Checks and Balances, Part 3 (posted 12/8/25)

This is the last of three columns on checks and balances in our government.  And I want everybody to know how difficult it was to stick to this topic today, because I have got such a long line of knucklehead leftists and their recent idiotic shenanigans that I am just dying to mock.  So it’s taking every bit of mature and manly restraint for me to stay on subject.

And regular readers will know that “mature” and “restraint” are not exactly in my natural wheelhouse.  So let me get started before my baser nature kicks in.   (But next column…)

In my last column I discussed the two main ways in which I think the legislature has abdicated its job of checking the other branches. The congress’ fecklessness has empowered the other two branches, helping to create an “imperial presidency” and an “imperial judiciary.”  Because if congress weasels want to keep their offices by becoming gutless castrati, some other branch is going to have to (and usually want to) step into that power vacuum, and the executive and judiciary have done so. 

The Imperial Presidency

The Founders created a pretty strong president; they made him the head of both the civilian and military (as commander in chief) chain of command, and they placed no term limits on him.  (That only changed after FDR.)  He was given veto power over legislation, and a monarchical pardon power too.  But the Founders also created a way for the legislature to over-ride his vetoes, and to impeach him, if things came to that.   

As the government grew, and executive agencies were founded and grew, the presidency gained more power.  Over the years, some legislatures curtailed some of those powers; in addition to creating term limits, they imposed rules requiring him to go to Congress to get a declaration of war if he tried to use the military for too long after responding to an emergency situation.   (That last example suggests some dysfunction, because presidents have been undertaking many military actions while declaring few wars in recent decades.)

One oft-cited bit of evidence that presidents have become too powerful is the huge increase in the number of Executive Orders that have grown in recent years.  However, when I researched it, I was surprised to find that that’s not the case.  The undisputed champions of EO-issuing are FDR (both totally, and on a per-year basis) with 3728 (!), and Woodrow Wilson in a distant second with 1803.  By comparison, Obama’s 276 orders in 8 years, Biden’s 162 in 4 years, and Trump’s 220 in his first term seem modest. 

Of course the substance of the EOs should matter more than their frequency.  If FDR’s only EO  had been the one forcing Japanese-Americans into camps during WWII, it would have been one too many.  And no one would now object to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (which was an EO), nor to Truman’s desegregating the military or Ike’s desegregating public schools.

Of all three branches of government, I’m most sympathetic to the position that presidents find themselves in, and I see the frequent use of EOs as a necessary evil – with the emphasis more on “necessary” than on “evil.”  

As our congress has become more dysfunctional, a president usually finds himself slogging through mud to get anything done.  If the opposing party has even a slight majority in congress, he can be tied up in endless investigations, and cannot get any regular bill passed through congress at all.  If his party has a slim but not a super-majority, he still can’t break a filibuster to pass legislation, and can only do so through continuing resolutions, which are very limited.  

Thus the rash of EOs at the beginning of Trump’s second term, and the recent policy whiplashing at each change of administration.  Obama’s first EOs canceled Bush policies (closing Gitmo, stopping terrorist detention and interrogation policies, etc.); Trump’s first EOs countered Obama’s (trimming Obamacare damage, closing the border); Biden’s canceled Trump’s (killed the Keystone pipeline, opened the border, free fentanyl for all American kids, etc.).

One more factor that limits the president’s power: as the only one with term limits, the long-term seat-warmers in congress and the deep-state bureaucratic functionaries can just slow-walk and hamper everything he tries to do, and then just out-wait him.    

The Imperial Judiciary.

Just like the other two branches, the judiciary has stepped out of its lane too.  In one way, judges (especially on SCOTUS) are given more power than anyone else in gov’t, since they serve for life and are functionally impervious to any pressure or checks on their behavior.  (I know: technically, they can be impeached, but in reality, that almost never happens.) 

But in another way, judges are supposed to be more tightly checked than the other 2 branches, because they are supposed to keep their own political opinions ENTIRELY out of their rulings; their job is to interpret the laws, not to shape, slant or make them.  In the real world, no human can actually do that perfectly, but things have really fallen apart on this front, as more and more judges (local, appellate and SCOTUS) have IMHO been de facto legislating, by novel “interpretations” that coincidentally change the law to be more in line with their political priors.

Amy Coney-Barrett made this point recently, when she joined all 7 other judges in slapping down Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s “extreme” and nakedly partisan attacks on Trump, and on the other SCOTUS judges, including Kagan and Sotomayor, in an opinion that is “at odds with more than two centuries of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”  In her response to Brown-Jackson’s rant (read it and see!), Barrett pointed out that “Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”

As a conservative, I see about 90% of the problems with an imperial judiciary coming from the left, and they all stem from the differing judicial philosophies.  Conservatives are supposed to be “originalists” or “strict constructionists,” who do their best to get back to the original meaning of the constitution, and rule based on that, even when – especially when! – the outcome goes against their own political preferences. 

Scalia provided a great example of that approach, when he declared that he hated flag burning and would outlaw it if he could…but that’s not what the constitution supported, so he ruled against his own desires. 

The lefty approach is the so-called “living document” view, in which the constitution’s meaning is continually in flux…and coincidentally enough, they always find that it is fluxing toward exactly their own political preferences.  This mindset results in what we conservatives call “activist judges” – robed partisans who continually give leftists their chosen policies through judicial rulings that they could never have achieved democratically and legislatively.

Two influential examples of this are Roe vs. Wade in 1973 and Obergefell in 2015.  For two hundred years, nobody had imagined that a right to abortion existed in the Constitution, but then 5 partisans in robes peered into the “emanations and penumbras” of that document and “discovered” that it had been there all along.  For nearly 250 years nobody had detected gay marriage in the constitution, but once again, 5 robed activists were shocked to find exactly what they hoped to find there. 

Unexpectedly!

To be fair, the division between judicial philosophies isn’t always so clear.  There are real challenges in ruling on issues that hadn’t existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, but affect our lives today.  And while conservative originalists place great weight on “stare decisis,” or following precedent, they necessarily overturn a precedent every time they reverse an earlier ruling that they find was unconstitutional.

Thus lefties screamed hypocrisy when the Roberts court overturned Roe, and again when they overturned Chevron. But of course those same lefties are huge hypocrites on the issue of stare decisis, citing it when it bolsters their political priors, and shredding it when it doesn’t.  (Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson were once precedents, and no one still argues that slavery and forced segregation should still exist.)   After all, Roe overturned 200 years of a precedent which every sentient judge – and person, for that matter – agreed on: the constitution is silent on abortion. 

And 38 seconds after Roe was issued, the left carved it on a stone tablet, proclaiming that it is and would always be inviolable precedent, until the end of time.   

The second Trump administration has brought the imperial judiciary issue into stark relief.  There are three levels of federal courts: district courts (with local jurisdiction), circuit courts (i.e. appeals courts) and SCOTUS.  There are 677 district court judges, and too many of them are hard partisan leftists, and they’ve been lodging TROs against virtually everything Trump has tried to do. 

Not all of the challenges are frivolous, and I expect that the administration will lose on some of them, including the way Trump’s done tariffs, and probably on stopping birth-right citizenship, too.  That last one is really a shame, because I’ve read enough on that topic to think that the Constitution didn’t require giving citizenship to those born to people who are in the country illegally.  But I don’t have enough confidence in the six supposedly originalist justices to stick to the law on that issue. 

Having said that, most of the TROs have been ridiculously, nakedly partisan.  Many local judges have said that Trump shouldn’t have control of executive agencies (whether in firing personnel, or shrinking or eliminating those agencies), shouldn’t be able to enforce our immigration laws, or to direct foreign policy.  Most of them have also declared that their local court judgement should automatically apply to the entire country.

Thankfully, Trump has been batting around .900 on reversing the TROs so far, because if he weren’t, our judicial system would be completely unworkable.  You obviously cannot have 677 local judges acting as de facto presidents, claiming for themselves the right to micromanage and reverse every action the president takes. 

Some of the lower courts’ more transparently egregious power grabs have been reversed by the circuit courts, but some haven’t, and if it weren’t for a mostly originalist SCOTUS, the tidal wave of lawfare and partisan rulings would have paralyzed the country.  

But that is a scary position to be in, both because this court isn’t consistent, and because the next time Dems gain control, they’ll change the makeup of the court, either legally (by replacing exiting justices) or corruptly (by packing the court). 

