Category: Uncategorized

Yesterday I came across a leading nominee for “the most unintentionally funny article of the year” award.  It appeared in Salon right before Thanksgiving.  I apologize for not having seen it earlier, but once I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it.

The article is written by someone name Matthew Rosza, who I can only conclude has been struggling manfully with a ferocious addiction to psychotropic drugs.  The title is, “Here’s your leftover turkey: The case for Hillary Clinton 2020.”  With a title like that, it’s got to be anti-Hillary, right?  Not so fast.  It appears in Salon, and it begins, “Are you sick of Republicans? Or just right-wingers in general?”  The tone says, “Obviously!”

Rosza cites – in what I can only imagine would be the strained voice of someone who just took a long draw on a bong and is trying to speak without exhaling – four points in favor of the Dems nominating Hillary in 2020.

I cannot stress enough exactly how much I am NOT making any of these up:

1. “Hillary Clinton is the Winston Churchill to Vladimir Putin’s Adolf Hitler.” The author refers to Putin as having a “right-wing nationalist agenda.” Because nothing spells “right wing” like coming up through the ranks of the KGB in the waning years of the Soviet SOCIALIST Republic.  But don’t let that distract you from the headline: he compares Hillary to Churchill!  And not Ward Churchill – which might actually make sense — but the good Churchill!

Other than their jowly looks and rotund build, is there anyone LESS like Churchill than Hillary freaking Clinton?!  Do you remember when Churchill met with Ribbentrop and produced that childishly gimmicky “re-set button” that was meant to indicate how the Brits wanted a clean slate with the National Socialists?  Me neither.

Every sentence in this section is a delight.  For example, “This is where Clinton offers a quality that no politician in America can beat.”  Quick, who amongst you shouted out, “Ankle girth!”  You would be correct, but that’s not what the author said, so by definition he is wrong.

2.“Hillary Clinton being elected president (at last) would monumentally piss off misogynistic trolls, and what’s not to like about that?” That’s a great reason to elect someone, isn’t it?  Not to bring forth on this continent a new nation.  Not to create a Shining City on a Hill.  Not to further our progress toward being the last, best hope of mankind.  Nope.

We just want to piss off the opposition.  Like when a bunch of 18^th century Americans voted for Jefferson “just to get Hamilton’s goat.”  Or when the Democrats voted for Douglas as a way to tell Abe Lincoln to “stuff it up his stovepipe hat.”

There are always jerks on both sides of the electoral aisle, so electing anyone is always guaranteed to anger some bad eggs – so that argument has virtually nothing going for it.  And by the way, electing Nikki Haley would also piss off a ton of misogynist trolls – and we’d get an amazingly talented candidate then, instead of an incompetent, corrupt, pudgy, cross-dressing, cawing-voiced Churchill imitator in a bowler hat.

3. “By winning the popular vote convincingly in 2016, Hillary Clinton has earned the right to be considered the presumptive nominee in 2020.” Ah yes, the popular vote.  Not the electoral college vote – which, spoiler alert, to anyone who hasn’t paid attention to American politics for lo these many decades – actually DETERMINES THE WINNER! The popular vote is like “amount of game time spent in the lead” in the NFL.  Which is why the Atlanta Falcons are the reigning Super Bowl champions.

Oh, wait.

4. “We can expect her to be a good president.” Did I mention that I am not making these points up?

The beauty of the weapons-grade obtuseness of this section is that the author actually raises the specter of Hillary having helped Bill get away with his serial harassing.  But in his mind, the jury is still out on that. To wit, “Frankly, the worst thing that can be said about a potential 2020 Clinton candidacy… is that her husband still hasn’t answered for the numerous sexual abuse accusations against him.”  You don’t say?!

And no, that’s not the worst thing.  That’s not even in the top 3 worst things.  If there were a museum dedicated to “The Worst Things That Can Be Said about a Potential Hillary 2020 Candidacy,” this thing would be on the second floor, near the back, at the end of a poorly lit hallway, right next to the transgender bathroom.

But Rosza goes on, “While it may seem unfair for Hillary to be held accountable for Bill’s alleged predations…”  — and not since Marion Berry was caught on video smoking crack with a constituent has the word “alleged” been deployed so implausibly – “…it can plausibly be argued that she played a role in helping him cover them up.”

Here’s a partial list of other things that Matthew Rosza believes “can be plausibly argued:”

• the existence of gravity
• the roundness of the earth
• the hotness of the sun
• the cuteness of a kitten just after its eyes have first opened

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not arguing with Mr. Rosza.  I hope that his insightful arguments win the day, and the Dems run Hillary again.  I even have a bumper sticker idea for them: “I’m with Her again…and then maybe one more time after that.”

Tell me where I can send my contribution, and the check will be in the mail.

 

 

Another month has passed, which means that it’s time for my traditional retrospecticus (hat tip to anyone who gets that obscure Simpsons’ reference), as I look back on my favorite stories of November.

Obviously, the biggest story of the month is – as CO and the CO nation have alternatively named it – pervnado/pervalanche/hornucopia.  In just the last week, we’ve seen the fall of Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor.  If you’re like me, your response was, “That old codger?”  “Who?” and “He’s still alive?”  But still, the hilarity is worth savoring.

In a healthy culture, these guys would all retreat from society to begin long, tortured conversations with their genitalia.  (“You see what you’ve gotten us into?  I knew that I should never have let you do the thinking for both of us, Charlemagne Lauer!”) (Yes, I think that Lauer is the kind of guy who would give a comically grandiose name to his almost certainly unimpressive equipment.) (Sorry about that mental picture I just stuck you with.)

But ours is not a healthy culture.  So Lauer has a team of lawyers working on getting him a golden parachute – not my words – in the neighborhood of $30 million.  (This is where a lesser writer might be tempted to make a “severance package” joke.  But I am way too dignified for that.)  Barely animated corpse John Conyers is clinging to the door frame of his Congressional office with his dessicated mummy hands.  Al Franken is apologizing, but he doesn’t remember doing anything wrong, but he’s deeply sorry for the bad things that he can’t recall, and now he has to get back to work for the American people.  In the Senate, where it would be an absolute outrage if he had to share that august chamber with the likes of Roy Moore.

Half of the middle and upper management at CNN and NPR and the three networks are cleaning out their desks and banging into each as they try to cram through the exit doors like a bunch of horny Three Stooges, only much less funny.   When they finally burst through the doorway, the cardboard boxes they were carrying fall apart, and they spend the next half hour on their hands and knees in the hallway, trying to sort out which marital aid belongs to which supervisor, and whose velvet-lined handcuffs are these, and is that blindfold a matched set with that ball gag?

Ugh.  If the offenders at Fox hadn’t been run out of town earlier in the year, they’d be lined up at the elevators so deep that they’d be lucky to make it out onto the street by Christmas.

 

But that’s not my favorite story of November.  That honor goes to Trump vs. Pocahontas Warren, Round Two.  Was it classy for Trump to put a rib kick in on Warren when he was supposed to be honoring the Code Talkers at the White House?  Was it juvenile, and a little embarrassing?  Did it still make me laugh?  No, yes, and I’m not too big to admit it.

Warren’s response was perfect, as she stepped right into the trolling trap, calling the name a “racial slur,” and vowing that she will not allow Trump to “shut [her] up.”  Guess what, Liz?  That’s the last thing he would want you to do.   He wants you to keep talking all things Indian – What do you think of the phrase “indian-giver,” Elizabeth?  Any thoughts on the name of the Washington Redskins?  Would you consider yourself a big Columbus fan? — and as you do so, he’s rhetorically putting a huge, feathered headdress on top of your dopey head, turning you into the Native American version of Dukakis in that tank commander’s helmet.

Especially since Warren is supposed to be a leading future Dem presidential contender, we cannot stress enough the sleazy details of her egregious faux-Indian scam.  In case you haven’t followed that story, here are my favorite details.   The blue-eyed, blonde, pasty-white future Senator began claiming to be Cherokee in her 30s, got herself listed as a minority in a directory of lawyers, and ended up with a job at Harvard, where the school touted her as a prominent minority hire.  She later denied that she got any advantage from her claimed minority status – a laughable claim to anyone even the least bit familiar with the political climate of academia.

What “facts” did Warren base her claims on? “Family lore” and the fact that her grandpa had “high cheekbones.”  I’m not making that up.

Hey, you know who else has some high cheekbones?   Melania Trump.  And we all know how feared the Slovenian Sioux were, all throughout the Badlands.

You know who else has high cheekbones?  My Norwegian-descent wife.   And yes, the Slovenian Sioux were only outstripped in their fighting reputation by the Oslo Apaches.  When the war canoes took to the fjords, pioneers knew that they were in for heap-big trouble!

My favorite Warren anecdote is that she once had the gall to submit five supposed family recipes as entries in a book of Native American dishes called – and again, I’m not making this up – “Pow Wow Chow.”

But it gets funnier – and I know what you are asking:  How?  (Get it?)

It turned out that two of her five recipes were plagiarized directly from another source: a man named Pierre Franey.  I know, you don’t often hear of Indians named “Pierre.”  (Although Pierre Horse, after merciless teasing during middle school, changed his first name to “Crazy,” and went on to become a ferocious warrior.  Also, Sitting Bull’s real first name?  “Jacques.”  True story.)

