Martin Simpson

We left Edinburgh and drove back into England, stopping briefly in a rural area where we saw about 80 surviving yards of Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans around 120 to establish some border control and keep the Scots out. 

That particular section of the wall is not overly impressive – the nearby St Andrew’s Church was built in 650, largely of stones taken from the old Roman wall – but I enjoyed seeing it for several reasons, beyond my usual love of history.

First, because borders – and border walls – obviously work.  How did everybody know that 2000 years ago, but Brandon’s brain-trust doesn’t know that today?!

Second, because it reminds me of the cantankerous Scots, and their rebellious spirit that was passed down to my hillbilly ancestors in Appalachia.  I love the idea that the Roman legions – the most intimidating military force in the world at that time – could whip some Scots in some skirmishes and battles, but they never stayed whipped.

Until finally even the mighty Romans threw up their hands.  “Just when these highlander-billies seem like they’re beaten, they get all wound up on scotch and haggis, and they come back at us again.  Screw it, let’s just build a wall.  Our empire will stretch from Africa to right here, and beyond the wall it will be nothing but barbarians and bagpipes.”

And the Scots said, “Aye.  You may have catapults and legions and the Emperor Hadrian, but we’ve got ‘the chieftain of the pudding race’!  Haggis!!”

It’s funny to think that 1900 years ago, the Romans wouldn’t go into the highlands to mess with the Scots, and 100 years ago, the federal revenuers wouldn’t go into the hollers of Kentucky to mess with some of the same stubborn people.   Good on ‘em.

Our other main stop that day was in the great medieval (and earlier, Roman) town of York.  We spent half the day there, and it wasn’t enough.  We saw the original city walls, and the Shambles – Europe’s best preserved Medieval street – but we spent most of our time in the spectacular York Minster gothic cathedral. 

The size and beauty of the cathedral – it took 250 years to complete, and is one of the largest in Europe – is hard to describe.  It would take days to fully appreciate all of the statuary and carvings, stained glass windows, and tombs and painted wooden figures throughout.  We went down into a crypt area, and through a Plexiglas floor could see the remains of the original Roman fort walls, along with the first Norman church built there centuries later. 

During the next day, we spent a lot of time on the road, but our main stop was a highlight for me: Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of the greatest of the dead white males, Shakespeare.

(Not to be confused with the whitest of the live white females, who is far from great: Lizzie Warren.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The weather was beautiful, sunny and cool, and we did a drive through in the bus to orient us, and then were let out for about 2 hours.  We took a walk to the river and then down a street past Shakespeare’s daughter’s house and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, down into a lovely park running along the river.  We walked a shady path and watched a few rowers on the river, along with a swan. 

At the end of that park was the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried at the altar.  (Unfortunately there was about to be a concert, so we couldn’t get up to the front to see Shakespeare’s grave up close.) 

We walked back to the center of the oldest part of town, past the grade school that Shakespeare attended, and the spot where the new house that he bought when he returned from London as a financial success once stood.  The dope who ended up owning it in the 1800s tore it down! 

A few blocks further we saw the Shakespaw Cat Cafe, a quaint little place boasting a room containing some mellow rescue cats and a traditional three-course afternoon tea.  My wife and daughter stayed there, while my brother-in-law and I walked on and took a tour of Shakespeare’s childhood home, which was as primitive and cool as you’d expect.  In the museum along with it, I got to see a Shakespeare 2nd folio, along with a lot of other great artifacts.

We made it back to London by around 4:00, and after dinner we took a last, long walk around town.  Our hotel was in Kensington, and a two-mile stroll down Kensington Road brought us to the Albert Memorial, an impressive tribute to Victoria’s husband, which sits on the edge of Kensington Gardens, across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. 

The central memorial – focused on a guilded statue of a seated Prince Albert – also features allegorical sculptures depicting industrial arts and sciences valued by the Victorians, including agriculture, commerce, engineering and manufacturing.  A frieze that circles the main structure contains images of famous sculptors, composers, painters, poets, architects and engineers.

The whole thing occupies a square, at the four corners of which are four more sculpted groupings of people and one large animal, each one symbolizing a part of the British empire.  The Americas grouping features a bison, the African one a camel, the Asian one an elephant, and the European one a bull.   (Google the memorial for views of the many sculptures.)

I had a great time on this trip, and packed a lot into 12 days.  In addition to spending time with my two top-shelf daughters, I got to see Oxford, Stratford, 2 early Shakespeare folios, 3 Roman towns, multiple castles, half a dozen great churches, and 5 amazing border collies at work.  I also ate haggis 3 times, and lived to tell the tale.

Plus, unlike during the CO and COW’s vacation (God bless them!), the country we were visiting didn’t burn down when we were there!

So we’ve got that going for us.

Since I’ve been home and had some time to reflect, three thoughts from this trip have been running through my mind.

First, I don’t think I’ve ever realized how small the UK is compared to America.  My home state of Florida (I wasn’t born here, but I got here as soon as I could) covers just under 70K square miles.  All of England is only 50K; Scotland is 30K, and Wales is only 8K.  As the crow flies, London (in southern England) is only 300 miles from the Scottish border, and less than 500 miles from the farthest we got up into the Scottish highlands.  (My north Florida home is 2500 miles from the Canadian border!) 

A corresponding realization is just how much England/UK has punched above its weight throughout history.  The idea that so many great writers, thinkers, builders and inventors lived here, and that so many great events of history took place here – all in a place not much bigger than my state – is mind boggling.   

My second thought is an appreciation of the civilizational confidence on display in the sights we saw, in both religious and secular contexts.   The Albert Memorial is perhaps the best distillation of the pride taken in a globe-straddling empire on which the sun never set, but the various palaces and castles also represented impressive accomplishments: Buckingham Palace and Windsor castle in England, Cardiff Castle in Wales, and Blair and Edinburgh Castles in Scotland all bespeak wealth, and military and engineering prowess.

The many churches we saw were also mesmerizing.  The soaring ones like St. Paul’s and York Minster over-awe visitors with their sheer size and grandiosity, but I found that smaller ones, such as St. John the Baptist near Windsor Castle, Christ Church and the many chapels of Oxford, and Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland also had their charms.

The church I found most aesthetically pleasing overall was St. Andrews Presbyterian church in the small town of Fort William, Scotland.  You can find a picture online of the interior of the church: stone walls containing deep-set gothic arches with stained glass, an elaborately decorated altar area up front, all beneath a gorgeous, steep wooden ceiling, supported by symmetrical arches of beautifully carved, dark-wood trusses and buttresses.      

Even if I were atheist or agnostic, these places would move me.  The amount of effort and dedication they took to create is hard to fathom.  At York Minster I read about the building of the cathedral, and put myself in the shoes of a stone mason in the year 1220.  He began working on the massive foundation of a cathedral that he knew he would never see completed. 

If he were lucky, he might live to see one of the transepts completed in 40 years or so.  But he knew that even if his children took his trade, his son would never see the building completed, and not his grandson, either.  As it happened, the structure was finally finished in 1470, 250 years and 12 generations later! 

My final thought is a melancholy one, involving the seemingly frivolous, unserious and less accomplished society of our time compared to theirs.  The sublime churches are mostly empty of worshippers; the faith that built them and inspired the greatest artists and thinkers of many generations has receded like a once-beautiful and life-giving lake after a long and devastating drought. 

As a Christian, that is a depressing thought, and an ominous one.  Once the West’s civilizational confidence lost its foundational Judeo-Christian worldview, it rested less steadily on purely civic and patriotic foundations.  As the decades have gone on, the left has chipped away and undermined those bulwarks.

Our greatest historical figures are denigrated as just a bunch of dead, white males.  Our past accomplishments are sneered at as colonialism and oppression, healthy patriotism derided as jingoism and prejudice, and our virtues and sacrifices dismissed as dishonest cover for the trendy sins of this age (racism, sexism, whiteness, etc.). 

I am praying for a return to an ordered and reasonable faith, but I can’t say that the prospects look good for that.  Without it, I can’t see how we can counter the ascendant religions of the day – not just explicit religions like an aggressive Islam, but the atheistic equivalents of proselytizing religions such as socialism, “neutral” multiculturalism, or nihilistic materialism.  

I don’t see any of those ideological systems yielding to the kind of desiccated, fractious, and insecure and self-flagellating secularism of our post-Christian societies. 

When I was growing up in farm country, I heard the saying, “You should never eat your seed corn.”  Today you live off of this year’s harvest, but you set aside what you need to plant for next year, which ensures your future.

I loved our trip, and I liked the people I met in England, Scotland and Wales.  They’ve got rich history, beautiful land, and an amazing patrimony – architecturally, artistically and intellectually.  I just hope that they are not living too much off of past glories.

But I’m afraid that they, as well as we in America, may be eating their seed corn, culturally speaking.   

On the other hand, every generation is another chance to turn things around.  And we are cautious optimists, after all. 

The first step to improving things is clear, at any rate:

Biden delenda est!    

Before I get on to the rest of our England and Scotland trip, I have to give a hat tip to some anonymous commenter who described our intrepid Prez and VP team absolutely perfectly.  He called them “Sh*ts and Giggles.”

