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In part 1 I discussed the fine dining and fine wine aspects of the COSMIC II gathering in Denver.  But as I mentioned, we also had some very fine conversation.  As I recount some of those conversations, please remember that as the evening went on, I had an appropriately celebratory amount of wine, and so I may be a little fuzzy on a few of the details.

Also, I’m not a creepy, amoral rat like Michael Cohen, and thus did not have a tape recorder secreted on my person.  So what follows are my paraphrased recollections, rather than a verbatim transcript.

During dinner, CO himself made a short speech about the site, and how it started as mostly a happy accident, and his subsequent plan for building a culture at the site that would be collegial and respectful and smart.  He talked about how Ari Rodriguez was one of the first respondents with whom he had a lot of exchanges, and who was thus an early and encouraging sign of the kind of vibe he was looking to create at the site.

He also thanked the lovely and gracious Laura Belveal (the COSE) for her deft editing and organizational skills, and the crucial role she has played in maintaining high standards on the site.

Ari Rodriguez made some heartfelt and moving comments on what the CO site has meant to him.  He talked about being a bit of a troll in the past, and hitting critics hard, and said that CO’s rules really challenged him, and helped him to grow as a contributor.  It was interesting to hear that, because Ari has struck me as a civil and well-mannered commentator; I sort of wish I’d seen some of his early trolling, just because I appreciate some rough elbows thrown at some deserving targets.  (As you may have noticed, I am not as mature as Ari, or many of the other CO denizens, either.)

Don Deere also had some eloquent things to say about the site and the sense of camaraderie that he’s found there.  Laura then made some sweet and gracious comments, some of which would have made me tear up a bit, if I weren’t as tough as a two-dollar steak.

I sat between Laura and Christopher Silber, whom you may know from his erudite pieces on various economic issues.  He is also a sparkling conversationalist, and while I exhausted all of my knowledge of economics – which took about 3 minutes, tops – I learned a lot from listening to him.  He lives in San Francisco, so of course my first thought was: how’s the poop-in-the-streets situation near your place?  Thankfully he lives in a pretty much poop-free neighborhood, so he’s got that going for him.

I said a few words myself, focusing on how much I’ve appreciated CO and the site, as an amiable virtual community amongst the ocean of bile that the internet can so often be, and – on a personal note – as a forum for my rants and tomfoolery.  I work in a very politically correct field, and thus have to bite my tongue pretty much all the time.  So it’s been a great blessing to be able to let go with some rambling, often free associating, cathartic rants, and to get mostly positive responses.

After dinner, we went up to a kind of lounge in the hotel.  Christopher Silber had brought two very good bottles of wine, and we uncorked and shared those, as we talked for several more hours.  The only drawback was that there were too many interesting people, and not enough time to spend with all of them.  I talked for a while with Ari and his wife Mona, and Don and his wife Jody, and appreciated the fact that both wives – like my own, and like CO’s wonderful wife – are mostly a-political, and yet encourage and/or indulge their husbands to participate on the CO site.   The clear consensus was that all of us guys have married up.

At one point in the evening, when CO was temporarily out of the room, his sister offered to share some secrets of his earlier life.  But then she mysteriously passed out with a small dart in her neck; when I whirled to see CO coming into the room, he appeared to be replacing a small blow gun in his vest pocket.  So his origin story remains shrouded in mystery.  Hopefully we will learn more in future COSMIC get-togethers.

As the end of the evening, Christopher graciously agreed to give me a ride back to my car, which gave us the chance to chat a little more.

All in all, the event was a lot of fun, partly because of how easy it would be for such a gathering to go wrong.  What if people don’t get along?  What if they aren’t as collegial and fun as they seem on the site?  What if my smart-assery isn’t as easy to take in person as it is online?  What if there isn’t enough wine?

Thankfully, none of those worries proved true, and a good time was had by all.

A common theme of the evening was what a sweet little miracle it is to have a site that has drawn such an eclectic bunch of people from all over the country.  All of us look forward to reading and contributing to the site, and we’ve made real friends there.  So it was such a great experience to meet some of them in real life, and a relief to find that they are all the kind of good eggs that you’d expect from their writing on the site.

As CO and Laura plan future gatherings, I hope that I’m able to attend, and I hope that more of you will be able to, too.

And, in that glorious reunion, will we find the time to mock Elizabeth Warren?

Abso-freakin’-lutely we will.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Last week, ex-president Obama crammed a month’s worth of hypocrisy into one speech, this time to the beleaguered people of South Africa.  It is true that they cheered his feckless inanity, but in their defense, look what life experience they have to compare it to: the Boer War, vicious oppression under apartheid, and “necklacing” (being wrapped in tires and then lit afire) by Winnie Mandela.   Compared to that, how bad can one speech by an entitled, self-satisfied politician be?

That was a rhetorical question.

The rhetorical answer?  Pretty bad.

My instinct is to want to give Obama a break, since it’s got to be tough to watch your legacy systematically dismantled by an orange cartoon character whom you thought had no chance of following you into an office that you felt was beneath you but way above him.

But even for Obama, this speech was insufferable.   Adopting his bemused, incredulous lecturer rhythms, he condemned – of all things – dishonest politicians.  If you haven’t seen it you should watch it, because flat words on a screen don’t do his smarmy delivery justice.

But here are his words: “We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where (sic) they’re caught in a lie, and they just double down, and they lie some more!”

Can you imagine that?  (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”)  A politician so clueless and lacking in honesty, (“If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.”) that he lies repeatedly (“There’s not even a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.”), and when he gets caught (“I’m not a king, I can’t just legalize people who come to this country illegally. That is not how our system works.”), he has the gall to lie again (“We’re going to spend this trillion dollars on shovel ready jobs.”)

Why, that’s unprecedented!

Obama also waxed eloquent on that favorite leftist topic, wealth inequality.  Quoth the maven:  “I’m actually surprised by how much money I got (sic)….  There’s only so much you can eat.”  (He said, before a dinner consisting of an expired can of pork and beans and cold ramen washed down with contaminated river water.)  “There’s only so big a house you can have.”  (He said, thinking about the one-room tar-paper shack where he and the Scowling Wookie™ cook over a dung fire and do just fine without electricity and running water.)   “There’s only so many nice trips you can take.”  (He said, from his front steps in Chicago, because he can’t afford to travel to the other side of the world and stay in posh hotel suites where he is entertained by colorful local dancers, and takes selfies with an endangered lavender rhinoceros while hammering checks from gullible leftist dopes.)

I can’t tell you how glad I am that that man is no longer president.

Speaking of glad, how about that boffo movie opening for Rob Reiner’s “Shock and Awe,” a conservative-bashing piece of tripe directed by Reiner and starring some big name actors.  And also Rob Reiner.

Described as “embarrassing” and a “disappointment,” Meathead’s magnum d’oh-pus (boom!) managed to bring in only $41K in its opening weekend.  Its Rotten Tomatoes audience score was 29%.  For comparison, here are some audience scores for other movies, none of which I am making up:

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984):  65%

Ishtar (1987): 37%

Waterworld (1995):  43%

My Aunt Donna’s home movies of her 2002 trip to Branson, Mo (2002) (15 minutes of which featured the floor of her minivan, shot when she thought that the camera was turned off):  30%

Okay, that last one was made up.  But once again, a leftist windbag makes an awful propaganda piece and gets smoked at the box office.

Compare that outcome to the one that will greet a documentary that I am currently working on.  My subject will be election night 2016, and I’ve got never-before-scenes footage of Hillary and her team as the shocking election results come in.

So be on the lookout for “Shock and CAW,” opening this fall.

 

In other movie news, Scarlet Johansson was looking forward to playing the lead role in a biopic about the life of Dante “Tex” Gill.

I know what you are thinking:  Is that the Tex Gill who brought law and order to the old West as a straight-shooting Texas Ranger in the late 19^th century?  Or is it Tex Gill, the tough-as-nails blocking back who opened big holes in the interior line for Emmitt Smith during the late 90s Dallas Cowboy’s championship run?

No, it is neither of those people whom I just made up.  It is the Tex Gill who was born Lois Jean Gill, but who – through a commitment to gender confusion and a greedy desire to exploit other women – identified as a male and went on to a career in the fast-paced world of pimpdom, eventually becoming a crime boss who ran a prostitution ring in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and 80s.

Because that’s who we make movies about today.

Johansson ran into a storm of criticism, and no, it did not involve why she would want to play a misogynistic, mentally ill pimp in what is sure to be a steaming pile of Pelosi called “Rub and Tug.”

It was about the fact that, according to many lefty believers in identity politics, it is a terrible thing for a woman to play a woman who identified as a man in a film.  Because that would be inauthentic, and it would take a role away from one of the hordes of transgendered actors who are currently working at Starbucks because Scarlet Johansson is hogging all of the great transgendered pimp roles out there.

Leaving aside the ridiculous gender politics – and oh how I wish that we could all do that for the rest of my life! – think about what these knuckleheads are objecting to: an actor was going to play a character that was different from what that actor is like in real life.

In other news, it turns out that Russell Crowe, who played a Roman Gladiator in the movie “Gladiator” is neither Roman nor a gladiator!  And Charlize Theron, who played unattractive serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the film “Monster” is actually quite attractive, and has not killed even a single person.   And guess what else?  When Bruce Willis played a dead guy in “The Sixth Sense,” he was – hold onto your hat, because I’ve done my research – ALIVE!

And don’t even get me started on Elizabeth Warren, who has played a Native American while being as white as a Scottish highland dancing competition in Finland during the Winter Solstice.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Anyway, we can all stop rending our gender-nonconforming garments, because Johansson has bowed to pressure from the BCA (Binary Crybullies of America) and pulled out (no offense) of the film project.  So… crisis averted, I guess?

 

Finally, it has fallen to me to be the brave soul to ask the question that has been on all of our minds lately: what is it with the left and feces?