This SCOTUS was often a useful check on Obama and Biden, overruling Biden’s EO vax mandate and his attempt to force all Americans to pay the school loans of the students who took them out, among others.  Some quick research showed me that Obama’s win-loss rate at SCOTUS was the worst of any modern president – he won only 45% of the time, compared to Reagan’s 75%, HW Bush’s 70%, Clinton’s 63% and W Bush’s 60% — until Trump’s first term, when he won around 44%.  (I couldn’t find Biden’s final number yet, but it will likely be at or near the bottom.)   

At the same time, Roberts was able to twist himself in knots to find a way to preserve Obamacare, even though his own ruling suggested that it wasn’t constitutional, and this SCOTUS has not produced automatically originalist rulings.  Also the two best justices – Thomas (my hero!) and Alito – are the oldest, and we can’t afford to have either of them replaced by a Dem president.   

To top it all off, the army of terrible partisan local judges are in some sense winning, even as they keep being beaten in court.  Because every wave of lawfare rulings gums up the works and slows Trump down, limiting the amount he can get done.  

I know: this column has been pretty heavy on the “cautious” and light on the “optimistic.”       

I would like to hear your thoughts on this subject, because I’m not sure what we should do – other than making sure that JD, Rubio or DeSantis win the WH in the next couple of presidential cycles! – to rein in our imperial judiciary.     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Checks and Balances, Part 2 (posted 12/5/25)

In my previous column, I laid out why I think the Founders created our system of checks and balances, and summarized the way that system provides for each of our three branches of government – legislative, executive and judicial – to check each other’s power. 

Today I’ll start with one other aspect of our government which allows checks and balances to work.  This is federalism, the idea that the federal government shouldn’t dominate states in all ways, such that they can’t make their own individual laws to reflect the democratically expressed will of their citizens.

The check on federalism is the Supremacy Clause in article 6 of the Constitution, which says that when it comes to a fairly short, enumerated list of federal prerogatives, federal law trumps state laws that would contradict it.  For example, once the Republicans whipped the Democrats, freed their slaves, and outlawed slavery, Democrat states could no longer have state laws that allowed slavery.  

When the Dems tried two of their most famous, racist work-arounds – creating the Klan, and Jim Crow laws – both of those were eventually ended thanks to our criminal laws and the federally-enforced Supremacy Clause, respectively. 

SCOTUS justice Brandeis summarized the idea of federalism in 1932 when he said that states can become “little laboratories of democracy” in which local policies and legislation can be tried without impacting the rest of the nation.  If those experiments prove successful, the nation can adopt them on a national level, if the people agree.

Such experiments have been going on in the states non-stop for the last century and more.  Two common examples relate to crime, and to taxes and regulation. 

Regarding crime, red states generally blame criminals more than society for criminals’ actions; they support the police, and they prosecute and incarcerate criminals (especially recidivists) for longer sentences.  Blue states generally blame society more than criminals; they are more critical of police and more likely to defund or decrease their funding; they are much more generous to criminals, releasing them on no bail pending trial, prosecuting them less, and giving them shorter sentences and letting them out early if they are convicted.

Regarding taxes and regulation, blue states and cities – operating from their preference for more and stronger government oversight of most aspects of life – have aggressively regulated and taxed.  They assiduously regulate (and from our conservative perspective, micro-manage) construction and business, and they heavily tax everything from income to sales to property.

Red states have generally done less regulation and taxing.  It’s easier to build a house, and to start and run a business in a red state, and you pay a lot less – or zero – in state income tax.  (All 7 states with no income tax are red; all 8 with a top tax rate of 9% or more are blue)  

In Brandeis’ terms, the little laboratories have been doing their experiments, and the results are now in.  In blue states, crime is generally worse, cost of living is much higher, unemployment is higher, and state services are worse.  In red states, the reverse is generally true.  (Exceptions come when stats from blue cities – regarding educational, social and political dysfunction, along with higher crime and poverty – are misleadingly attributed to the red states those cities are in.  Devious politicians then dishonestly label blue city problems as red state problems.) 

National migration patterns reflect the results of those “little laboratory” experiments:  productive people are fleeing blue states like CA, IL and NY (among others) and going to red states like FL, TX and TN (among others).  This kind of “voting with your feet” is an informal, yet very powerful form of checks and balances, since it gives all states incentives to treat citizens well, and disincentives for treating them poorly.

Having now sung the praises of our system, I must turn toward some problems with it.  I would point to three ways in which I think the original separation of powers and checks and balances have eroded over the last 40-50 years or so.

First, the legislative branch has largely abdicated its proper powers in favor of personal benefits/enrichment of congressmen.  Second, the powers of the presidency have grown toward an “imperial presidency” (a term which gained prominence in the 1960s, and got a boost from an influential 1973 Arthur Schlesinger book with that name).  Third, the powers of an imperial and overweening judiciary have similarly grown. 

Legislative abdication:

I think the Founders would be rolling in their graves to realize how wrong they’d been about one thing.  They thought that given the ambition of mankind, each branch would jealously guard their own power by continually pushing back against the other 2 branches, which is how it worked at first.  (Hence “setting ambition against ambition.”)

But it turns out that in recent years, most of our congressmen/women have deteriorated into self-serving cowards, without the spine to fight and take principled stances that might cost them personally.  We used to have a bunch of individual budget bills every year, and every congress-weasel would have to vote on all of them, and each vote would piss off somebody.  (Vote for a farm bill that farmers think disfavors their interests, and you’ll have some angry Midwesterners on your hands!) That necessarily involved checks and balances: auto-makers and heavy manufacturers would be vying with farmers and white collar business for support/perks/non-interference; east coast states would be trying to get a piece of the pie for their people and industries, as Midwesterners and west coasters would for theirs.

But since congress is now full of people who don’t care about anything but getting re-elected, and getting Imhotep Pelosi-level rich on insider stock trading (!) they avoid taking any tough stances.

Instead, we’ve now devolved to the point where each year there is one huge, bloated, omnibus bill which hits the House and Senate floor a day or so before the whole thing has to be passed, or the entire government closes down.  There’s not even enough time to read it, let alone debate any part of it – which gives every puss in congress the chance to sneak in billions of dollars of pork and dirty deals, knowing that the people likely won’t ever find out about most of them.

And if they do – if some whistle-blower reveals some of the sleazy, sweetheart deals that were in the omnibus bill – the congress weasels have given themselves perfect cover: “What was I supposed to do?  We didn’t get the bill until it had to be passed or the government collapsed.  If I’d known everything that was in it, I’d have fought it, but I didn’t, and I had no choice.  It’s a rotten system, and needs to be changed!”  

Annnnnddddd…it’s never changed.  Because it serves the interests of the self-interested politicians.

The legislature has also largely abdicated its power by giving it over to bureaucratic agencies, who are supposed to limit themselves to enforcing the laws that the congress passes.  But the congress often passes laws with ambiguous and/or platitudinous instructions.  One example involved the Clean Water Act, which tightened restrictions on polluting waterways, and empowered the EPA to enforce that requirement.  Because who could oppose clean water and unpolluted waterways?

What happened next could have been predicted by people who understand humans, and the natural tendency to behave in ways that increase your power and job security.   Agencies who regulate lightly require less employees and budget, and are less powerful.  So before you could say “power corrupts,” the EPA had decided that “waterways” means every mud puddle in the country. 

I exaggerate.  A little.

But quickly enough, examples such as this popped up: you own a little piece of land in an area with patterns of seasonal rains; it might have a small dry pond on it for most of the year, which then becomes filled with water only during the rainy season.  An activist bureaucrat could then declare that such occasional water constituted a “waterway,” and thus a protected “wetland,” and claim the right to regulate the landowner into bankruptcy by forcing him to pay for onerous government inspections and “mitigation” strategies.

I’m not claiming that regulations are always or even often wrong.  But the end result should not be that unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally and functionally “write” a law, with no recourse for the people who are harmed by their self-created interpretations.  That would open the door to extreme, undemocratic abuse on the part of unelected bureaucrats.  And that’s what was often happening. 

In the 1984 Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, SCOTUS first created the principle of “Chevron deference,” which meant that a government agency’s interpretation of a law should be given deference, rather than being overseen (and checked) by the judiciary.  Fortunately, in 2024, SCOTUS corrected that mistake, overruling Chevron, and curtailing Chevron deference.   

That was not a perfect solution, because it took power away from unelected bureaucrats, only to give it to unelected judges.  No longer could an activist EPA functionary declare your mud puddle the equivalent of the Mighty Mississippi… but an activist judge could!  However, at least that judge’s decision could be checked and reversed by a higher court. 