After what seems like 37 years of the disastrous Biden-Que Mala term – with him pooping on the pope and her yammering on about Venn diagrams and electric schoolbuses – I salute you, anonymous wiseguy.

Our first week in England ended in Liverpool, and from there we drove up into the Lake District, where we hit the only vigorous rain of our trip, though we still took a scenic boat trip on Lake Windemere and had some good fish and chips at a very quaint 300-year-old pub/restaurant.  

From there we moved on into Scotland, where we spent four days.   We got to take in most of the green, hilly countryside under cloudy skies, but the brief interludes of full sun made us appreciate the scenery even more.   We took a boat ride on Loch Lomond, and saw a Commando Memorial – a 17-foot-tall bronze rendering of three impressive WWII soldiers near what had been a training base from which they shipped out to kill Nazis.

We had a scenery stop at Glencoe, where three craggy mountains are in close proximity, and mark the site of a famous 1692 massacre of the MacDonalds by the Campbells.  (The tales of fiercely independent, warlike people, with intermittent feuding and long memories, seemed oddly familiar, consider the Scots-Irish part of my dad’s bloodline.)

We spent a night at a beautiful rustic hotel in the highlands, and after supper we took an excursion to a sheep farm that was one of the highlights of the trip.  We met Neil, one of two remaining shepherds in the area, and he put his 5 impressive border collies through their paces.  We stood in an empty pasture near a ridgeline, and while facing us and with the dogs behind him, Neil demonstrated various whistles.

He’d say that this whistle told the dog to go left and sprint; then he’d give a fairly quiet whistle, and a gorgeous black-and-white collie tore off down the left side of the pasture.  Neil said that the next whistle meant stop, and the dog skidded to a halt like a cartoon character.

The next whistle had the dog walking comically slowly, like Wile E. Coyote trying to sneak up on somebody.  The next whistle meant walk normally, and the dog did.  Then Neil gave the sprint whistle again – all without looking toward the dog – and that good boy tore away like he’d just seen Liz Warren, and mistaken her for a ghost. 

(On account of how ghastly white she is.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The dog disappeared over the nearest small ridgeline.  And after a minute or two, a herd of maybe 90 sheep came thundering over that crest, with the dog racing back and forth behind them, his fur flying and his teeth bared and tongue lolling in what looked like the smile of a creature doing exactly what God made him for.

I’d count anyone lucky who has half a dozen moments in a given year when he’s as happy as that collie when he’d brought that herd of sheep back to Neil.

I asked Neil what dog breeds he thinks are most intelligent, and he said that he’s worked with several herding breeds over the years, but the border collie is the smartest, and it’s not close.   (Because he’s never met Cassie the Wonder Dog and therefore doesn’t know any better, I didn’t hold that against him.)

Neil also said that there’s no such thing as bad dogs, only bad owners, because any time he’s met an allegedly problem dog, the owner was the actual problem. 

Sidebar: When I got back home and read the stories about Joe Biden’s dog Commander, who has bitten half a dozen secret service agents and WH personnel, just like his previous dog Major, who did the same thing, that made perfect sense. 

In addition to being a lousy father and a terrible president, Brandon is a total failure as a dog owner.  And none of us are the least bit surprised. 

We spent two days in Edinburgh, and had a great time.  I’ve seen pictures of the old castle on the top of the cliff in the middle of town, but pictures don’t really do it justice.  We got a tour of the old town from a local guide, had a dinner with touristy entertainment provided by a bagpiper and a couple of Scottish dancers, and wandered the impressive old city, finding one cool “close” (a tiny, narrow alley between buildings) after another.

One close opened into a small courtyard, where my brother-in-law and I came across a Writer’s Museum, in a three-story built in the 1600s.  (Google it.) The building was gorgeous, with one floor dedicated to each of the big three Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. 

Scott has an impressive statue in the middle of town, and Adam Smith (a hero of mine, as he is of all right-thinking economists) has a smaller one not far from the castle.  A bunch of kids were acting the fool around his statue, and I was barely able to restrain myself from knocking their hats off and telling them to show some respect. 

(I had the same instinct in many churches all over England and Scotland.)

I really liked Scotland and the Scots, for several reasons, including their proper appreciation of dogs.  In every small or medium sized town where we spent any time, many dogs accompanied their Scots owners – along with Welsh dogs in Wales, and English ones in the Lake District, too. 

(Walter Scott’s statue – and many paintings and sculptures of Burns – included a faithful dog at the great man’s side.)

I also like the Scots’ national self-confidence.  I ate haggis three times, and while the last was the best, it still wasn’t great.  But man, are the Scots proud of their national flower (the thistle), their writers, and their haggis!

That last meal was a dinner in a small town in the countryside, maybe 20 miles from Edinburgh, in a restaurant owned by the same family for many generations.  Two other tour groups were there with us, and I’m sure that the owner’s performance is partially a tourist-driven exercise.

But there was no mistaking their national pride, either.  The owner sang a melancholy song by Robert Burns in a very nice baritone, and then he announced the introduction of the haggis. 

A bagpiper in the back of the room belted out a tune – I like bagpipe music, though a little of it goes a long way – and as he slowly piped his way in a serpentine path among the tables, a waitress followed him, holding high a platter with the haggis.  As she passed each table, she lowered the dish so that the appreciative audience could see it.

When they had both made their way to the stage, the piper and the owner dribbled the top of it with Scotch, as they recited alternating verses of a Robert Burns poem called – I’m not making this up – “Address to a Haggis.”    

They recited the poem – one in partly confusing Scots English, and the other in regular English, and it was amazing.  It started by addressing the haggis and praising it (“Good luck to you and your honest, plump face/ Great chieftain of the pudding race!”), and ended by attributing Scottish martial bad-assery to their terrible national meal:

“But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,

The trembling earth resounds his tread,

Clap in his ample fist a blade,

He’ll make it whistle;

And legs, and arms, and heads will cut off

Like the heads of thistles.

You powers, who make mankind your care,

And dish them out their bill of fare,

Old Scotland wants no watery stuff,

That splashes in small wooden dishes;

But if you wish her grateful prayer,

Give her [Scotland] a Haggis!”

Good lord!  I tried to imagine America – after these dispiriting recent years – having that kind of patriotic pride about a national dish, and it beggars the imagination.

Can you picture an American host singing the national anthem, then announcing the entrance of the hamburger?  A guitarist could weave through the room (probably playing a Johnny Cash song), followed by a pretty waitress displaying a giant burger on a silver tray to all of the foreign tourists in the place.

When they’d made their way to the stage, the host could dribble some Kentucky bourbon over the opened bun, while he and the guitarist recited an Ode to the Burger:

“You may be named for Hamburg drear,

but you have been perfected here.

And while foreigners about their foods prattle,

you are the finest gift from cattle.”

And a closing that ties American military prowess to the hamburger? 

“While pathetic vegans, weak and pale,

choke down their gruel and at life fail,

our armies triumph like conquering lords

with bellies full of Angus and Hereford!

We won at Bastogne and Peleliu,

but not by slurping beef-less faux stew.

So let your soy boys eat their swill,

we’ll feed on the bounty of the grill!”  

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little choked up, and in need of a few shots of Knob Creek 9. 

Next up: my third and final entry about our trip.  In the meantime, as always…

Biden delenda est!

As promised, I’m going to post a few columns about the highlights of our England and Scotland trip which ended last week.  If you’re not interested in my family vacation – and why should you be, really? – I’ll post my usual political snark-fests as scheduled.

Our trip ended up being 12 days long.  Karen’s brother Will came with us, and we got the chance to see both of our daughters.  We had a 10-day tour scheduled, but we flew over two days early to visit youngest daughter Emily, who is taking a couple of study-abroad classes at Oxford for 6 weeks. 

Because I am a huge fan of literature, history and architecture – and sure, pretty fond of my daughters, too – I was really looking forward to seeing Oxford.  And it did not disappoint!

We spent two days walking around the amazing university, surrounded by great stone buildings that ranged from – by American standards – old, to really old, to unthinkably old.  The university is the oldest in the English-speaking world, with its beginnings in 1096, and its first rapid growth phase took place in the 1100s.  (Rumors that Nancy Pelosi was in its first graduating class have been disproven, both because she has never been smart enough to get into Oxford, and because she was already in her late 1100s during THE 1100s.)     

On our first full day there we took a walking tour led by an Oxford student on summer break, and learned a lot about the gorgeous old colleges and some of the history associated with them.  Highlights were the circular Radford Camera Library, C.S. Lewis’ academic home of Magdalen College, and the natural history museum, which is housed in a beautiful, high-Victorian space filled with gothic arches made of elaborate wrought iron trusses, under a glass roof.

The ugliest building on the campus is the modern Weston Library, just a stone’s throw from the incredible Bodleian libraries.  But inside the Weston I saw a Shakespeare first folio, a first printing of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and a hand-drawn 1932 Christmas card that Tolkien made for his kids, among many other great old books. 

So the Weston has that going for it.