As discussed in earlier columns, lefty San Francisco is battling a Rising Tide of Human Waste (worst-selling Tom Clancy book ever, by the way), to the point where there is now a handy Poop Map App (worst-selling Dr. Suess book ever) to help you negotiate your way across town.  The mayor of San Fran (from guess which party?) has started an “education” campaign to try to get her voting base to stop defecating in public.  When asked if she was thinking of implementing any punishment for those who use her city as a toilet, she said (and I am not making this up), “I didn’t express anything about a penalty.”

Of course you didn’t.

But now, in a bid to take part in the Great Leftist Bowel Movement, open-minded progressives in the Boyle Heights area of LA found a fun way to respond to a new business opening in their neighborhood.  It turns out that the Asher Café and Lounge is owned by a legal immigrant (Boo!) from Israel (BOO!) who supports Trump (BOO!!!).  So when he recently had a grand opening for his café, the local lefties engaged him in a respectful but bracing dialogue about their political differences.

HA!  I kid!  They actually put on masks, screamed at and accosted his customers, and threw human waste on his windows.  And then celebrated their great victory on social media.

Lest you think that this was a one-off event – or, I guess, a #2 off (boom!) – if you google the story, you’ll find references to reports that the Defend Boyle Heights group used “similarly aggressive tactics against another coffee shop in the area last year and against an art gallery nearby that eventually shuttered.”

That’s right.  When entrepreneurs try to bring leftists some artisanal coffee, they skip right past the cream and put poop in it.  When a gallery owner tries to bring art to them, they throw poop on it.

This is why you can’t have nice things, lefties.   This, right here.

I’m going to end this column by bringing together our two themes – art and human waste – in a way that you will not see done anywhere on the internet other than the CO site.

In his immortal work of literature The Divine Comedy, the great late-medieval poet Dante (see, you did not see this allusion coming, did you?) devised devilishly appropriate torments for the people that he thought would be going to the Inferno in the afterlife.  In what I’ve always seen as a stroke of genius – I thought so when I first read it as an immature 16-year-old, and still think so today, as an immature elderly gentleman – Dante consigned flatterers to their own fitting torment.

Demons suspend them by their ankles over a trough of excrement.  The demons repeatedly lower them into the vile quasi-liquid, and then pull them back up, allowing them just enough time to sputter and gasp for breath, before dunking them again.   The implication was that people who talked s**t during their lives, would have their mouths full of it in the afterlife.

But that was an insightful rhetorical trope, used to great effect by a great writer, and meant to suggest what happens to people in hell.

By contrast, today’s lefties – knowing Dante only (possibly) as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – want to employ this hellish political tactic in LA, and San Francisco, and every city they govern.

Just as we feel pity for those in Dante’s Inferno, we should feel sorry for the poor protesting souls on the left.  We’re far from perfect, and we’ve got some obnoxious folks on our side too.  But for the most part, we try to engage the left with facts, and we quote Hayek and Krauthammer, and we draw examples from history, and cite economic statistics, and appeal to logic.

And they poop in their hands, and they throw it at us.

Well done, leftists.

For the rest of us, if there isn’t a blue wave in November, I think we’ll all be bracing for a brown wave in 2019.

After a day of travel back home from Denver, and another day back in the office to re-acclimate to real life, I thought I’d share my experience at the gathering of CO-conspirators at COSMIC II.

I realize that doing this carries some risks.  Because the vast majority of the CO nation was not there, and will likely be wracked by pangs of jealousy over what they missed.  It’s like that time in college, when you were out at some dive bar in the suburbs with your buddies, and you called it an early night, leaving the bar right before the Stones showed up to play a 12-song tune-up for their US tour that was about to start.

Or the time you were set up on a blind date, and when she was 10 minutes late you left, thinking you’d been stood up, and the next day your friend the waitress said that some girl showed up looking for you, and she looked just like 1983 Rebecca De Mornay, when she was in Risky Business, in that scene on the empty train car.

My point is that it was really a great time, and don’t hate we few… we happy few… we band of brothers… For he (or she, no offense) that Saturday ate some great food with us shall be our brothers (or sisters, no offense)!  Be they ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle their condition!  And COers in America now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not in Denver, and hold their manhoods cheap (or womanhoods, no offense) whilst any speaks that drank with us… upon COSMIC II Day!

See?  You’re terribly jealous.  But at the risk of making things worse, I have a few thoughts…

Meeting everyone for the first time was made even sweeter for me because I’d spent the three previous day with my cousin, who is like a brother to me.  A sarcastic, pain-in-the-arse brother.  I flew to Denver on Wednesday, and he drove his Harley for three days from Illinois, reaching Denver that same evening.  When he planned that excursion, he had no way of knowing that it would be over 100 degrees for all three days of his ride through some of the most featureless landscape this side of the Sea of Tranquility.  But with hog farms.

He and I spent several days driving around Colorado, doing a little hiking, and seeing Breckenridge, Vail, and Aspen, and half a dozen small towns in between.  We rode through an amazing stretch of beautiful canyons around Glenwood Springs, and we hiked up a hill to a small cemetery we found, to see Doc Holliday’s grave.  Then we returned to Denver on Saturday, and he went to hang out with an old friend of his in town, while I went to Cosmic II.

One last necessary detail: my cousin Darryll may well be the most caustically sarcastic human on the planet.   To give you an idea, at my world-class, much-loved dad’s funeral in December of 2014, the cousins were sitting around after the service making small talk.  In an offhand comment, I said that I always thought that if I could have one wish, I’d love to be able to make a head-over-heels tumbling run down an aisle in a crowded building, and nail the landing flawlessly.  (You had to be there, and I’m sure that it made perfect sense at the time.)

My cousin looks at me without missing a beat, and says, “Gee, if you only had one wish, I would have thought that it would be that your dad hadn’t died.”

Total, horrified silence around the table for a long beat, then a storm of laughter.  All I could choke out was, “Too soon, you idiot!”

I did get him back though.  When his mother, my beloved Aunt Donna (whom I wrote about in March, if you want to go to the archives at Martinsimpsonwriting.com) died, I went home to be a pallbearer.  After the service and before the ride to the cemetery, a line of folks passed the casket and comforted my cousins.  By the time I got to him, Darryll had been weeping openly for a few minutes — for those of us males raised in the Midwest this is a very rare thing, unless the broken femur is severe enough that the bone is sticking through the skin.

I teared up too, and when I got to him, he gave me a bear hug, and I whispered in his ear, “You are making a total ass of yourself!  Man up!”

Good times.

Okay, I said all of that to say this:  going from three days with my hyper-critical, much-loved jackass of a cousin into the company of the merry band of COers threatened to give me the bends.  Because they are all so warm, and generous and big-hearted and welcoming that the change in atmosphere made me dizzy.

I may also have been dizzy because I spent 15 minutes wandering lost around the streets of Denver.  My freaking GPS in the phone got me downtown, to within .3 of a mile from my destination, when it lost service.  So I saw a surface lot and pulled in to park immediately, thinking that I could surely find my bearings on foot.

Cut to 5 minutes later, after I’ve wandered in circles – and rhombuses, and trapezoids, I think — and been reduced to asking a homeless guy for directions.  He explained that I had to walk toward the sun until I saw a blue sign.  He couldn’t tell me what the sign would say, but I’d know it when I saw it.  And he warned me that Trump had drones in the air over downtown, and they could read my thoughts, and he was going to surrender our country to Putin within 3 days, and they were going to come for anyone who is not in the top 1%, and put us in camps.  (Interesting side note: only this afternoon, when I saw some of the hysterical coverage of Trump’s Helsinki press conference, did I recognize that that homeless man was actually MSNBC spokes-lunatic Lawrence O’Donnell.  True story.)

Anyway, I’m wandering around hearing my cousin’s voice in my head (“Way to go Magellan!  The phone takes you to within .3 of a mile, and you’re going to end up wandering in the desert for 40 years!”) I   finally gave up on my dream of making a positive first impression, and called lovely and gracious Coloradoan Laura Belveal (the COSE, to those of you with a scorecard at home).  Unfortunately, Laura is not a Denverian.  (Denver-ite?) So this is how our conversation went:

Me: “I’m at 20^th and Lincoln.  How do I get to you?”

Laura: “I don’t know Denver.   We’re at 17^th.”

Me: “20 is three more than 17.”

Laura: “I know.”

Me: “But which way?”
Laura: “Can you see what the next street is?”

Me: “I see big buildings.  And cars.  And the TIAA building.”

Laura (talking to me very slowly): “I don’t know Denver.

Me: “Well, it has a big TIAA building, I can tell you that.”

Laura (now talking to me like Tom Cruise did to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man): “Can you call an Uber?”

Me:  “I’m a very good driver.  A good driver.”

Laura: “I’m sure you are.  Why don’t you call—”

Me: “Hey, listen, I think Lawrence O’Donnell is about to relieve himself on the sidewalk right next to me, so I’m going to start walking up Lincoln until I see if the cross streets go up or down.”

Long story short – I know, TOO LATE! – I found Laura at the restaurant, and she was as sweet as she is on the site, and she took me over to the building where the COers had gathered for pre-dinner drinks in a very cool rooftop bar.  (It gave such a panoramic view of the city that I could even see the TIAA building from there!)

I think most of the gang had known I was coming, but Laura and the COW had kept it a secret from CO.  I had been a little intimidated to walk into a group of strangers, but the vibe was so welcoming that all of that dropped away immediately.  I talked with CO for a while, and he was just as you’d expect: intimidatingly smart, but very friendly.  Though he didn’t refer to himself in the third person, which threw me for a while.

We all went to the restaurant, where we had a reserved room with our own waitstaff, and even a seating chart that Laura (and maybe the COW too?) had come up with.  The food was great, especially for someone with an uneducated palate like mine.  All I know is that white wine goes with fish, and red wine goes with meat, and chocolate milk shakes go with everything.  But I had some red wine that went great with an amazing salmon dish, so go figure.

