Martin Simpson

Listen, I’d love to start your Monday out on a high note. 

I’d love to tell you that the banks aren’t failing, and millions of illegals aren’t crouched down in sprinters’ blocks waiting to bum-rush the border on Thursday, and Tucker’s back on the air.

And that I’ve mastered the guitar after three weeks’ practice and will be going on a 10-city tour with CO in June, and that we are now taking applications for extra roadies, most of whom will be needed to deal with the veritable clouds of female undergarments we expect to be tossed onstage during our performances.

But I can’t tell you that. 

Because the banks are dropping like Kennedys at an open bar, and the illegals are chomping at the bit like so many biological males in a NCAA women’s track event.  And I still suck at the guitar.

So the best I can do is offer two moments of levity before facing our country’s currently alarming situation.

First, a dumb joke you may have heard before: 

Q: What’s the difference between a filthy Greyhound waiting room and a lobster with breast implants?

A: One’s a crusty bus station, and the other’s a busty crustacean. 

Second, a dumb politician, whom you’ve definitely heard too much of:

Last week, a reporter asked Mayor Pete if he hopes to serve another term as secretary of transportation.  (That’s already a joke, although no one is laughing.)  

His answer, which I swear I am not making up: “Right now, I’ve got my head down, seeking to deliver.”

If you’ve ever watched the great cartoon Archer, this is where we say, “Phrasing!”

All right.  To paraphrase John Fetterman at the beginning of a debate, “That’s all the good news I’ve got.  Goodnight everybody!”  

On to two red-flag cultural items ripped from the headlines.

First, the outrageous story of a death on the subway, and the horde of nihilistic fools who can neither see nor tell the truth about the hellscape that they’re helping turn NYC (and Chicago, and LA, and San Francisco, and Baltimore…) into.

To hear them tell it, a saintly African-American named Jordan Neely – who would have been an honor student and currently on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer if Amerika’s evil racism hadn’t blighted his life – was minding his own business on the subway, when an evil white guy strangled him to death. 

Because: racism.

As you already know, unless you just awakened from a 30-year coma three minutes ago and then started reading this column, this leftist tale was a ridiculous attempt to whitewash the perp’s background and actions. 

How white was that wash, you may be asking?  As white as Elizabeth Warren, if you can believe that.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

(Several faithful readers recently pointed out that I hadn’t mocked the Land o’ Lakes Butter Maiden (D- Massachusetts) in several consecutive columns.  So mea culpa.)   

In reality, Neely was a tragically common figure in our large, Democrat-run cities lately: a recidivist who was alternatively severely mentally ill, an addict, a career criminal, or some combination of the three.  At age 30 he’d already racked up 42 arrests.

His resume included at least 4 other violent offenses, one against an elderly woman that left her with a broken orbital socket among other injuries.  In fact, he had an open warrant for a violent assault when he got on the subway and acted exactly like someone who has an open warrant for his arrest.

“But wait, Martin,” you are not asking, because you know better, “I thought he was only minding his business when he was unjustifiably strangled?”

Nope.  He was threatening other riders, hollering semi-coherently, and generally carrying on like an aggressive and unstable man.   

And the guy who “strangled” him?  He’s a Marine who chose to try to subdue the guy, rather than stand by and watch him assault or harm anyone else in the train car.   And he didn’t use the amount of force that he could have, considering his training. 

He didn’t drill the guy with punches to especially vulnerable places, or try to smash his trachea with an elbow strike, or use any of the other brutal tactics that a soft English professor like me knows nothing about.    

He put the guy in a submission chokehold, and when Neely resisted, several other riders – black, as it happened – got on top of him until he passed out. 

So naturally, when the Marine’s justified actions unintentionally resulted in the violent criminal’s death, the worst people in New York showed up to protest and lie and race-bait.  They screamed at and assaulted cops so blatantly that even in benighted NYC, a handful of them were arrested… at least temporarily.

To prevent commuters from getting somewhere to do something productive, some of the protestors jumped down on the train tracks to disrupt subway traffic. 

Tragically, none of them were either electrocuted or smashed by a train like Neely’s old-lady victim’s orbital socket. 

And before we can be tempted to dismiss the mob’s despicable reactions as the behavior of a stupid and malicious underclass of insignificant d-bags, into the fray marched the (clotted) cream of the (rancid) crop of NY’s finest leftist politicians.

NY Governor (and semi-professional Wicked Witch of the West impersonator) Kathy Hochul mewled about how “horrific” it was to watch a video of Neely “being killed for being a passenger” on the subway. 

AOC, proving that none of us can tell the difference between her juicy booty – her words, not mine – and the hole in her head, called the Marine a “murderer” and accusing him of “lynching” Neely.

I guess I can just cut and paste Shakespeare’s line from the Tempest into every column I write from now on: “Hell is empty, and all of the devils are here.”

The plight of the remaining good people in any of the big blue cities is truly tragic.  That Marine tried to do the right thing, as did the other riders who helped him subdue Neely, and the still others who thanked and congratulated him on video afterwards. 

In any sane city, he would have received the thanks of civic leaders, and would not have to pay for a drink in any city bars.  But in a Democrat Schiff-hole, he now has to hire a lawyer and bankrupt himself with legal fees, and hope that he’s not convicted and jailed for his bravery and protection of others.

It’s heartbreaking to have to say this, but the good people of New York should leave as soon as they can.  The evil scumbags who run that town – and the evil scumbags who vote for them – have put good New Yorkers in a no-win situation.

They’ve purposely ensured that vicious criminals and the severely mentally ill remain on the streets and in the subways.  When one of them confronts you – and they eventually and repeatedly will – you have to choose between passively placing your life in their demented hands, or else trying to resist them, and ending up either injured, dead or in jail.