My daughter is staying in Exeter college, which features a gorgeous little chapel, and a dining hall that is too pretty to eat in.  We stayed in a small 17^th century hotel that had been built against the old city walls, just a block from the Bodleian.  (If you’ve ever wondered about the height of the average Brit in the 1600s, it was apparently pretty short, judging by the doorways that we were all constantly ducking to get through as we contorted ourselves up the super-narrow, winding staircase to our rooms.) 

Our last night there we attended an evensong service in the visually and acoustically impressive Christ Church.  Emily is having a great time there, and is already moaning about having to come back to Florida during the August steam-bath season.

We arrived back in London on Monday at midday, and our oldest daughter Katie was waiting for us at our hotel in Kensington.  (She flew in from her home in Denver to take the tour with us; because her husband only recently landed his zookeeper job there, he wasn’t able to take the time off to join us.) (And yes, he’s an actual zookeeper, and while Katie meandered around the Sceptered Isle with us, he was back at home, hip-deep in wallabies and tree kangaroos.)  We had Monday and Tuesday on our own in London. 

We took a train to Trafalgar Square after lunch, and then walked down past 10 Downing Street to Westminster and Big Ben, then over past the Churchill War Rooms and along St. James Park all the way down to Buckingham Palace.   Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower that holds Big Ben had been under repair and covered in scaffolding when we were there in 2019, but now it looks as good as new. 

We spent most of the second day riding around town in an open-topped tourist bus, reacquainting ourselves with city’s layout, and hearing about different areas of the city.  We toured the British Museum for a couple of hours, and got off and on the bus several more times, seeing all of the usual sites, then finished up with a boat ride on the Thames before returning to our hotel.

Our tour officially started the next day, and lasted for eight days, four of which we spent in England and Wales, and four in Scotland.  On our first day, we stopped initially at Windsor, where we saw the castle from the outside (apparently Kate and William were there, which meant that there were no tours), and the very pretty (if smallish, by the standards of the cathedrals in parts of the country) St. John the Baptist church. 

Our second stop was in Bath, the originally Roman city situated in very hilly and bucolic countryside on the Avon River.  It had tons of old churches and old houses, and we stopped for a quick photo op at the Royal Crescent, a curving line of impressive Bath stone that formed maybe 15 or 20 joined mansions, before walking around the town for a bit.  I wanted to see the Roman baths, but all of the tickets for the day were sold out, so we wandered around the city center and had a nice lunch.

By the end of the day, we ended up crossing into Wales, where we stayed the night in the capital, Cardiff.  Our hotel was only a few blocks from the impressive castle at the center of town, so after supper we walked around it.  The oldest part was built by the Romans, followed by additions by the Normans, and later the Brits and Welsh.    

The next day we crossed the border back into England, and ended up at another Roman walled city (which I hadn’t heard of) called Chester.  I regret that we didn’t have more time to spend there, because the center city was really interesting.  It contained a multi-block length of basically intact medieval buildings, which our tour guide walked us through, telling us some of the history of the town.  The area featured Tudor-style, heavy, wooden-timbered buildings, decorated with carved and painted wooden figures.  There was an impressive Gothic cathedral nearby, and also the remains of an impressive Roman amphitheatre.

Unfortunately, we had only an hour to walk around and get lunch before getting back on the bus and being driven back across into Wales, where a local Welsh guide took us through some gorgeous, hilly landscape where sheep outnumbered people by a good margin.  We walked around a picturesque little river town called Llangollen (because it’s the law in Wales that nothing can be easy to spell), before heading back to Chester.   

We arrived in Liverpool that evening and took an abbreviated Beatles tour with a local guide.  As a Beatles fan (though not one so devoted as the Great and Powerful CO), it was very cool to see the school where John and Paul went, local spots where George and Paul had worked and bought their instruments, etc.  We had supper not too far from the Cavern Club, which was reconstructed several doors down from where the original succumbed to an infrastructure project several decades ago.

This weekend I’ll post the second half of our trip.  But in the meantime, don’t forget two important ideas:

Liz Warren is as authentically Sioux as I am a Welsh shepherd (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and

Biden delenda est!

I’m back after my trip to England and Scotland, and I missed you all.  I’m hoping that everyone survived the brutally Simpson-less fortnight, and to make up for my absence, I’m going to post several extra columns over the next week with some highlights from the trip. 

Today, though, I’ll just touch on a few mock-worthy political stories I’ve seen since I’ve gotten back.  But only after pointing out that one of the blessings of a good trip is to escape politics for a while.

In fact, only three very brief political things happened during the two weeks I was gone:

1. An Uber driver in London was a Middle-Eastern fellow, and when I asked where he was from, he said, “Jerusalem.”  And then, before I could say “Shalom,” he said more quietly, “Palestine.”

Needless to say, that particular “shalom” remained holstered.  I also managed to overcome my smart-arse instinct to say, “Oh, is that Jerusalem anywhere near the Jerusalem that has been the capital of Israel over these last several millenia, minus a few centuries?”

2. As we rode a bus around London during our first day there, we drove through the West End, and for 7 or 8 consecutive blocks, we drove beneath at least six hanging lines per block which were strung from a building top on one side of the road to the other.  And from each of those lines hung 5 identical flags.

If you thought that maybe those flags were Union Jacks, or the flags of many nations, you would be wrong. 

Each one of them – all 200-300 of them – was the ugliest new variation on the LGBTQ+ flag.  It’s the one with a purple circle on a yellow background added to the increasingly jumbled colors and shapes from previous iterations of the flag. 

By the way, I looked this up so that you don’t have to, (You’re welcome), and I found that the new circle represents intersex people, somehow.

As a properly raised Midwesterner, I find the impulse to advertise your sexual tastes in public to be super weird.  If you ever come to visit me at Stately Simpson Manor, you might find an American flag out front, and possibly a seasonal or holiday flag. 

But you will not find a flag touting heterosexual sex.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

You will also not find a yard sign saying that, “In this house we…” followed by a line-item sexual menu.  (e.g. “…enjoy cowgirl position” or “missionary” or “costumes and foreplay.”)

But equally as weird as hanging a sexual preference flag over your streets in the first place, is hanging literally hundreds of them!  All right, we get it: you’re not straight!  Can we please move on?

3. Our bus driver for the tour was a great Polish guy named Tomac, and I quickly learned that he had the kind of bracing, unedited transparency of many Eastern Europeans. 

When talking about the variety of tourists he has driven for, he mentioned a man from Iraq who was on his last tour. He said, “When I first learned he was from Iraq, I obviously thought, ‘Suicide bomber?’  But no! He was really nice guy!”

After three decades in a politically correct liberal arts department, I can only be grateful that I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee when he said that.  Because my resulting spit-take would have been disastrous.   

Anyway, more about my trip in a day or two.  But for now, I’ve been home for three days, and a quick skimming of the news provides ample evidence that our politics has not gotten any saner while I was away.

Consider the case of reliably dimwitted Dem congressman Steve Cohen, who was in a hearing on the subject of whether transgender “women” (i.e. dudes) should be allowed to use women’s locker rooms without the consent of actual women. 

Since the only logical, reasonable answer is “no,” Cohen was a hard “yes!” 

But even he had to acknowledge the problem his idiotic position would cause.  He admitted that,“Things should be dealt with in a different way,” and went as far as suggesting, “putting up some type of… barrier… in a women’s area of a locker room.”

I’m no architect, but I think that such a “barrier” might also be called a “wall.”  So Cohen just proposed using a wall to separate a transgender locker-room space from a female locker-room space. 

You know what you just described as a solution there, Steve-O?  Separate locker rooms for men and women.

Why didn’t we think of that?

Speaking of people who don’t understand basic human biology, you may have heard that one U.S. state has followed the lead of the Netherlands, by crowning the first-ever biological male winner of a beauty contest.

Surprise: it’s California!  There an Asian fella calling himself “Monroe Lace” won the “Miss San Francisco” contest.

Let’s just skip right past the fact that, “Do you know who the current Miss San Francisco is?” sounds like the set-up to a very bad joke, and land on the fact that in addition to not understanding how gender works, “Lace” also doesn’t understand how metaphors work.

Because after winning, he said, ““Every time I put on the sash, the weight of it reminds me of the weight of my job; of the responsibility I have to make a difference for young children.”

First, unless your sash is made out of leather – and in San Francisco, who knows? – it is practically weightless, a fact which makes implying that it is heavy a particularly inapt metaphor.

Second, can we PLEASE leave the young children out of this? Apparently not, as CBS reports that Lace spends most of his days visiting elementary schools. A video clip showed him reading a children’s book called “Sparkle Boy” — about a young boy who enjoys wearing women’s clothes — to a 4th grade class at Tenderloin Community School.

Or was that a book called “Tenderloin Boy,” read to 4th graders at Sparkle Community School?

Ugh.

Finally, you may have heard that Disney is producing a live-action movie version of Snow White, due in theaters next year. 

The good news is that after several years of woke films that bombed like the Enola Gay, a crumbling streaming subscriber base at Disney+, declining attendance at their grooming centers – er, parks – and a stock price that has been sliced in half, Disney brass has learned their lesson, and is aiming for a respectful, traditional update of the timeless classic.