“Don’t be so dismissive, Simpson,” you might be saying.  “Maybe this Pierre Franey was somehow connected to the French and Indian War.  I remember reading about that in school.”

Nope.  It turns out Pierre was connected to… Le Pavilion, a snooty French restaurant in Manhattan.

“But Manhattan was once sold by its Indian inhabitants for a bunch of beads,” you might say.

And I’ll just nod my head sadly, and point out that Pierre wrote and published these two recipes… IN 1979!!

But wait.  There’s more.  The two recipes that she stole – recipes that she claimed came from her Oklahoma-dwelling Cherokee ancestors – were for “Cold Omelets with Crab Meat” and “Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing.”

Because when you think of lobster, you think of Maine.  When you think of corn, you think of Iowa.  When you think of potatoes, you think of Idaho.

And when you think of crab, you think of… Oklahoma?!

The lonesome, moonlit nights on the prairie.  The wind rustling through the grasses and wheat fields, the howling of a far-off coyote.  The campfire crackling under a starry sky.  And the clacking of millions of crustacean claws, as the great crab herds make their way across the endless plains in their awe-inspiring migration.

We should never stop mocking Elizabeth Warren.

 

Also in November, I came across three other stories that add to my happiness:

1. A study by researchers at Columbia and Harvard (I know, but still) found that sarcasm – writing it and reading it – makes people more creative. So we here at CO should all be a bunch of Michelangelos, DaVincis, and Edisons. The article also said that one potential downside of being sarcastic is that it “can come across as mean.”  But what do they know? Bunch of eggheads who ought to go “F” themselves!

 

2. A study conducted at the Medical University of Graz (Austria) found that, “Vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters, despite drinking less, smoking less and being more physically active than their carnivorous counterparts.” Not mentioned in the story was the fact that the most famous Austrian vegetarian in history was Adolf Hitler. So let me get this right:  I get to wash down some steak dinners with some fine alcohol, while not working out, and being less prone to go on a continent-wide anti-Semitic murder spree, AND I get to be healthier too?  Move over, Mayo Clinic and whichever medical labs housed the inventions of the artificial heart and Viagra (not that I need either of those, thanks for asking), and make way for my new favorite institution: the Medical University of Graz.

 

3. A Swedish study – reported in Fortune – finds that dog owners live longer and are healthier than non-dog owners. The study pointed to reduced incidence of cardiac disease, greater support and companionship, and stronger immunity because of exposure to dirt that dogs bring into the house.

So picture how sweet it is to be me.   I’ve been in the top 5 rankings of “Most Sarcastic People in the Northern Hemisphere” for 7 years running and am thus writing and sculpting and painting and inventing things 24/7; I’m washing down burgers and steaks and pork chops with beer and wine and scotch and am Olympic-athlete healthy, and Cassie the Wonder Dog is providing me with top-shelf companionship while helping me to live into my late 100s.  Plus I’m married to a woman with the cheekbones of a Norwegian/Navajo princess, and Christmas is coming.

The world is truly my oyster, with an appetizer of Oklahoma crab bisque.

 

 

 

I’d like to revise my comments over the weekend on the burgeoning sexual harassment epidemic.  Some thoughtful CO contributors have made some persuasive arguments on two points: 1. I might have been too quick to buy the MSM attacks on Roy Moore.  2. Women might be worse horndogs than my sheltered experience has taught me.

But first, there’s been some good news this week, mostly in the death-and-disgrace category.  Charles Manson has finally died, and good riddance to him.  We should never forget how the elite left romanticized counter-cultural creeps and criminals (that’s some sweet alliteration right there) like Manson.  For one example, hat tip to Breitbart for glossing a sickening 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Manson, which included quotes from a Manson friend to the effect that, “Charlie is very Christ-like and has a Christ-like philosophy.”

Yep.  Very Christlike.  Remember when Peter came running to Christ, warning that the Roman centurions were approaching, and Christ said, “Verily, thou shalt off the pigs, and pronounce that the time for Helter Skelter has arrived.  James, John, Barnabas, Tex, go forth and slay all whom ye find!”

Me neither.

Also Mugabe is finally out in Zimbabwe.  Or is it that Zimbabwe is finally out in Mugabe?  I don’t follow African politics as closely as I should.  I can never remember whether Tanzania is a guy or a country.   I know that Congo is both a country and the son of King Kong in a great 30s sequel, and that Rhodesia is gone, but the Rhodesian ridgeback is a fine dog.  Also, Toto had a nice song about Africa.  Where was I?

Oh yeah.  I’ve read enough about Mugabe to know that he’s in the Idi Amin school of horrible post-colonial dictators who combined the worst of tribal backwardness with the dysfunctional, destructive socialism that might be the worst thing the European colonizers gave to Africa.  (And yes, that includes making the pre-existing slavery systems even worse, if that were possible.)

In other “things I’m thankful for” news, at least one more female has come forward to have her tush dusted for prints left by smarmy Al Franken during an encounter at the Minnesota State Fair.  One of the CO commenters on my last piece coined the term “schadenboner,” and though that kind of term might be beneath the dignity of an august gentlemen like myself… YES!  Man is it fun to watch some Youtube footage from just a month or two ago, in which Franken was self-righteously mouthing platitudes about how women deserve the utmost respect, and what a shame it is when powerful politicians behave badly!

If only Lil Peep were still alive, and knew the word “derriere.”  I’m sure he could rhyme that with “State Fair” in a devastating rap “song” lambasting Franken!

Speaking of lambastable jerks now caught up in the harassment-palooza, smug leftist mummy Charlie Rose is out after his harassing ways have come – you’ll pardon the expression — to light.  Even more fun, creepy octogenarian racial arsonist John Conyers (guess which party?) seems to have been an abusive jerk for many decades.

It turns out that Hugh Hefner may have died just in time.  And if things keep going the way I think they’re going to for Bill Clinton, I suspect that within a few months, he may well be wishing that he would have checked out from a massive heart attack while ensconced in an “intern sandwich” a year or two ago.

All the lefty fratricide is looking like it’s going to be the feel-good hit of the winter.  Kirsten Gillibrand suddenly discovers that her patrons the Clintons are horrible people.  Donna Brazile suddenly realizes that Hillary done Bernie wrong.  Anthony Weiner suddenly realizes that he’s not even in the top 5 most embarrassing Democrat Weiners.

Gillibrand’s transparent fecklessness is especially sweet.  Quick, tell me what new info has come out about Bill Clinton in the months since Gillibrand was sucking up to him and touting Hillary’s wonderfulness as a potential prez?  That’s right: nada.  Yet Gillibrand has reversed herself like Sulu coming across a bevy of naked green slave women on the planet Gorlok.  (Yes, I enjoyed Star Trek as a kid.  And even then, I sensed that there was something off about Sulu.)

Good times.

Anyway, I have taken under consideration the charge from some COers that I may have been too hasty to condemn Roy Moore.  It’s not that I wouldn’t put it past the MSM to try to smear a GOP pol right before an election, and it’s not that I think all female accusers are automatically believable.  For example, Anita Hill.

I think the strongest evidence that Moore might be innocent is that there are no reports of his piggish behavior in the intervening 40 years, and I think that that’s super-rare.  Generally, if you’re the kind of guy who will repeatedly prey on vulnerable women when you are young, you keep doing it for years, until you are eventually Bill Clinton.  In other words, this kind of behavior very rarely flares up for a year or two, and then goes into abeyance for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, and though I haven’t followed the story extremely closely, at least one of the women that I saw seemed pretty credible, and there are enough similar accounts that it would be unusual if there was no fire in all of those clouds of smoke.

I just think we need to resist the impulse to believe the worst of our political opponents and simultaneously bend over backwards to dismiss and overlook bad behavior on our side of the aisle.  It’s a human and natural impulse, but it can take us to bad places.

Finally, I got a kick out of some of the responses to my weekend column from female COers, including Georga Collins, Erva Mercer, Tina Smith and Vera Rivers.  They pointed out that women can be as raunchy and offensive as men, but they did it in such a disarmingly frank way, and they obviously have a point.

I’m of mixed minds about this.  Biologically, males have a greater hard-wired interest in pursuit and seed-dispersing to the maximum extent, and between that … design feature, let’s call it … and the natural size and strength differences between the sexes, and the power differential that older men often have compared to younger women, male-to-female harassment is always going to be a more serious issue.

I remember an old Larry Miller routine about male/female differences.  In response to a female friend arguing that women can be just as horny as men, he pointed to the difference between women watching male strippers, and men watching female strippers.  The former are always in giggling groups, and their groping and sleaziness is light-hearted, celebratory and ultimately non-threatening.  But the latter, whether in groups or alone, are usually creepily serious, staring at the flesh on display like a cheetah watching a gazelle for signs of a limp.   He was not wrong.

The harassment issue is so vexing partly because it includes such a mix of real victims and villains, mixed with political opportunists and hypocrites, and there are so many variations in context that it is difficult to address one type of harassment without either dismissing or exaggerating other types.  The gender feminists’ tendency to lump all sexual behavior together – from an uncomfortable stare to a clumsy proposition to a hand on a shoulder to a drunken kiss attempt to a pat on the butt to an attempted assault – doesn’t help.

I also know that perceptions of the negativity of harassment varies hugely from males to females.  Most males are rarely displeased when females – any females! — express a sexual attraction to them.  During my first year of college, I was going into the cafeteria when I thought I heard my name, and looked over at a group of 4 girls, who were looking at me and laughing.  I checked to be sure that my fly was up, and went about my business.