Get out now! 

Not only will you be able to survive and thrive outside of that Hobbesian dystopia, but by removing yourself, you’ll ensure that the NEXT victims of the criminal predators will be Hochul, AOC, Pritzker and the whole rotten bunch of leftist predator-enablers who put them in power. 

And then they’ll get exactly what they asked for… good and hard.

Finally, turning from the tragic to the pathetic, I am compelled to address Que Mala’s latest public performance.  You’ve probably seen this by now, but if you haven’t, you missed a classic that is destined to end up there with her deathless “the significance of the passage of time” ramble. 

(In fact, I think that there may be something about the concept of time that triggers whatever sub-set of Tourrette’s that she has, because this one also involved her deep thoughts about time.)

To say that she spewed out some more word salad is to not do her justice. 

She went to the word salad bar and filled up her plate, and then went back for seconds! 

She was talking to an audience at the historically black school Howard University.  (Which really should make her performance a racial hate crime.) 

Her speech was nominally about how great abortion is, and how terrible the GOP is, and how much she loves the LGBTQ movement.  (Not “Let’s Get Biden To Quit.”  The other one.) (The one in which the big hulking dudes are competing against women in sports, and giving them concussions by slapping them forcefully with their totally female phalli.  And then giving interviews with their totally female voices that somehow sound like James Earl Jones.)

But when Que Mala speaks, the alleged subject matter is never the issue.  It’s the words.  Oh, the words!

Saith VP Muy Malo:  “So I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”

Yikes.  And also, what? 

This is her worst outing since last month, when she gave a speech during women’s history month, and said that she was thrilled to honor “women who made history throughout history.”  Did they do it with a high degree of historicity, you’re wondering, if you’re the snarky sort?

She’ll have you know that women are a historically under-represented group of history-making historical figures, whose actions shaped the very fabric and contours of history.  And probably time, too.

Well, at least she didn’t say “her-story,” another leftist figure of speech which makes me shudder just to type or say it.

It could have been worse, I guess.  Because Que Mala could have pulled out a white board and drawn a Venn diagram to illustrate her point: “The circle on the left side represents the past, and the circle on the right side represents the future.  And the overlapping section, right here in the middle?” 

“That’s THIS exact moment in time, which I’ve been contextualizing for you right now, here, in this moment in which we all exist.  A ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA!”

That’s the woman who is a heartbeat away – one feeble, arrhythmic, and barely detectible heartbeat away – from being the president of the United States.

Saint John said it first, and the rest of us have said it a million times since:  Jesus wept.

Also, when it comes to being a politician, she stinketh!

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Kathy “I’m melting! I’m melting!” Hochul, 2024!

Thank you all for your kind words and wishes about the travails that my mom and Edgar the dog experienced during our Tennessee trip.   I’m happy to report that mom is experiencing nothing worse than what feels like a minor head cold, my sis and her hubby didn’t catch the ‘rona, and Eddie is back to his “good boy” self after the vet found nothing to explain his seizure.

As I mentioned in my last column, I’ve heard a lot worse country lyrics than, “Momma’s got sick and the dog had a seizure.” 

In fact, just typing that has inspired me to try to write at least one verse of lyrics, which I am still years away from being able to put to music with my feeble newbie guitar skills. 

It’s tentatively called, “Spring 2023 Blues” –

“Momma got sick and the dog had a seizure,

Biden’s destroying our land at his leisure,

And Fox News has just tossed out our buddy Tucker,

Rupert, you low-down dim-wit mother—”

Okay, maybe I need a little more seasoning (and a little less medicinal bourbon) before turning my hand to songwriting. 

But after the amazing job CO did with “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” on his guitar at Christmastime, perhaps he can start working up an original country-flavored tune, while I try to hash out some lyrics?

(Everybody mark your calendars, because this day may be the beginning of a musical collaboration destined to produce the Lennon-McCartney of the 21st century!)

As I got settled back in at home and caught up on the news that I’d missed in Tennessee, I was struck by how much this militant transgender craziness has metastasized all over the country.  Disruptions have happened at public speeches on campuses, in schools and at parades, and even in state houses.

The latest transurrection – not to be confused with an insurrection, which is terrible beyond measure – happened in Montana, of all places.

(By the way, for those scoring at home, here’s how it works:  Guy in a horn hat walking through an empty chamber escorted by cops?  Mortal threat to democracy!  Guys dressed in Liza Minnelli dresses, Tammy Faye makeup, and late-career Liz Taylor wigs, screaming through bullhorns and jostling lawmakers?  Democracy in action!)

The action this time happened during a debate in the Montana legislature about a bill forbidding doctors from doing mutilating gender-based surgeries on children.  As it became clear that the pro “cut the kids” side was going to lose, a guy pretending to be a gal named “Zoey Zephyr” stepped up to do two things:

1. Prove the truism that even with hormone therapy and makeup, an unattractive man makes a horrifically more unattractive woman.  (See: Admiral of the Seven Seas Richard “nobody calls him Dick” (anymore) Levine)

2. Make an overwrought grab for attention like a grown-up theater kid chewing the scenery in a venue so far off Broadway that it’s practically – literally, in this case – in Montana.   

After plowing through the usual talking points, “Zooey” peaked with a hysterical accusation that anyone who votes for the bill “will have blood on their hands!”

Which is weird.  Because you know who really has literal blood on their hands in this case? 

Doctors who take a scalpel to the genitalia of children.  Which – I’m no doctor – I’m pretty sure have lots of blood vessels in them. 