Obviously, the best solution would be for congress to start writing fewer and clearer laws, so that these kinds of power-grabs by unelected officials would be much less common.  But to paraphrase an old saying, wish for congressional courage and competence in one hand, and defecate in the other, and see which one fills up first.

I think Learned Hand said that.  Or maybe it was Maimonides.

To summarize, the legislative branch – between shrinking from their duties to actually write and pass legislation, and deferring to federal agencies to in effect write the laws that congress only hints at in gutlessly ambiguous bills – has abdicated its mission, and its ability to check the other branches.

In Part 3, I’ll discuss the problems with the other two branches: the imperial presidency, and the imperial judiciary.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

A Few Thoughts on all of the Exploding Drug-Running Boats Lately (posted 12/3/25)

I was going to post the second in my three-part series on checks and balances in our government today, but I’ve been watching the news, and I need to call an audible.

Because a top-shelf, five-star, chef’s kiss example of lefty hypocrisy – the Democrat outrage over Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan drug boats, and Hegseth’s alleged “kill the guys in the water, too!” order – demands a response.   

Spoiler alert: reports of that order are BS, as even a story in the New York Times admits. (It’s a Christmas miracle!)

First, I do think it’s a topic worth debating and scrutinizing, as we should do with all uses of government power.  Unfortunately, I think it’s a debate we’ll need to have amongst ourselves, because the Democrats have rendered themselves totally unable to be taken seriously on this kind of moral issue, and on this specific moral issue.

Who can maintain a straight face while listening to their concern about the ramifications of taking the life of a criminal bringing poison into our country when they’ve not shown a fraction of that concern over the death of law-abiding citizens here?  They didn’t care about the young woman lit on fire by a recidivist criminal in Chicago; they didn’t care about the dead Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by another recidivist on the bus in Charlotte.  Not only did they not care about Charlie Kirk getting murdered, many of them actually celebrated it.  I could go on and on.  (They didn’t care about raped and murdered Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, etc. and etc.)

But it’s even worse than that.  If you’ll just sit down and let them lecture to you about morality, they’ll explain about the important context in which the different types of violence occurred.  Because the drug smugglers were killed directly by the US government, you see.  Whereas the wave of violence they’ve unleashed on the country was only carried out by the millions of unvetted foreigners whom the US government allowed in with no oversight, or career-criminal US citizens whom Democrat governors and mayors repeatedly released to continue preying on innocent Americans.

Um… I don’t think that’s quite the persuasive justification that our leftist friends think it is.

But never mind that.  Because there IS a direct analogy to Trump’s attacks on drug dealers intent on killing Americans that seems to have slipped the Dems’ minds.  And conveniently enough, it was carried out by the most popular and highly respected Democrat of this century: Barack Obama.

You may remember him as the flawless Light Bringer™, who was definitely not an arrogant narcissist like the Bad Orange Man. 

No, no.  He was the kind of modest guy who would say the following quote, which I swear I am not making up.  On June third of 2008, when describing what his winning the Democrat primary would mean for the world, he said, “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal….”

There was even more to that quote, nauseatingly enough. He also said that his rise would signal “the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless,” and on and on. 

And he was right.  Because on June second of 2008 – I remember it well – I walked to our local hospital and kicked the crutches out from under a one-legged man, and yanked the cannula out of the nose of an octogenarian lung cancer patient, before going to my job and firing a bunch of tutors who worked for me.  Because if there were two things I loved in life, it was keeping healthcare from the sick and making people jobless.

I mean, other than defecating in the ocean and urinating on the earth.  Because I hated them both so much.

But then, the very next day, Obama brought me to my senses with his announcement that the oceans and the earth were going to be just fine, and he was going to heal all the sick people.  And that’s when I realized that I had been foolishly worshipping Jesus, when I could have been devoting myself to the holy Community Organizer and his scowling outside linebacker of a wife.  (Go TCU! De-fense! De-fense!)

I had been blind, but now I saw!  

You probably see where I’m going with this: Barry droned the hell out of half the world, and the MSM must have been taking those 8 years off, because they had very little to say. 

And it was even worse than I remembered.  I knew that he’d taken out some people in some of the more terrorist-infested parts of the world, but if pressed, I would have guessed that he ordered maybe a dozen drone strikes.

But I just researched that, and came across a site called, “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,” which bills itself as independent and non-profit, and looks reasonable, if clearly left-leaning.  And I found that Obama had actually ordered 563 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen!  For comparison, that is almost 10 times the number of strikes (57) carried out by George W Bush during his 8 years as president.  

For those of you youngsters out there, W Bush was Hitler after Hitler had been Hitler, and before Trump became Hitler.  So you can imagine how terrible he was! 

And yet Obama left him in the dirt, when it came to drone strikes.  (And that dirt was gently drifting down to settle on and coat the ground.  Because of the explosions from all the drone strikes.)

But when some Americans criticized all the drone strikes, Obama’s administration insisted that “drone strikes are so ‘exceptionally surgical and precise’ that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting ‘innocent men, women and children in danger.’” (I didn’t make those quotes up either.)

Yet, when pressed to release data on how many civilians were killed in those strikes, it turned out that the number was not, in fact, zero.  As of the end of 2015, the administration put the number at between 64 and 116.  Various outside sources put the number at between 380 and 801.

But even taking Obama’s numbers at face value – which, shame on you if you fall for that – does 116 civilians sound like the result of “surgical strikes” to you? 

If so, I’d like to meet your surgeon. 

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Open scene, with a gowned doc standing over a patient on a table, with a nurse standing by:

Nurse: Would you like a scalpel, so you could make a surgical cut, doctor?

Surgeon: Nope. Just give me a meat cleaver and a butcher knife.  Ooh, and a DeWalt drill with a 2-inch spade bit!  Let’s DO THIS!  (Holding his fist toward the nurse.)  Fist bump.

Nurse: Uhhh…aren’t we supposed to be sterile? 

Surgeon (waving at her dismissively): Ok, Debby Downer.  Just hold this guy down.

Nurse (alarmed): He’s not even under anesthetic yet?

Patient: Wait!

Ten…seconds…layter…

Surgeon: Man, that is a lot of arterial spray!

Patient (shrieking):  Ahhh!  I’ve gone blind!!

Surgeon: Oh, man up.  That’s just the blood in your eyes.

Patient (thrashing): Is there supposed to be blood in my eyes?  Why is there blood in my eyes?!

Nurse: I think I see his cervical vertebrae!  What are you doing?!

And, scene.

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Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Barack the Drone-a-nator.  (Tag line: He’ll be bock…to strafe your Ramadan feast!)

At the time, I didn’t complain about Obama’s strikes, partly because I never heard about most of them.  (Thanks, objective reporters!)  But also because I don’t have double standards.  If he was going after terrorists in terrorist havens, I understand that to be part of war.  And another part of war is that civilians unlucky enough to be close to enemies when they are struck might become collateral damage.

See: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and every other war since Nancy Pelosi’s dad led a chariot charge that flattened a bunch of Hittite “No Pharoahs!” protestors in the Valley of the Kings 3500 years ago.

You know who else didn’t get outraged about Obama’s darkening the skies with drones and airborne terrorist body parts?  Most Americans, and 99.9% of Democrats.

Now fast forward to the last month or so, and those same Democrats are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and shaking their tiny fists in rage, because Trump is mowing through drug-running boats like Dirigible Pritzker mowing through a custom-made five-foot-long Subway sandwich.

And it’s not like we’re sinking Carnival cruise ships with a shoebox of meth and 1200 souls on board, or smugglers who are carrying some drugs and a handful of tourists on a deep-sea fishing excursion/drug run.

These boats are tiny, and their entire cargo is drugs, and their entire crews are cartel members!

Look, I don’t have my Masters in Drone-ology.  But I did complete all the coursework, before changing my career goal to English professor.  And when I was studying for the final drone exam, I came across this sample question:

Consider this hypothetical scenario: You have a visual lock on three evil enemies of your nation.  You can choose only one of them to engage with a warhead suppository, with the goal of killing the bad guy while minimizing the chances of injuring or killing nearby noncombatants.  Would you drone:

A. A terrorist driving in a car with one of his wives and a couple of his kids dressed as suicide bombers for Muslim Halloween.  (No treat!  Only trick!)

B. A terrorist sitting in a crowded café surrounded by civilians while watching Satan’s sport. (i.e. soccer.  Duh!)

Or

C. A cartel member all by himself – in a drug-filled boat on a large body of water, miles away from the closest civilian. 