HA! I kid!  Several years of critical and financial failures have taught them nothing, so they’re going to create a soul-deadeningly woke monstrosity that is guaranteed to fail even harder.

How woke is it?  Recent photos from the set and insider reports indicate that they’ve cast a Hispanic actress as Snow White, six of the dwarves are now normal-sized (but ethnically diverse) actors, and Prince Charming has been removed from the plot entirely.

I’m not making that up.  Only one of the seven dwarves is a dwarf!

And while actors of all ethnicities can play many, many characters on screen, there are limits to that kind of flexibility.For example, you shouldn’t cast Jim Gaffigan as Black Panther, or Dylan Mulvaney as Genghis Khan, or Whoopi Goldberg (with or without a fat suit) as Karen Carpenter. 

And you can’t cast a person of color as Snow freaking White!

This is not hard, Hollywood!  The character’s name contains both “Snow” and “White.” 

You need someone of pallor in that role.  (Might I suggest a certain Massachusetts senator?) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And you can’t cast Andre the Giant, Wilt Chamberlain and the starting lineup of the Chicago Bulls as the 7 dwarves! 

And without Prince Charming, who is going to wake Snow White up from her enchanted sleep? Gloria Allred?

If they had a shred of honesty left, the Disney execs could at least re-title the film, to prevent misleading any potential viewers.

Would “Mocha Brown, Six Diversity Hires and a Dwarf” fit on a movie marquee?

Maybe not.  But you know what would fit nicely on a bumper sticker?

“Biden delenda est!”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Monroe “or is that Marvin?” Lace, 2024!

On the menu for today are several funny stories, plus a few thoughts on CS Lewis.

First up is the case of a Russian named (creatively enough) Ivan, who decided that since he was visiting Rome, he should carve some graffiti into a wall of the Colosseum.  A bystander saw what he was doing, recorded it, and put the video online.  Italian officials charged Ivan with vandalism, and as part of a plea deal, he wrote an appropriately remorseful apology letter.

So what’s so unusual or funny about that?  People do dumb things all the time.  Eric Swalwell believed a Chicom spy (who was far too attractive to be interested in him) when she said that she was super attracted to him. 

Hunter Biden recorded himself breaking multiple laws of God and man, and later left his bag of narcotics in the White House, thus forcing law enforcement to suddenly pretend that they were deaf, dumb and blind.

Allegedly.

What’s funny about this story is the reason the vandal gave for defacing the Colosseum.  He claimed – and I swear I am not making this up – that he did not know how old it was.

The Colosseum.  The most famous structure from ancient Rome.  And this guy thought that maybe it was a Craftsman building from the 1920s, or perhaps an oversized mid-century modern?

Whatever we do, we must not allow Ivan to ever meet AOC.  Because he might find himself attracted to her juicy booty – her words, not mine – and then yada yada yada, they could procreate. 

And that child would be so mind-numbingly dumb that at the moment of his or her birth, a black hole of anti-intelligence could form that would devour our planet, and then the universe, in a vortex of stupidity so dense that not a single comprehensible thought could escape its gravitational pull.

In other, equally horrifying news, Joy Behar had an unusual response to the MSM’s recent discovery about Joe Biden’s habitual angry outbursts.  (By the way, two thumbs up to whichever human came up with the resulting, perfect nickname for Biden: Old Yeller!)  Behar said – and oh how I wish I were making this up – “I am turned on by Biden’s anger.  I like it.” 

The thought of Joy Behar in any context is bad enough.  But the thought of her being sexually aroused? 

May God have mercy on our souls.  And mine, for even bringing it up. 

Let’s never speak of this again.

My favorite idiotic lefty story of this month (so far) comes from reliable idiotic lefties Ben and Jerry, makers of ice cream and twin owners of black belts in hypocrisy.

Their latest affront came on our nation’s Independence Day, when they put out an insufferable, anti-patriotic tweet: “The United States was founded on stolen indigenous land.  This Fourth of July, let’s commit to returning it.”

They went on to suggest that we start with Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, land that they rightly claim that the US Government ceded by 1851 and 1868 treaties to the Lakota Sioux, who lived in that area.  B&J moved into full virtue-signaling mode, noting solemnly that those noble natives considered that land to be “sacred.”   

Never mind that the Sioux only “owned” that land because they stole it from the Cheyenne. 

That’s right, after they slaughtered a bunch of Cheyenne and mercilessly drove the remaining refugees off the land, they looked around at all the prairie grass – and Cheyenne corpses, don’t forget – and said, “Just soak in all of this sacredness!”

Of course the Cheyenne had stolen it from the Kiowa, so they didn’t have a powerful counter-argument to make. I mean, if they had been capable of making arguments, instead of lying around as dead as Joe Biden, like so many human pin cushions pierced through with arrows fired by the noble, oh-so-peaceful Sioux.

Anyway, some wise guys read Ben and Jerry’s condescending proclamations, and spent 30 seconds researching Ben and Jerry’s corporate headquarters, located at 30 Community Drive in South Burlington, Vermont. Which, as it turns out, is on land once owned by the Abenaki. 

Who are a tribe of Indians, and not a delicious sushi dish, as I previously believed.  (Cue Homer Simpson drooling meme: mmmmm, Abenaki!) 

Someone then contacted the chief of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation.  (Yes, I also mistakenly believed that “Nulhegan Band” was a fine IPA brewed somewhere in Maine, and “the Coosuk Abenaki Nation” was a rap group whose vulgar lyrics prevented me from ever getting into them.  Mea culpa.)

(Okay, I’ll admit it: I thought that Mea Culpa was a super-hot Italian folksinger.  Let’s stop this foolishness and just move on, shall we?)

Anyway, someone brought Ben and Jerry’s obnoxious tweet to the attention of Abenaki chief Don Stevens.  And before you can say anything smart, yes: if a full-blood Chippewa princess can be named “Elizabeth Warren,” the chief of the fearsome Abenaki can be named “Don Stevens.” 

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)    

Though to be fair, Don Stevens looks more like my Uncle Don – or Don Rickles – than an Indian chief.  But he does have a sweet bear-claw necklace in the pic I saw, so he must be legit.  

When a New York Post reporter spoke with him, Stevens said that he “looks forward to any kind of correspondence with the [Ben and Jerry’s] brand to see how they can better benefit Indigenous people.”

Don’t hold your breath on that one, Donnie.   

Finally, as we fly to England later today and then head for Oxford, I am going to mention a few quick crime stories, and tie them back to Oxford.  (Is there any rhetorical feat I can’t pull off, you may be wondering?  Well hold my pint, and watch this.)   

Here’s how leftist authorities handle crime in Dem-controlled, “enlightened” cities: recidivist career criminal and elderly-puncher Jordan Neely threatens everyone on a subway car; Marine hero Daniel Penny defends Neely’s intended victims by putting him in a submission hold that unintentionally results in his death. And the authorities canonize Neely and charge Penny with a crime. 

Another example: in late June, an unidentified male sucker punches a woman on a NYC subway platform, and it’s caught on video.  The authorities haven’t found the man, but Tiktok did take down the victim’s video of the assault for “graphic content violations.”  (The violation wasn’t the sucker-punching scumbag crime – it was showing the sucker-punching scumbag’s actions.)

Now here’s how a free citizenry responds to crime, usually in conservative/”red” areas:

On Saturday, June 8^th, in Nashville, a criminal named DeCarlos Groves pulled a handgun and jumped over a Corner Mart’s counter, landing on clerk Peter Fang.  But then Fang struck! (boom)  He fired several shots from his own gun (because: Tennessee), killing Groves.  The cops are investigating, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say… a finding of self-defense, and then handshakes all around.

Meanwhile, in Texas, criminal Cedric Milligan experienced criminal justice reform after he broke into a woman’s home.  By which I mean she shot him dead.  (Because: Amarillo.)  Texas law says that homeowners have no duty to retreat when a criminal breaks in. 

So the homeowner is in the clear, and Cedric Milligan is in the ground.

That same approach works in other countries too, as we can see from an incident that happened in Tel Aviv, Israel on July 3^rd.  A Palestinian terrorist rammed a group of Israeli civilians with a truck, then got out and started stabbing them.  He wounded seven, and caused a pregnant woman to lose her baby.

But the idiot brought a truck and a knife to a gun fight.  So an armed civilian quickly shot him dead.  One of Democrat jihadi-enthusiasts Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s favorite groups (Hamas) took responsibility for the attack, and another of their favorite groups (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) praised it. 

So what does all of this have to do with C.S. Lewis?   Among many other subjects, he wrote about how an increasingly decadent West’s is taking a self-destructive approach to virtue in the face of evil.  Here’s one of my favorite quotes ever, from his “Abolition of Man”:

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Unrepentant criminals and terrorists deserve condemnation, but our left praises them, and bestows their highest honor – saintly victimhood – on them.  Law-abiding citizens who stand up to predators and fight back deserve our praise and support, but our left condemns them and tries to ruin their lives.