Sidebar: One of the most consistent vexations of the trans activists’ rhetorical style is their evasions of clear and accurate language in favor of euphemism, obfuscation and dishonest descriptions.

In that way, they are very similar to the radical pro-choice activists in the abortion debate.  You know the examples only too well: the most prominent and profitable group dedicated to preventing parenthood is called “Planned Parenthood.”

An unborn baby – which has separate and distinct brainwaves, heartbeat and DNA from her mother – is called “the mother’s body”.  It’s also called “a tissue mass,” which is true, as far as it goes. 

I.e. in the sense that a mother, or a father, or Whoopie Goldberg, can also be called a “tissue mass.”  (In Goldberg’s case, that would be a “massive tissue mass.”) 

Or, my favorite, a “fetus.”  Abortion supporters use that term frequently – “It’s NOT a baby, it’s a fetus!” – and often with the haughtiness that medium-smart (at best) people display when they use a medical term, often because those terms come from Latin.  Which “fetus,” in fact, does.

I imagine that many pro-choicers think that “fetus” probably means something like “tissue mass,” or “tiny part of the mother’s body.”  Inconveniently for them it means… wait for it… ”offspring!”

D’oh!

Anyway, although abortion enthusiasts have had decades to develop and refine their favorite propagandistic pet phrases, the transgender enthusiasts are catching up quick.

Almost every term they use is either grossly euphemistic or else blatantly dishonest.   They invented “cis gender” to replace “normal.”  (I don’t mean that term to be insulting, but simply descriptive. As in, “Humans normally have two eyes through which they are able to see.”  As opposed to, “Some people are blind, while others are cis sighted.”) 

They use “gender affirming” to describe actions that deny gender.  

Consider constant calls to give “transgender kids the medical care they deserve.” 

The kids aren’t “transgender,” since no one can in reality change their gender; they are either suffering from a mental illness called gender dysmorphia or – much more commonly – either driven by a social contagion, or being abused by unstable parents riddled with Munchausen-by-proxy narcissism. 

And giving kids irreversible drugs and hormones to stop their normal physical development (while also sterilizing them and causing a raft of pernicious and often life-long side effects) cannot in a sane society be called “care.” 

Not to mention the horrific, Frankensteinian surgeries.  To castrate a young male and then surgically flay his penis in an attempt to use it to create a non-functional pseudo vagina is NOT “medical care that they deserve.”  In fact, that is not medical care that ANYONE deserves.

Oh, wait.  I forgot about serial rapists.  Castration and penis flaying sounds about right for those predators. 

So I stand corrected. 

The Zephyr story has an extra layer of confusion. Because “Zoey” is a guy who poses as a girl, and has a “girlfriend” named Erin Reed, who is also a guy posing as a girl.  (I know what you’re thinking: bricklayer? Heavy equipment operator? Nope: Erin is a journalist/activist/content creator.  What are the odds?)  

So they are either two gay guys with autogynephilia in a gay relationship, or two biological males in a… I guess… lesbian relationship, somehow?

(I miss Archie Bunker: “And you knew who you were then/ Goils were goils and men were men.”)

And not to get off track, but in addition to all of the other insanity associated with radical transgender activists, why do they always have to pick such bizarre new names for themselves?  

“Zooey Zephyr?”

If you ever start reading a column of mine in which I proclaim that I no longer want to be referred to as a humble Roving Correspondent, or a hilarious genius, or even Marticus – all of which are totally normal, and pleasing to the ear as well – and then ask you to address me as Zippity Bop Delecto, you should stop what you’re doing immediately.

And then begin what I hope would be a nationwide prayer and email chain in the hopes of confirming that I have not flayed my magnificent genitalia, and am not looking for a gig pushing Bud Light or a prime-time slot at CNN.

Okay, maybe “magnificent” is a bit over the top. 

Or is it?

Perhaps I’ve said too much. 

And just when you think that nothing can top the incomprehensibility of our subcultural sexual confusion, yet another major institution takes the lead in the competition for “most idiotic inability to understand your own core purpose.”

First Bud Light went full tranny.  Then Fox News fired their best and most popular host in Tucker Carlson.  (He was a ratings juggernaut!  As opposed to Don Lemon.  Who was a ratings naught.)

But not since the NFL started dressing their players in pink and prattling on about breast cancer and America’s rottenness has another institution that relies on recruiting males you think of as toxic gone as stupid as the example I’m about to bring up.

And by the way, yes, the 15-year-old push to “woke up” pro football still sticks in my craw! 

If I can speak for the mostly male fan base of the NFL – and I think that I can – we were raised to stand up and put a hand over our hearts when the anthem is played.  I know that that makes us hicks and rubes in your eyes.  Yet somehow we can still sleep at night. 

And you don’t have to coach us up to appreciate breasts, you idiots.  We’re already big fans! 

Also, let me save you some money before you can come up with any future campaigns to lecture us about the virtues of apple pie, pick-up trucks. or the rear ends of women.  We’re way ahead of you! 

We’re also perfectly comfortable with taking the controversial “anti-“ position when it comes to both cancer and racism.

But we’re never going to hate our country or believe that it’s anywhere near as racist as the white leftists on Martha’s Vineyard or the members of the Congressional black caucus are.  So stop trying to “educate” us and focus on God’s favorite game, dammit!

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  Stupid marketing campaigns.

I give you: the drag queen Navy recruiter!

I know.  That sounds like a 1970s set-up for a joke lobbed to Charles Nelson Reilly or Paul Lynde on Match Game. 

But it’s 2023, and what once was satire is now reality.

The oddball in question is an actual sailor who goes by the drag name “Harpy Daniels.”  He seems to not be a gender dysmorphic person, but just a gay guy who likes to dress up like a woman and sail around the world’s oceans for months at a time in close proximity to hundreds of young, physically fit men.