That evening, I asked the only one of the 4 girls I knew what that had been about.  She told me that one of the girls asked who I was, and when she told her my name, the other girl said, “I’d like to jump his bones.”  Not exactly a vulgar comment, I know, and not Weinsteinian in its offensiveness.  But to hear a lot of gender feminists talk, that would be an offensive, even devastating comment if the genders had been reversed.  But was I devastated?

Are you kidding?!  I was over the moon!  A pretty girl wanted to jump MY bones?  I told all of the guys in my dorm.  I may have told my mom, the next time I called home.  I walked around campus for weeks with the melody to Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walking,” repeating in my head, as I mumbled to myself, “These bones are made for jumping, and that’s what you can do…”

I admire the attitude of the above-mentioned CO commenters.  In the case of relatively minor offenses — a clod making an offensive comment or grabbing a tush – the best response is probably a slap or a groin kick and a rebuke, following by getting on with one’s life.  If we start criminalizing every awkward and unpleasant interaction, or handle charges of harassment with one extreme (dismiss them or blame the victim) or the other (destroy the accused’s life with no attempt to determine the truth of the charge), we’re going to create a cultural mine field.

On the other hand, watching the lefty elites get into a circular firing squad over this is pretty entertaining.  Who do you think will be next?

Please God, let it be Schumer.  Or Stephanopolous.  Or Keith Olberman.  Or John Oliver.  Or Stephen Colbert.  Or…

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To read Martin’s other columns – or some of his short stories, more of which will be posted on his site in coming weeks – go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com

If you are like me, you are probably trying to read this through tear-filled eyes, as you struggle to cope with the tragic loss of Lil Peep.

What’s that?  You’ve never heard of Lil Peep?

Let me paint you a word picture: White Rapper.  Totally lacking in musical talent.  (But I repeat myself.) Worse fashion sense than I had as a pre-teen in 1974.  (Which was the cultural nadir in fashion sense since the short-lived micro-toga-with-sandals-and-black-socks craze in Greece 300 years before Christ.)  Tattoo aficionado, with bonus points for including facial tattoos in the mix.  Extra bonus points for the “crybaby” tattoo over one eyebrow, and for the fact that some of the tattoos looked like they were done by a twitchy meth-head in a county lock-up, with ball point pen ink and a shank fashioned out of a piece of rough metal as the tattoo needle.  Looking at him, you’re pretty sure that he didn’t vote in the last election, but if he did, you’d bet your mortgage that he voted for Hillary.

Okay, now Google him, and behold the wonder of my descriptive powers.

Yeah.  Even with all of that going for him, he somehow fell prey to an opioid overdose.

First it was Yung Mazi, the bullet proof rapper who was shot to death.  Now it’s Lil Peep, lost to drugs.

It’s like The Night the Music Died.   Except instead of a plane crashing into a corn field, it’s bullets and oxy.   And no musical talent was lost.   Anyway, RIP Peep, I guess.

 

In a more culturally significant development, as the avalanche of sexual harassment stories continues to come out, I have been forced to think about this disconcerting topic.  So far, I have 5 thoughts about it:

1. I am beginning to get the horrifying, discombobulating suspicion that the unlikeliest, most unexpected event since Hannibal showed up on the wrong side of the Alps with a bunch of guys riding elephants has happened:

The misanthropic gender feminists may have a point.

Even typing that sentence made me throw up in my mouth a little, and now I’m dizzy and my vision is blurring.

But it might be true.  When they are not arguing that women and men are exactly the same — and if you suggest that there are even the tiniest differences between them you are a horrible sexist caveman bigot — gender feminists are arguing that OF COURSE men and women are totally different, because all men are execrable sexist pigs who can’t be trusted alone with any woman under any circumstances.

The first idea is transparently stupid, and accounts for the wisdom of shunning misanthropic gender feminists as if they were a combination of Scientologist and Jehovah’s Witness who coincidentally really want to talk with you about a multi-level marketing opportunity if they can have just a few minutes of your time.

I have always thought that the second idea was a ridiculous exaggeration, pushed mostly for reasons of personal animus, political gain and/or revenge against a world that values female beauty over other qualities too much.  I knew that men are both blessed and cursed with a sex drive perhaps a tad bit more… let’s say “persistent”… or maybe “omnipresent”… okay, okay, let’s go with “all-consuming”… than most women fully understand, and that many men have treated women more than disrespectfully on at least some occasions in their lives.

But after the last month or so, I’m starting to think that it may have been almost all men, with almost all women, and almost all the time!

2.One upside of this depressing glimpse into human behavior?  I personally am looking better and better by comparison.

As a Christian, I believe that we are all fallen and flawed, and to quote Christ, “People suck.”  (I think that’s the NIV translation, but your mileage may differ.)  And I’ve always known how compromised my impulses were in that area.  I would not deny sometimes looking upon a woman with lust in my heart.  Like from age 13 to about 26, with brief breaks to watch football or read or sleep.  Come to think of it, even the sleeping didn’t stop the old unconscious mind from churning with a few cheerleader-related scenarios.

But luckily for me, I met the alluring Mrs. Simpson in my mid-20s, and since then all other women have become invisible to me.  Am I aware that young ladies enjoy wearing yoga pants in recent years, you ask?  I have heard rumors to that effect, but I could not personally confirm it.  On account of their invisibility to me, as I may have mentioned above.

Anyway, as the numbers of accused male harassers has continued to balloon recently, my stock as a husband, father, colleague and boss has continued to rise.  I had never thought of “managed not to grope or assault my co-workers and employees” as a very high bar to get over.  But apparently only a few of us have managed to pass that stringent test.

As I told my wife after the latest harasser accusations came out this week, “I don’t like to throw around the word ‘hero’ lightly.  But I may be the greatest hero in Christendom.”

To the untrained eye, she seemed to be unimpressed, but you don’t know her as well as I do.  She did point out – with only the subtlest hint of sarcasm — that I’m going to have to choose between that title and “hilarious genius” on my next box of business cards.  So now I’ve got some serious thinking to do.

3. We are all hypocrites about this issue.

I will not deny that I have taken great pleasure in watching the industrial-sized barrel of karmic whoop-ass being unloaded on piggish Democrat fund raisers like Harvey Weinstein, and piggish Democrat politicians like Al Franken and Bob Menendez and the long list of piggish Dem pols in California and elsewhere whom the MSM are working overtime to ignore reporting on, and piggish lefty actors like Ben Affleck and Kevin Spacey and Sulu, and piggish lefty comedians like Louis C.K..  Not to mention whichever piggish lefties may have been accused in the minute or so since I started writing this paragraph.

One of the joys of the last couple of weeks for me has been watching some sheepish Democrat national politicians finally having to turn on the Big Creep Himself.  NY Senator Gillibrand may be the best example.

Until 10 minutes ago she was praising Slick Willie – and his enabling moll and founder of the “Bimbo Eruptions” bullying squad Hillary – and accepting his money and stumping for Hillary.  But now, after 20 years of careful deliberation – and, totally coincidentally, after neither Clinton holds any political power for the first time in…would you look at that? 20 years! – she is suddenly shocked to realize that Handsy McGroperton™ behaved badly, and should have resigned in disgrace.

Ugh.  You enabling creeps are beneath contempt!

But speaking of contemptible creeps… Roy Moore and Dennis Hastert and some high profile Republicans have been piggish harassers (and in some cases, much worse) too, and we on the right hate to face up to those cases.  Trump himself has (at the least!) talked very rudely and behaved crassly toward women in the past, and we do ourselves no favors by trying to excuse or downplay the sins of the guys on our side, just because the other side is also living in a glass house.

4. Here is something that I know many of us are sorely tempted to say, but that we should NEVER say: The political right is not as bad on this issue as the political left.

Not because that’s not true – I believe that it is manifestly true! – but because it is the first step on the road to becoming evil creeps ourselves.  We have to expect and demand better from those on our side, even if that has some political cost.  We can and should try to wisely limit that political cost – by write-in voting for another Alabama conservative instead of Roy Moore for example, or by finding a constitutional way to not seat him and call another special election to replace him, if that’s possible.

But we cannot jump on Franken and excuse Moore, or we’re going to become the same kind of hypocrites as the lefties who are now criticizing Clinton only because it allows them to attack Moore.

5. All that being said, the double standard in the mainstream media is continually infuriating.

To pick one quick example: I just came across a story about how Ohio state supreme court judge William 0’Neill and potential gubernatorial candidate bragged about all the women he has been with.  (You can find the story on MSNBC’s website.)  As I started reading it, within 3 paragraphs I knew to a certainty that he was a Democrat.

Not because it identified him as such – oh no!

The story did not mention his party affiliation in the first three paragraphs.  And no GOP pol has ever been the subject of a scandal story without his party being mentioned in the first three paragraphs.  Or the first paragraph, for that matter.  Or the first sentence, now that I think of it.

Usually, such stories start like this:  “Republican Senator John Doe (R-Indiana) allegedly groped a young female staffer in his Republican Senatorial Office during a conversation about supply side economics just after a meeting with a local Young Republicans club and before meeting with his fellow Republicans on the Ways and Means committee – where he is the senior Republican member.”