C.S. Lewis was a great writer and a better man, and tomorrow night I’m going to be walking around in the city where he taught and wrote.  I can’t wait.

But I won’t let my excitement cause me to forget the appropriate ending for all of my columns:

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Don “the Dread Abenaki” Stevens, 2024!

There’s a lot for me to cover today, and I’ve also got an announcement about some travel I’ll be doing on Friday.  So I’ll get right to it.

I’ve chosen two quick stories that feel like they could only happen in 2023, in a West that’s gone mad.

First up is the mysterious “coke in the White House story,” which has proved to be a great example of our MSM at work.  First they reported that the cocaine was found in a high-traffic area where many tourists often go. 

Which seemed a little odd to me.  I’ve always thought of cocaine enthusiasts as folks who like to keep their cocaine either on their person, or else carefully stored somewhere.  But now we’re talking about the kind of tourists who also feel the need to lug along some coke when they go on vacation?

Hey, I get it: you’re stuck in the car for hours with a nagging wife and feral kids, the lines at Disney are insane, and the Disney “princess” who is escorting your youngest girl through a collection of obscenely over-priced dresses has a 5 o’clock shadow and a Johnny Cash baritone … you’re going to need a bump now and then, just to keep things on an even keel. 

But we’re supposed to believe that during the White House tour, some goof in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt just chucks his stash into a “cubby,” figuring he’ll grab it on his way out?  But he never does that, because you know how cocaine users are all “que sera sera” about whether they’ll use cocaine or not.  

Then the MSM reported that the big red X on the cocaine treasure map was actually in an area where tourists don’t have access.  The first family, staffers and influential invited guests can get there, though. 

But intrepid and not-at-all-leftist-hack “journalists” were quick to report that administration officials “are setting low expectations that they will be able to identify who left it.” 

Ah yes.  Low expectations.  The wheelhouse of the Biden administration!

How could we ever expect that we’d catch someone who left a stash of narcotics in one of the most heavily guarded buildings in Christendom? 

Sure, every grandma in a MAGA cap who was escorted through the capitol building on January 6^th was picked up on security cams and satellite footage, using retinal scans and facial recognition software, and is now doing life in Sing Sing.

But we can’t solve the mystery of the Cocaine Cowboy of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Look, I may be just a simple country English professor with a mean Andy Griffith impersonation and a hobby of solving crimes – call me Mart-lock, if you must – but I’ve narrowed down the list of suspects to one of two people.

Either the coke was left by a big Hunter Biden fan, who was hoping to have his hero autograph his personal bag of cocaine.  (Which I understand is, among drug addicts, just like having a baseball signed by Babe Ruth is for baseball fans.)

Or – and hear this wacky theory out – the coke was left by Hunter Biden. 

I offer three bits of evidence:

1. Hunter has full access to the White House, and is known to leave many things in the cubbies there – subpoenas for paternity tests, parmesan cheese packets, bags of cash from corrupt regimes – especially when he’s high.  Which is pretty often.

2. Hunter was kicked out of the Navy after only a month, and guess why? 

If you said, “Excess of patriotic zeal,” or “He resembled Bull Halsey so much that people couldn’t tell them apart,” you might have the kind of IQ you need to appear on the View.

But if you said, “cocaine use,” that’s a bingo! (Hans Landa reference?  Check.)

3. You may have seen Hunter in many laptop videos, as he snorted – you didn’t see this coming! – cocaine (!) off the backsides of hookers from many eastern bloc countries. And Pacific Rim countries.  And South and Central America. 

And the local Waffle House.

If I can pompously speak of myself in the third person – and I think that I can – Mart-lock rests his case.

Speaking of it being 2023, guess who just won the Miss Netherlands competition!

If you said a lovely young woman who looks great in a bathing suit and plays a musical instrument and has a top-notch plan to achieve world peace – and also female genitalia – you’re just not paying attention.

Because it’s 2023.  So naturally the new Miss Netherlands is a dude. 

The young fella’s nom de groin (French pun: boom!) is Rikkie Valerie Kolle.

From a distance, Rikkie doesn’t look too bad.  But when the camera gets closer, you detect a set of Freddie Mercury teeth and an Adam’s apple that catches your eye.  And because I’m an old guy who’s heard a few Steely Dan tunes in his day, let me be the first to say, “Rikkie please lose my number.”

In the story I saw, Rikkie’s pic appeared beside that of the runner-up, who is one of those old-fashioned women, with the breasts and the hips and the XX chromosomes.  I took one look at that picture, and it was as if Glenn Quagmire were on my shoulder, saying, “Giggity giggity” and “Gaggity gaggity.” 

I feel sorry for the delusional guy who “won” the competition, but I feel much worse for the poor women who lost to him.  That’s got to be pretty tough to take. 

The only analogy that I can think of – painful-embarrassment-wise – is if a stage full of beautiful and talented Native American women lost a Miss Native American pageant to shrewish, translucent Elizabeth Warren.   

The point being that Rikkie is about as female as Lizzie is a Chippewa. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Seriously.  If we can’t count on Miss Netherlands having female nether regions, what can we count on in this mixed-up world?

I’ll close today with some personal news that I’m happy to report: this Friday my wife and I are going on a 12-day trip to England and Scotland. 

Regular readers will remember that I have two daughters, neither of whom I am comfortable bragging about.  I mean, if I were to say that they are brilliant and gorgeous and the apples of daddy’s eye, those would just be objectively verifiable data points, obvious to any neutral observer.  As is the fact that my oldest is busy saving lives as the best pediatric nurse in the mountain west.

My youngest daughter is a planetary science and astrophysics major, and we were really happy when she got a full-ride scholarship.  (Was that happiness due to the fact that the lack of crushing college bills freed me to retire early and write more columns for CO nation?  In the words of my favorite stooge, “it didn’t hoit.”)

One little bonus from her scholarship is that she gets to spend a study-abroad six-week semester at Oxford in the summer between her junior and senior years of college.  And as it happens, this is that summer.

She’s been at Oxford for a week now, and this Friday we’re going over to see her.  We’ll spend the weekend with her, and then we’re meeting our other daughter and one of Karen’s brothers to take a 10-day tour of England and Scotland.

As an old English prof, I’m as happy as an addict getting Hunter Biden to autograph his personal bag of cocaine!

That didn’t come out right, but you know what I mean.

I’ll post my last pre-trip column this Friday morning, and after that, postings may be sporadic, depending on how much time I have to write.   But I’ve enjoyed writing travelogues for my trips with the cousins in the Cadillac, and I hope to be able to do the same thing during this trip. 

In the meantime, even though I’ll be across the sea, we must all continue to affirm that most important credo…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Rikkie “Dude Looks (sort of) Like a Lady” Kolle, 2024!

I’ve been back in town for a couple of days, trying to catch up and digest the recent news.

I was supposed to fly home on Monday the 3^rd, but my flight that day was delayed to the point that I wouldn’t have been able to catch my connector in Charlotte.  So I flew home on the 4^th, and missed the fireworks.

But I still got to see some, and in a new way.  After my layover, we took off from Charlotte at a little before 9:00 p.m., and as we climbed out, I saw probably two dozen small fireworks going off at various spots beneath the plane.  Those were all private displays, since it wasn’t quite fully dark then, and they were cheerful sights.

They were going off everywhere: on cul de sacs and in backyards, in at least one park, and alongside several ponds.  Within the next half hour or so, we flew over several other sizeable towns, and though the plane was a lot higher, you could still see small volleys of town fireworks down there.  Even as we descended into Gainesville around 10:30, there were still some stragglers, lighting up the sky within a few miles of the airport.

After all the recent vitriol aimed at our country, and the distressingly widespread cultural decay and loss of civic pride, it was encouraging to see those signs of affection and celebration of a nation and culture this is worth fighting for.

Still, watching those small displays of color and lights against the backdrop of a vast landscape as it was descending into darkness also evoked a melancholy that felt like more than just a visual metaphor. 

But I refer you to the Simpson family motto that appears on the familial crest – which I am not making up, even as I’m skeptical that the Appalachian branch of the Simpsons ever had a coat of arms.  (Though it seems like that coat of arms, if it existed, would feature a pair of crossed Kentucky long rifles, under a Wonder Dog, rampant.) 

That Latin motto – which I am now suggesting to the Great and Powerful CO that the CO cite adopt as its own – is “nil desperandum.”  As you might guess, the English translation is “Never Despair.”   

That motto lines up nicely with two quotes I usually think of during patriotic holidays, both from WWII Marine hero Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller.  (During a long career of badassery that included leading Marines on Guadalcanal and Peleliu, and during the Inchon landings, Puller was eminently quotable.)

The quotes are: “We’re surrounded on all sides and badly outnumbered.  They can’t get away from us now!” and “We’re not surrounded, we’re in a target-rich environment.”

Upon landing back home I was greeted by my wife, who had the good judgment to bring Cassie the Wonder Dog with her.  It was great to be met with a frenzy of sloppy kisses, ecstatic jumping around and tail wagging. 

And the dog was happy to see me, too.  (BOOM!)