What could go wrong?

Can anyone remember way back to when the purpose of the military was to kill people and break things? 

If I can engage my Sam Kinison filter for just a moment…

[begin Kinison] “You know what kind of things we traditionally sent our military to break?  Al Qaeda ammo dumps.  Battered Toyotas full of ISIS freaks carrying AK-47s.  Jihadi jaws, femurs and spirits.  

NOT FAKE FINGERNAILS AND HIGH HEELS!!  OH!  OHHHHH!!!!” [end Kinison]

The story covering this mind-numbingly stupid recruitment plan notes that, “Despite their efforts, Navy officials [are] projected to miss their goal for enlisted sailors by 8,000 recruits.”

The hell you say!

I think the bad-ass Navy Seal who shot smelly goat-ravager and terrorist Osama Bin Laden said it best in his tweet on this abomination: “Alright. The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bullsh**.”

Winston Churchill is said to have derisively described the traditions of the Royal Navy as “Rum, sodomy and the lash.” 

So I guess the US Navy has their new recruiting slogan for 2023:

“Hold the rum.”

Not to be confused with the conservative slogan for 2024:

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Zippity Zappity Zephyr, 2024!

April certainly ended with a bang for me.

In case you missed a previous column, I’ve been in TN for the last week with my wife and Wonder Dog, spending time with my octogenarian mom while my sister and her husband were enjoying a well-deserved vacation.

When my wife came down with covid on Monday, she tried to stay rested and separated as much as possible from mom and I.  Still, we had a good week and a great visit, with me driving mom around to various nice areas of town, taking walks and having some good conversations. 

I drove her past the previous two houses she’s lived in, and although she didn’t remember the houses when I described them, she remembered the names of the streets they are on, and she remembered the houses themselves when we drove by.  In the evenings we watched some old family videos that my sister recently had converted from old videotapes into electronic copies.

We watched a lot of past Christmases, some birthdays and celebrations with my daughters when everyone was a lot younger and skinnier, and some family gatherings with my mom and dad’s siblings, most of whom are gone now.

We also saw a lot of videos of my dad, and I was happy to recognize how happy those made mom.  I’d feared that seeing dad – who passed in 2014 – would be tough on her, but it was quite the opposite.  And as with many who have Alzheimer’s, mom’s memory of those days from decades past were much clearer and more accurate than her memories of very recent events.

It was a great time, and since my sister and her husband got back home today, Karen and I will drive back to Florida tomorrow.

On the downside, my mom caught covid, and one of my sister’s dogs had a really frightening seizure last night!

Sadly, I am not making that up.  And yes, I recognize that “momma got sick and the dog had a seizure” sounds like a very bad country music title.

Mom is doing very well so far, with the only real symptoms being a super-stuffed-up head and a bit of fatigue.  Since she had covid last year and recovered pretty quickly, we’re hoping for the same this time.

Edgar the dog seems to be doing well, too.  My sister spoke to a 24-hour vet and my wife looked at info on dog seizures on the internet.  (I know: if you can’t trust pet health info you find on the internet, what can you trust?)  The seizure looked very violent and freaked everyone out, but it only lasted a minute, after which Eddie quickly bounced back. 

My brother-in-law is taking her to their regular vet this morning, and we are hoping for the best.    

So after all that, this will be a shorter than usual column, focusing on two good-news stories.

First in Portland, OR – a town that has produced very few positive stories as of late – the far-left administration of Portland State University showed that (all recent evidence to the contrary) they are not completely ineducable.  

You may remember that just last week, city officials in San Francisco voted to rescind their idiotic, self-defeating ban on dealing with yucky conservative states who don’t favor voting fraud, and abortion in the third trimester.  Well now, PSU’s leaders similarly reversed themselves, dumping a policy passed in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd riots – er, “peaceful protests with just a dusting of arson and other felonies” – that disarmed campus police.

 A campus cop spokesman at the time said, “We can do an effective job without weapons.  I know [campus police are] talented to do their jobs without the use of a weapon.”

I’m not making that up.  I guess the idea was to meet any violent criminals who posed a danger to the students with a potent combination of harsh language and scowls of disapproval.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the MSM reporting on this story were shocked – shocked, I tells ya! – at what happened next: “But then crime increased three years in a row across Portland. The city smashed its previous homicide record in 2021 and again last year. Many businesses have fled the city due to repeated burglaries and vandalism.”

I love the way that quote starts: with a “but.” 

Anybody with any common sense and a basic grasp of how conjunctions work would know that that sentence needs to start with the “cause-and-effect” relationship indicated by a “so” or a “thus” – “We disarmed the cops, SO crime rates exploded.” – not a “but,” or a “however,” or even a “who’d a thunk it?”

My favorite part is that the poor spokes-dope who bragged in 2020 about how cops didn’t need to carry weapons to do their job was the same one who had to announce the humiliating about-face:  “Recently, our officers encountered individuals on campus with weapons.  This has made me make the hard decision to have more armed patrols on campus.”

Listen.  Do you hear that?   It’s the sound of millions of normal Americans slapping their foreheads with their palms.

I guess PSU expected that their cops were only going to be called to dorm-room bull sessions on philosophical questions that got a little too heated, or maybe some pillow fights in sorority houses.  Instead, criminals did what criminals do… and that caught the big brains at PSU totally by surprise.

Great job, Sherlock!

Speaking of happy endings to crime stories, I don’t know if you caught the tale of Matvey Klimenko, 38, a resident of Jacksonville, Florida.  On April 12^th, Klimenko armed himself with a knife and broke into his ex-girlfriend’s house and threatened to kill her.