When did the lefty reporter get around to mentioning that William O’Neill is a Democrat?  Paragraph 8.  And even then, the reporter didn’t bring it up – the candidate did:  “Lighten up, folks.  This is how Democrats remain in the minority.”  If the boastful pol hadn’t mention his own party affiliation, I’m not sure that the reporter would ever have gotten around to it.

Okay, now I realize that I have a couple of more thoughts on this issue, but this column is long enough.  So I’ll post again in a day or two, with a few reasons why I think the well-intentioned “#metoo” campaign may ultimately do more harm than good.

This is going to be a good news/bad news kind of column, and I always like to get the bad news out of the way first.

Last Friday my mother-in-law passed away, after only two weeks at our house (with support from hospice).  We had expected to have around 3 months with her, but she declined very suddenly.   We took her to a beautiful hospice facility in our town on Thursday for what we thought would be a temporary pain management issue, and she never regained consciousness after that evening.

On the upside, she had a pain-free last couple of weeks, and she passed very peacefully, surrounded by those who loved her, both at our house and in the hospice.  Her last words were to tell my wife that she loved her.  She is survived by her two sons and daughter, and she will be very much missed.

 

In another, much less consequential helping of bad news, Democrats won elections in VA and NJ on Tuesday, in a mostly expected but still sobering result.  I think Ben Shapiro’s cautionary take is probably right.  He pointed out that Dems did well in down-ballot races in VA, as well as in a couple of nominally red districts in Georgia, and suggested that the GOP brand has not been helped by holding power for a year without getting much done, that Trump is not very popular outside his base, and that without the giant political black hole that is Hillary on the ballot, Dems improved their numbers from the last cycle.

I don’t have any deep or personal stake in any of those elections, but I did hope that Gillespie would unexpectedly win in VA, mostly because of the despicable ad that some leftist group put out against Gillespie.  I’m sure you saw it: a faceless white guy in a truck with a Gillespie bumper sticker and a Confederate flag tries to run down a racially diverse group of kids.   Very subtle, you racial arsonist creeps!

To top it off, the ad ends with the tag line, “Reject hate.”  And the incoming governor’s victory speech included some blather about how the VA voters have rejected bigotry and want to come together.

You people ran an ad smearing a milque-toast, center-right candidate as a homicidal, racist freak.  You don’t get to stroke yourselves over how morally superior you are.  That would be as absurd as Harvey Weinstein posing as a benefactor of actresses, or Hollywood “feminists” praising Roman Polanski, or Cankles McPantsuit feigning advocacy for the kind of vulnerable women her husband preyed on.

Oh, wait.  All of those people did that.  Bah!

I do have one last bit of explanation for why Ed Gillespie lost that I have not seen reported in any media source.  And that, of course, is the role played by the awesome prognosticating powers of… The Simpson Face Punchability Index™ (SFPI).

For those of you who hadn’t discovered CO before this past summer, you can go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and find my archived column from July, in which I unveiled the SFPI.

The short version is that every human face has an inherent punchability rating between 1 (the human equivalent of a virtually unpunchable Cassie the Wonder Dog when she was an adorable puppy) and 10 (Bill Clinton during his finger-waving “I did not have sexual relations with that woman – Miss Lewinski…” speech).  In the absence of any hugely significant extenuating circumstances, the candidate with a lower SFPI will defeat the candidate with a higher SFPI.

In the run-up to this Tuesday’s VA election, I entered photos and detailed facial measurements of Gillespie and Northam into the Cray supercomputer that houses the proprietary SFPI algorithms, and the results will probably not surprise you.

Northam is a mixed bag: healthy set of eyebrows, fairly regular features, not too good looking but not ugly.  He’s also mixed in the subtler, character-influenced features that only the sophisticated technology behind the SFPI™ could detect.  He’s a Democrat, which invariably raises one’s punchability, but he’s also an Army veteran, which invariably lowers it.  His SFPI is a 4.

Ed Gillespie, unfortunately, is a sufferer from Acquired McConnell-itis, also known in the medical literature as “Chinless Cartoon Turtle Syndrome.”   (You’ve probably seen the telethons.  “For the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can help provide the facial reconstruction and chin implant surgery that will bring hope to the life of a needy child who is otherwise doomed to a life of relentless mockery and eventual defeat at the hands of a candidate with a lower SFPI.”) Gillespie’s SFPI is a solid 8, so his loss was a fait accompli.

 

One last bit of bad news this week is that apparently we no longer hold drum-head court martials or trials and speedy executions of traitors and deserters anymore.   So Bowe Bergdahl is now free to roam the earth.

Six good men gave their lives looking for that jerk.  Plus a military service dog, Cassie informs me.  (Islam teaches that dogs are unclean animals, and disdains them.  If Islam had done nothing wrong but screw up Cat Stevens and slander Man’s Best Friend, those two facts alone would rank it at the bottom of world religions in my book.   And in Cassie’s, since she is very sensitive to anti-caninism in all its pernicious forms.)

And Barack von Clausewitz called Bergdahl a hero who served with distinction, and traded 5 hardened jihadi terrorists for him.  And stood by in the Rose Garden, grinning, while Bergdahl’s weird-beard dad spoke Arabic and praised Allah.

Ugh.  I wouldn’t have traded the lone service dog for him.  Or a service cat, if there were such a thing.  Or a service hamster.  Or a civilian skink.   Or a Norway ray with an advanced case of rabies and a four-day life expectancy.

I hope Bergdahl has enough moral sense to repent and regret his actions, and feel the moral weight of the good men who lost their lives because of his idiocy.

And I hope that some day, a police K-9 dog who has a cousin service dog in the military recognizes Bergdahl walking the streets of some American town, and takes a chunk out of his arse.

 

And now, on to some good news.

 

First, the reprehensible Teen Vogue magazine is shutting down.  I know, I hadn’t followed it either.  But apparently it had been chock full of mindless leftist agitprop and relentless promotion of the joys of slutdom to vulnerable young girls.  Satisfyingly, it closed shortly after running a “Guide to An*l Sex” story aimed at teen girls.

Sadly, they turned down my freelance story pitch, “Guide to An*l Sex for Teen Vogue Editors,” which begins with an angry dad who finds his daughter’s Teen Vogue magazine, goes to their office, forces an editor down over a desk, rolls up a copy of the magazine into the shape of a cylinder… [story continues on page 43].’’

 

Second, it seems that last Saturday, fascist group Antifa threw a series of well-advertised and hyped rallies in large cities from coast to coast, and not many people showed up.

After taking out full page ads in the NY Times among other papers, and getting tons of publicity, the fascist group Refuse Fascism – whose stated goal was “organizing millions of people to drive out the fascist Trump/Pence regime” – was able to get a decent sized crowd in LA, but not much anywhere else.  Seattle (home of hordes of ne’er-do-well lefties who can usually be counted on to turn out for anything that doesn’t involve honest work or coherent thought) produced around 50 attendees, while Boston and Chicago had around the same result.  Philly had a little more, but most places had less.

And the dramatic, Gotterdammerung-style pitched battles were not in evidence, either.  One woman in NY was arrested for “splashing a drink on a Trump supporter,” though.  So … take that, Fascism!   (Remember when that Parisian waitress threw a glass of wine in Himmler’s face in 1942, and the Nazis pulled out of France the same day?  Me neither.)

Texas was an even more encouraging story.  “Around 30 protestors” came out in Austin… and were outnumbered by around 50 police, and 200 Trump Supporters.  And that’s in Austin – the San Francisco of Texas!  (And I don’t mean that as a compliment.)

 

Speaking of Texas, although the evil atheist gunman’s attack on the church last Sunday was a tragedy, it’s denouement was anything but.

In true Texas fashion, two bystanders who saw the gunman run out of the church stood by, helplessly wringing their hands while he got away, before they called the police.  One of them told a local reporter, “That poor shooter was obviously under the spell of an evil firearm.  I only hope that he can get the kind of therapy that he obviously needs.”

HA!  I tricked you.  What actually happened was that one bystander – an ACLU member wearing a floppy rasta hat — jumped into the other’s Prius (with a “coexist” bumper sticker on the back), and they slow-chased the gunman down, then used a combination of blunt language and sweet reason to appeal to his conscience, whereupon he turned himself in and apologized to the community.  Then a Texas jury sentenced him to community service, and the sheriff ordered in kale and a vegan buffet for the jurors.

HA!  I am truly an unreliable narrator.

You know what really happened.  Former NRA instructor and Hemingway-look-alike Stephen Willeford heard the shooting, grabbed his ammo and rifle and ran barefoot out into the street.  As one does.

When the killer came out of the church, Willeford exchanged shots with him, hitting him twice.  The killer fled in his truck.  Regular citizen Johnnie Langendorff, wearing a cowboy hat and driving a pick-up truck – check and check – was passing by.

Willeford jumped into his truck and said words that have never been said in LA:  “”That guy just shot up the Baptist church. We need to stop him.”  Langendorff replied with words that have rarely been said in LA:  “Okay.”

Those two badasses then chased the gunman — Mr. Majestyk-style — at speeds up to 95 mph until the evil dope crashed, and ended up killing himself.  After which – I can only hope – local residents came by and urinated on his body.

 

There are a lot of things wrong in the world.  My mother-in-law is gone, Virginia has voted for a hateful candidate who prides himself on his lack of hate, and our military justice system lets traitors go free.

On the other hand, there’s Texas!

 

As November begins, it’s time to reflect on the three things I learned in October.