And yes, there was crème brulee.  Which shocked me, because I had always thought that Crème Brulee was a piping hot Italian actress from the late 60s – I swear I saw a skinny dipping scene that she was in with Sophia Loren that left quite an impression.  But it turns out that it is a dessert. A dessert that, luckily for me, goes well with red wine.

Not that I had too much wine, necessarily.  But I’m not used to a waitstaff of any kind, let alone one who refills your glass with Ninja-like stealth.  And I was nervous to meet so many smart people, and you know the old cliché: Feed a cold, starve a fever, and drink a lot of wine when you’re nervous.

Then several people said some complimentary things about my writing.  And you know the old codicil to the old cliché: Drink more wine when you’re happy.

But beyond the great food and the great atmosphere, was the great conversation.

Some of which I will share with you in Part 2…

It’s been a good news/bad news kind of week.  But fortunately, most of the bad news has been happening to people who deserve it.

First up, it was a bad week for some poachers in South Africa.  At a sprawling private ranch called the Sibuya Game Preserve (and by the way, if you haven’t heard Sibuya’s duet with Beyonce, you really owe it to yourself to give it a listen), the owners have been plagued by poachers illegally killing game.  But last week, the lions got on the board.

In a story reported on Hot Air, Sibuya staff “came upon convincing evidence that at least three poachers had sneaked into the sprawling preserve to kill wildlife illegally.”

What kind of evidence, you ask?  In addition to various guns and ammo, the staff – who, judging from the following quotes, should be granted honorary Texas citizenship immediately – “found three pairs of mostly empty shoes and assorted human body parts.”

Mostly empty shoes?!  I’m thinking: foot with calf attached in one, foot by itself in another, and three toes in yet another.  And the other little piggies went “wee, wee, wee, all the way home.”

If by “home” you mean “into the belly of a lion.”

You go, lions!

 

Speaking of Texans, you might have missed the story of the Dallas carjacker who picked the wrong woman to mess with.  A Dallas African-American mother named Michelle Booker-Hicks parked her SUV  at a gas station and went inside.  Local criminal genius Ricky Wright, 36, jumped into the SUV and tried to steal it.  Booker-Hick’s two kids – 2 and 4 – were in the back seat, so she jumped in with him.

According to a Dallas Morning News story – which I am currently having laminated and intend to hang on my new office wall — “She told the man her children were in the back seat and to pull over, but he didn’t listen.”

You know how women can sometimes get irritated when a man doesn’t listen?  So does the Dallas Morning News, which continues, “When the man didn’t stop, she pulled a gun from the glove box and shot him in the head, police said.  The vehicle then crashed into a utility pole.”

I’ll bet it did.

In an interview with a local tv station, Booker-Hicks said, “”I should have just have emptied the whole clip but I didn’t. I didn’t. I just wanted to give him a warning shot.”

I love this woman! In case you’ve forgotten, she shot him IN THE HEAD!  Where do you think she would have shot him if he hadn’t heeded her subtle warning?

Quick question from the Texas citizenship test (which I am just now making up):  When being victimized by a criminal, where should you fire a warning shot?

1. Guns are barbaric. I would use a combination of sweet reason and stern language.
2. Into the air.
3. Into the criminal’s head.

Answer key:  If you chose A, you fail.  Go back to your blue state and continue to ruin it.  If you chose B, you’re on the right track.  But is a shot that doesn’t hit someone really a “warning?”  If you chose C, welcome to Texas.

Addendum: Wright’s head is apparently as full of cement as you might have guessed, because he survived being shot in the head, and is currently facing several charges.

 

It was also a bad week for the bonehead censors at Facebook.  Though they often can’t be bothered to delete any vile, slanderous material posted by BLM or Occupy Wall Street or the DNC, they are really on top of dangerous “right wing” posts.  So when a Texas newspaper posted a morally questionable, offensive document, the censors leapt into action, labeling it “hate speech” and taking it down.

The bad news: that document was an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence!  Perhaps the greatest written document of all time – my marriage certificate, my daughters’ birth certificates, and the Gutenberg Bible are other leading contenders – apparently triggered the censors.

Granted, the offensive portion had the phrase “merciless Indian savages” in it.  But the Founders can be defended on several grounds for that line:

1.It was the 18^th century, a time when speech about all ethnic groups featured a few more rough elbows.  In fact, two centuries later, when a young me was in 3^rd grade, I remember watching commercials for a popular snack food that featured a little ditty about “the Frito Bandito.”  If you haven’t seen that, go to Youtube immediately.  I’ll wait.

See what I mean?  The sombrero, the six guns, the accent.  The reliance on theft of snacks as a lifestyle choice of the Mexican community.  And that was the 1970s, not the 1770s!

2. Did you hear what some of those tribes were getting up to in the 18^th century? There was plenty of mercilessness and savagery to go around on the frontier.  #notallIndians

Facebook did manage an apology on July third, and it started out with the words, “It looks like we made a mistake…”

Ya think?

 

Speaking of merciless non-savages, Liz Warren also had a rough week.  In his speech in Montana, Trump called her out yet again, offering to pay a charity of her choice $1 million if she’ll take a DNA test and it shows any Indian ancestry.  Warren offered some lame comeback, the gist of which was she doesn’t need no stinking DNA test.

Dad joke trigger warning alert.  3….2….1.

Apparently she has reservations about the whole project.  Boom!  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

In the only truly bad news example from today’s list, a lot of patriotic Americans (and maybe some America-loving foreigners, too) had their Fourth of July trip to the Statue of Liberty ruined by a narcissistic leftist virtue-signaler who climbed the statue as part of an anti-Trump protest.

Theresa Okoumou immigrated here from the Congo at least a decade ago, and to show her gratitude to her adopted home, has a long history of protesting how awful America is.  In response to her stunt, NYPD staged a mass evacuation of Liberty Island, screwing up the plans of hundreds of people who wanted to visit the statue on the Fourth.

This story might explain some of the quality of life differences between NYC and Texas.  When the cops first got up to her, according to a NY Post story, “We started engaging in a dialogue of why she was up there,” said ESU cop Brian Glacken, one of two officers who ascended the ladder. “She was basically up there about the children in Texas. At first she wasn’t friendly with us, but we took our time to get a dialogue with her, to get her to trust us. That took a while.”

Now, picture that happening in Texas: Congolese malcontent climbs onto the Alamo and starts protesting.  Texas Ranger shows up.  Passersby ask the Ranger, “Are you going to close the Alamo for the day while you establish a friendly dialogue with her?”

As he pulls his six-shooter from the holster, he says, “No ma’am.  I’m going to open the dialogue in the traditional Texas way.”

“You mean, with a warning shot to the head?”
“Yep.”

The ungrateful Congolese jerk jumps to the ground, and sprints to the nearest bus station to get a ticket to NYC.  Problem solved.

 

Finally, you may have read recently about the most metaphorically perfect symptom of what happens when the Left single-handedly runs a city for several generations.  I’m speaking, of course, of the infamous San Francisco “poop map” – a guide to the ever-increasing locations throughout the city where you might step into some human waste as you take your evening stroll.

This past week, that story has taken a bit of a twist, in the form of a clear plastic bag of approximately 20 pounds of human waste that was left on a street corner in San Francisco.  Even jaded local residents noticed.   “I wouldn’t say this is typical,” said a two-year area resident in an online forum, which I am honestly not making up.  “I can’t say I’ve seen anything like that. I’ve seen open feces, smeared feces. I commend whoever put it in a bag. It could have been much worse.”

I think that would have to be the best definition I’ve ever seen of “defining deviancy down.”  Local leftists now have apparently said, “Okay.  We’ve accepted that we’re going to be living knee-deep in human waste.  But let’s have some pride, and at least put it in a bag.”

Oddly enough, when city services personnel arrived to dispose of it, they found a circle of SF citizens standing around, talking to the bag.  Several were complaining about Trump’s immigration enforcement, while others vented their spleen about the evil 1%, and about Trump’s upcoming Supreme Court nomination.

It took the city workers 10 minutes of patient explanation to convince the onlookers that the entity to which they were complaining was not, in fact, Nancy Pelosi.  “I understand your confusion,” one man in a fluorescent vest explained, as he stood with his palms outstretched in a calming gesture. “But this really is a bag of human excrement.  Really.”

One local, wearing an “I’m with Her!” t-shirt, squinted at the pile, and slowly began to nod her head.  “Oh, yeah.  I was wondering why she was wearing a bag.”

“Hey,” an excited man on the edge of the crowd said, as he pointed across the street.  “There’s Dianne Feinstein!  Let’s go demand that she resist Trump’s ripping of children from their mothers’ arms!”

As the crowd began to run across the street, another city worked called out, “That’s another mound of human crap!”  The disappointed throng pulled up short, and looked around aimlessly.  One dispirited member pointed farther down the street.  “I guess that’s just another pile of s**t?”

One of the city workers followed his gesture.  “No, that’s Jerry Brown.”

The crowd rallied, and tore off down the street.

Before you laugh at them, let me ask you a few questions:  Would a bag of crap ever raise your taxes?  Would a bag of crap declare your city to be a sanctuary city for illegals?  Would a bag of crap try to make you feel guilty about how much you earn, and how many taxes you pay, even though it paid none at all?

See?   Maybe it’s time you considered getting on the bandwagon:  #bagofcrapforcongress2018.

What a fortnight this has been!  (That’s Brit-talk for two weeks, and like most Brit-talk, it sounds cooler than the alternative.)  I can’t remember having this many political stories going my way since November of 2016, when the Trumpkin passed Secretariat—um, I mean Secretary Clinton – in the final turn, turning the Javits Center into a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and making cute little guy Maddow cry.

Let’s start with the Supreme Court.  To be transparent, I’m not generally a huge fan.  I think the SC has usurped all kinds of power that the Founders never meant to rest in the hands of unelected judges, and it is far more consequential than it should be.  I would be open to all kinds of reforms, including limiting the terms of judges to 10 years.