“Hey Martin,” you’re not saying, because you know better, “Klimenko was probably a hard-working taxpayer with a clean record and a long history of treating women respectfully, wasn’t he?”

Prepare to be shocked: ol’ Matvey K seemed to have gone pro in the lucrative field of being a career criminal and recidivist piece of s**t.  He had a long rap sheet, including multiple domestic violence charges.  Several women – including his mom and sister! — had filed restraining orders against him.

In fact, cops say that he had previously “harassed and stalked his ex-girlfriend, threatened to kill her and held her at both gun and knife point.”  When she moved to get away from him, he managed to find her at her new address.

She was able to barricade herself in a bathroom and call the cops.  And because Jacksonville isn’t in CA, IL or NY, he was not immediately released on his own recognizance and given a key to the city and an apology for the inconvenience.

Instead, a SWAT team and hostage negotiator showed up, and spent several hours trying to reason with Klimenko.  He managed to flee from the house, and when officers spotted him, they pursued him, firing less-than-lethal rounds at him.  (I would prefer they use more-than-lethal rounds, but I would also settle for just-enough-to-be-lethal rounds.)

They also used a tactic that is dear to my heart: they released a police dog on him.  K9 officer Zeke went after him like a fur missile, cornering him between two houses, and going for his legs.  Klimenko managed to get hold of Zeke’s vest with one hand, and raised his knife in the other.

That’s when Zeke’s handler yelled, “Don’t let him stab him, don’t let him stab him!”  (You can see the whole thing on a video released by the Jax PD.)  

After a few commands to drop the knife, SWAT team members shot the evil thug in my favorite way for criminals to get shot:

Repeatedly!

To re-cap: Klimenko crushed it at the “room temperature challenge,” his ex has been sleeping well for the first time in a long time, and Florida is a safer place today.

Oh, and who’s a good boy?

ZEKE! 

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Portland State Police Chief Barney Fife, 2024!

Thanks to all of you who sent good wishes for my wife’s bouncing back from covid, which is well underway.  Today she felt back to about 60% of full strength, which is markedly better than the last several days. 

In addition to my wife being on the mend, I’m feeling some excitement for the same reason I imagine many of you are:

It’s SatanCon eve!

As I write this late on Thursday night, all over Boston parents are helping their little ones put out the gender non-binary gingerbread people and soy milk for Krampus, before tucking them into bed, with visions of forked tails and pitchforks dancing in their heads.  

Soon they’ll be asleep but still restless, as they dream of fat guys in goat-skin pants and useless N-95 masks painted like skulls, and crazy Sam Brinton, for some reason – garish lipstick smeared over his mouth and bald head – laughing maniacally and running through an airport dragging stolen suitcases behind him as he dashes off to a staff meeting at his influential job in the Brandon administration.

Um… it’s possible that I’ve somehow caught my wife’s fevered hallucinations of the last few days.

Speaking of which, close proximity to illness has made me think about the state of our nation, which reminds me of someone with a threatening, gangrene-like infection.  And right now, it seems like there are roughly the same number of troubling symptoms as there is evidence of encouraging antibodies being created and marshalled to counter-attack the illness.

On the encouraging, anti-body-creating side of the ledger, we have sites like this one, along with networks of like-minded people – sites like the Daily Wire and the Babylon Bee, conservative podcasters, some media figures like Gutfeld and Jordan Peterson and Tucker (wherever he lands), educational institutions and sites like Hillsdale, Prager U and etc.    

We also still have entrepreneurial eccentrics like Elon Musk, with his can-do, optimistic spirit.  Last week, his experimental Space X starship successfully launched, but soon developed problems in flight and had to be blown up.  This experience prompted one of the greatest euphemisms in history from Musk: the craft “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

In other contexts, that verbiage could be putting a brave face on an unmitigated disaster.  As in, “Since Biden took office, America’s economy, border and international reputation have all experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.  Run for your lives!”

But not for Musk, who is such a cautious optimist that he was a South Afri-Can (not a South Afri-can’t) before he became an Ameri-can.  He was sanguine after the “disassembly.”  He noted that all experiments provide useful data, and tweeted: “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

Another encouraging metaphorical antibody story comes from usually gangrenous San Francisco (metaphorically, but also often literally speaking), where in 2016 the city’s board of supervisors took time away from their busy schedule of not noticing that a rising tide of human feces and dirty syringes was slowly burying their streets to enact an idiotic law.

The law forced a boycott of 30 states who had the audacity to pass laws on various subjects – abortion, gay marriage, preventing fraudulent voting – that the SF overlords disagreed with. 

You don’t see this kind of arrogance in conservative places.  We like paying lower taxes, exercising our 2^nd amendment rights, and empowering cops to arrest and jail criminals, for example.  

But hey, if Californians want to pay more than half of their earnings to the government, or New Yorkers and Chicagoans want to be disarmed when thugs attack them, and then to be sure that those thugs are not inconvenienced by police, we say, “You do you, lefty masochists!”

But SF lefties, in their wisdom, decided that they’d bring those benighted 60% of states to their knees, by depriving them of the privilege of doing business with San Francisco.

So why is this a good-news, social-antibody kind of story? 

Because it turns out that when your chief exports are the aforementioned human waste and filthy syringes, withholding that bounty from other states doesn’t give you the amount of leverage that you expected.

Fast forward to last week, when SF officials voted to repeal the boycott law. 

They did this after producing a report that showed several hilariously unintended consequences of their “let us run your lives, deplorables” boycott.  For one, no other state made any attempt to change their own laws in response to the city’s narcissistic a-holery. 