First, I learned that Glamour magazine is run by a bunch of leftist dunces, because they chose Linda Sarsour as one of their “Women of the Year.”

If you don’t know Sarsour, here’s a brief overview: Palestinian-American “activist/writer,” protestor of police surveillance of Muslims, regular attendee at Black Lives Matter protests.  She’s also a big supporter of Sharia Law, and has attacked Sharia critics such as Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as women who deserve to have “their [female genitalia] taken away.”   (Sarsour’s sleazy insult is even worse than you might realize, since Hirsi Ali – who in a sane world, would be at least a “Woman of the Decade” – suffered genital mutilation as a child being raised in the Religion of Peace©)

Also, in 2012 Sarsour was honored by the Obama White House as a “champion of change.”  Naturally.

The brain trust at Glamour honored her primarily for the lead role she played in organizing January’s Women’s March in Washington, DC, i.e. the march where many women paraded in the opposite of thinking caps, and Ashley Judd screamed the incoherent, spittle-flecked keynote address at the top of her lungs.

Or, as all of us right-thinking-Americans know it, “The Schadenfreude-Palooza Blow Out Gala Celebration of Hillary Clinton’s Non-Inauguration Day Festivities.”

You’re probably asking yourself whether Glamour made up for the egregious Sarsour pick by honoring other “Women of the Year” who maybe don’t hate America and/or promote clitoridectomies in their spare time?

Let me guess: one of your teachers in grade school told you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.  If so, that teacher lied to you.  Because THAT was a stupid question.

Among Glamour’s other honorees: Nicole Kidman (meh), Samantha Bee (coincidentally also being honored this year as “Unfunniest Woman in the Solar System”), Solange Knowles (no idea who she is, but I’m going to guess that being named “Solange” is not a good sign) and – last and definitely least – cognitively impaired US Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

That right there is a Murderer’s Row of Bad Choices.

Though to be fair, Kidman had the brains to dump kooky Scientologist Tom Cruise, and Solange turns out to be Beyonce’s sister (I just looked her up), and is not responsible for her parents’ cruel child-naming practices.    Plus, her middle name is “Piaget,” which almost makes up for “Solange.”  In fact, I also just learned that Beyonce’s middle name is “Giselle.”  Wow!  How funny would it be if we learned that after naming Beyonce Giselle and Solange Piaget, their parents had a third daughter and just went with “Janet?”

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Glamour’s amazing judgment when it comes to picking women to honor.  Sarsour, Samanthee Bee and Maxine Waters on the same list, huh?

Apparently, Eva Braun, Squeaky Fromme, Lizzy Borden, famed eugenicist Margaret Sanger and Aileen Wuornos were unavailable.

 

Second, I learned that Jake Tapper is becoming an increasingly disappointing human.

At one point, I thought he was clearly the smartest person at CNN.  (I know, that’s a very low bar.  Like “the tallest skyscraper in Kansas,” or “The Most Ethical Kennedy.”)  And he used to have at least a baseline of common sense; for example, he called Linda Sarsour’s evil insults to Ayaan Hirsi Ali “ugly sentiments,” which is more than I can see dim bulbs like Don Lemon or Lawrence O’Donnell admitting.

But when the news broke this morning of the latest example of a grateful, salt-of-the-earth immigrant doing his best to assimilate into our Western society – i.e. the jihadi freak who rented a truck and ran down several dozen pedestrians on a Manhattan bike path, killing at least 8 – Jake was on the beat.  The details became pretty clear pretty quickly: the driver intentionally ran down everyone he could hit, then jumped out with what turned out to be two fake guns, and ran around screaming, “Allahu Akbar” until some cops shot him.  (Tragically, he survived.)

Now, the usual MSM take on such events is clear.  “We may never know what motivated the killer.  The obvious initial inference is that he may have Tea Party ties.  On the other hand, he had a ridiculous-looking beard with no mustache, and we all know how the inscrutable Amish often wear their beards that way.  We have linguistic experts on staff who are trying to translate, “Allahu Akbar,” which they believe may be a Pennsylvania Dutch phrase which roughly translates to, “Come hither, Hezekiah, so that we may make haste to flee in our inconspicuous black buggy with the reflective orange triangles on it.”

But not Jake the Snake.  He was all over the jihadi angle from the beginning, saying – and I am not making this up — “The Arabic chant Allahu Akbar, God is great — sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances…”

Wait, what?!

Ah yes, the beautiful circumstances that we associate with that poignant phrase.  Those Hallmark moments that mark the idyllic life in an Islamic theocracy:

A clean, sword-stroke beheading of a Sunni or Shia infidel, as the case may be.

A clean, sword-stroke be-handing of an adolescent who stole whatever is the Muslim equivalent of a pack of Twizzlers from the local “Crazy Akbar’s” corner store.

A clean, cane-stroke whipping of a woman wearing a pup tent who still doesn’t know her proper place.

An enthusiastic celebration of every Tuesday’s “throw a homosexual off the roof” ritual in beautiful downtown Damascus.

And now, in Manhattan, a boisterous installment of the soon-to-be-commonplace “Running of the Infidels.”

Clearly, the mainstream Left and GOP establishment are right: what we need now is many more unvetted immigrants to add to the rich tapestry of life in America.

 

Finally, the third thing I learned in October is how to treat people in the workplace.

After watching the reports of the rampant sexual misbehavior of our moral superiors in Hollywood and the corporate and political worlds, I’ve come to realize that I might be the only adult male who HASN’T been routinely groping my colleagues and subordinates over the last 30 years.  (No one in HR told me that that was an option.  And now that I’m deliriously happily married, my wife informs me that it is still not an option. So, great timing on my part.)

First, thanks again, prominent celebrities and high-profile social leaders, for giving us lowly deplorables such a smorgasbord of world-class examples of hypocrisy we can use to instruct our children on how NOT to live.

To my hypothetical son: “This is a picture of Kevin Spacey.  If he invites you to his house for a sleep over, NOPE!”

To my very real daughters: “Girls, do you see this picture?  What’s that?  No, that is not an unshaven, overweight Gollum.  Well, it is.  But it‘s also Harvey Weinstein.  If he should invite you to discuss an acting role over lunch, you can only meet him in a public place.  And your mother has sewn you a burka, which I have modified with an unbroken coil of wire connected to a car battery, which will function as your own personal electric fence.   Also, here is some bear mace, and a taser. And your krav maga instructor will be here at 2:00.”

Perhaps my favorite example of “left-on-left” crime was the picture of Ellen Degeneres drooling over Katy Perry’s chest from about 4 inches away, which she wisely sent out as a tweet with the hilarious caption, “Happy Birthday, @KatyPerry!  Time to bring out the big balloons!”

(By the way, I am so non-tech savvy that I have never thought about getting an “@” tag for myself.  But if it’s not taken, I wanted to request “@hilariousgenius.”  One CO reader called me that last year, and I really like the sound of it.   Wait, this just in: my 15-year-old tells me that I have to be on Twitter or Instagram to actually use that, and I don’t know what either of those are.  So I guess I can’t just go to work and request that everyone address me as “@hilariousgenius?”  Fine.  Forget I said anything.)

Anyway, pointing out double standards like Ellen Degeneres’ is way too easy.  It’s not even like shooting fish in a barrel.  It’s like shooting a large fish in a one-gallon bucket, if the fish had the lowest IQ in his school (HA!), and he was sleeping in the bucket.  And I had a new shotgun that came with a five-year no-miss fish-shooting warranty.

And yet, I’m going to point out that double standard anyway.  Can you imagine if a male tv-show host had posed with Katy Perry, staring deeply into her cleavage, accompanied by a double-entendre so tired that it would have embarrassed even creepy old Hugh Hefner?  How do you think that guy’s career would be going right about now?

Because I am nothing if not a strict empiricist (I originally wrote “rigid empiricist,” but in this context, I took the high road with a tasteful word choice edit.  You’re welcome.), I put this hypothetical to the test.  Yesterday, for Halloween, I went to my office dressed as a combination of Harvey Weinstein, Ben Affleck, Kevin Spacey and Ellen Degeneres.  (It was a very complicated costume, and no one got it.)

As soon as I came in the door, I slapped my secretary on the behind, took a selfie while motorboating an intern in a low-cut top, and then wedgied a row of sales reps who had dressed up as Little Bo Peep, slutty nurse and Lady Gaga, respectively.

So I’m unemployed, and my trial date is December 12^th.

On the upside, I’ll have more free time to write CO columns now.

Well, it’s been another eventful week, full of highs and lows.

On a high note, Tucker Carlson ran a graphic from one year ago this week that warmed my heart:  “The New York Times reports that Hillary has a 93% chance of winning the election in a couple of weeks, compared to Trump’s 7% chance.”

I’ll never get tired of that.

 

On another high note, my favorite story of the week involves the subject of a one-question quiz:

Question: Who or what is “Wunk Sheek?”

1. A famous Klingon warlord
2. The sound Hillary made last September when she collapsed against a waiting limo and then slid down its side until aides caught her.
3. The latest Malaysian model/actress to claim that Harvey Weinstein groped her.
4. An “indigenous student group” at the University of Wisconsin.

The answer, of course, is “D,” you ignorant, Eurocentric jerk.

It seems that the Wunk Sheekers were at their excited, Wunk Sheekiest during a recent protest of Columbus Day.   I mean, Indigenous Peoples Day.