That being said… WOW!  This last spate of rulings have landed like a flurry of Mike Tyson jabs, from back when Tyson was at the peak of his powers, before he got out of shape and tattooed his face and started biting people’s ears off.   54 used to be one of my favorite numbers because Brian Urlacher wore it as he patrolled the defensive middle.  Now it’s one of my favorite numbers because of all of the 5-4 rulings of late.  (And yes, it’s pathetic that some of these calls should be that close!)

In the Christian baker case, the SC made a sensible ruling on not forcing private businesses to violate their principles because customers disagree with them.

In the so called “Muslim ban” case – two of the six countries affected were Venezuela and North Korea, not exactly known for their Muslim demographics, and the ban somehow didn’t affect countries containing 92% of all Muslims – the SC knocked aside the weak cheese arguments of the court lefties.  Especially egregious was the argument from the “wise Latina” – and I use that nickname the same way I would use the nickname “Tiny” for a 350-pound bouncer – that the text of Trump’s order wasn’t unconstitutional, but his tweets were.  So… she doesn’t like Trump, and therefore he can’t execute the powers of the president.

The court followed that with another common sense ruling that government unions – which even FDR argued should not exist in the first place — can’t force their members to pay dues that then go to politicians with whom those members have a hate-hate relationship.

All of those are good rulings, and none would have happened if Cankles had been elected, and had appointed a Saul Alinsky clone to the Supreme Court.

But then – the clouds opened and heavenly light shone through while harp music drifted earthward – Anthony Kennedy announced that he’s stepping down, giving Trump a chance to put Gorsuch II onto the bench.   And if my condition doesn’t abate – it’s already been way more than 4 hours — I’m going to have to call my doctor in the morning.

At this point, I must give due respect to Mitch McConnell.  Yes, I may have called him a Chinless Cartoon Turtle in the past, and I may even have done a phlegm-assisted Southern-accented impression of his ridiculous voice to amuse Cassie the Wonder Dog.

But when I think back now to his tussle with Harry Reid – holder of the highest ever Simpson Face Punchability Index™ rating of 9.95 – I cannot help but laugh.  When Reid used the “nuclear option” and dropped the required number of votes to stop a filibuster and confirm a judge from 60 – 51, McConnell warned that the Dems would come to regret that move.  That already happened, when McConnell blocked Obama’s last-year nomination of Merrill Garland and we got Gorsuch (peace be upon him) instead.  And now it’s likely to happen again.

So I salute you, Cocaine Mitch, and bestow upon you the honorary title of Yertle “Nostradamus” McConnell.

But even outside of the court, it’s been a banner week everywhere I look.   The Dems went farther off into the loony left by giving a NY primary win to a telegenic 14-year old Hispanic socialist.   I guess if you need to have a banner carrier for your socialist contingent, it’s better to take a cute young minority woman with no track record over a screaming, pasty Vermonter in his late 100s.  But Smiley Castro-Chavez-Guevara (no, I am not going to waste my precious time looking up her name) then went for the racist-sexist-ageist trifecta, saying that one reason for her candidacy was that old (check) white (check) males (check and mate) like her opponent are icky, and not worthy of a vote.  Ah, the tolerant, open-minded left.

But she’s even worse than some leftists, in that she seems prone to conspiracy theories only believed by the truly loony fringe.  In an interview, she talked about the need to get rid of ICE (and thus any border enforcement at all), in part because they have created “black sites.”  Of course she has no evidence, and the interview just slid on to the next topic on which she is equally unhinged.

By the way, if a conservative had referred to black sites, s/he would have been roundly mocked, and also informed (snootily) that “those should be called ‘African-American sites,’ you racist!”

Not to be outdone in stupidity – a quality in which she has virtually never been outdone – Maxine Waters got hold of what was apparently a three-dollar Mr. Microphone and started hollering at a bunch of mental patients, unemployed drifters and recent parolees (I’m guessing).  She excreted some truly inspiring thoughts about how they should find and publicly harass any GOP politicians they can find, at their homes, at gas stations, or restaurants.

Now I know what you are thinking.  You’re thinking, “Dementia is a terrible thing.”

I thought that, too.  Judging from her angry, incoherent babbling and her apparently melting face, I thought that in her very old age, her mind has given out, and she is a figure to be pitied.  But then I remembered that nearly 30 years ago, she cheered the Rodney King- LA riots as a righteous “uprising,” and that she partied with some of the thugs who had assaulted various pale folks when they were acquitted.

She’s always been a malevolent person, and her current advanced age is no excuse.   Let’s hope that she stays in good health, and screeches her way through the Trump re-election campaign in the most high profile way possible.

 

Next up, good old Jeh Johnson also tossed in his two cents on the immigration issue.  You may remember him as Obama’s DHS secretary.  I remember him primarily as the man with the most annoyingly spelled name since Brett Favre.

Call me old fashioned, and a traditionalist.  And even ruggedly handsome, if you must.  But I am not one to go along with a society’s insane agreement to pronounce names incorrectly.  “F-A-V-R-E” features an “R” that comes after the “V” – therefore, “Fav-ruh.”  But all of sports media agreed to call him “Farve.”  The same thing happened with Cub shortstop Shawon Dunston (1985-2002), when everyone agreed to pretend that that “O” was not there, and call him “Shawn.”

But not me.  I could accept “Shawn” or “Sean,” but not “Shawon.” So I spent the better part of two decades talking about “Sha-won” Dunston and Brett “Fav-ruh.”  And people around me continually stared at me with what I choose to interpret as quiet admiration for my fidelity to the rules of English pronunciation.

Which brings me to Jeh Johnson.  In a sane world, his first name would have to rhyme with “meh” – which coincidentally enough, matches the emotion that the mention of his name should inspire, in even the best-case scenario.

But no.  “Jeh” wants to be called “Jay.”  And our sheep-like media just go along with it.  But we have a spelling for “Jay.”  It’s “Jay.”  I could even accept “J” for a first name, because that would be almost cool, and how else could you pronounce “J?”

But come on.   Pilots in trouble do not make frantic “Meh Deh” calls on the radio. I don’t sing “Oh Happy Deh” in church on Sundeh.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

So Chris Wallace interviewed Jeh on the subject of the morality of separating children from their parents when those parents illegally cross our borders.  Wallace pointed out that this was Obama’s policy, and that such hideously inhumane and cruel proceedings went on for years, with nary a peep from our debased, Jeh-humoring media.  Until Trump became president, and then separating children became the new Holocaust.

If you want to watch an example of a politician dancing around his obvious culpability while acknowledging nothing, watch that interview.  When Wallace asked him for a solution to illegal immigration, Jeh said, “We can’t have catch and release…”  Even though that’s what Jeh and his boss did.

And he said, “We did not want to go so far as to separate families.”  But that’s what Jeh and his boss did.

You almost get the sense that Jeh and his fellow leftists wants us to forget that Trump inherited the child-separation policy – the very one that the lefty mobs now claim to be so offended by – from Obama.

I have only one response to that: Not to-deh, Jeh.  No weh.

 

After all this immigration talk, I bet you are wondering – as I was – what some random old Native American lady thinks about the issue.  Well, I don’t know that.  But I do know what Elizabeth Warren thinks about it.

She appeared at a rally and added her screeching voice to the chorus of hypocrites calling for abolishing ICE: “We need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality.”  By which she apparently means, we should sneak into the ICE camp while they are asleep around their campfires, and scalp a few of them, before stealing their horses and skulking away in the night.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Finally, to provide the entertaining cherry on this fortnight’s delicious schadenfreude sundae, my favorite leftist propaganda-documentary-making spokes-walrus — Michael Moore – appeared on the Late Show, which is inexplicably still on the air, hosted by totally un-funny “funny man” Stephen Colbert.

Moore pointed to the “migrant family separation crisis” – naturally, without mentioning that it was Obama’s crisis for years.  During his interview, Moore called Trump “the devil.”  At least, I think that’s what he said.  It was hard to understand him, since he conducted the entire interview while chewing on a comically-oversized turkey leg that you would typically only see in a feast scene in a film about Henry VIII.

Moore indicted lazy America, asking, “When are we all going to get off the couch?”  (He asked this while sitting on a dangerously over-taxed chair.)  His rousing call was that “we all have to put our bodies on the line” to stop Trump.  Unfortunately, he flopped his own body on the line, which resulted in powdering the line and driving it eight inches into the ground,  and leaving manatee-shaped divot all around the line.

But he’s got a new film coming out in September, and it’s going to really tell the truth about the insidious Trump agenda.  So we’ve got that to look forward to.

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Speaking of things to look forward to, I’ve been anticipating getting my home office squared away since we moved into our new/old house a month ago.  I finally achieved that, and have been able to realize one of my long-held dreams: having an office with floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases!  You can see a picture of my new sanctum sanctorum at my web site: Martinsimpsonwriting.com

Proof # 4378 that the world is unfair: Charles Krauthammer is dead at 68, and vile, brain-fried old hippie Peter Fonda is still alive at 114.

Krauthammer has been a hero of mine for a long time.  He had the kind of intellectual gravitas that is obvious to even pedestrian-minded folks like me, and yet he could also banter with the best of them on Special Report.  I always loved when he’d launch a well-deserved broadside at some execrable offender, and after landing one verbal killing stroke after another, Brit or Brett would be temporarily silenced.  And Charles, with a twinkle in his eye, would use that old tagline, “Strong letter to follow.”

Famously, he dove into a pool while a young med student at Harvard, and hit his head at just the right angle to sever his cervical spine, paralyzing him for the rest of his life.  In a terribly ironic twist, he had been reading two books beside the pool before he took his ill-fated dive:  a medical text called “The Anatomy of the Spine,” and a 1930 existential novel by Andre Malraux called “Man’s Fate.”  If you were writing a novel and tried to sneak in that detail, any decent editor would red pencil it: too obvious and ham-handed.