For another, connected San Franciscans had gotten exemptions and waivers to do business with the states on the naughty list, to the tune of $791 million of purchases in a single year.

And the schadenfreude salt in their self-inflicted wound?  It cost the totalitarian twits $475,000 in staffing expenses to enforce their failed experiment in dictating to other American states.

Some positive pushback is also happening on the gender-dysphoria/transgender-mania issue.  Several sporting bodies have ruled that competitors have to stay in their own biological lane.  Anheuser-Busch is losing billions because of their Bud Light/ Dylan Mulvaney idiocy, and legislation is being passed in many states to criminalize gender “affirming” (i.e. denying) surgeries on children.   

More evidence is also coming out that refutes the rationale for such traumatic surgeries.  (Although the idea that we’ve taken it this seriously for this long is already evidence of the extent of the disease’s progress.) 

One example is an article in PJ Media with the succinct title, “Study Shows Mothers of Boys With Gender Issues Are Mental.”  It details a study from 1991 which has recently gained attention, and it’s the kind of study that documents what should have been obvious to everyone without any such study: “The mothers of gender dysphoric boys tend to suffer from a host of mental illnesses of their own.”

You can read the story, and the details are chilling.  One top-line finding is that mothers of the kind of gender-confused boys who would now be wrongly diagnosed as “trans” and shoved onto the castration conveyer belt (worst Lucy episode ever, by the way) are 9 times more likely to meet the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than moms of “normal” boys.

I can only hope that as more evidence continues to come out, we’ll be giving way more scrutiny to the unstable, ideology-driven Munchausen-by-proxy parents who are behind so much of the torment caused by the trans explosion.  

Unfortunately, the news about the health of our body politic is far from uniformly rosy.  Our higher education system, for example, is way too often still a source of cultural pathology. 

A recent example comes from UNC, where almost 700 professors signed a public letter opposing a bill requiring students to take courses on our government and founding documents.  They object to students being forced to read documents like the Federalist Papers or the Gettysburg Address, because doing so “substitutes ideological force-feeding for the intellectual expertise of faculty.”

Although too many professors’ “intellectual expertise” too often amounts to teaching their own CRT and Marxist “ideological force-feeding,” you can understand why anyone might resist the state scrutinizing how they do their job. 

In fact, another set of government employees – cops – also initially resisted scrutiny of their work, in the form of required body-worn cameras.  But we have rightly decided – and I think most police departments now agree – that since they are public employees doing a critical job, state scrutiny is justified. 

Since properly educating our nation’s citizens is as important as policing our streets, I think we should supplement requirements to teach our nation’s history and foundational documents with laws requiring professors to wear body-cams – accessible to the taxpayers who employ them – in the classroom. 

Most of the time, cops’ body cams exonerate them of accusations from criminals, although they also do incriminate bad cops sometimes.  I’m guessing that those results would be reversed in “prof-cam” cases: more would be caught teaching left-biased quasi-propaganda than an accurate depiction of our nation’s virtues and flaws.   

(And how fun would it be to watch a cable show with the theme song, “Bad profs, bad profs, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when your woke b.s. outs you?”)

One final area of our social gangrene can be found in the media.  Examples abound, but a particularly great one was a piece this Wednesday from NYT propagandist David Leonhardt.

Faced with Biden’s manifest incapacity, our MSM has gone into full Pravda mode, covering for Joey Gaffes and publishing a thousand variations on the same “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes” story.  But now that he is visibly deteriorating day by day, the lefty propagandists need to step up their game. 

Enter Davey Leonhardt, and his article, which argues – and I swear I am not making this up, “Strange as it may sound, the American government can function without a healthy president.”

Is that not perfect? 

First the MSM told us that Biden is fine, and that he wasn’t hiding in his basement, and that he’s got the energy and smarts of a much younger man.  Then they said, “Okay, he’s calling a lid on some days at noon.  Make that 10.  And he’d love to talk to you, but he’s at his beach house for the 6^th weekend in a row.” 

Then they said, “Okay, so maybe he can’t make it up a mobile airport staircase.  And he sometimes shakes hands with ghosts.  But he didn’t poop on the Pope.”  Then, “Okay, he may have pooped in the general vicinity of the Pope, but he’s fine.  He’s doing a great job.”

And now that his physical and mental decomposition is obvious, Leonhardt brings us the convenient news that our country can work just fine without a healthy president.  He cites several examples that don’t help as much as he thinks they do.      

He cites FDR as a president who had physical challenges but performed well… but FDR died when he was 17 years younger than Biden is now!  Leonhardt also mentions that when he was ill, FDR was surrounded by “aides, Cabinet secretaries and military leaders” who “performed well” when the big guy wasn’t at his best.

Whereas Brandon is surrounded by Que Mala, Mayor Pete, Merrick Garland, Hakeem Jeffries, et al. 

Not exactly the caliber of people who could win a world war.  Or even the card game “War.”  (Not to mention a battle of wits, for which they are all totally unarmed.)

Leonhardt also cited Reagan, who eventually died with Alzheimer’s.

On the other hand, Reagan was just shy of 78 when he left office after 8 years, which is younger than Biden when he was inaugurated.  Also, Reagan was a great president who did not have a preternatural ability to turn everything he touched into crap. 

And on his worst day during his early 90s, Reagan was more cogent than Biden has been on any given weekday of his presidency so far.

On second thought, maybe the better analogy for our nation’s current struggles is to the aftermath of a stroke: one side of our body is relatively unscathed and functioning relatively normally (let’s call it the red-states side), but the other side has been devastated: partially paralyzed and rapidly atrophying.   

I’m not sure what this might mean for our future, because you can’t amputate half of a ravaged body.  But maybe the effects are still contained enough that a curative amputation is possible?