(Rumors that Eric Swalwell – while taking and failing that test, and then settling for a career in Democrat politics – first chose “A,” then scratched that out and chose “B,” have not been confirmed.)

I wish somebody in the Trump administration would ask me to write a statement for Trump to deliver to the press, like the one he gave when we killed Anwar al-alwaki.  I’d have him walk down that red carpet, clear his throat, and read this off the teleprompter:

“As of now, my administration has conducted 14 strikes on cartel drug boats.  And they’ve all been just terrific, in terms of explosions, and when it comes to dead terrorists.  Nobody’s ever seen anything like these strikes!   People are saying to me, “Sir, you’ve saved millions of American lives already, just from the drugs you’ve already blown up.”  That’s what they’re saying. 

But I know that many of you in this room, and especially those of you who are stupid – you know who you are, and frankly, you’re very stupid people, let’s be honest – are saying that these strikes are unprecedented, and I should be more presidential, like some of the dwarves who held this office before me.

Like Sleepy, and Horny, and Grudgy.  You know who I’m talking about.

Well, even very stupid squirrels find an acorn once in a while, so maybe you’re right.  Maybe I should treat this threat like my predecessors have.   In fact, I’ve been told that Barack Obama set a fine example. 

So today, I pledge to you that I will follow in Obama’s footsteps, just to make the low-rated losers in the fake news media happy.  While I’ve carried out 14 drone strikes on terrorists, Obama carried out 563.

So after I launch 549 more drone strikes to kill terrorists, I’ll stop right there, and Barry and I will be tied.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Man, did that feel good to get off my chest!  Tomorrow or Friday I’ll post Part 2 on Checks and Balances, and update you with any CO site news if I have any. 

Thanks for checking in, and for subscribing!

A Discussion of Checks & Balances, Why they Used to Work, and Why They Seem to be Weakening, Part 1 (posted 12/1/25)

Before I get started today, I’d like to update you on what’s going on with the now-suspended Cautious Optimism Facebook page.

I’d like to do that…except that there’s not much to update you on.  I’m going to touch base with CO in the next day or two, but so far we’ve not gotten any feedback on what caused Facebook’s mysterious overlords to suspend the page.  Which makes it a little tough to figure out whether we’ll be back there or not.  I’ll post here as soon as I know anything more.

In the meantime, thanks again for all the comments and feedback!  Traffic on this page has jumped, and many of you have let us know that you’re willing to follow us to our eventual new home, and subscribed so that you can be kept in the loop.  Please continue to share the word with others you know, especially those from the CO site.

Today’s column is part one of three on the subject of checks and balances in American government.   I’ve been involved in an email exchange on this subject with an old friend of mine who is a good-hearted liberal, and it has proven to be more interesting than I had first expected.  Discussing that led me into a little bit of religion and philosophy, a consideration of some strengths of our system (and a lot that seems to be going wrong with it now), and a dusting of mockery of some people I believe are crying out to be mocked.  (Because: me!)

My lefty buddy asked me why I think the Founders created checks and balances in our government in the first place.  I’m pretty sure that he asked because he believes that Trump has been trying to wield way too much power.  (You won’t be surprised to hear that my friend has been very enthusiastic about the “No Kings” protests, for example.)  What follows is an edited version of my response to him:

I think that there is both a philosophical answer and a political answer to the question.

Philosophy first: I think the Founders created a series of checks and balances because they were geniuses, and they were steeped in the Judeo-Christian world view that (in large part) has made the West the most successful civilization in human history. 

At the heart of Christianity is the understanding that human beings are flawed and fallen; that’s why God gave us the Law in the Old Testament (to try to hem in and correct our fallen nature) and Christ in the New Testament (to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves, i.e. save us from our sins). 

Side bar: That conception differs radically from most other religions/world views that I’m aware of, especially the two major competitors to Judeo-Christianity now, Islam and communism/socialism.  Islam teaches that the way to paradise is by following the teachings of Muhammad: charity and good relations with other Muslims, but also spreading the faith by the sword, killing lots of infidels and gays, establishing sharia law with no allowance for a separation between mosque and state, etc. 

Marxist communism/socialism sees human nature as malleable and perfectible, and the source of all conflict as class-based and economic, which explains all the big talk about creating “the new Soviet Man” or some such, and pointing to the moment when socialism will blur into communism/nirvana when the dictatorial (socialist) government withers away into pure commune-ism. 

Of course, that can only happen when human nature has been completely changed, which Uncle Jesus and common sense tells me can and will never happen on this earth.  Hence the reason why the last century was filled with commie/socialist attempts at social re-engineering that resulted in poverty, oppression, environmental degradation and mass murder.  (Except when the socialism was heavily watered-down, half-capitalism, as in the Scandinavian countries, most of whom have now retreated from socialism, as I understand it.  They’ve still got market-suppressing over-regulation and high tax rates, but other than that…)

Now the politics:  The Founders’ understanding of Judeo-Christianity and flawed human nature led them to embrace and institute two great secular ideas with their roots in that tradition: free market capitalism, and a democratic republic (not a pure democracy, i.e. despotic mob rule) which incorporates checks and balances.

Another side bar: In a recent discussion with CO, he pointed out that “capitalism” is a derogatory term popularized by Marxists and socialists to denigrate and make a straw man out of free market economics.  I said that in debate, I try to use “free market capitalism” to stress that point, but he prefers the term “freedomism,” to more fully remove the straw-man denigration inherent in the term “capitalism.” 

For what it’s worth, Adam Smith – 18th century big brain and a hero of mine – also didn’t use the term capitalism, and preferred the phrasing, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”  Am I saying that CO is smart like Adam Smith?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

Anyway, free markets work because rather than trying to completely re-program basic human nature – as communism/socialism does – it turns the ubiquitous sin of greed toward a moral purpose.  You win in a free market by providing a good or service to another person which he is willing to voluntarily exchange money for, producing a win/win, or else the deal doesn’t happen. 

So you get what you want – whether that is out of a greedy desire, or a healthy ambition, or desire to provide for yourself and your family – by giving me what I want.  And the rising tide lifts all boats.  Hence Smith’s famous quote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Socialism fails, on the other hand, because it exacerbates the equally ubiquitous sin of envy.  It tells people who are less economically successful that successful people have wronged them, and fans the flames of their resentment into a falsely righteous anger and a sense of entitlement to the work and resources of others.

And before you know it, you’ve elected professional useless people like Bernie, AOC and Mamdani, and everything in states and cities they govern begins going to hell in an ever-increasing series of handbaskets.     

Checks and balances work because in addition to having good qualities – being charitable, willing to work for your bread, helping your neighbor – people are also power-hungry, greedy, lazy and all the rest.  The Founders knew that, and set up the system which Madison describes as one in which “ambition must be made to counter-act ambition.” 

Powerful senators are checked by powerful representatives, requiring them to compromise and horse-trade if they want to pass bicameral legislation.  Ambitious legislators, through the power of the purse or impeachment, can check presidents, and those presidents can check the legislature with the veto and the “bully pulpit.”  

The judicial branch checks the legislative and executive branches, and itself, as when higher courts slap down out-of-control lower courts.  (See the last 10 months!).  Those branches also check the judiciary, through passing new laws, amending the constitution or (more rarely, and more controversially and less settled) by defying SCOTUS rulings.  

Examples would be Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and instances when the free/Republican states defied the slave/Democrat-state-driven laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act, and SCOTUS rulings such as Dred Scott.  Such defiance is encapsulated in Andrew Jackson’s likely apocryphal comment that “[SCOTUS Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

As potentially destabilizing as open defiance of SCOTUS rulings could be, the fact that SCOTUS has no military or legislative agency to enforce its rulings provides a sober warning to the judiciary against drastically trampling the will of the citizenry.

That’s how the system of checks and balances has traditionally worked.  But in the last sixty years or so, that system has been fraying.

Coming up in Part 2: The boost to checks and balances provided by federalism, and the erosion of checks and balances by the abdication of the legislature, and the rise of a quasi-imperial Presidency and a quasi-imperial Judiciary.     

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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Update on the (Temporary?) Suspension of the Cautious Optimism FB page (posted 11/26/25)

Hello All,

I’m feeling a little down as I write this, because as those of you have faithfully followed the Cautious Optimism Facebook page already know, Facebook suspended the CO site last Friday evening, 11/21/25. 