And somehow, because history is apparently not their strong suit, they directed some of their ire at Abraham Lincoln.  Who I guess co-discovered the New World, spread small pox among the angelic natives, and took tobacco and syphilis back to his native Italy on his ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Mary Todd?

Anyway, a Wunk Sheek spokesperson, who identifies as “Misha” – and your guess re: pronouns for this one is as good as mine – said the following, which I am not making up:  “Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves….”

Um, no.  If you want to be real, Misha, you’re going to have to pull your wunk out of your sheek, and open a history book, where you’ll find that Lincoln was a Republican who not only did not own slaves, but actually did free them.

There was a party, though, that did fight to keep slavery, and then created the Klan and Jim Crow and poll taxes and Robert Byrd.    Can you guess which party that was, Misha?   I’ll give you one hint: its founder was Andrew Jackson.

And before you Google him, let me pass along a trigger warning: he was not an enthusiastic supporter of Indigenous People’s Day.

 

 

 

On a low note, it turns out that Kid Rock is NOT going to be running for Senate.

I know what you’re thinking: “Martin, you’re a connoisseur of the fine arts, and a devotee of classical music, with impeccable taste when it comes all that is noble and edifying.  Also a handsome, and a powerful man.  We don’t see you as a typical Kid Rock fan.”

You would be right – and also an insightful judge of people.  But as much as I am not a fan of rap, I would be up for a Kid Rock vs. Frederica Wilson contest in Florida’s 24^th Congressional District.  Sure, his lyrics might not be deathless prose, but I’d stack them up against the unhinged mewlings of national embarrassment Wilson.

Move over Cole Porter, and stand back, Gershwins.  Make way for the aesthetic bliss of the opening lines of “Bawitdaba.”

To wit:  “Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy/ Diggy, said the boogie, said up jump the boogie.”

Okay, now that I typed that out, it’s not so impressive.  However, put it next to this gem from Wilson, which I quoted last week:  “The dog can bark at the moon all night long.  But it doesn’t become an issue until the moon barks back.”

That’s just as stupid, and it doesn’t even rhyme!  (And yes, I know that “boogie” doesn’t exactly rhyme with “diggy.”  But it’s fairly close, and not nearly as rhetorically unsatisfying as a moon that barks at a dog.)

Or consider this get-out-the-vote appeal to her political base, from Frederica’s last campaign speech:  “I need all of your votes, including The G’s with the 40’s and the chicks with beepers/The northern lights and the Southern Comfort/ And it don’t even matter if your veins are punctured/All the crackheads, the critics, the cynics/And all my heroes at the methadone clinics… not to mention all my homies in cell block 6.”

No, wait. Those are more lyrics from Bawitdaba.  Although they are also an eerily accurate description of Wilson’s core voters.

Anyway, the point is that I would gladly vote for Kid Rock over Wilson.

Or Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters over Maxine Waters.

Or Rush’s Geddy Lee (and he’s Canadian!) over Sheila Jackson Lee.

Or Bela Lugosi (and he’s dead) over Nancy Pelosi (full disclosure: she may be dead, too).

Or Cassie “the Wonder Dog” Simpson over any Democrat, and half the Republicans.

 

On another low note, how about that Harvey Weinstein?

Democratic bundler, friend of Bill and Hill, supporter of feminist causes, admired staple at Hollywood dinners, fundraisers and award shows.  Also, horrific sexual predator whom none of our moral superiors in Hollywood could bother themselves to criticize or expose for three decades.

One bright side of the Weinstein scandal is that I now have a new favorite oxymoron: “open secret.”

As in, “it’s been an open secret for years that Harvey bullies every man and assaults every woman who crosses his path.”  And yet Hillary was shocked – SHOCKED! – to find that Harvey was less than a perfect gentleman.

For a super-brainy woman who once had a 93% chance of being elected president (that never gets old!), she certainly seems to find herself getting shocked by the antics of sexual predators around her a lot.

What might be the most incomprehensible part of the whole sordid story is how bad Weinstein was at being a pervert.  He had some of the most beautiful women in the world under his control… and he made THEM watch HIM shower?!

I don’t even like to watch myself shower, and I’ve got the body of a Greek god, honed by years of marathons and javelin-throwing to near-perfection.    Whereas Harvey looks like a troll mated with a gnome and had a baby, who then adopted a horrible diet and let himself go.  But he’s insisting that the gorgeous starlets in his hotel suite keep their clothes on and watch while he shampoos his back hair.

Ugh.  Please, Jimmy Kimmel et al, tell us more about how we are all deplorables who need your wise counsel on how to live moral lives!

 

Speaking of deplorable, when I wrote about Frederica “Half-gallon brain in a 10-gallon hat” Wilson last week, I hadn’t yet noticed what may well have been her most revealing comment – her crowing that, “Niger is going to be Trump’s Benghazi.”

Obviously, the Rhinestone Cowgirl is not smart enough to realize the implication of what she was saying.  Because for the last few years, her party has been insisting that Benghazi was not “Benghazi,” i.e. it was not a scandal at all.

It was an unforeseeable tragedy, caused by a horribly offensive video, which enraged a bunch of otherwise peace-loving Muslim passers-by – who happened to be carrying small arms and rocket propelled grenades, as one does during one’s evening walks — to the extent that they spontaneously launched a spontaneous hours-long attack on a US embassy, culminating in four spontaneous murders.

When she was finally called before a congressional committee to explain, Hillary morphed into the mob guy in Goodfellas, explaining to DeNiro that Pesci got whacked instead of getting made:

Congressional Questioner:  “What happened to Ambassador Stevens? Did you get that straightened out?”
Hillary:  “Well, we had a problem.  And ah… we tried to do everything we could.”

Questioner:  “What do you mean?
Hillary:  “You know what I mean.  He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”

Questioner:  “But isn’t it true that Stevens sent repeated requests for more military support?”

Hillary: “Look, there was this video.  And there was nothing we could do.  He’s gone.  And that’s it.”

And now along comes Annie Oakley Wilson, saying that the non-scandalous tragedy in Niger is going to be Trump’s version of Hillary’s scandal in Benghazi, which Wilson’s party has insisted for years was not a scandal.

Once again – nice job, Democrat voters of Florida’s 24^th district.

 

This past week has been a mixed bag for me.

Personally, I’ve had the unutterably painful experience of watching two loved ones in their 70s receive diagnoses of late stage cancers that resulted in life expectancy of less than four months.  Both of them are responding with stoicism and grace, and my wife and I are going to have the privilege of bringing our relative home with us, where she’ll be surrounded by loved ones and supported by hospice during her final months.

I will respect their privacy and not discuss any other details here, except to say that hospice is great and deserves our support, and that smoking is every bit as bad as advertised.  Both of them began smoking in their teens, and that has played a key role in their respective diseases.

I know that at this late date, everyone knows what smoking does.  But if I can add my voice to the throng of nagging busybodies in your life, please try to quit again.  Use whatever gimmick or strategy you can – nicotine gum or patches, prayer, support groups, hypnotism, acupuncture, voodoo, loved ones willing to douse you with a bucket of water when you light up.

Whatever it takes.  If you’ll pay my airfare, I’ll personally fly to your house and read excerpts from one of Noam Chomsky’s terrible books when you light up, as a form of aversion therapy that probably violates the Geneva Convention.   But please quit!

Thus ends today’s sermon.

And now: things that don’t really matter all that much.  Like idiot politician, and the idiotic voters who elect them.

Before yesterday I’d never heard of Frederica Wilson, and my life was better for it.  She’s a Democrat African-American congressdope from Florida, and she’s been embroiled in the mini-scandal about what Trump said to the widow of a dead serviceman in a condolence phone call.  A call which Wilson listened in on, just in case you thought she might be a classy human with an ounce of decency.  Nope and nope.  (If you haven’t heard about it, Google it for the painful details.)

The story is a perfect Rorschach test, as many political stories are.  It’s a she said/he said tale, but to believe her take on it, you’d have to believe two things:  1. Wilson could tell the truth if her life depended on it.  And 2. Trump would call and intentionally insult the wife of a dead serviceman.

I don’t believe either, needless to say.  Trump says a lot of crude, insensitive and clumsy things.  But this smells like a political hack operating in bad faith to either manufacture or purposefully misinterpret a statement from Trump for her own grubby ends.

General John Kelly – and since Patton is dead, Kelly is neck-and-neck with Mad-Dog Mattis as my most admired general — gave a press conference excoriating Wilson, referring to her as following in the long tradition of “an empty barrel that makes the loudest noise.”

I hadn’t heard that one before, but now I’m going to try to use it every day.

As in, “By the way, did you notice that Hillary in a pantsuit bears an uncanny resemblance to an empty barrel, and she tends to make a lot of annoying noise?”

See?  Thank you, John Kelly.

Anyway, how would you guess that a brainiac like Frederica Wilson would respond to that shot across her empty bow?  As reported by CNN (I know, but still), “Wilson told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that Kelly’s “empty barrel” remark was racist, but didn’t explain why.”

Didn’t explain why, you say?  I guess I have to be the one to point out the obvious.  Barrels often contain oil.  And oil, as I’m sure Elijah Muhammad has explained at one time or another, is black.

So, res ipsa loquitur — Frederica Wilson would probably say, if she wasn’t a total dope and knew even one cool Latin phrase – racism.  Duh!