Regardless of the eventual best-case-scenario outcome, one thing is clear…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ David “Baghdad Bob“ Leonhardt, 2024!

So my wife and I made it up to Tennessee late Saturday just fine, and our visit got off to a good start.  We both spent our first day with mom at home, and there was a lot of conversation, and a lot of laughter.  

Sure, Karen and I had to repeat ourselves pretty often, and answer the same questions multiple times.  But that’s not much to ask for, from the woman who gave you life.

Especially since I spent a career teaching college kids who required me to repeat things just as often, and asked just as many redundant questions, with no excuse nearly as good as, “I’ve got Alzheimer’s.” 

Plus my mom never complained about a manifestly fair grade, gave me her designated pronouns, or went off and voted for lefties who are making everything worse.

When we took a short drive around town, she repeatedly muttered, “I just wish so many new people would stop coming here.”  Her Tennessee town is experiencing the kind of growing pains being felt by many red states, dealing with an influx of refugees from blue cities and states.

What had recently been gently rolling hills and farms, woods and meadows are being supplanted by houses, individually or in small developments.  Traffic is getting worse.  Prices are going up.  Tennessee is feeling growing pains, because it is a welcoming and flourishing place.  (Not unlike Florida, in fact.)

With my tongue firmly in cheek, I reminded her that she and dad came down here from Illinois 15 years ago, so they were part of the invading yankee hordes.  But she is undaunted.  She argues that her new home state should have started restricting the inflow shortly after she and dad arrived, her tongue also in cheek.

Annnnnddddd… then my wife got covid.

She started feeling bad yesterday afternoon, and finally took a test that came up positive late in the evening.  She’s had the vax and a booster, but spoiler alert: you know.  A doc she works with in FL had a Paxlovid script sent to a local pharmacist, and I picked it up for her, and she started on it today.

I’m not so worried about her – she’s otherwise in good shape and pure of heart, and enveloped in the health-restoring (and probably anti-viral) love of her husband – but I’m not thrilled that we happen to be here with my 84-year-old mom.

On the other hand, mom has been vaxed and boosted (spoiler alert: you know, again), and actually had covid last year, and came through like an octogenarian champ.  She’s certainly in better shape than a certain stumblebum who recently went to Ireland (and got barked at by dogs and laughed at by humans) whom I could mention.

On yet a third hand, that comparison is cold comfort at best.   “In better shape than Joe Biden” sounds like a cruel joke.  (Like “better preserved than Imhotep Pelosi.”  Or “smarter than Schiff.”  Or “better smelling than Swalwell.”)

Anyway, I’ve been a bit distracted. 

Then I pull out the laptop today and find out that we won’t have Don Lemon to kick around anymore, and that Tucker Carlson got fired.

The former story is worthy of nothing more than a hearty laugh, and a cheerful goodbye to one of the exemplars of the specific type of racist and sexist narcissists who seem to breed in the fetid swamps of leftist media.  (See: the talentless ladies of the View, the hacky hosts of late-night “comedy” shows, Fredo Cuomo, dishonest giant-human-thumb-impersonator Brian Stelter, etc.)

But the Carlson firing really caught me by surprise.  I share CO’s feelings about this decision, and I can see from the CO site this evening that many around here feel the same way.

In many ways, getting rid of Carlson is the polar opposite of kicking Don Lemon to the curb.  Carlson actually has talent, intelligence and ability, and a willingness to argue for unorthodox positions that he really believes in.

His exposure of some parts of the January 6^th videos was a service to the nation, and his openness to those on the other side of the political aisle – e.g. RFK Jr., Tim Robbins, or Sean Penn – is extremely rare in media. 

And his odd laugh aside, his gift for mockery and humor made for a lot of must-see segments.  His montage of Democrats adopting hideously inauthentic and pandering accents, to cite one recent example, was worth savoring. 

From Hillary doing an egregious audio equivalent of a “black-face” version of a spiritual in front of a southern black audience (“Ah ain’t no-ways tie-uhd…”), to AOC’s offensive “Jenny from the barrio” take on her brief flirtation with an actually useful service job (“ain’t nothin’ wrong with serving people’s foooood”), to Black-Panther-cosplaying “Tennessee Three” member Justin Pearson’s laughable transition from a button-down nerd doing white face at Bowdoin to a big-afroed southern preacher with the MLK delivery and the Malcolm X glasses, Carlson sliced and diced those phonies with great elan.        

(If no one has called Jones’ act “Dr. Urkel and Mr. X” yet, let me be the first.)    

In addition, Carlson has made all the right enemies.  Lefty dullards throughout Congress, the White House, and the MSM were crowing over Carlson’s ouster today.  They think that they’ve been able to cancel him, as they so fervently want to do to every persuasive voice who disagrees with their pinched and dysfunctional ideology.  

But I think they’ve misjudged him, and the finality of their victory.

The reason most of the timid souls in the MSM have to live in fear of being cancelled is that they have no actual talent, nothing that sets them apart from the woke crowd.   If a bland teleprompter-reader like Matt Lauer or Charley Rose gets caught with his pants down, he can be easily replaced.

When Andrew Cuomo’s bad acts became too embarrassing, a similarly soul-less empty pantsuit Dem like Hochul was waiting in the wings.  When Fredo went down, and then Stelter, and now Lemon, they are un-missed and un-mourned.

They are a dime a dozen, and anyone willing to sell their soul for a little camera time can fill their shoes.  (That reminds me: SatanCon ’23 tickets are still available.  Rumors that Don Lemon and KJP are going to be surprise panelists representing the hoary underworld – or Hunter Biden, representing the whore-y underworld, for that matter – are as yet unconfirmed.)  