I have continued to watch the reaction to the SCOTUS rulings from last week.  Last year I mentioned that for the first time ever, I read two actual SCOTUS rulings – the Dobbs case overturning Roe, and the gun case out of NY – and was pleasantly surprised at how logical and understandable they were.  I’ve heard excerpts of last week’s Creative 303 free speech case and the affirmative action case, but this weekend I’m going to read them in their entirety. 

In the meantime, it’s been entertaining to watch the Dems continue taking the SCOTUS decisions about like you’d expect: they’re all over media and social media spewing a bunch of lies (not discriminating is racist, it’s “judicial activism” to stick to the constitution instead of making stuff up that agrees with them, etc.).  They’re also renewing calls to pack the court.

(Funny how they never saw any problems with the court when it was issuing many blatantly unconstitutional rulings over the last 50 years.)  

They’re also throwing themselves on the floor, and pounding on it with their tiny fists, and promising to hold their breath until they die if the court doesn’t give them what they want RIGHT NOW!

AOC wants to subpoena John Roberts and drag him before congress for questioning that sounds like it would amount to, “How dare you disagree with me and my juicy booty (my words, not Martin Simpson’s)?”

My favorite reaction came from Imhotep Pelosi, who emerged from the base of the pyramid she lives under to give an interview to obsequious leftist mouthpiece Jen “Hacky” Psaki.  After agreeing that packing the court might be worth looking into, Pelosi also said that, “there certainly should be term limits.”

Got that?  The woman who first took office during the reign of Cheops the Indignant in 1548 BC thinks that justices shouldn’t be able to stay in their positions for too long. 

Again, it’s funny that she never objected to RBG staying on the court, even when that octogenarian jurist had the posture of a jumbo shrimp and couldn’t speak an intelligible sentence.  But since the two of them were friends and co-religionists (in the church of Marx) – rumors that when they first met they discovered that they frequented the same embalmer have not been confirmed – she was happy to see RBG stay on the court until her dying day.

Well, she wasn’t happy on THAT day, since RBG’s passing gave Trump one more appointee to SCOTUS.  Ah, how that sweet memory warms my heart in this metaphorical winter of our discontent. 

Let me close with some news that it would take someone with a heart of stone to laugh at: horrifically terrible ex-NYC mayor and groundhog-killer Bill De Blasio and his goofy activist wife Chirlane McCray are separating.

By now we’re all used to seeing terse press releases from divorcing famous people: “We are sad to announce our separation. We will continue to be there for our kids, and ask that everyone respect our privacy during this painful time.”  So normally I would not comment on this.

Except that these knuckleheads announced their split during a narcissistic three-hour interview with the New York Times!

During that ordeal, Bill whined that dealing with covid during his mayoralty “made me emotionally very needy.”  He quoted a Tibetan Buddhist.  He said that the couple won’t be divorcing, but that they will be dating other people.  He played a song that includes the lyrics, “If you found some other dude/ What do I do?/ If he loves you truly/ How could I not love him too?” 

It was so bad that I found myself agreeing with the NY Intelligencer, whose headline to the story was, “Oh God, Why Are [They] Telling Us This?”

But the “crème de la cringe” of the entire story was the little detail that when they married, McCray was… wait for it… an out lesbian!  Which he knew, probably from the article that she wrote called – I swear I am not making this up – “I Am a Lesbian.” 

De Blasio, showing the same kind of judgment he used in running a once-great city into the ground, said, “There was a part of me that would at times say, ‘Hmmm, is this like a time bomb ticking?  Is this something you’re going to regret later on?’”

Ya think?! 

When I was a young man and looking for a wife, I had a set of positive qualities I was looking for:  Shares my faith, good character, good sense of humor, hot as a two-dollar pistol, etc.

While I think that kind of list is still useful today, I also think that any young men in that position in 2023 probably need to include a set of negative qualities to avoid in a potential wife, too:

Doesn’t say “my truth,” “cis gender,” or “micro aggression.”

Doesn’t have to be a Republican, but cannot be a Democrat.

And so on. 

But sadly, in 2023, it is apparently necessary to start any list of qualities in a prospective wife with an all-caps headline at the top of the page:

NOT A LESBIAN!

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Bill “Duh” Blasio, 2024!

I didn’t write a Friday column because I’ve been up in Maine visiting an old grad school buddy.  My following of the news has been pretty spotty since Wednesday, and I even missed the end of Pride Month. 

But as Independence Day approaches, I’m feeling some renewed pride in my country, and enjoying watching the fireworks over the Supreme Court judgments this week, during which common sense and judicial sanity went 3-0.  (USA! USA!)    

The coverage has been perfectly on-brand for the left: never talk about the specifics of the case, or the law, or precedent.  Instead, give a feelings-based dramatic performance, going long on hyperbole but sprinkled with made-up – and also completely irrelevant – statistics. 

(“According to the good people down at the Human Rights Watch, America is more racist now than during slavery or Jim Crow Days,” or “The leading cause of Death for African-American men is being shot as they walk out of Bible study by marauding Klansmen police.”)

Because we’re in such a dispiriting pre-primaries season, it was especially encouraging to get the three final rulings of this session.  On the other hand, it’s more than a little depressing that anyone even needs to say the findings of those cases out loud, let alone have a years’ long legal debate over them:

It’s wrong for the government to racially discriminate against people, in college admissions or anywhere else.

It’s also wrong to quasi-enslave people who own businesses, by forcing them to create products or services that involve endorsing beliefs that they do not hold.

No, a president shouldn’t be able to just transfer half a trillion dollars in college debt from the millions of students and families who signed up for it, to the hundreds of millions of Americans who did not.

Are those really that hard to understand, or argue?   Judging by the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left, apparently. 

And you can’t help but love it when clueless ideologues undermine their own arguments with their vitriolic statements.

For decades, the supporters of affirmative action (or, to call it by its real name, institutional racism) have asserted that the policy only makes the slightest of differences, by giving only the tiniest of advantages to minority applicants who are almost identically as qualified as their Asian or white competitors.

And now those same people are ranting as if this ruling means that no black or Hispanic students will ever get into a good school again.

If you’re saying that some minorities will never be able to compete with other minorities or whites without a huge governmental thumb on the scale, you’re arguing that those races are inferior.  If that’s what you believe, go to your nearest mirror, stand directly in front of it, and see if you can spot the racist.

One tantrum-y reaction to the Creative 303 case was to call for refusing to serve Christians, which is both stupid and hilarious.  A popular tweet summed up that witless argument best: “Perhaps gay stylists, designers, caterers and planners should start withholding services from Christian conservatives, and see where that goes.”

It’s hard to top one tweeted response: “Idiot.   No Christian walks into a salon, announces they’re Christian, and then demands that the gayest dude there sculpt the face of Jesus on their dome.”

Which is of course true.  The point is not that businesses can refuse to serve customers who are gay or atheist or Christian – they still legally cannot – it’s that they can’t be forced to produce messages that they don’t agree with.

A better analogy would be this: Say that your whole family has voted Democrat since the 1820s, and you want to honor great-great-grandad’s legacy by getting a KKK cake to celebrate Nathan Bedford Forest’s (D-the Confederacy) birthday.  So you go down to your local African-American baker, and force them to bake that cake for you.

Can you see the problem there, Skippy?

Having said that, I still tend to agree with the idea that hateful lefties should try the “ban the Christians” approach.  Because I for one would love to know which business owners hate my guts – because of my religion, my race, or just because they can’t stand hilarious geniuses with firm jawlines and animal magnetism who enjoy mocking them.

I don’t want to give any hateful Christophobes a single dollar’s worth of business, and I would appreciate them advertising their vile bigotry, so I can be sure to go elsewhere. 

For that matter, if there are any self-proclaimed “Christians” who want to refuse serving black people or anyone else – that was NOT the case with Creative 303 or the cake baker who was bullied in earlier cases – they should be able to advertise their creepy prejudice too, so that we can all avoid their businesses.  

The college debt ruling was especially satisfying, given the complete bankruptcy (you see what I did there?) of the would-be grifters’ – students and college administrations included – ridiculous arguments. 

I was raised in the Midwest in the 1800s, where your word was your bond, and you paid your debts. These adult children signed up for loans and promised to pay them back.  I’m sorry if they overpaid, and I know that many of them did.  (Everybody who got a grievance studies degree, for example, definitely overpaid.  Because those degrees are worth literally nothing.)

But the only choices now are either that people who took out loans are required to pay them, or else people who did NOT take out those loans are required to pay them.  

Reading the reactions of many disappointed borrowers is instructive, if depressing.

One article bemoans the fact that many borrowers are “left wondering: Where do we go from here?”
I immediately thought of the old saying that many of us heard from our parents or grandparents:  There’s a great place to go when you’re in debt.  TO WORK!

One typical borrower is Graeme Strickland (25) who graduated from UNC in 2020 with $30K in loans.  He’s very disappointed with what he calls a “culture war” involving this issue, and says, “And like, this is my income. This affects the money I’m able to spend on groceries.”

No kidding, Graeme.  But you’re talking about, like, our tax money, which you spent on, like, your own stuff.  And if you don’t, like, pay it back, you’re going to be affecting the money we’re able to spend on groceries, too.