I’ve spent the last 15 minutes – which I will never get back – looking through the debris field of Wilson’s political record.  And from that I learned two things:  1. She is a far-left loon whose presence in Congress speaks very poorly of the constituents who elected her.  And 2. She apparently inherited an extensive hat collection from a wealthy cowboy pimp.

I’m guessing that her parents were really hoping for a boy who would one day drive cattle from Topeka to Dallas.  To assuage their disappointment when she was born, they nailed her with the name “Frederica,” stuck a ridiculous baby cowboy hat on her empty head, and foisted her upon the voters of Florida’s beleaguered 24^th District.

Seriously, look at her hat pictures.  In fact, pull up a split screen of a few lovely ladies in the reproductive organ headgear from January’s march, alongside one of Wilson’s garish hats.  If you could look up the phrase “opposite of a thinking cap” in the dictionary, those are the pictures you would see.

If there is no such cliché as “a two-pint brain in a 10-gallon hat,” I would like to invent that now, and apply it to Wilson.

But not satisfied with eavesdropping on a condolence call and then trying to score political points off of it, she steered into the stupid skid, releasing this tweet: “ I still stand by my account of the call b/t @realDonaldTrump and Myesha Johnson. That is her name, Mr. Trump. Not “the woman” or “the wife.”

Hilariously enough, the mother’s name is actually “Myeshia” Johnson.

I am not making that up.  In a snotty, three-sentence tweet meant to excoriate Trump for not using the grieving widow’s proper name, Hopalong Bonehead GOT THE GRIEVING WIDOW’S NAME WRONG.

Ugh.  To complete the empty barrel trifecta, Wilson gave an interview afterwards, an excerpt of which appeared on Bret Baier’s show.  Wilson said,  “Let me tell you what my mother told me when I was little.  She said, ‘The dog can bark at the moon all night long.  But it doesn’t become an issue until the moon barks back.’”

Cut back to Bret, wearing the same confused expression that my Aussie shepherd gets when I try to explain to her that Frederica Wilson is in congress.

By the way, I would bet my life that Cassie ‘the Wonder Dog’ Simpson would make a much better representative than Wilson.  She doesn’t have much foreign policy experience, but she is a strict constructionist on Supreme Court nominees, and she is very tough on crime, having protected our house from burglars for over three years now.

Plus she’s up to date on all of her shots – which, judging from that little barking moon story, I’m guessing that Frederica Wilson is not.

If it didn’t mean moving to the 24th district, I would create an exploratory committee tomorrow.   The first ad would feature my beautiful girl at attention – her one brown eye and one blue eye staring soulfully into the camera — behind a chewed-up, bedazzled cowboy hat, with the slogan, “Cassie Simpson – Who’s a good girl?  Not Frederica Wilson!”  Tagline: “My name is Cassie Simpson, and I approve this—WOOF!”

Before I dive into my second column in a month on the virtues of failure, I have to note the passing of Tom Petty.

Petty is on my Mount Rushmore of musicians.  I started following him in high school, and he’s the rare rock star who continued to put out quality music over many decades.  I chose my grad school in part because Petty had come from that town.  (I know – not the most mature way to choose a grad school.  But on the other hand, unknown to me, my future wife lived there, and God used Tom Petty to get me into close proximity to her.  From there, it was up to my charm and pig-headed persistence during the courtship process to wear her down.  Mission accomplished!  And to quote Petty, the waiting was the hardest part.)

Losing Petty is a doubly bitter blow because of the knowledge that singers with horrible music and worse politics like Cher (71) and Barbra Streisand (75) and Madonna (112) inexplicably live on.

In fact, in my darker moments, I have to keep from thinking about the unfairness of great creative people who are gone, versus horrible ones who seem impervious to death.  Off the top of my head, Vince Flynn, Robert B Parker, Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy are all dead.  Flynn is an especially bitter loss, because he was so young.  But many of you might say that Parker, Leonard and Clancy were in their 70s or older, so their deaths aren’t a shock.

Okay.  But you know who else has lived into their 70s, and yet continue to torture us with terrible books?  Hillary Clinton (later this month) and Bill Ayers.  In fact, Bill Moyers is 83, Dan Rather is 85, and Noam Chomsky is 88!  And they’ve been living on nothing but bile and hatred of America for at least the last 30 years!  And that’s not to mention that Harry Reid and Maxine Waters are still alive in their late 100s, and Nancy Pelosi was a teenager in the Pleistocene Era, and is still fixing me with that glassy-eyed mummy stare through my television screen several times a week!

Ugh.  Got off on a tangent there, didn’t I?  Anyway, I’ll miss you, Tom Petty!

And now, on to failure.  (If I can steal Hillary’s original title for her book on 2016, before she wussed out and went with “Wha’ Happen?”)

Last month I wrote about how entertaining failure can be, whether it’s from a rapper who gets gunned down 10 minutes after crediting God with making him bullet proof, or environmental extremists who get trapped by ice on a sailing expedition to show how the oceans are boiling.  And I didn’t even mention Carlos Danger/Anthony Weiner, who would be the funniest failure of the last 10 years, if it weren’t for Clydesdale Ankles’ failure on November 9^th, and the fact that Weiner was perving on teenagers.

But today I’ve got a few examples of how failure can not only amuse us, but teach us.   And I’ll start – as one usually should – with a quote from Edmund Burke: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”

Burke knew a thing or two, and you won’t go far wrong in life if you find yourself repeating, “I’m going with Eddie Burke on this one” when you need to make a decision.

And he looks even wiser when you compare him to the intellectual heroes of the Left – Rousseau was a dope, Thoreau had a nice way with words but went home to stay with mom three nights a week when he was supposedly thinking deep thoughts in the isolation at Walden Pond, Marx is 0-47 in “I’m sure socialism will work THIS time” predictions since 1917, and Noam Chomsky has already lived about 87 years too long.

But I have to quibble with Burke just a bit; it’s not just examples, but examples of failure, that teach us.    Especially in a free or quasi-free market, failure sends crucial signals as to what works and what doesn’t.

Hollywood insults their audience, and the box office tanks.  Remember that spate of anti-US war movies when we were engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan?  I know, I didn’t either.

But I looked up a few titles: Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss, Body of Lies, Green Zone.  The cumulative box office returns for those was less than I received from a few exclusive showings of my family vacation films.   Sure, I had only back-end points, and took a bath.  But I didn’t have to pay Redford to direct, or sleep with Harvey Weinstein to get my masterpiece made, so I’ve got that going for me.

ESPN foists leftist tirades on their audience, and they’ve lost millions of subscribers, and are on a glide path toward implosion.   Leftist university administrations – the U of Missouri, Oberlin, etc. – cater to leftist crybullies and thugs in the student body and the faculty, and thereby lose students and financial support and the jobs of many employees who are no longer needed to teach students who aren’t there, and maintain buildings that aren’t necessary to house students who aren’t there.

The NYT puts out biased pap, and slowly bleeds readership and advertisers, and ends up shrinking print runs and laying off employees and renting out floors of their building in NYC (to late-night infomercial makers, if there’s any justice!).

Of course, failure in the political marketplace can also be instructive.

Blue states deploy leftist financial strategies: they levy confiscatory taxes on any citizens who are financially successful, and lavish benefits and promise generous pensions to government employees.  They throw up roadblocks to the formation of small businesses, and hire more government workers to inspect and harass and fine the hardy few who run that gauntlet.  Then they are shocked when businesses close or flee, and financially successful residents decide that they would rather live where they are not simultaneously resented and bled dry.

Baltimore and other large, Democrat-run cities treats their cops like crap, and lionize their thugs (Michael Brown was a gentle giant, etc.), and then they’re shocked when the “Ferguson effect” ensues.   Cops pull back from energetic, interventional policing, and the criminal element in those areas fills in the void, preying on the very poor people and minorities whom the Dems claim to represent.

People vote with their feet, and their eyes, and their time, and their dollars, and the results lays bare the failure of leftist policies.

Okay, so this column has been a little serious for my tastes.

So let me end with a best-of-both-worlds tale, in which failure is both entertaining and instructive.  Someone dies in this story, though, and that’s usually not funny.  But as we’ve seen with Yung “Bulletproof” Mazi and the guy who got killed (literally) losing a fight to an armless man, it can be.

 

In this story, we meet an idealistic young vegan named Dr. Maria Styrdom, 34, who along with her husband wanted to climb Mt. Everest.  But not “because it was there” – the idiotic reason that most mountain climbers usually give, and that I’ve never understood.  (You know one thing that Edmund Burke did NOT say?  “I’m sick of these gently rolling hills of England.  I think I’ll go give gravity and hypoxia a chance to kill me.”)

No.  Styrdom was sick of hearing questions about whether vegans “have iron or protein deficiencies,” so she decided to drag her husband up the mountain with her to prove something.  “It seems that people have this warped idea of being malnourished and weak,” she said. “By climbing the seven summits we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more.”

Not since Bob Titanic launched his ship with the boast, “She’s unsinkable, I tell’s ya!  Un-freaking-sinkable!” has someone come so quickly to regret their words.

You can guess the result.  She made it to the top of the mountain – because God is merciful, and He didn’t play the “iron deficiency” and “malnourishment” cards until she was on the way back down the mountain – and then she died.

This cautionary tale contains at least 4 great life lessons:

First, c’mon.  (Do I need to say this?)  Don’t be a vegan!  I mean, have you ever tried a steak?  Or a hamburger? Or a pork chop?  Not to mention a pork chop on top of a hamburger, served with a side of steak?