Even more astounding facts about Krauthammer?  He was a Democrat well into his adulthood, and he wrote speeches for Walter Mondale.  I almost can’t believe either one of those.  We’ve all heard the cliche about “if you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by 30, you have no brain.”  But as insightful and gifted as Charles was, I can’t believe he wasn’t through his immature lefty phase by 2^nd grade at the latest.  And to picture him in the act of placing the words of one of the century’s most gifted minds into the mouth of one of the millenium’s most boring men is nothing short of astonishing!

It’s a testament to the weapons-grade blandness of Walter Mondale that he could have spoken words written by Charles Krauthammer – Charles Freaking Krauthammer! – and still come across with all of the intellectual vigor and effervescence of a barely animated block of wood.

Seriously, it’s almost like a variation on the old philosophical riddle, “Can God make a weight too heavy for Him to lift?”  Except that it solves itself.  Yes, God can make a man so existentially mundane that he can so deaden the words written by a wordsmith as talented as Charles Krauthammer that he could lose 49 of 50 states.  And that man is Walter F.  Mondale.

Anyway, Charles is gone, and the world is a little emptier without him.  Sadly, there will be no more “strong letters to follow” from him.

 

Peter Fonda, on the other hand?  Ugh.  If you are like me, you probably assumed that this lefty fossil died decades ago.  Most likely either aspirating his own vomit, or with a mostly-empty needle sticking into his upper arm, just below the rubber tourniquet that he had tied himself, shakily.

But it turns out that he is alive, and that the frontrunner in the “predicting the eventual cause of Peter Fonda’s death” office pool now has to be “suffocation, caused by 3^rd-degree cranial-rectal inversion.”

I assume you saw his lovely tweets in the last several days.  Apparently he’s been trading in misogynistic hate toward conservatives for some time, but he earned some special attention this week, when he tweeted, “We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles and see if mother will stand up against the giant a–hole she is married to.”

For those of you who don’t speak “Compassionate Leftist,” allow me to translate from that to English:  “I disagree with the way President Trump is following our immigration laws.”

And it’s not enough that Petey is so hateful and inarticulate – he happens to be a colossal hypocrite, too.  Because Obama followed these same policies for 8 years, and Fonda’s friends in the MSM and the Democrat party could not be bothered.  In fact, you may remember the wave of outrage that hit about two weeks ago, when video emerged of immigrant kids being held in quasi-cages, and the networks all went wall-to-wall cage-gate Cage-Gate CAGE-GATE!!!

For about 6 hours.  Because in hour six, someone discovered that that video came from 2014.  When Barack “The Emperor’s New Dashiki” Obama was prez.

So… Throat clearing.  Shuffling of papers on the desk.  Soft cough.  “Okay, nothing to see here, folks.  We’ll be right back after the break, to unpack the rumors that Donald Trump asked Stormy Daniels to wear only a babushka scarf and coat herself with Russian dressing during their one-night stand a million years ago.”

Anyway, Melania reported evil geezer Fonda to the Secret Service for his threat, which makes me love her even more.  If I were the kind of creep he is, I’d wish for Fonda to be thrown into a cage full of MS 13 gang members after someone had dosed their meth with viagra.  But I’m too dignified for such a thought.

Though I will say that for those of you keeping score at home, Peter and Jane Fonda have now moved past Uday and Qusay Hussein, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Rahm and Ari Emanuel and onto the gold medal stand in the “My Least Favorite Siblings Ever” competition.

And, as fate would have it (or, as I would put it, “as a vengeful yet just God would have it”) Peter Fonda has a movie coming out tomorrow.  The movie is called, “boundaries,” and its tag line – which I swear I am not making up – is “every road trip comes with baggage.”

Yes.  Yes it does.  Baggage like having one of the actors wish pedophilic rape on the child of a president the week before his first movie in 72 years comes out.

How about it, COers?  Can we all get together and NOT go to that movie?!

 

Rather than ending on that somewhat down note, I thought I’d revisit one of my favorite “sign of the times” lefties of the last decade or so: delusional white woman who pretends to be a black woman, Rachel Dolezal.  (I know what you were thinking.  You were thinking I was going to say, “Delusional white woman who pretends to be an Indian, Elizabeth Warren.  But that would be too predictable, don’t you think?) (Still, #wemustneverstopmockingher.)

So Rachel somehow conned a bunch of dull-witted leftist identity politics/racial grievance mongers in the NAACP to elect her the head of a local NAACP chapter, despite her being not the least bit black.  (And no, the “C” in “NAACP” does not stand for “Caucasian.”  And never mind what it does stand for, because if you said it out loud, you’d be an evil racist, you evil racist.)

When it turned out that Rachel was as white as Liz Warren, hijinks ensued, and Rachel was fired by the NAACP, and had to take a job as head of the NAAWP.

Unfortunately for her, there is no such group for White People, so she became unemployed.  But she still somehow managed to acquire — and put into a bank — around $85,000 US dollars.

Did having 85 large keep her from fraudulently applying for public assistance, you ask?

Did you read the part above, where I mentioned that she is a committed leftist?

So, long story short, Dolezal has plead not guilty to welfare fraud, and is going to trial.  You’re probably wondering what my favorite two parts of this story are. So I’ll tell you.

First, virtually every MSM story written about Rachel’s recent woes uses phrases like “the woman who pretended to be black,” or “Ex-NAACP Chief who posed as a black woman.”   “Pretended to be?” “Posed as?”   I’m outraged by you judgmental journalists having the gall to question this blue-eyed white woman’s blackness!  The next thing you know, you’ll be telling me that the two male high school athletes who recently won several state competitions in women’s track are actually male athletes “pretending to be females.”  Or that Bruce Jenner is “posing as” a woman.  Shame on you!

Second, the news stories mentioned that Rachel Dolezal has now changed her slave name.  (Or is that her “free name?”  I’m so confused!)  She is now legally known as “Nkechi Diallo.”

Don’t get me wrong: Nkechi is a pretty bad-ass name.  If I knew an actual black woman with that name, I would admire her name 100%.

But Rachel Dolezal is definitely a “Rachel.”  Or maybe a “Jenny.”  The judges would also accept “Julie.”

But c’mon.  She’s no “Nkechi,” any more than she’s a “Zu Zhi Chang,” or “Imhotep Dolezal.”

Which brings me to my closing thought.  A while back both the esteemed CO and the equally esteemed COSE pointed out that lists are fun.

So I present a list contest for CO nation:  Worst name changes in history (not counting Rachel to Nkechi).

I will suggest three nominees:

1. “Cassius Clay” to “Muhammad Ali.” Rationale:  “Cassius” is not just cool, it’s Roman Emperor cool.  (If I had had a son – and if I hadn’t gone with “Walter Payton Simpson” or “Antonin Scalia Simpson,” he was going to be either “Marcus Aurelius Simpson” or “Hadrian Simpson.) And “Muhammad,” no offense, has been a little devalued these last 14 centuries or so.
2. “Cat Stevens” to “Yusuf Islam.” Rationale:  Cat Stevens was one soulful singer, who wrote songs such as “Tea for the Tillerman” and “Peace Train.”  “Cat” is a name that will get you laid in every hemisphere, if you’re into that kind of thing.  “Yusuf” is not a great start, and “Islam” is… how should I put this? … not a great finish.  And Yusuf Islam wrote such upbeat ditties as “DEATH TO SALMAN RUSHDIE!” and “Jihadi Train.”
3. “Prince” to “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” Rationale: Sure, “Prince” is not that horrible.  It’s not good, but it’s not horrible. But “TAFKAP”?  It’s a cliché because it’s true: don’t pick a name that has to be written as an acronym.  (And no, WEB Dubois is no exception, even though WEB is much better than TAFKAP.)

Okay, CO nation.  I’ve thrown down the gauntlet.  Choose one of the above, or nominate your own in the “Worst Name Change In History” contest!

As Father’s Day is upon us, I’d like to wish everyone in the CO nation a happy holiday.

Last June I wrote a tribute to my own dad whom I lost a few years ago, and I won’t repeat any of that here.  But if you’d like to read that column – and hear the last joke he told me from his death bed, for example — you can find that in the archives from June 2017 in the column to your right.

I’ve been thinking about dad a lot lately, partly because our move to a new old house has given me the chance to set up an organized workshop.  Dad was always very organized, but I’ve been storing tools haphazardly for years, and I know that he would be so pleased to see me setting up such an orderly work space.  The first step was to put doors on the old garage, and with the help of a guy who built two steel frames, and a carpenter who let me help him put wood over those frames, I now have some functioning garage doors.  (I’ve put a pic of those doors on my website, too.)(I know…that’s what the public wants to see: hot carpentry project action!)

As I was moving one of the toolboxes I inherited from him into my new space, I looked inside, and found a wood plane.  The plane still held some wood shavings in it, and it suddenly hit me: the last time this was used, dad drove it across something that he was working on, and then replaced it on his tool bench.  Those shavings suddenly seemed almost like a part of dad himself, and it felt like he was right there with me again.  It’s funny what can catch you by surprise and choke you up when you’ve lost a loved one.

Okay, so writing about pop always constitutes “things I love.”  But as is always the case, there are plenty of “things I hate” to deal with in our public life, too.  Things such as the MSM, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton, for example.

It’s still too soon to tell what may come of Trump’s meeting with North Korea’s Kim, but if it has done nothing else, it has given the lefty, Trump-hating MSM another chance to beclown itself.  They are so transparently biased that they’ve flipped positions half a dozen times in a perverse game of “heads Kim wins, tails Trump loses.”

Remember when Trump spoke rudely of Kim, calling him little Rocket Man, and noting that he was fat?  I thought that his words weren’t wise, but the MSM acted like it was Armageddon:  “You can’t talk about world leaders like that!  Trump should be diplomatic, and temperate, and stick to the niceties of etiquette.  His idiotically insulting language is going to start WWIII!”

Then Trump spoke positively about Kim (he’s talented, he’s a tough leader).  And the MSM lost it again:  “You can’t talk about dictators like that! This is no time to be diplomatic, and temperate, and stick to the niceties of etiquette!   To compliment a dictator is as bad as being a dictator.  Trump’s cuddling up to Kim is going to start WWIII!”