Strickland graduated three years ago, but he “has yet to consider loan payments or interest.”  But now that Biden’s power grab has failed, he “has resigned himself to his new debt-laden reality.”

What a novel concept!  After sitting around for three years not even thinking about his loan payments, he has now grudgingly resigned himself to reality? 

I can barely imagine what a world would be like in which Democrats would resign themselves to reality.  Other than that Liz Warren would admit that she’s whiter than The Sound of Music and immediately leave public life in disgrace.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Or consider Ariana Cuellar (31), a case study in learned helplessness who graduated 10 years ago, but still has $30K in unpaid loans.  She might have majored in drama, judging from the way she reacted to the news that Uncle Sugar isn’t going to pay off her loans for her:

“I will never be able to get rid of these loans. I think even if we got that $10,000 worth of forgiveness, unless the interest rates are changed, I will not be able to get out from under it.” 

She’s absolutely hopeless about her chances to pay back even $20K, EVER!  Even though she has likely paid more than that in car payments, cable bills and eating out in the last 10 years.

The “journalist” reporting on this plays into Cuellar’s self-pity, saying that “the winding road to the SC’s decision has worn her out.”   Because what could be more exhausting than sitting around for years NOT paying your loans?

But it’s worse than you think.  Because Cuellar is losing faith in the system. 

“I lost faith in any sort of justice.  I don’t feel like it’s going to get better. I don’t trust the government to take care of us.”

First, it’s not “justice” for you to be allowed to be a deadbeat. 

Second, you don’t trust the government to take care of you?  GOOD! 

You’re 31 years old!  The government’s not your parent or your pimp, and you’re not a child or a hooker.  You’re supposed to take care of yourself, and that means taking responsibility and paying your own bills and debts.  

Seriously, you’re never going to have a fulfilling and successful life and career if you listen to politicians and bureaucrats promising to do for you what you can and should do for yourself.  

Bureaucrats like Carolina Rodriguez, who “spends her days talking to borrowers… at New York’s Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program (EDCAP).” I would have gone with DUNCE-CAP as the acronym there, but okay.

Rodriguez complains that borrowers feel “defeat and resignation,” and reports that, “Most borrowers she speaks to these days are more focused on other paths to forgiveness, such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.

Good lord!  First these naïve borrowers relied on a serial liar like Biden to pay their bills for them. When that didn’t work, they look to plan B (another loan forgiveness plan), and then to Plan C (yet another partial loan forgiveness plan).

I wonder if they’ll ever arrive at a plan – maybe Plan Z? – to actually work hard and pay off their loans themselves.  Because that plan might be just crazy enough to work!

And that is just one more reason that we all must say…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Graeme “Super-Victim” Strickland, 2024!

Another week, another target-rich environment re: mockable political figures.

Let’s start with Que Mala Harris and the well-known fable of the frog in the boiling water. 

Everyone who read that last sentence knows the fable.  And everyone who has thought about it for eight seconds knows that it’s not even true: any frog who can escape from either quickly boiling or gradually boiling water will do so. 

Because it’s a tired old trope AND untrue, you should never use it in a public address.  But if you do use it, you don’t need to explain the hell out of it … because EVERYBODY already knows!

So naturally, since that fable is a banal cliché, Que Mala – who double majored in banal cliches and Willie-Brown-servicing – decided to tell the boiling frog tale several days ago.  And because she is Que Mala, she made it into a Russian-novel-length slog.

First, she gave an unnecessary introduction: “I think of those two frogs.  You know the two frogs in the two pots?  So, for your listeners, here it goes…”

Yes, here it goes.  Please take a lot of time to explain to us a fable that requires no explanation.  And if possible, try to work in Venn diagrams, the significance of the passage of time, and a yellow school bus.

Said no audience ever. 

After meandering through the story, she finally arrived at the end: “The lesson there, as far as I’m concerned… don’t be that first frog.”

As far as you’re concerned?!  This isn’t a treatise on quantum physics that requires your nuanced interpretation!  It’s a beaten-to-death-horse waste of verbiage that any first-grade class would roll their eyes at.

Every time I see Que Mala speak, I’m reminded of the comedian Louis CK’s bit on his wife’s inability to tell a straightforward, coherent story.  (Spoiler alert: they’ve since divorced.)  He lampoons the way she starts a sentence, but then branches off into one verbal box canyon after another, until no one is able to follow.

I find myself muttering his final response whenever I accidentally catch any of Que Mala’s mind-numbing attempts at communication: “Have some consideration for the f***ing listener!”

Speaking of skeevy dimwits – and we just were – have you heard the latest attack on Casey DeSantis? 

It seems she was at a public event supporting her husband, and she wore a jacket with the state of Florida and an alligator depicted on the back. 

Enter Marvin Dunn, an octogenarian racial arsonist and former Psychology professor who fancies himself a “historian and organizer.”  Does he constantly call himself “Dr.” on all of his social media and in all public utterances, just like “Dr.” Jill Biden? 

You bet he does. 

(And yes, I too am a former professor.  But whenever someone recognizes me in public and points at me and says, “Hilarious Genius!”  I never hold up a hand and say, “That’s DR. Hilarious Genius to you.”  I just sign an autograph and accept compliments, and then go on about my day, humbly making the world a better place.)  

Anyway, DR. Dunn took to his Twitter account, posting side-by-side pics of Casey’s jacket and a creepy old postcard showing an alligator in front of two black children.  His message: “Florida’s First Lady makes a racist fashion statement.  Black babies as alligator bait was a theme in racist Florida humor of the early 1900s.  It’s an inside joke. If you are not from Florida, you may not get it.  She does.  Do you?”

Now Casey’s jacket didn’t have any black babies on it.  Just an alligator, an outline of Florida, and the words, “Where woke goes to die.”

And it turns out that black-baby-less references to alligators are pretty common in these parts. 

The alligator is the state reptile.  The yearly drag race in our town is called the Gator Nationals.  The mascot of the finest university in the state – and coincidentally, the institution which granted me the PhD that entitles me to be called Doctor, but which I never insist on, because I am not a narcissistic d-bag – is the Gator. 

Our town is plastered with all manner of Gator iconography and imagery, and yet zero percent of those Gators are depicted with black babies, or eating black babies, or even looking hungrily at black babies.

But DR. Whitey-hater Dunn knows the truth.  He hears all the dog whistles, and he can spot an arcane reference to an obscure, century-old postcard that has nothing to do with anyone alive today, even when it’s not there.

I’m surprised that racist old jerk isn’t in congress!  Or at least on MSNBC, or the View.

Speaking of idiots in congress, the congressional Dems hit a new low this week, when they cheered for congenital McCarthy-ite liar Adam Schiff when he was rightly censured for repeatedly touting the Russia hoax, and claiming to have evidence that it was true. 

Evidence which, as luck would have it, he was somehow never able to produce. 

I understand politicians circling the wagons to protect reprobate members of their own party, when doing so is in their petty self-interest.  The Dems have rallied around mentally compromised senators (Fetterman, Feinstein), virulent anti-Semites (Omar, Tlaib), and morons (most of the rest of them).  Republicans are slow-walking the eventual ouster of ridiculous liar George Santos.

But there’s a difference between sheepishly refusing to boot a bum because he’s YOUR bum, and actually cheering for one, in the House, for all the world to see. 

That’s what the Democrats did last week.  When the GOP voted to censure the execrable Schiff, everyone in both parties knew that he richly deserved it, for spending years abusing his power and running corrupt, dishonest investigations.  

It’s bad enough that not a single Democrat voted his conscience on the censure vote, which was sure to pass, regardless.  But to cheer him and chant his name, while he received his justified rebuke?

Congressional Democrats disgraced themselves, and they should never have another majority in the House until every member who cheered for Adam Schiff’s serial lying is gone. 

Finally, the media frenzy about the imploded sub story drew me in too, for several reasons.

First, I’ve always been creeped out by dark, deep water, so I can’t imagine ever getting into a tiny sub like that.  And if I had ever been tempted that way, finding out that the sub was operated by a video game controller would elicit a hard pass!  Even without the benefit of hindsight, it seems foolhardy beyond belief that people would take that trip.

On the other hand, I have a grudging admiration for extreme adventurers, even as “extreme adventurers” often seems to be synonymic of “foolhardy beyond belief.”  And the Titanic story has always fascinated me, so if there ever was a reason to travel to the ocean floor, seeing the final resting place of the great ship would be it.

The initial stories about the mini-sub possibly being lost at sea with the oxygen slowly running out created a horrific picture worthy of a Poe story: five people crammed into a tiny metal coffin, pinned to the ocean floor by immense pressure, in complete darkness, as they slowly smothered to death?

The skin crawls at the thought.  And even though the reality of their fate – an instant implosion of the sub, with all on board dead before they knew what hit them – is not exactly a happy ending, it is merciful by comparison.

But I found the darkness of many peoples’ reactions to the story to be as unsettling as the darkness of the ocean depths.  I’m thinking especially of all of the sickos who were absolutely gleeful over those five souls’ predicament, just because they were rich. 