In this post, I’ll update you on that situation, and ask all of you to follow/subscribe to this site – which will continue to be free, as always.  If you do so, you’ll get an automatic notice every time I post a new column or update. 

Since I think most of you originally came here from the Cautious Optimism FB page, clicking “follow” here is the best way to stay in touch and get updates on where the CO site is going to migrate to, if we can keep it going. 

So thanks in advance for doing that!

I talked to the great and powerful CO over the weekend, and he told me that he’s been repeatedly contacting Facebook and trying to get answers from them, but so far with no luck.  They haven’t told us why the site was suspended, or whether it was only taken down permanently, or only temporarily.  He had hoped that the suspension might only be for 72 hours, but that would have ended on Monday evening, and that obviously has not happened. 

So we’re not sure what the next step is going to be.  CO would like to keep the site going, and since it had recently grown to more than 34,000 followers, I think many people feel the same way.  I have really loved writing for the site for the last nine years, and have made many friends there, and would hate to see that end!

CO and I discussed several options, if FB doesn’t relent and un-suspend the site.  One option would be to re-start the dormant, old Cautious Optimism site, but we’re not sure that that can happen.  One advantage of re-starting that would be the continuity; followers of the newer site could move over to the old site with the same name, assuming we can find a way to let them know that that one is back.  The downside of re-starting that site is that if FB won’t even tell us why they suspended the new site, who knows whether they might do the same to the old one, if we break some mysterious rule that they won’t even identify!

Another option might be to start a new site on a different platform, but neither CO nor I are tech savvy in the ways to do that.  In fact, if any of you out there who have followed and enjoyed the Cautious Optimism page and who have the skill set to consider setting up and maybe even helping to manage a new one, let me know that, and I think CO might be willing to negotiate a deal with you to make that happen. 

One regret that CO and I have is that neither of us thought to create some kind of an email list of CO site followers, so that we could reach all of them with updates about where the site might migrate to, in case something like this happened. 

And now something like this has happened, and we have no way to contact the CO family!

The good news is that I have this WordPress site, and you’re here, and I’ll still be able to communicate with all of you who have been coming here regularly.  The arrangement I had with CO was to post every new column on the CO site first, and then when I wrote a new one to post there, I’d post the former one here.  So I am going to continue to write columns and post them here, as always. 

I’ll post my next new column shortly, but in the meantime, please do hit “follow” on this page, so I can let you know what the plan is, as soon as we get one.  And if you know some of the other regulars from the Cautious Optimism site who don’t know about this site, please send them here and ask them to subscribe, too. 

And while you’re at it, I’d love to get some comments and feedback from you:  How many of you would be willing (or even eager?) to follow us to a new home, if we can find a way to re-create the site elsewhere?  I’m assuming that the lion’s share of you found this page because you found the CO Facebook page first, but if that’s not the case for you, please let me know how you found me.

Also, if you’re at all tech savvy and have any suggestions for where we could locate a new site, we’d love to hear that, too!

I’ll be back to update you soon, and thanks!

Martin

I’ve Got 3 Women on my Mind (posted 11/19/25)

In today’s column I’m going to focus on three women, one of whom I admire, and two of whom I don’t.  In honor of a classic Clint Eastwood movie – which I just picked up from our library for a re-watch after many years – I’ll call this column the Good, the Bad, and… well… Michelle Obama.

First up is the Good, in the form of Tiffany Fong.  I’d never heard of her before today, and after more research, she might turn out to be a weirdo.  But for today at least, I’m a fan, because she had a great response to smelly Eric Swalwell. 

Lately Swalwell has started doing these cringey short videos in which he pretends to be walking in public when he’s surprised by someone coming up and asking a political question.  Then he gives an answer that shows the kind of brainpower that you might expect from someone who fell for a Chicom honeytrap. 

In this case, his off-camera stooge asked him why Trump has now called on congress to release all of the Epstein files.  Swalwell claims that Trump could have forcibly released the files on his own at any time, and then says, “Checkmate.” 

He might as well have said “Coffee Mate” or “Ahoy, mate,” because that makes no sense.  And of course it ignores the giant inconvenient fact that all Dems have been ignoring as they try to turn Epstein into a Trump problem: every day during the four years of the Biden nightmare, the Dems could have released the files in their entirety.

And now, because Trump hadn’t yet done what they never did, he’s an existential threat to democracy.  Or something.

Enter Tiffany Fong, who I’m told is an attractive 20-something Asian-American gal.  I can’t confirm that, because as regular readers know, ever since I first laid eyes on my smokeshow wife almost 40 years, all other women have become invisible to me.  (Which reminds me: all of you who have been sending me all of those nude pics might as well cut it out.  Though I do appreciate the thought.)

Fong’s response to Swalwell made me laugh out loud: “I feel like I could get you to some release some files.” 

Yes!  Fong played the Fang-Fang card.  Well done!

I took a quick look at Fong’s X posts and found that she has an irreverent sense of humor.  For example, “If your boyfriend is at a ‘No Kings” rally, that’s your girlfriend.” 

She posted a pic of Grandpa Simpson storytelling in front of Bart and some kids, under the words, “Back in my day women had vaginas.”

She posted a Trump-esque troll-y painting of herself wearing vaguely colonial garb, only tighter.  Behind her is a soft-focus American flag, she’s straddling a gatling gun, and a scowling, bad-ass eagle is perched on her left hand.  The painting reads, “What the f*ck is a kilometer?”

After she posted that she’d voted for Trump, some hateful lefty group sarcastically awarded her “Chink of the Month,” and she responded snarkily: “Yay! I bring honor to my famiry!”

I like this gal.

Now onto the Bad, played today by Jasmine Crockett.  (Unexpectedly!)

Everybody who knows anything about Crockett knows that she’s as phony as Liz Warren’s Cherokee heritage.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  She’s a spoiled rich kid who went to fancy private schools and used to speak grammatically correct English, but now she pretends to be a hood rat who can’t conjugate the verb “to be” correctly.

Don’t axe her why.

This week she was interviewed by a weirdo who calls himself “Larry the Fairy.”  (Which rhymes, just like “nomen est omen.”) And he asks her, “So many MAGA women receive gender-affirming care such as lip fillers, breast augmentation, etc.  Why do you think they are so against gender affirming care for trans people?”

She starts laughing, and literally stomping her hoof like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

Sorry, “foot.”  That should be “stomping her foot.” 

Or should it? 

As she is whinnying, the camera pans back, and we see that standing on the other side of her is a super-stable-looking drag queen dude – over 6 foot, giant pink wig and ridiculous caked-on makeup, wearing a dress that is struggling manfully to contain some serious flab-alanche-risk fat rolls.  He’s probably there to make Jasmine look slim by comparison. 

And he almost pulls it off. 

So Jasmine waxes eloquent on the appearance of conservative women thusly: “So I have this thing where like, you know a MAGA woman, when you see one, they all have a look, right?  Like they lips be like (gestures to her mouth), anyway, that’s a whole other issue.” 

Yes.  “They lips be all like this,” says the woman whose parents blew a quarter-million dollars on her education. 

That’s one of the Democrats’ bright lights in the House, people.  A black woman wearing a culturally-appropriating wig of straight hair, the fake fingernail talons of a Disney villainess, and fake eyelashes as thick as her skull, standing between Larry the Fairy and a drag version of Dick Butkus if he’d really let himself go.

And she wants to tell you about how conservative women look weird. 

Sorry.  I meant, “… about how MAGA women, they be lookin’ all weird and sh*t.”      

Speaking of which, let’s turn to Michelle Obama, who has to be one of the most privileged and least happy people in the country.  She famously said that she’d never been proud of the country until it elected her husband, and she’s spent most of her post-White House years complaining about the immense burden of being her. 

This March she started a podcast with her brother; it’s called IMO (In My Opinion), but it should have been called “Festivus,” because it’s all about the airing of the grievances. 

She complains about being in the fishbowl at the White House, the racism of America, and especially, about her husband.  She didn’t want him to run for president, he’s always late for everything, she can’t stand the way he chews with his mouth open, and on and on.  

Her podcast debuted with 338,000 views – not stellar numbers, considering her high profile and the big media promotional push it got – but then quickly dropped off to 66,000 within a month.  As of September, it reportedly has only around 17,000 subscribers. 

And now she’s come out with a book of pictures of herself, called The Look.  The podcast and her book reveal Obama’s unfortunate combination of narcissism and racism. In an interview she said that she had to “conform to a white environment of appropriateness.”