When Trump originally announced the summit, the left dismissed it: “You don’ t just schedule something like this so casually!  It takes months of working through diplomatic channels, and an intricate series of negotiations.  This thrown-together set-up will never amount to anything!”

Then Kim gets aggressive, and Trump cancels the summit.  “HA!  This summit could have accomplished so much, and now Trump has blown it!  Presidents work for years to arrange for diplomatic breakthroughs like this, and now a precious opportunity has been squandered!”

Then Kim reverses course, Trump declares the summit back on, and the MSM spins so fast they get motion sickness: “This meeting won’t accomplish anything.  Nothing to see here.”

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t have high hopes that a totalitarian regime like Kim’s is going to give up its nukes and become a responsible citizen on the world stage.   But it’s worth a try.  And it’s not like Trump is going to upset some marvelous status quo:   NK is a nightmarish moonscape of oppression and starvation and dysfunction, and decades of diplomatic efforts on the parts of a half-dozen presidents have done nothing to prevent or change that.

Bill Clinton said all the right platitudes and tried a combination of scary talk and diplo-speak and bribes to prevent NK from getting nukes.  And they got nukes.  Bush talked tough, and Obama talked smoothly, and neither of them made a bit of difference.  The traditional approach has gotten us to here; how bad could an unconventional approach by Trump be?

Regardless, the MSM have once again demonstrated their bad faith.  If Trump is nice to Kim, he’s being played and tacitly approving evil; if Trump plays rough with Kim, he’s needlessly rude, and provoking Kim.  If the meeting happens, it will mean nothing, but if the meeting gets called off, it’s a golden opportunity lost.

We hate you, MSM.  We really, really hate you.

Speaking of things we hate, Lizzie Warren was talking to cute little guy Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and she admitted that she’s “filled with terror” about the possibility of the GOP hanging on to the Senate and House in November: “If Donald Trump remains in control of the House and the Senate, and the Republicans won’t stop him, I don’t know what happens in the next two years.”

Don’t get your headdress feathers ruffled, Liz.  If the past year is any guide, what happens might turn out to be continuing economic growth, lower unemployment than King Hussein ever achieved, and maybe even an end to the Korean war.  Sure, there will be a downside for you: more judges who try to follow the constitution will be appointed, we’ll likely get more regulation reform, and ordinary people will get to keep and spend more of their own money.  But you’ve got to take the good with the bad.

On the other hand, you are also up for election in November, and the dopey voters in MA have not shown any inclination to toss out the cranky old papoose with the bathwater.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  So you’ve got that going for you.

Finally, it’s been fun to watch the incipient fallout from the IG report, which appears to be every bit the broadside fired into lefty Washington that we thought it would be.  It turns out that Peter Stroke and Comey and McCabe WERE dishonest and unprofessional, and Obama DID lie about not knowing about Hillary’s private server, and that Hillary WAS treated with kid gloves instead of competently questioned and exposed.

It’s been very frustrating for those of us on the right to see another Clinton apparently getting away with terrible behavior again.  Yes, she lost the election.  (giggle)  And yes, her behavior since losing has revealed just how awful she is (chuckle), and what a nightmare of a president she would have been (snort).  But it feels like she still hasn’t been called to account, and forced to answer for her actions.  In any fair system, she should be facing prosecution.

On the other hand, I’m Mr. Glass-half-full.  An inveterate optimist.  I like to stay on the sunny side of life.

So I’ve been thinking hard, trying to come up with some silver linings on the dark cloud that is Hlllary’s eluding prosecution for her intentional, reckless mis-handling of classified materials.  And I’ve come up with two.

First, if she was standing trial and on her way to jail, she would not be free to stay in the spotlight, and go on a terrible book tour and give terrible speeches and CAW CAW CAW her way through one television appearance after another, and thus remind the American people of exactly how terrible she and her party are.

Second, if she were charged, she would have to post bail, and then be released on some kind of modified house arrest while she awaited trial.  And you know what that means: (cue scary organ sting) an ankle monitor.

That’s right.  Some poor, unlucky member of the law enforcement community would draw the short straw, and would end up with the job of trying to get an ankle monitor onto one of those fetlocks of hers.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is more than we can — in clean conscience — ask of any man or woman.

Happy Father’s Day!

 

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding, and while I’m not a lawyer (which is only part of the reason that I am such a boon to society), I have a few thoughts.

First, this is the worst possible case for the “let’s force businesses to agree with our positions” advocates.  The gay couple in question seemed to have gone out of their way to find a baker who would turn down their request, and come across as obnoxious activists looking for a legal fight.  That doesn’t make their argument wrong, but it also doesn’t make them look good.

The baker, on the other hand, comes across as a decent person who was just trying to follow his religious beliefs.  He’s not an angry homophobe, screaming at the gays to get out of his business and burn in hell! He had apparently made cakes for gay people before, and did his best not to offend anyone, while at the same time sticking to his religious beliefs.

The Colorado commission who initially ruled against the baker were angry, condescending leftist hacks right out of central casting.  They made no effort to hide their disdain for the baker’s Christian beliefs, comparing his thinking to the kind of worldview that led to the Holocaust.  In fact, the reason that 2 of the leftists on the SC joined the opinion of the 5 intermittently sane SC justices was that even they couldn’t overlook the transparently prejudiced ruling of the Colorado commission.  (Which begs the question: What would a far-left lower court have to do to get Methuselah Ginsberg and Kid Latina Sotomayor to rule against them?  The smart money is on “not possible, under any circumstances.”)

While I’m a Christian, I’m pretty libertarian in my politics, and I’d like nothing more than for the government to back way off on almost every front.  In fact, I think a lot of our current problems stem from the fact that there’s one aspect of English Common Law – maybe it was in the Magna Carta?  (did I mention that I’m not a lawyer?) – that we have tragically lost in recent decades.  I’m referring, of course, to the bedrock principle of “Mind Your Own Business, You Totalitarian Jerks.”  (MYOBYTJ, as it appears in Black’s Law Dictionary.)

“How would MYOBYTJ apply to this situation, Dr. Simpson?” you may ask.  “Also, how it is pronounced?”

It’s pronounced just like it’s spelled, of course.  And here is how it would be applied in the case of “Angry Gay Activists v. Baker Who’s Never Hurt Anyone:”

Two Christophobe gay guys walk into a bakery.  (I know – sounds like the start of a good joke, though sadly, it is not.) (Also, yes, I called them “Christophobes.”  Because “homophobe” is a linguistic pet peeve of mine.  “Phobe” comes from “phobia,” which is a fear, and makes no sense in this context.  People who aren’t thrilled with gay people don’t fear them.  No one has ever heard two suspiciously well-groomed males discussing musicals and suddenly shrieked and passed out like a tarantula just descended from the ceiling and landed in their lobster bisque.  On the other hand, plenty of lefty activists have come across a 10 commandments plaque or a Nativity scene and immediately pulled their unisex dresses over their gender-binary heads, and ran around shrieking and hyperventilating and fumbling in their transgender wallet/purse/biodegradable bag to find their cell so they could speed dial the ACLU number to make the scary Christian inanimate objects stop torturing them.) (So yeah.  “Christophobes.”)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.

Two gay guys with nothing better to do go into a bakery and ask the baker to make a fabulous cake for their gay wedding.  He respectfully declines, stating that doing so would violate his religious convictions.  The two hair-trigger Christophobes become outraged, and call the local Sheriff, their Congressman and Senators, the Governor, and the Colorado Commission on Very Important Issues.  They explain the situation to each of them in turn.

And each time, the official on the other end of the phone should have said something to the effect of, “So why don’t you just find a more gay-friendly baker to make your cake?  Or maybe boycott that baker, and tell your gay friends not to use him for their weddings or Oscar parties or gay-mitzvahs or whatever.”

And when the busybodies reply, “Don’t you understand?  This baker thinks differently than we do!  He should be forced to run his business in a way that doesn’t offend us!”  each and every official should respond, “Mind your own business, you totalitarian jerks!”

I’m serious about this.  I’d like to see business owners free to operate how they’d like, and let the market and a free society handle that.  And not just about issues that I have a rooting interest in:

• If a Jewish deli doesn’t want to serve pork, anybody insisting on a pork chop wrapped in bacon should be told MYOBYTJ!
• If a Muslim baker doesn’t want to bake Christmas cookies and some boneheads object? MYOBYTJ!

And I wouldn’t just apply it to religion, either.   For example, I dislike smoking; it’s expensive, and makes your clothes stink, and it caused the deaths of my mother-in-law and a favorite aunt in the last 6 months.  If someone wanted to open a bar or restaurant in my town that allowed smoking, I wouldn’t go there.

But you know what else I’d do?  I’d mind my own freaking business!  If a smallish town has 6 bars, why couldn’t one of them allow smoking?  No one who objected would have to work there, or eat there, or drink there, and most people wouldn’t.  If enough people voted with their dollars and stayed away, the bar would close.  But not because some crybullies forced them out of business.

I know that smoking is not good for you, but that’s not the point.

You know what else isn’t good for you?  Ice cream.  Riding a motorcycle.  Women half your age.  Many other women.  Many men, too.  Playing the lottery.  Cocaine.  Red meat.  Electing delusional white ladies to the Senate from Massachusetts. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  Really loud music.  Stepping in to defend a weak person against a bully who’s much larger and stronger than you are.

Half the juice in life is negotiating your way around and through those things.  For example, I once had a good meal at a steakhouse with a woman who wasn’t good for me (despite a cuteness of almost Nikki Haley-esque proportions), and then took her back to her apartment on my motorcycle, where she fed me some ice cream.

But just when I was about to do some things that would have left me with terrible regret (and possibly some soft-tissue injury) she pulled out some cocaine and said, “Let’s snort this, and then buy a lottery ticket and vote for Elizabeth Warren.”

Of course, I jumped up in righteous outrage and tossed some clothes at her and said, “Put your clothes on and get out of my apartment!”