There’s a reason that envy is one of the seven deadly sins.  (By the way, happy Pride Month!) It’s very tempting to hate rich people, especially when we’re comparatively poor, just as it’s easy to hate the attractive when we’re ugly, or the athletic when we’re graceless. 

Or the exotic Native Americans, when we’re pale and inauthentic Elizabeth Warren.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

It’s one thing if a particular rich person’s wealth is ill-gotten – from being a criminal, or a con-man, or a corrupt politician.  (But I repeat myself.)  But to harbor a mean-spirited spite – to the point of cheering their impending death – for anyone who has done better than we have is a soul-withering exercise! 

I wish that the people who celebrated what they thought was the slow, tortuous death of the five people on that sub would catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and experience even a passing redemptive moment of shame at what they’re becoming.

Ugh.  Rather than end on that sour note, I’ll close by recommending a great poem, written by Thomas Hardy in 1912, on the subject of the Titanic’s sinking.  It’s called “The Convergence of the Twain,” and you can easily find the text online.

It’s short – just 33 lines, divided over 11 stanzas – and I always enjoyed teaching it to non-English majors, because of its dramatic subject matter, and its fairly accessible metaphors and imagery.  (In particular, he suggests a darkly inverted “marriage” of the iceberg and the ship; the “convergence” of the title refers to the moment when ship and ice come together as one.)       

Hardy starts by imagining the Titanic in its eerie, final resting place, and then shifts back in time to when the “unsinkable” ship was being built.  He foreshadows the disaster with a chilling juxtaposition of humans creating Titanic in a crowded shipyard, while Nature is simultaneously creating the iceberg in the huge, empty ocean.  

Here are my favorite 3 stanzas:

“VI

     Well: while was fashioning

     This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

     Prepared a sinister mate

     For her—so gaily great—

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

     And as the smart ship grew

     In stature, grace, and hue

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.”

That last line always gets me!   

Especially when watching our current political class blithely driving our country toward disaster, the doomed ship’s fate seems depressingly relevant.

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ “Dr.” Marvin Dunn, 2024!

I’m not watching a whole lot of Fox lately, since they’ve revealed a Bud Lite-like disdain for their customers. At this point I’m avoiding the brand, and following only a few individuals I like.  I watch at least the first 10 minutes of Gutfeld, and the last 15 of Bret Baier’s show, and I’ll stop fast forwarding and watch whenever they’ve got Brit Hume or Victor Davis Hanson on. 

But I did watch the two-part interview that Baier did with Trump this week.  And if he was trying to do what successful candidates do – make it hard for people to vote for your opponent and easy to vote for you – he went one-for-two.

He did take some effective shots at Biden and the Dems, though at this point that is not exactly a tough task.  (They are so manifestly creepy and despicable that any normal and not super-partisan-left human is already repelled by them.)   He also showed a few flashes of the old, spicy, hard-elbows Trump, as when he needled Baier about how many viewers Fox has lost lately.   (Fact check: true.)

But I am aggravated by how he continues to make it harder for anyone who is not already a die-hard Trump fan to support him. 

You know that his lawyers had to be drinking with both hands when he started talking about the details of the documents case against him, for example.  His charges about how the MSM and left has attacked and lied about him – and how they’ve covered for Biden and every leftist miscreant around – since 2015 are all true, and made even more effective by the joke of an indictment from Alvin Bragg, and the transparently bogus civil suit by Jean Carroll.

But his defense to the more serious current indictment with Baier was muddled at best, and he seemed at several points to admit to some key charges against him.  Rather than having declassified all those docs at the end of his presidency – which would have been an air-tight legal defense – he agreed that he had said (apparently on tape) that he could have classified them but didn’t. 

I think that if you’re not going to charge Hillary or Biden for doing the same or worse, Trump NEVER should have been charged.  But I also think that Trump’s petulance and lack of discipline handed his enemies – whom he already knew were people with no moral compass who have happily fabricated evidence against him – an armful of evidence to hammer him with.

But Trump’s thoughts on loyalty were the low point for me.  You all know that I’m pulling for DeSantis, so it always irritates me that he accuses DeSantis of disloyalty just for daring to run for president.  But at least I can see why Trump feels that way, even as I disagree.

But when Baier read just a partial list of all of the Trump appointees whom Trump eventually turned on and attacked, it wasn’t new, but it was damning just the same.  Every administration has picks that turn out to be bad calls, and even a few turncoats, and I didn’t blame Trump for most of those early on.  I liked that he was such an outsider, and I knew that that meant he didn’t have a deep network of “experienced pols” (which is not the compliment for me that it is for some) from whom to choose.

But when the titles, names and insults are listed – cabinet members who are all idiots and cowards and traitors, secretaries of state and ambassadors and candidates you supported who all did lousy jobs – it makes Trump look terrible.  Either he picked a line-up of the worst, most disreputable job candidates in history – and we’ve all seen the Biden and Obama administrations, so that’s going to be a hard “no” – or Trump throws everyone who ever disagrees with him under the bus.   

He even trashed Kayleigh McEnany!  All she ever did was defend him loyally, outwit the dimwits in the press corps, and look great doing it.  (And set a standard for spokespeople that makes the Ginger Prevaricator and Kewpie-Doll Identity-Hire Pierre look even worse.  Which I wouldn’t have thought possible.)

But when McEnany cited one poll saying that Trump was up by 25 points, he attacked.  Because another poll showed him up by 34, he called her “milquetoast” and said that the “RINOS and Globalists can have her.  FoxNews should only use REAL stars.”  

That’s how he treats his people who did a good job for him!  Compare that to the praise he’s been giving to leftist Schiff-shows like Ken-Doll Newsom, Grandma-Killer Cuomo and Spineless Charlie Crist, just because doing so allows him to smear DeSantis. 

If I were him, with that record, I wouldn’t be talking a lot about loyalty.

It pains me to write that, and I will obviously still vote for him if he’s the nominee, because Trump at his worst is way better than any of the current Dems at their best.  But I’m afraid that he’s only making the future tougher on himself, even if he does return to the White House. 

Because he’s going to need to hire a ton of good people to carry out his plans to drain the swamp, clean out the deep state, etc.  And with the way he’s been treating his people from the first administration, he’s making that task a lot tougher. 

But enough about that unpleasantness – let’s remember who our real opposition is.

I know we’ve all heard enough about Hunter Biden this week, and his unutterably corrupt sweetheart deal that has allowed him to skate on a boatload of felonies without even a slap on the wrist. 

But I think the more telling story about Hunter this week came from LA, where a member of “an elite sex club” revealed that Hunter was also a member.   

None of you, reading the last paragraph, gasped in surprise, and thought, “Martin, are you telling me that that jumper-of-his-brother’s-widow and degenerate druggie who filmed himself cavorting with hookers of many nations belonged to a sex club?  The hell you say!”  

The guy who ratted Hunter out, Damon Lawner, has been kicked out of the sex club.  Because, and I quote, the club “upholds a strict code of conduct to protect our members’ safety and privacy.”

Ah, yes.  Nothing says “strict code of conduct” like asking rich LA weirdos, “Do you have $75K, and would you like to bang strangers?  You’re in!”

The most salient part of the story?  Hunter Biden was kicked out of the club for being, and I quote again, “a scumbag.”

That’s right.  The son who makes Joey Gaffes so, so proud, was actually too scummy to meet the high moral standards down at Club Chlamydia.     

Speaking of a group with the moral gravitas of a skeevy sex club, the ACLU is mad again, and that’s good news for us. 

This story starts in 1984, when an evil pervert named Duane Owen raped and stabbed to death a 14-year-old girl while she was babysitting.  Two months later, he broke into a home and beat a 38-year-old mother of two to death with a hammer.  Her kids found her body the next morning.

For the next thirty-nine years he sat on death row, until Florida finally executed him last week. 

So why is the ACLU mad?  Are they outraged because his conviction and execution were so rash and speedy that he may have been wrongly killed?  Probably.  But they’re REALLY angry because ol’ Duane claimed to be transgender, and Florida still cruelly refused to give him “medically necessary gender-affirming care.”

You can’t make this up.  (Also, happy Pride Month everybody!)

The ACLU said that by not using Duane’s preferred pronouns and giving him the “care” he wanted, the state caused him “enormous suffering” and exposed him to “cruel and unusual punishment.”  They also hoped to prevent the execution because of how hard they’ve made it to get the drugs used in that procedure. 

Since “gender affirming care” for males is often a ghoulish euphemism for castration, I would actually have been in favor of giving that surgery to Duane.  Imagine his surprise when it was explained to him that the state had spent all of its drug budget on execution drugs, so the “gender affirmation” would have to be done without anesthetic.

Fortunately, Florida was able to find execution drugs, and justice was done on June 15^th.    

Owen’s final statement was, “I have transcended space and time, I have seen the visions of the crow.”

Everybody at the prison gave a confused look and shrugged their shoulders, but Joe Biden got what he was putting down.  “That guy makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle, doesn’t he?  God save the queen, man.”

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Damon “More Moral than Hunter” Lawner, 2024!