“Let me explain something to white people!  Our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern, so when we’re straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by straightness.”  (Rumors that her husband has not been “trapped by straightness” have not been confirmed.)  She even complains that blacks don’t swim or go to the gym “because we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all.  It is exhausting, and it’s so expensive, and it takes up so much time.” 

There’s a lot wrong with that paragraph, starting with the fact that there’s no such thing as one universally accepted beauty standard, let alone a racially coded one.  And contrary to Michelle’s self-martyrdom, most women aren’t thrilled with their natural hair, and tend to spend a ton of time on it, trying to get it to do what it doesn’t naturally want to. 

Many women with straight hair want it curly, and those with naturally curly hair want it straight.  Women with short hair want to grow it out, and women with long hair cut it short and then don’t like how it looks.  Blondes darken their hair, brunettes lighten theirs, and leftist women dye it fluorescent colors to repel normal people. 

When I was a young man, women would spray and tease their hair to within an inch of its life.  Some white women got perms (resulting in a simulated Afro), and Bo Derek once got corn-rows, even though most men didn’t notice, because their eyes never made it up to her head. 

And when Michelle whines about spending half of her waking life “trying to keep her hair straight” for us whiteys, I wish she would have asked me, because I could have told her that we couldn’t care less about how her hair looked.  In fact, to the extent that I ever noticed her looks at all, it was because I was unnerved by her constant scowl, or freaked out because she’s built like a pass-rushing outside linebacker for TCU.   

During her most recent interview for the book, Michelle incorporated three fundamental errors into one paragraph: “We have to start educating people about all kinds of beauty.  And our beauty is so powerful and so unique that it is worthy of a conversation, and worthy of demanding the respect that we’re owed for who we are, and what we offer to the world.”

The first error is her belief that people can be “educated” to regard something as beautiful.  That’s not how beauty works.  When a beautiful woman walks into a room, the straight men there all recognize her beauty.  (Even the gay guys notice.  But they just say, “Meh.”)

Over the last half-dozen years, fashion magazines spent tons of money trying to “educate” men into seeing “transgender” dudes as beautiful women, and morbid obesity as attractive, and they convinced zero men.

The second error is that it’s demeaning to reduce someone’s value to their appearance, or to suggest that beauty is all they “offer to the world.” Has no one ever told her that beauty is only skin deep?

(I’m guessing she never had a dad like mine, who told me that I needed to look for a girl who, the more I got to know her, the prettier she got.)     

The third error is that narcissism is ugly.  There are few bigger turnoffs than someone insisting “my beauty is powerful, and unique, and worthy of a conversation.  I demand the respect that I’m owed!” 

If that’s your attitude, you’re going to get all the respect you are owed. 

Which is to say, zero respect.   

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

4 Patterns Suggesting that the Dems are Lying (posted 11/17/25)

As usual, lately I’ve been paying close attention to how our political opponents have been acting.  I’ve had my ear to the ground, my nose to the grindstone, and my head on a swivel.  Maybe that’s why I feel like I slept weird last night.

Anyway, I’ve noticed a pattern in recent Democrat behavior, and wonder if you’ve noticed it too.

Example 1: I’ve mentioned this one before, but do you remember when our lefties were gnashing their teeth and rending their garments for several years because of the ongoing “genocide” against “Palestinians?”   Never mind what actually happened.  But to hear them tell it, this was the worst injustice ever, and it involved the IDF doing everything they could to kill Gazan children, while doing their best to avoid accidentally shooting any of the filthy terrorists who were hiding behind those children.

And yet when Trump engineered the end of that terrible carnage, they pouted, and sulked, and stamped their little feet.    

Of course, they didn’t give Trump or Netanyahu any credit for bringing that happy resolution about.  (Unexpectedly!)  But you’d think they’d at least celebrate the end of “genocide,” wouldn’t you?  Hell, even the “Palestinians” were celebrating in the streets as their vicious terrorist brethren who had been rightly held in Israeli jails were returned to them. 

But no.  For our MSM, elected Dems and campus left, Trump was the Grinch who Stole the Genocide, and they were very displeased.

Example 2: As soon as the peace began and the IDF pulled back from Gaza, the Hamas cowards crept back out of their holes and immediately started slaughtering their fellow “Palestinians” who happened to be from rival clans.  Those Gazans might have been expected to assume positions of leadership if the peace continued as scheduled, and Hamas were disarmed and removed from power.  And Hamas couldn’t have that. 

You may have seen the footage of some of the many reprisal killings, which often featured the rival Gazans bound, hooded and helpless, while the peace-loving Hamas terrorists bravely shot them in the backs of their heads.    

You may also remember, like me, how every Gazan killed between 10/7/23 and the beginning of the Trump truce on 10/13/25 was a totally innocent victim and a saint, a veritable Mohammad Luther King Jr.  And the world media covered all of those dead Gazans exhaustively.

Right up until the truce started and Hamas started slaughtering their co-religionists. 

And then each of THOSE killings was…a mystery.  The formerly voracious media closed their notebooks, and turned off their cameras.  Al Jazeera and other jihad-friendly Middle Eastern reporters closed out the word processing programs on their laptops, and returned to the goat porn sites that make up the remainder of their internet usage. 

The MSM has gone radio silent, despite what has to have been at least hundreds of Hamas-on-Gazan murders.  Because I am nothing if not a tireless researcher – you’re welcome, CO nation – I searched for a death toll since 10/13/25.  But I was unable to find anything. 

My first search yielded dozens of articles about all the Gazans killed since Israel responded to the Hamas attack on innocent Jews, but stopped counting in late summer or early fall of this year.  But the death count before that was high, believe them!

Many MSM sources reported between 40,000 – 60,000 “Palestinians” killed by the IDF.   Something called Middle East Monitor came out with a shock headline in late June pegging the deaths at 84,000. 

I’m sure CAIR and the pro-jihadi factions on American campuses – Students for Justice in “Palestine,” the groups claiming to be Jewish but who are fronted by trans, heavily-pierced and heavyset scary gals (I call them the “Jewish as a Ham Sandwich Consortium”), and the faculties of Columbia, Harvard and Yale – have set the number at eleventy-billion.

So I narrowed my search, and made it consecutively more specific.  I went from, “How many Gazans were killed by Hamas since the truce started?” to “How many Gazans were killed by Hamas since 10/13/25?” to “For the love of God, how many Gazans were killed by Hamas in the last 34 days?”

But the response was always the same: pages and pages of articles detailing the quintillion Gazans murdered after Hamas attacked Israel – all of them pediatric nurses and special needs infants and elderly amputees with spina bifida, and brave journalists – but beginning on 10/13/25…nothing.

It’s a Ramadan miracle.  The “Palestinians” have all come down with a simultaneous case of immortality: no one is dying in Gaza anymore, since the evil Jews stopped killing them for no reason at all.

Example 3:  And now I jump ahead to last week, when the second worst crisis of this century – ranked just beneath the “genocide” in Gaza and just above  9/11 – i.e. the Great SNAP Holomodor of the government shutdown ended.  Mysteriously.

Because even though the Dems had absolutely nothing to do with the shutdown starting – it was the Trump shutdown, don’t you know – they somehow figured out a way that they could end it.  By…voting for the deal that had been on the table since the pre-Holomodor/shutdown started. 

And which they’d voted against, 15 times.

Once that vote had passed, was their response, “Thank God that the tragedy has ended, and we can begin the grim work of beginning to bury the bodies of the millions of SNAP recipients who starved to death, and who were totally not mostly morbidly obese, despite what your untrustworthy, functioning eyes might have been telling you.” ?

It was not.  Instead, they ran to every camera and microphone and podcast studio and began venting their rage, and caterwauling that their fellow Dems had wrongly allowed the horrific shutdown – which they’d been screaming for 42 days must end – to end.

My final example takes us to Berkeley, where self-congratulatory leftists will tell you that they bravely started the Free Speech Movement 61 years ago.  And ever since, they’ve been stalwart defenders of the rights of everyone to express unpopular views, free from obstruction, interference or violence. 

Except for, I wanna say, the last 60ish years or so.  Because every conservative who tries to give a speech on campus is harassed and shouted down at best, or violently attacked at worst.  (Rest in Peace, Charlie.) 

Which takes us to last Monday, when the last speech in a series put on by Turning Point USA was scheduled to be given at that cradle of the vaunted free speech movement, Berzerkely.   Annnnndddd… out came the freaks.  