And she said, “Those are your clothes, and this is my apartment!”

To which I wittily replied, “Oh, yeah.”  The next thing you know, I’m making a dignified (if pantsless) retreat, while she is screaming from the second floor landing like a crazy person, “Elizabeth Warren is a Native American role model!”

And I’m screaming back at her, “She’s as Indian as Ingemar Johanssen!”

“Who is that?”

“Google him!” I yelled.

“You better stop mocking Elizabeth Warren, and I mean it!”

“NEVER!” I screamed, as I roared away into the night, having learned a valuable lesson.

 

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  Minding my own business.

I think most rap music sounds like racist and misogynistic cats mating inside a metal garbage can in a concrete parking garage.  I think vegan food tastes like a cruel experiment concocted by misanthropes with defective taste buds.  I think that leftist policies are destructive to all I hold dear.

But if someone wants to open a socialist vegan restaurant that features rap music all day, God bless them.  Not my cup of tea, and I would not think highly of anyone patronizing that establishment.  But I would not in a million years walk in there in a MAGA hat, and insist that they play some Hank Williams while making me a hamburger.

Because I know how to mind my own business.

Of course, there is a political element to this.  While all of us are fallen and imperfect and prone to want to impose our wills on others, the vast majority of totalitarian bullying today comes from the left.  Who is imposing speech codes and shouting down speakers they disagree with?  Who knows better than I do what kind of lightbulb I should be able to buy, and how many gallons of water my toilet should hold, and how big of a soft drink I should be able to buy?  Not the political right.

(And to anticipate one mistaken to objection from the left, we don’t want to dictate what any women do with their bodies.  That’s why you’ve never heard of any conservative legislative pushes to ban piercing, or tattooing, or appendectomies, or surgeries that make you look like a duck-billed platypus with cartoonishly large breasts. When we try to prevent abortion, it’s not because we want to control women’s bodies.  It’s because we took biology in school, and recognize that something that has different brain waves, and a separate heartbeat and DNA is not, technically speaking, “part of your body.”)

In conclusion, the Supreme Court got it right this time.  Don’t force an African-American baker to make a stars-and-bars cake to celebrate Jefferson Davis’ birthday.  Don’t force a white baker to make a Malcolm X “Kill Whitey” cake.  Don’t force a socialist baker to bake a “Trump 2020” cake.  Don’t force a sane baker to make a “Hillary 2020” cake.

Mind your own business, you totalitarian jerks!

So it’s June, and you know what that means: another month of leftists behaving badly.

Let’s start with Samantha Bee.  And before you say, “WHO?”  I’ll point out that she has an alleged comedy show watched by many of her relatives and a few poor souls being held against their will by sadistic kidnappers who have duct-taped them to chairs with those crazy Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamped-open-things on.  She’s currently in a neck-and-neck competition with Noah Trevor, Jimmy ”Waaah!” Kimmel and Stephen Colbert – or as you may know them, “Who?” and “He was a little funny when he hung out with Carolla,” and, “Ugh.” – for the “Least Funny and Lowest Rated Human on TV.”

A week ago, Ivanka Trump put out a picture of her and her adorable two-year-old son.  So naturally the leftist twittersphere went into a spittle-flecked rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking.  She must have given the sweet pic some sort of inflammatory caption, right?  Like, “Don’t forget, his grandpa is going to be president for 6 more years!” or “Look how beautiful and white he is!”  or “So glad I didn’t abort this little guy! #no-more-infanticide.”

But no.  The pic was sweet, and the caption was sweet:  “My [heart] #Sunday morning.”
And the lefties went NUTS!  A writer named Casey Quackenbush (man, I bet middle school was a picnic with that last name) at Time magazine – which I was shocked to learn still exists – put it this way:  “Ivanka Trump faces a storm of online criticism for tweeting a photo of her embracing her son, with critics denouncing her as “tone deaf” amid emerging reports of immigrant families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

I am not making that up.  A “storm of online criticism.”  “Tone deaf.”  For a picture with her son.

And it wasn’t just Senora Quackenbush.  (snort) I think Andy Ostroy said it best, by which I mean “stupidest,” (and no, I’ve never heard of him either):  “As screaming children are being ripped from their horrified parents at the border because of daddy’s unconscionable cruelty…@IvankaTrump demonstrates a staggering measure of tone-deafness & insensitivity in her “Sunday morning” snugglefest with her kid.”

Look up “drama queen” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Nancy Pelosi, beside the quote, “No, this IS the end of the world.  It’s Armageddon!”  But then, in the small print, you’ll find, “See also: Andy Ostroy.”

Anyway, when Samantha Bee and her crack team of writers saw that beatific photo of maternal love, they knew that had to marshal all of their talent to expose this outrage.  So they locked themselves in a room for a week, to focus their attention and their rapier wit on the First Daughter.

You know that old saying that if you put 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 typewriters for 1000 years, they’d produce the works of Shakespeare?  Well, this was just like that.  Except that when they came out of the room, they were babbling incoherently, and covered in feces, and all they’d come up with was a list of vulgar words for the female anatomy.

So Slanderin’ Sammie went on the air, and called Ivanka a “feckless c-word” and suggested that she use her body to tempt her father into incest in an effort to change his mind about applying US law to people who break it and thereby endanger their own children.

Sidebar: Take it from a guy who is almost too modest to mention that the internet has agreed that he is a #hilariousgenius – that’s not comedy.  Anybody can drop an “F” bomb or a c-word.  I do that every time I drive across town, or accidentally come across a Samantha Bee monologue, respectively.  And I don’t even have a team of writers to help me!

Comedy takes a little more thought than that.  I mean, you try coming up with a humorous reference to Liz Warren for a dozen columns in a row.  It’s not as easy as I make it look.

Sure, I could just call her a feckless squaw, and pour myself a scotch and call it a column.  But no.  I have higher standards than that.  So I pour that scotch first, and I tilt back in my chair, and try to think of the whitest people I know.

I think of that actor from the movie “Powder,” but that’s too obscure.  I remember a disturbing Martin Short albino character from some long-ago tv sketches, but that’s even more obscure.  Scotch, scotch, scotch… Boom.

Edgar Winter and Tilda Swinton had a baby (look them both up).  And that baby was still three shades darker than faux Indian Liz Warren.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Okay, maybe not my best work.  But still better than Sam Bee and her over-paid menagerie of hacks could come up with.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Incest-implying, c-word deploying Samantha Bee is obviously a feminist heroine.   Which is why she was honored by the Television Academy (I’m not making that group up, even though no one’s ever heard of them before) with an award for “Programming that Advances Social Change.”  If by “advancing social change” you mean “making society much, much worse.”

Meanwhile, crazy loon Roseanne said something equally offensive about truly terrible leftist hack Valerie Jarrett, and now she’ll never be on network tv again.   The end, and nothing to see here, and move along.

 

The two most recent Democrat presidents were also in the news this week, with a couple of schadenfreude-tastic interviews that I’ve been savoring and re-reading.  First up was Barack “Sophocles” Obama, whose philosophical musings in the days after Trump’s election were excerpted from Ben Rhodes’ forthcoming dumpster fire of a book.

In the days after the shocking electoral reversal, Obama had a dark night of the soul, during which he carried out a caustically critical self-inventory.  According to Rhodes, Obama mused, “Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe I shouldn’t have had such faith in my own god-like ability, and such disdain for everyone who disagreed with me.  I mean, did I really say that my election would stop the oceans from rising, and begin the healing of the world?  What was I thinking?  I’ve become a character out of a Greek tragedy, whose hubris finally called down an epic punishment from the gods. I’ve got to repent, and change my ways, and spend the rest of my days trying to undo some of the damage my obviously flawed worldview has caused to the greatest nation on earth!”

HA!  Of course I kid.  What Obama really said was this:  “Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe we pushed too far.  Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe…. Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or 20 years too early.”

Translation: “I am so amazingly wonderful.  It’s too bad that Americans are such primitive, tribal ignoramuses that they cannot appreciate the wonderfulness of me.  Maybe in a few decades, they will have caught up to my greatness, and regret electing a cartoon character who is erasing all of my glorious achievements.  But probably not.  Because they suck.”

 

But even more fun was a series of interviews that Bill “Handsy McGroperton™” Clinton found himself entangled in.  He recently pretended to co-write a novel with an author who has lately made a career of getting other writers to write novels that he can pretend to have co-written, and then they went on usually friendly NBC to do an interview promoting that book.

And things went well, for a while.  As long as the interview stuck with questions along the lines of, “Why did you decide to pretend to write this book,” and, “What do you think of your co-author?”  Bill was his old affable, self-deprecating, superficially charming self.

But then things went off the rails.  The interviewer actually started asked some tough questions – after only 20 years, I was as shocked as Bill was! — such as did Bill ever apologize to Monica Lewinsky, and in these days of #MeToo does he see things differently?  And the mask dropped, and Bill revealed his true nature.  He became visibly angry, and pointed his finger, and tried out one lame defense after another:

He denies what everyone knows happened, and what he has admitted in the past:  “I don’t think it would be different today… because people would be using the facts, instead of the imagined facts.”  (i.e. “I did not have sex with that woman.”)

He denies that he was wrong:  “No, I think I did the right thing.  I defended the constitution.”  (Question for any constitutional scholars in the CO nation:  which amendment is it again that protects our God-given right to cavort in the Oval office with gullible girls our daughter’s age?  I think it’s right around the part where we don’t have to quarter British soldiers in the mother-in-law suite anymore, but I couldn’t find it in a quick search.)

He deflects to make his horniness a problem for Trump: “[People are accusing me] partly because they’re frustrated that they’ve got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the oval office, and his voters don’t seem to care, so you don’t ever talk about that.”

I know.  Re-reading that makes it no clearer.  First, is Bill Clinton seriously claiming that no one ever talks about allegations of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump?!  After Billy Bush was suddenly the most famous Bush in the fall of 2016?  After we’ve spent more than a year on an investigation that originated with Democrats paying a foreign spy to come up with fictional stories of Trump throwing bundles of  cash at troupes of acrobatic Russian hookers to get them to urinate their way through the presidential suite at the Moscow Hilton?

