the world, including in Europe, and specifically in Hungary and Poland.   He ended that paragraph with this quote, which I swear I am not making up: “You think that would happen on my watch or Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t.”

Um….  Joe, your entire party has been outraged FOR TWO SOLID YEARS about the way that Putin interfered with our very own election in the EXACT way you just described.  And do you know when they have been saying that this happened?

In 2015 and 2016, Joe.  Do you remember what we call that dark period in our mist-enshrouded, distant past?  YOUR WATCH!!  (Cue Sam Kinison: OH! OHHHH!)

Ugh.  But that’s not the most enjoyable Biden gaffe of the last several days, IMHO.  In fact, it’s not even his best gaffe of Friday!

Nope.  That would be when Biden accidentally referred to little-known sweaty hack candidate Julian Castro as “Julio.”  Thus setting off a scalded-dog howl from woke scolds everywhere that Biden is a racist old white guy who can’t tell one Hispanic-named non-entity from another.

As odd as it is to say, I’m on Joe’s side on this one.  You may remember Simpson’s Law of Stupid Spellings, which states that none of us are bound to mis-pronounce the idiotically spelled names of others.  (For example, must we call Brett “Favre” Brett “Farve?” We must not.  Similarly, must we refer to Obama’s former flunky “Jeh Johnson” as “Jay?” No weh.)

So along comes Julian Castro, and he wants his name to be pronounced “Hoo-lian.”

I don’t think so.  Did “hoo-lius Caesar” give us the “hoo-lian” calendar?  Do we celebrate our independence on the “Fourth of Hoo-ly?”  Did Shakespeare write about Romeo and Hoo-liette?  Would Batman ever have been tempted by the feline charms of “Hoo-lie Newmar” as Catwoman?  No, no, no and don’t be ridiculous!

I’m sure that in Joe Biden’s old, cobwebby, low-functioning brain, he registered that Castro has a Hispanic-sounding first name, and the feeble, intermittent sparking in what passes for his synapses spit out the little ditty about “Me and Julio down by the schoolyard.”  Thus, “Julio” Castro.

In the spirit of bipartisan compromise, I would give Mr. Castro “Julio” if that were his name, because it’s a Hispanic name without an equivalent English pronunciation.  But “Julian” has a recognized English pronunciation, and the unifying language of the country for whose highest office he is running is English.

But I’m still willing to meet him halfway.  I’ll agree to a pronunciation of his first name that differs from its spelling, if he’ll agree to allow me to choose the most fitting non-literal pronunciation: “Fidel.”

 

Finally, let’s turn from the laughable antics of our home-grown lefty clowns to the laughable antics of lefty clowns in Belgium.

You may have read about the way that many Europeans have been inviting huge numbers of mostly uneducated, low-skilled immigrants – most of them from Muslim-ruled countries – to pour into their countries in recent years.  Shockingly, things have not gone so well, what with lawless “no go” zones in Paris, and crime rates against women and gays skyrocketing, and reinvigorated anti-Semitism everywhere.  Plus some truck bombs, and some train bombs, and some cartoonists getting murdered here and there.

As in the States, many of the elites pushing the hardest for open borders just happen to live in walled, gated, wealthy and protected neighborhoods.  But one young Belgian woman named Ameline (possibly pronounced “Hoo-lian.”) deserves more credit, because she was willing to put her Euros where her big mouth was.  She lives in a Belgian village with the cool/weird name of Spy, and about a year ago she began inviting immigrants to set up camp on her own property.  Before you know it, word got around in the migrant squatter community, and she soon had around 100 migrants living in tents on her property.

When I first read about this story earlier this year, I decided to do some prognosticating.  So I opened the well-lit, climate-controlled cabinet where I keep my extensive hat collection, and I pulled out my tax-deductible wizard hat.  I sat down at my desk, put it on, and wrote down a few predictions.

The power of the wizard hat is such that I spontaneously made a couple of predictions on other topics before I could focus on Ameline/Hoolian.  (I predicted that after receiving an initial media tongue-bath, Beta o’Rourke would become a skateboarding laughingstock, and that the Mueller report would make the Democrat leadership look dumber than the Skateboarding Doofus.)(Done and done.)

Then I predicted that Ameline’s utopian experiment would end badly.

For a while, it looked like the mighty wizard hat might have faltered.  Breitbart posted a story about her in April, which initially sounded like she was sticking to her guns.  The story referred to some neighbors who were upset, and mentioned that Ameline had tried to placate them by moving some of the migrant tents a short distance.  When the local police said that they might try to forcibly move some migrant tents out of the area, Ameline sounded like a smarter Belgian AOC:  “I respect the work of the police and the commune. If they come, they come but not on my private land! That’s for sure!”

But as I read between the lines, it sounded like this Belgian might be beginning to waffle.  (HA!)  At one point the story noted that Ameline and her family had been feeding and cleaning for the migrants, but quoted her as saying, “We try to do our best … but it’s not easy for us, we are starting to become exhausted.”

Fast forward three months, to last Friday, and Breitbart did a follow-up story, entitled, “Woman Who Invited Migrants to Camp In Her Garden Now Demands They Leave.”

The details are about what you’d expect, if you were wearing a magnificent wizard hat like mine:  There were “incidents of aggression and violence.”  The situation deteriorated until the family “stopped all aid to the migrants,” citing alcohol and violence and the statement that, “We did not feel safe anymore.”

If only other countries who are considering opening their borders to millions of unvetted migrants could hear this story, and learn its crucial lesson: Respect the Wizard Hat!