They formed a mob and employed all the old fascist tactics so beloved by the self-proclaimed “anti-fascists.”  They screamed, blew whistles and used bullhorns.  They chanted obscenities and super-peaceful messages like, “F**k your dead homie!”  They scuffled with police and engaged in a lot of vandalism (overturning barriers, throwing objects, spray painting, etc.) 

The most viral video from that night revealed two people fist fighting, one in a “Freedom” shirt, and the other one who stole his cross necklace and assaulted him. (Guess which one was on which side?) 

Despite the freedom shirt guy being all bloody, the cops initially detained him.  Because: Berkeley.  Fortunately, a ton of video was available that showed who started the fight, so the good guy was released and the bad guy charged with robber and battery resulting in injury.

The perfect detail that completed the story?  The leftist aggressor’s name was… wait for it… and I swear I’m not making this up… Jihad Dphrepaulezz.  (I’m guessing that that last name is pronounced just like it’s spelled?) 

Jihad! 

How does that Latin phrase go?  “Nomen est omen.”  (The name is a sign.)  

And I can’t think of a worse omen for how your kid is going to end up than you naming him “Jihad.”  

Though I guess if his full name was “Jihad Child-Killer McScimitar,” he might be a little more screwed than a more typical “Jihad Jones,” or whatever. 

But still.  Don’t name your kid “Jihad.” 

(Cue the NBC musical sting, “The more you know!”)

Just to reinforce that point, regular readers might remember the cheerful tale from a month ago in England (you can find it in my column from October 4th at Martinsimpsonwriting.com) involving a Religion of Peace™ follower named Jihad al-Shamie.  After he stabbed a few unarmed civilians, cops arrived, and it turned out that he’d brought his knife skills to a gun fight.

And as usual in a rousing round of rock-paper-gun-knife, the gun really cleaned up against the competition.  

Anyway, to recap:

When the terrible genocide in Gaza the leftists had been wailing about ended, instead of celebrating, they slunk away and pouted.

And when Hamas started murdering Gazans in large numbers – the same Gazans that right up to 10/13 had been the salt of the earth, and each of their deaths a crime against humanity – the lefties just turned away, sucking on a kale smoothie so they wouldn’t have to make a statement.

And when the Democrats finally ended the government shutdown – which the lefties had said was entirely Trump’s doing, and was a horror that must end – the lefties were furious, and immediately began mourning that the shutdown is over.

And when some conservatives came to the birthplace of the free speech movement to communicate their thoughts, the leftists did everything they could to keep them from speaking freely.

My conclusion?

If I didn’t know any better, it’s almost like they are totally full of Schiff, and wouldn’t know the truth if it was packed into a pager and blown up, right before their eyes.

Or into their eyes.  And into their hands.  And into their non-binary groins.  

Am I saying that’s what should happen to them?  Of course not. 

To quote a vacuous, cackling ex-VP, I’m just saying we should have that conversation.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

The Future of NYC — Lessons from 2 Classic British Authors (posted 11/14/25)

If you’ve never read anything by G.K. Chesterton or Rudyard Kipling, you are missing out.  Both British writers were at the height of their powers toward the end of the Victorian period, and both are out of fashion in academia today.  Which is one in a long list of indictments of academia today, if you ask me.  

And you should always ask me.

Chesterton (1874-1936) was an essayist and fiction writer; he wrote the Father Brown detective stories, as well as essays on various topics, and Christian apologetics (he was Catholic).  His writing is consistently witty and profound, but also easily approachable – a rare combination.

Kipling (1865-1936) is more famous, having been widely read and anthologized, and having turned down an offered knighthood and position as Poet Laureate.  Among his most famous poems are “If,” “Gunga Din,” and “The Power of the Dog.”  The latter poem is one that I sadly know I’ll be referencing in a future column, as Cassie the Wonder Dog seems to be becoming more deaf and unsteady by the week.  (The last line of every stanza of that poem is a variation on “giving your heart to a dog to tear.”) 

So what do these great writers have to do with the fate of NYC? 

They both communicated the traditional – one might even say conservative – wisdom that New York voters rejected last Tuesday.   

A common principle among conservatives is giving respect and deference to tradition and ideas that have stood the test of time.  That doesn’t mean resisting all change – the geniuses who wrote our constitution built into it the means of amending it over time, for example – but it does mean having the humility to learn from the wisdom of our forebears.  And it cautions us about the arrogance of assuming that we know more than anyone ever, and can thus overturn existing systems and build a perfect new world, or political system, with no unintended consequences. 

Chesterton summarized these two mindsets in a parable that has come to be called “Chesterton’s fence.”  It describes a foolish person walking through the woods and coming across a fence at the edge of a meadow.  He doesn’t know why it’s there, and since it impedes his progress, he wants to tear it down. 

Chesterton suggests that if you don’t understand why the fence is there, you shouldn’t tear it down until you do understand.  The implication is that once the fence is down, you’ll find out why it was there, to your regret.  For example, the horses or the bull that the fence had enclosed might show up, and either trample or gore you, and then escape.

In 2025, this concept can be paraphrased as “FAFO.”  And I think New Yorkers just voted to tear down Chesterton’s fence – the FA phase – and they’re soon going to find out.

“Why are rents so high?” they say. 

“Because of one-party Democrat rule!” we shout. But they can’t hear us.  (Maybe because the Muslim call to prayer is drowning us out?)   So in comes Mamdani, and if he does freeze the rent…the housing stock will deteriorate and rent will become even more unaffordable.  (Unexpectedly!)

“Why should we have to pay to ride the bus?” they say.  Annndddd…the buses are soon rolling flophouses for the deranged and the addicted and the shiftless, shooting up and treating the bus like a bear treats the woods.

“Let’s jack up the taxes on the evil 1% who already pay literally half the taxes in the city!” they say.

Annnndddd… they’re gone.  And the city revenues collapse, and the quality-of-life spiral tips more steeply downward, into a death spiral. 

Kipling saw all this coming in his poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” written one hundred and six years ago last month.   

In the 19th century, copybooks were used in education, as models for students to practice their penmanship.  On the top of each page would be written a sentence or two which the students would repeatedly copy below.  And because teachers back then weren’t insane or depraved, and didn’t focus primarily on new ways to get drag queens and porn into the curricula, most of the sentences to be copied contained a bit of wisdom or moral teaching.

Common sources for copybook headings were maxims from wisdom literature, the Bible, and great thinkers.  The idea was that students would get a win-win: better handwriting, with some moral instruction too.

Kipling’s poem contrasts The Gods of the Copybook Headings (i.e. traditional, conservative, common-sense/wisdom) with The Gods of the Marketplace (i.e. trendy, faddish, foolishness).  I like to call the latter “the Democratic National Platform, circa 1980 – present.” 

Which is why I’m no poet.

The poem has 10 stanzas, but I’ll share just four of them with you. 

Stanza 5 sums up the wisdom of peace through strength, and the second amendment:

“When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’

Stanza 6 describes the results of leftist “free love” and gender feminism:

“On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death.’”

Stanza 7 handles socialist economics:

“In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’”

The final stanza predicts the fate of Mamdani’s New York City, and our country, if the socialists take over:

“And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

I’m sometimes called a hilarious genius – and who am I to fly in the face of public opinion? – but I’ve clearly got nothing on Chesterton and Kipling!  In fact, I tried to write a new stanza for Kipling’s poem, but this was the best I could do:

“If the Democrats manage to beat us, we’ll all be neck-deep in a fight,

And forget what was once common knowledge, along with the good and the right.

Like there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a mad dog like Crockett will bite,

And Schiff’s got a neck like a pencil, and Liz Warren’s incredibly white.”

#wemustneverstopmockingher

I know: I’m no Rudyard! (But can you believe that he never used a single hashtag in all of his writings?  I’ve got him there, at least.)

A few critical souls – okay, many critical souls – have pointed out that I can be a little wordy, and I can’t deny that.  Which is even more reason to tip my hat to Kipling, because the man summed up the fatal flaw at the heart of the welfare state AND the leftist soft-on-crime legal philosophy in ONE line: “When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”  

And Kipling rightly foresees the inevitable result, only two lines later: Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, NYC, and every other big blue city.

Or as he puts it, “terror and slaughter return!”

We should all pray for New Yorkers, because they’re about to receive what they voted for, good and hard.  And I hope we can all use what’s going to happen there as a lesson and a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. 