And yes, Bill is self-righteously pontificating on how immoral it was for Trump to have a consensual one-night stand with an adult woman who makes her living having sex with strangers for money.  “Serious allegations” indeed!  Why, do you remember when Trump exposed himself to Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones, and dozens of others?!  If Harvey Weinstein is awaiting trial, and Bill Cosby is awaiting sentencing, how is it that Donald Trump could have raped Juanita Broaddrick, and has never had to answer for that!  I mean—

Oh, wait.

Bill also played the victim, whining that he left office $16 million dollars in debt.

He even trotted out the faux-feminist version of “some of my best friends are black,” saying how many women he has hired and appointed over the years:  “I had a sexual harassment policy when I was a governor in the 80s.” (Yes, but does, “I am ALL FOR IT!” technically count as a “sexual harassment policy?”) “I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor.”  (I guess it depends on what the meaning of “had” is, right Bill?) “Women were over-represented in the attorney general’s office in the 70s.”  (And some of them weren’t even C-cups!  I mean, come on!  Give the guy some credit.)  “I’ve had nothing but women leaders in my office since I left.”  (Mr. President, you’re not helping yourself.  Please stop talking.)

Seriously, if you haven’t watched that interview, you must.  Because there are few things more satisfying than watching a self-righteous, hypocritical old reprobate starting to reap what he has spent decades sowing.

Before I get to today’s semi-random meditations, I want to thank CO and the readers of this site.  After a couple of weeks without the internet I posted a column last week, and the response was really gratifying, and it has put a smile on my face for several days running.  In only two weeks I had really missed following the site, and to find that the feeling was mutual felt amazingly good.  So thank you all for your kind words, and the shares, and such a warm welcome back!

Now onto today’s theme, which is how vastly different two humans can be from each other.  Exhibit A is a GOP candidate for congress from Texas, and Exhibit B is a 30-year old who got sued by his parents to get him to move out of their house.

The first guy came to my attention arising from the state primary elections last Tuesday.  The consensus coming out of the primaries seems to be that things are getting even more polarized: more conservative candidates have beaten some moderate ones, and on the left, farther left candidates have beaten more centrist ones.  The prime example of the latter would be the battle of the two Staceys for Georgia governor, in which a farther left African American Stacey defeated a plain vanilla (no offense) white leftist Stacey by a surprising 3-1 margin.

I think this trend favors the GOP in the fall, because the general public is moving more to the right, while the Dems are moving from pretty far left to super far left.   Even though I think we’ve acclimated ourselves to way too much big government control over our lives, the polls seem to be moving rightward, probably starting with resistance to Obama’s hard-left (and uber dishonest) push to take over health care in 2009.  On issues from the Second Amendment to lower taxes to sane border controls to a more pro-American foreign policy, most voters are moving right.  At the same time, most lefties have become so deranged with Trump hatred – and so sure that regular people share their frothing hostility – that they may well be pushing the mushy moderates to either stay home or vote GOP.  Several months ago I was afraid that the historical trend that pointed to a blue wave in a GOP prez’s first midterm was going to hold true, but now I’m becoming more hopeful that 2018 might buck that trend.

My favorite GOP primary winner this time around was a guy you’ve probably never heard of:  Dan Crenshaw, from Houston.   He’s an ex-Navy Seal and a conservative… and he just about had me at ex-Navy Seal.  Did I mention that he wears an eye patch, after having lost an eye in an IED explosion in Afghanistan?  That’s right… an EYE PATCH!

Call me superficial.  (You won’t be the first.)  But I think eye patches make men at least 163% cooler than they would normally be.   And yes, I said “men.”  Call me sexist.  (Again, you won’t be the first.)  But eye patches don’t necessarily work on women.  That woman in Kill Bill had one, and it was just creepy, even before Uma plucked her other eye out.   And if you slapped an eye patch on Liz Warren, she might try to pass it off as an old arrow wound, but it would not work for her.  And she’d still be about as Indian as that translucent woman who dumped Tiger Woods after that unpleasantness with the Waffle House waitress.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But you put an eye patch on a man, and I’d follow that magnificent bastard to the gates of Hell!  A young, impressionable me was always a big John Wayne fan, not least because of his appearance in True Grit as “one-eyed fatman” Rooster Cogburn.   Then Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in “Escape from New York?”  Then, when I was reading a book on military history I came across Claus Von Stauffenberg, the reformed Nazi who tried to kill Hitler – even with Tom Cruise playing him, that guy was an eye-patch-wearing bad ass.

Of course, if you were giving out medals for “Best Use of an Eyepatch,” the gold has got to go to Moshe Dayan.   Little guy, tough as nails, led some tough Israelis in some tougher battles.  He lost his eye when a sniper’s bullet hit the binoculars he was looking through.

You heard that right, puny mortals.  A sniper’s bullet.  In the binoculars.  Which were on his face at the time.

And it just made him mad.  So mad that the next time the jihadis attacked his country, he led the forces that whipped them in six freaking days.

By the way, I always thought that that had to be the coolest name for a war ever.  If you had to be in a  war, is there any doubt which one you’d choose?    Especially considering the alternatives when a recruiter was pitching you:

Recruiter:  “How’d you like to sign up, do your duty for king and country?”

You: “What’s this war called again?

Recruiter (almost under his breath): “The Hundred Years’ War.”

You:  “Yikes!  You mean, with any luck I could die in this one, along with my son, and my grandson, and my great grandson?!”

A few centuries later, and it’s getting close to Halloween, when you come across a recruiter who has a better deal.  “What’s this war called?” you ask.

“The War of 1812.”

“Sweet,” you say.  “New Years Eve is only two months away, and then it’s 1813.  So I’m in.”

But wait.  Say it’s 1967, and a tough little bantam rooster of a guy wearing a wicked eye patch pitches you on a little conflict he calls the Six Day War.

“Well, it’s already Sunday evening,” you think to yourself,  “so if we kick things off at dawn, I’ll be home in time for the Bears’ early game next Sunday.  Done and done.”

As a kid, I flirted with the idea of getting an eye patch.  And there were various ways that I could have ended up with one.  I ran with scissors on occasion.  I rode a bicycle with reckless abandon, and later on I rode a motorcycle without a helmet.  Plus, several friends and cousins and I were raised on the Three Stooges, so you’d expect that at least one of us would end up in a Curly-eye-poke-related incident.

Skip ahead to my adulthood, and I’m not out of the eye-patch-related woods yet.  I have the high honor of writing for the Cautious Optimism website, a job that requires me to scour the internet for tales of leftists behaving badly.  In the course of that, I necessarily (and often unexpectedly) come across photos of Antifa chick mug shots, or pics of Lena Dunham, or Kathy Griffin, or any number of other hideous leftist crones.

At moments like that, one has to manfully resist the almost autonomic reflex to plunge any nearby sharp objects into one’s own eyes to make it stop.   But that is a risk I’ve been willing to take for the CO Nation.  (You’re welcome.  And yes, I do have a tip jar on my web page, thanks for asking.  Because when the inevitable happens, that eye-patch isn’t going to pay for itself, people.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah.   Dan Crenshaw for the House of Representatives.  Hopefully that blue wave will be no match for the one-eyed Seal!

 

On to the other end of the spectrum of humanity – prepare yourself for the whiplash: Exhibit B.  I give you Michael Rotondo, 30 years old, and a resident of New York.  Actually, a resident of mommy and daddy’s house in New York.

You’ve probably heard about the story, and if you haven’t, you can Google it.  But the general outline is that the guy apparently went to college, and – in a testament to the unfathomable generosity of women – somehow fathered a son.  But he’s been staying in his parents’ house for the last 8 years, even after his parents have written him letters and given him eviction notices and offered him cash to leave.

They finally took him to court, where a judge heard the case – and, I’m hoping, face-palmed himself repeatedly – and told the bum to get out of his parents’ house.  Rotondo has since been giving tv interviews in which he explained that he wants to get out, and has been planning to get out, and he’s trying to focus on regaining custody of his son.  Also, he’s a great father, and he no longer wants any relationship with his parents, who have been very mean to him.

I know nothing at all about the kid’s mother, but unless she has heroin for breakfast and meth for lunch and has a huge “I’m with Her” tattoo on her forehead, she better not lose custody of that kid!

Why did I put these two people in one column?  Because I am fascinated by humans.  Half of the time I find myself agreeing with Shakespeare, in his famous lines from Hamlet:

“O what a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!/ how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how/ express and admirable! in action how like an angel!/ in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the/ world! the paragon of animals…”

And then I read about Michael Rotondo, and am moved to compose a few lines myself:  “O what a piece of crap is man!  How feeble in reason!/ How finite in faculty! In form and moving how/ sluglike and repugnant! In action how like a fungus! / in lassitude how like a sloth!/ how did he beguile a female to couple with him?/ even one solitary, misbegotten time?/Seriously, poor Yorick, what gives?”

Okay, I know.  I’m no Shakespeare.  But Michael Rotondo is no Dan Crenshaw.  It’s hard to believe that he’s even in the same phylum!  Nobody could be more different from an eye-patch-wearing Navy Seal than this human walrus.  And yet Rotondo seems oblivious to his true condition, and how he comes across.

Though the analogy is admittedly a stretch, I see a lot of Rotondo in today’s Left.  Obama dangled before pupal-stage Bernie Sanderses like him the chance to stay on mommy’s insurance until 26, and he went one better, staying on mommy’s guest room bed until 30!  He’s entitled, and he’s been enabled right into a pathetic, gelatinous state of complete dependence.  And when he finally couldn’t get his way, he ran crying to the courts to try to avoid the consequences of his (in)actions.

Now if only we could get more GOP pols to emulate Dan “Rooster Cogburn-Plisken-Von Stauffenberg Dayan” Crenshaw, there would be zero chance of a blue wave in November!