Second, if you must be a vegan, keep it to yourself.

Third, if you absolutely can’t keep it to yourself – and from my experience with vegans, they can never keep it to themselves – don’t announce that you are going to climb Mt. Everest to prove how a diet of soy milk-infused tofu served on a bed of hummus (I don’t know if that’s a thing, but from my experience with infuriatingly chatty vegans, it probably is) is fantastic fuel for a jaunt up a mountain.

Fourth, consider the case of me.  Although popular opinion — of the voices in my head, anyway — is that I’m aging quite well, my cholesterol is probably in the mid-300s, I can no longer cover a speedy wide receiver on crossing patterns over the middle, and I pretty much hang around at sea level, other than on an occasional trip to walk in the woods in the Appalachians.

But I’ll never bother you with details of my diet or talk down to you about yours, and my chances of dying with de-oxygenated blood under a tumbling Sherpa in the middle of an avalanche along the treacherous north face is pretty darn close to zero.

So take it from me – and sure, from Fast Eddie Burke, too:  have a burger and listen to some Tom Petty, and enjoy the instructive and entertaining cavalcade of failure that is the slow-motion implosion of the left.

We’re already 5 days into October, so it’s past time for a “Best of September” post.

Item 1.  Trump’s 9/17 speech to the UN.  The smart set MSM types all had their dresses over their heads about how outrageous his comments were, and how unpresidential, and how rude.  I found myself mostly agreeing with them, and yet coming to the exact opposite conclusion. Which is: he’s speaking to the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the UN – it’s metaphysically impossible to be rude enough to those people.

Here’s the part where I give my spiel on Trump: didn’t vote for him in the primary, half of what he says makes me slap my forehead, not a consistent ideological conservative, etc.

And yet.  We all know what a president is supposed to sound like at the UN.  Just like Obama sounded, according to the MSM.  And I’ll agree that he had a glib, superficially smooth delivery.  But what he said was either bland, multicultural boilerplate – the community of nations is just peachy, we must respect other country’s belief systems, only by working together can we be successful and just — or awful, leftist America-bashing: we’re deeply flawed, we have too often been arrogant, dismissive, even derisive, etc.

Compare that to Trump’s message: we’re paying way too much for the UN, we can’t allow the Iran nuke agreement to give cover for their jihadi leaders to get nuclear weapons, and we are celebrating the 230^th anniversary of our constitution, which is the best constitution ever, believe me.

Yes, yes, and hell yes.

And then he called Porky Nork “rocket man,” and warned him that we’ll destroy him if he gets froggy with his nukes.  (And by the way, thanks loads, Bill Clinton, for giving us the deal that ensured that the Norks wouldn’t get nukes… right until the minute that they got nukes.  Nice job, Handsy McGroperton!)

Admit it: you laughed when you first saw that “Rocket Man” line.  Rachel Maddow and Mika and the Mensa members on the View, on the other hand, were horrified!  How could he be so disrespectful to a foreign leader?!

Yeah.  The foreign leader who has his rivals executed in barbarous ways, and has starved and enslaved  millions of his countrymen, and has been firing missiles over and around his neighbors in recent months.  Plus his haircut is a crime against humanity, and he had Hans Blix killed by a shark in a giant aquarium.

I just love the image of dozens of translators sweating into their collars as they tried to decide how to translate “rocket man” into their various languages in a way that would make sense.

 

Item 2. On September 27^th, Michelle Obama addressed a conference in Boston, during which she helpfully lectured the millions of women who voted for Trump last November.  She said, “Any woman who voted against Hillary voted against their own voice.”

And that might be true, if you are a woman whose voice sounds like this:  “What difference, at this point, does it make?!!  CAW, CAW.  Why am I not 50 points ahead, you might ask!  CAW.  Hey, sweetheart, stop tricking my husband into exposing himself and sexually assaulting you!  CAW, CAW, CAW.”

I know that as you read those words, you heard her voice in your head, and for that I apologize.  Nobody deserves that.

But seriously, Michelle, please keep lecturing us about how we are too stupid to know what’s best for us, and how any gyno-American who voted against Hillary betrayed the sisterhood.  We get it.  You think we’re all Nazis, and sexists and deplorables and the rest.   I’m sure that that smug condescension is going to work just great for you in 2020.

In other great Michelle-related news, she said that she’s writing a book, which is about – and I’m not making this up — “being her authentic self.”

Ugh.  I’m going out on a limb here, and guess that it might also include some stirring passages about “speaking my truth,” or “building bridges instead of walls,” or having “the courage to speak truth to power?”

Let me suggest that if you were thinking about getting rid of your knitting needles — now that you’ve used them to gouge out your eyes after seeing those Antifa-member mugshots last week — hang on.  I’m sure Michelle’s book will be available in an audio version.

And those knitting needles can also be used to pierce your ear drums, too.  So, you’re welcome.

 

Item 3.  Speaking of fine literature, Melania Trump was asked to help celebrate National Reading Day by choosing some children’s books to donate to one school in each state.  She picked some Dr. Seuss books that she has enjoyed reading with her son.

When the books arrived at a school in Massachusetts, the leftist librarian said, “We really appreciate the generous gifts for our students.  Even though we have our differences with the White House, we’d really have to be petty, small-minded a-holes to politicize this totally inoffensive gesture.  Thank you, Mrs. Trump.  PS, love the stilettoes. I wish I could pull those off, but I’m frumpy and unattractive.  And yet, it hasn’t made me bitter, and I’m not at all tempted to transfer my rage at my own disappointments into confrontational, nasty political fight-picking.”

HA!  I tricked you!  That’s not what she said at all.

What she said was that Dr. Seuss books are full of racism, and that the American education system is broken, and most kids are poor, and it’s all Trump’s fault.  Now please shove these books up your infuriatingly attractive rear end, Melania.  (Those are not direct quotes, but they capture the stunning, ill-mannered gracelessness of her response.  Read it, and tell me I’m wrong – I dare you.)

Like you, my first instinct was to laugh at the absurdity of claiming that Dr. Seuss books are racist.  But, because I take my awesome responsibility of reporting to CO nation seriously, I decided to do my due diligence.  It’s been a long time since I read Dr. Seuss, and I have to admit that I had forgotten a lot of it. So I went to my local library.

I was shocked to find that she was right!  Consider these Dr. Seuss titles that I had not remembered:

The Cat in the Pointy White Hood

Green Eggs and Miscegenation

The Grinch Who Stole Kwanzaa

One fish, two fish, red fish, white supremacist

Horton Hears a Racist Dog Whistle

 

So good job, leftist librarian!  You keep fighting the good fight against reality, self-awareness and good manners.

 

Finally, Item 4. After a hurricane hit Puerto Rico, the creepy far-left mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin “Don’t Call me Ted” Cruz, took time out of her busy schedule of not improving the lives of her city’s citizens to criticize how Trump was to blame for the storm and the horrible response to it.

Having recently been threatened by a hurricane myself, I’m predisposed to sympathy for Puerto Ricans and the stress and hardship they are under.  But I also finding myself questioning why God couldn’t have found it in His heart to drop a palm tree (or maybe a live electrical wire) on this woman’s empty head.

First, she gave a speech to the press from a warehouse-like area, during which she thundered about how her people were dying, and she was mad as hell, and not enough was being done to help.

The best thing about that speech: she was standing in front of stack after stack of pallets of supplies that had been delivered by the United States government.  Press reports soon had to admit that the feds had flooded Puerto Rico with material and assistance, but the Puerto Rican infrastructure and human resources were initially unable to transport the supplies from the port to their citizens, creating a bottleneck.  Which was entirely Trump’s fault, because as the mayor of a major Puerto Rican city, it’s his job to—

Oh, wait.

That evening, the totally unbiased and fair Anderson Cooper interviewed the mayor.  She was wearing a shirt bearing the professionally printed words “Help Us We Are Dying.”  (By the way, that was the worst name for a Led Zeppelin tour ever.  The best ever?  Ted Nugent, “Intensities in Ten Cities.”  Take that, racist Dr. Seuss.)

Because the best use of your time and resources if you are trying to cope with a natural disaster is to mobilize your forces and have some politicized t-shirts printed up.  I mean, that’s Crisis Management 101.

Her interview was a smorgasbord of stupid.  Some highlights were when Anderson asked her if people really were dying, and she stuck to her guns.  Yes, people were going hungry and thirsty, and old people had to be evacuated from nursing homes, and they weren’t getting dialysis, and the power wasn’t back on yet.  I waited for Anderson to point out that she has been presiding over a quasi-3^rd world city where that has been happening every Wednesday and on alternative weekends before any storm hit.  But alas, I waited in vain.

She did mention that the US response to Haiti had been “so good, and we were all so proud,” and by comparison, the current response was much worse.  For some reason, Anderson didn’t point out that the Haitian hurricane in 2016 killed approximately 600 Haitians, while as the mayor was speaking, there had been 16 confirmed deaths in Puerto Rico.

In case you are not good at math, let me help.  A response that limits deaths to 600 when a Democrat is president is “so good,” and makes us “so proud.”  But a response that allows the Puerto Rican death count to balloon up to 16 when a Republican is president is disgraceful, and probably evidence of a Dr. Seussian amount of anti-Puerto Rican racism.

Got that?