In the meantime, read yourself some Chesterton and Kipling.  You’ll thank me later.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

History Corner: Why We aren’t Nazis, and Trump isn’t Hitler (posted 11/12/25)

I hope you all had a meaningful and contemplative Veteran’s Day, and that you’re getting into a Thanksgiving mood.  Here in north Florida it has dropped below 40 degrees, so many locals have broken out the parkas, and are still shivering anyway. 

I’ve been paying at least minimal attention to the current kerfuffles in Washington, and am glad that this pointless shutdown is finally ending.  And it’s fun to watch the blue-on-blue sniping over that, with the most extreme lefties raging at the Senate Dems who voted to break the filibuster and end the shutdown, while those lefties try in vain to reason with Those Who Can’t Be Reasoned With. 

Note to self: Pick up another bag of popcorn at Publix tomorrow, because you’re out.

Amidst all that, I saw a few new stories of more violent attacks on ICE agents doing their jobs, and yet another rash of Dems comparing them to the Gestapo.  And this on the heels of a lefty friend of mine asking what I think of “the Right’s Nazi problem.” 

If it was anybody but him, I would have let my sarcastic freak flag fly – I keep it in my temperature-controlled flag wardrobe, along with my Stars and Stripes, my Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and my Gator flag (the latter will remain in storage until we can find a coach who can distinguish between his fundament and a hole in the ground). 

But because I love that guy, I didn’t say, “Do you mean the problem we have with the left calling us Nazis all the time for no rational reason?”

Instead, I wrote a thoughtful reply pointing out that with the exception of a handful of whackos who have no mainstream support in conservative circles, American conservatives have no connection to Nazis whatsoever.  Because we hate Nazis as much as we hate communists.

But that got me thinking that perhaps some of you would like a quick primer to summarize why the Nazi-GOP and Hitler-Trump comparisons are ridiculous, which you can share with any lefty relatives or acquaintances who raise the subject.  (Because if you just punch them in the face, then YOU’LL be the bad guy.)

So, before you can say, “We don’t deserve you, Martin!” here it is: 

First, for most leftists, “Nazi” has become an almost meaningless term of utter derision, to be applied to nearly every conservative they disagree with.  In that way, Nazi is just like “fascist” – it basically means very, very bad, and has been divorced from all historical meaning and context.

It is taken as axiomatic in academia and the mainstream left that Naziism and fascism are both right-wing ideologies.  But as with so much that is axiomatic in academia, that is at best a distortion, and at worst just false.  Because there is plenty of evidence that Naziism and fascism are more leftist than rightist ideologies.

A great book on the subject is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” (2008).  Even though Jonah has sadly contracted a severe case of TDS, he’s a very good writer, and he lays out the ideological and historical connections in great detail.    

Mussolini was a committed socialist for years, and started the fascist party only when the mainstream socialists rejected Italian nationalism.  But he didn’t reject socialism/leftism, as much as combine it with nationalism. He named his party after the “fasces” – a Latin word for a bundle of bound wooden rods/sticks that the Romans had used as a symbol of authority. 

That branding combined his love of Italy and the Roman Empire, authoritarianism, and his leftist devotion to collectivism.  (The explicit symbolism was that the weak individual sticks become unbreakable when combined into a collective.) 

A common definition of fascism starts by calling it “far right” (because of course it does), but then says that it is characterized by, “a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”

Look at that the description, and tell me what parts do NOT also apply to communism or the various “socialist republics” (USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, every nation behind the Iron Curtain, etc.).

“Ultranationalist” doesn’t apply, because good commies are internationalists (workers of THE WORLD unite, and all that), and possibly “natural social hierarchy” (though that is the defacto situation in communist countries, where party members are always an elite class above the peasants).

But all the rest of that definition applies 100% to communist governments.  1. Dictatorial leader (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu et al)  2. Centralized autocracy (check) 3. Militarism (yep) 4. Forcible suppression of opposition (yep)  5. Subordination of individual interests for the nation/collective (yep).  6. Strong regimentation of society and the economy (hell yeah!)

Hitler and the Nazis, on the other hand, were such eccentric weirdos that their political DNA is tough to fit as neatly into a left/right spectrum. The Jew hatred was apolitical, and made them almost unique, in that they were fanatically devoted to winning the war…but simultaneously crippled their own war effort by devoting tons of badly needed resources – men and materiel – to killing Jews.  And Hitler’s personal pathologies and enthusiasms made his government’s policies volatile and erratic. 

Just like Mussolini, Hitler was a nationalist, and didn’t reject socialism – just international socialism.  That’s why he named his party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. (If the Nazis truly were wholly right-wing, they would be the first and only rightist party in the history of the world with “socialist” and “workers” in its name!)  But since nationalism is (correctly) usually associated with the right, and because Hitler’s most hated enemy (after the Jews) was the communists, it became easy to see the Germany/Russia conflict as right vs. left, rather than the fratricidal battle among socialists (national vs. international) that it was. 

That’s not to say that Naziism was purely a leftist ideology.   Only that it was a weird goulash of multiple, sometimes contradictory influences: right-wing nationalism; virulent anti-Semitism; Master Race/perverted Darwinist racism; and authoritarian leftism. 

What has always aggravated me is that our country (and the West writ large) has rightly come to terms with and utterly rejected Naziism, but we’ve never done the same with socialism/communism.  (I join those because Marx and most of his orthodox descendants see them as inexorably joined: socialism is the interim step in which the workers take control of the means of production, and communism is the second step in which the State withers away.  Step 2 has never happened, of course, because the theory is fatally flawed and disregards human nature.)       

It’s socially acceptable (and even chic) for college kids to wear Che Guevara t-shirts and commie iconography (hammer and sickle jewelry or pins, etc.) in a way it would never be for them to wear a Himmler or Hitler t-shirt or swastika pins. In colleges, whole fields can call themselves “Marxist” without any stigma, and I’ll bet that only a tiny minority of college kids know that Stalin almost certainly killed more people than Hitler, and Mao slaughtered more than the two of them combined, or that communism/socialism killed well over 100 million people in only a little more than a century.

I think that that’s what makes communism/socialism so dangerous: it has never been held to account and rejected, the way Naziism (rightly!) has been.  Too many people still attribute good motivations to the commies/socialists – they supposedly wanted a more egalitarian and economically fair society (some surely did, but many clearly didn’t!) – and completely gloss over the fact that that system inevitably descended into dictatorship, oppression, poverty, environmental degradation and mass murder. 

This terrible, dishonest distortion – Hitler’s crimes and 15-20 million killed are the epitome of human evil, but the gulags and 100+ million communist murders are just well-intentioned tragedies along the path paved by collectivized farming, 5-year plans and the Great Leap Forward, etc.  You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as Lenin said – is in large part the result of the dishonest and inaccurate way history is taught in America.

Finally we come to the idiotic Trump = Hitler comparison.

Hitler took power at the end of January, 1933.  Within his first SIX MONTHS, he banned other political parties and labor unions, pushed through the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws without even consulting the Reichstag (congress), and in 18 months he’d executed over 150 leaders of a rival element in the Nazi party in the Night of the Long Knives, and taken total control of the judiciary.  Within his first 5 years, he’d invaded and subsumed another country, forced all young boys to join the Hitler Youth, murdered an estimated 70K-100,000 disabled or gay Germans, and started throwing dissidents into proto-concentration camps.

By comparison, Trump has been in office for a little less than 5 years over his two terms, and unlike Hitler in his first 5 years, he has not tried to ban the Democrat party or unions. (In fact, a near or actual majority of private sector union members likely voted for him last year).  He has not tried to abolish congress, and they’ve hampered him at every turn, tying him up in hoax investigations that took years before he was vindicated.  The oppositional judiciary has buried him in a blizzard of bogus TROs, which he’s appealed but abided by.   

He hasn’t murdered a single Republican (not even the RINOs!), Democrat, gay guy or anybody else.  He’s got Jewish grandchildren and has appointed many Jews to his administration, and he’s a national hero in Israel, after having spearheaded a peace treaty and the release of Jewish hostages. 

You know, just like Hitler did, with the Jews putting an honorary kippah on his head and carrying him out of the Reichstag on their shoulders, chanting, “Hit-ler! Hit-ler!” and “We love you, Adolf!”  

So remember: If some leftist asks you why conservatives love Nazis so much, don’t punch him.  Instead, print out this column and give him a copy.  Then say, “Good day, sir,” and turn on your heel.

If he tries to speak again, say, “I said GOOD DAY!” 

If he insists on continuing to bother you after that… commence to punching.   

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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