By contrast, people with real talent who bring something to the table (whether you like them or not) are uncancel-able.  Dave Chappel and Louis CK are very funny, so they’re still around.  Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, Jordan Peterson  and Dennis Prager have each earned huge audiences, so they’re still here.

Tucker Carlson is one of those types.  He’s going to land on his feet, and will soon once again (God willing) be a thorn in the side of the purveyors of “lying, pomposity, smugness and group think.”

The most striking detail of the Carlson story today: when news got out that he’d been fired, Fox’s value plunged by $1 billion dollars.

Coincidentally, one of the goals on my own personal bucket list is that one day, my own firing will be the cause of a billion-dollar loss to my employer. 

Sure, I’m not too close yet, because in the unthinkable, cataclysmic event that CO were to fire me from this site, I don’t think the hit to the net worth of CO nation would total more than $100 million, tops. 

But in the words of the great Dennis Miller, I’m just a young guy with a dream.

Speaking of which…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Reverend Dr. Urkel “X” Kendi, Jr., 2024!

After two columns this week on the fraught Trump v. DeSantis conflict, I’m back to discuss other stories that I came across earlier but didn’t have time to discuss until now.

First, though, a personal note.  My wife and I are going up to TN for a week-long visit with my mom tomorrow.  Regular readers may remember that mom is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and she lives with my sister and her husband.  They are going on a vacation, so my better half and I get to spend some quality time with mom. 

Karen is going to Zoom in to work from up there, and we’ll still have time to take mom on some day trips to a few of the small towns around Nashville.  Cassie the Wonder Dog will also get to frolic with her dog cousins Eddy and Raven.  (My sister is an Edgar Allan Poe fan, as you might have guessed.)

While up there I’m going to continue working on two of my retirement bucket list items: learning some conversational German, and how to play the guitar.  I got an acoustic guitar as an early birthday present last week, but I’m making progress mostly on the “developing calloused fingers” front so far. 

With any luck, in a year or two I’ll be able to back up the adorable Nena on an American tour, bringing my mediocre singing voice, sub-par German skills, and execrable guitar playing to the table.  Then, after I’m fired at the end of the first song, I’ll still be able to check off another bucket-list item.

But I’ll not let any of these worthy activities make me miss writing my two weekly columns here at Cautious Optimism.  Because: priorities.

Now, on to a few nuggets from the news over the last month or so that I noted but didn’t get around to commenting on:

Virginia’s solid Lt. Governor Winsome Sears appeared on Bill Maher’s show a few weeks ago, and she knocked it out of the park.  She was witty and combative, pummeling Ken Doll Newsom, and deftly defending 2^nd amendment rights. 

She noted that women and law-abiding black people are two groups who are pursuing gun ownership most quickly, and she said, “If you’re breaking into my home, while I’m waiting for the police to come, I’m gonna shoot you….  I’m gonna pray for you, but I’m gonna shoot you.” 

She got repeated applause from the audience – usually they are of the trained seal variety when it comes to leftist talking points – and got Maher to admit that calls for gun bans are foolish.  Her performance on his show illustrated why most lefty programs won’t allow any conservatives on, unless it’s to ambush them with dirty tricks or shout them down.

(Maher is the smartest and fairest of the leftist talk show hosts. I know: that’s like saying “the tallest building in Campbellsville, Kentucky.”  But still, credit where credit is due.)

Sears would make a great VP pick, if she wasn’t ineligible because she was born in Jamaica before her family legally immigrated when she was 6.   She’s got an amazing first name, and she’s actually smart and competent. 

It would be great fun to watch the Dems reveal their bone-deep sexism and racism (for the 1,000th time) if she ran.   For them, no woman who bucks the gender feminist party line is an authentic woman, and no conservative black person who won’t go onto the Dems’ ideological plantation is really black.

I’d love to watch a clot of Dems and MSM talking heads arguing that Dylan Mulvaney, Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, and Richard “Dick”/Rachel Levine are all women, but Winsome isn’t. 

And that Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) is Indian and Rachel Dolezal is black, but Winsome Sears (just like Clarence Thomas and Tim Scott) isn’t.  

Man, we are about to see an Old Testament, reap-what-you-sow, Sodom and Gomorrah-style beat-down descending on the benighted city of Chicago.  After the ruinous reign of weapons-grade-stupid Lori Lightfoot, only 38% of Chicago’s voters showed up in a run-off election.  So they got mayor elect Brandon Johnson, who before he is even officially in office, is already picking up right where the fright-wigged one left off.

Over the weekend, hundreds of “youths” rampaged through the Loop in an orgy of violence, terror, and property destruction. 

(By the way, if at least 3% of those in the mob had been white, the MSM would have screamed about the “white supremacist violence.”  But because the MSM called them “youths,” you don’t need to get out your “leftist-speak decoder ring” to find out what uncomfortable truth is being unsuccessfully evaded.)  

This is the kind of failure of government that, if left unchecked, will doom a city, so this was a time that required the new mayor-elect to step up to the plate and show that he wasn’t going to be Lightfoot redux. 

Unfortunately for once-great Chicago (RIP), this Brandon proved to be as inept as our other Brandon.  In a softball interview, a sympathetic news lady desperately tried to steer Johnson into saying the minimum necessary words: I condemn this violence.

But as the old saying goes, “you can lead a radical left apparatchik to water, but you can’t make him think.”

Three times the MSM lady said, “You don’t condone the violence, though…?”  And three times, Brandon refused the lifeline, and spewed a bunch of “commie gobbledygook” (boy do I miss Norm MacDonald!) and misdirection.

Finally he was exasperated enough to let slip some of the reliable old class-warfare, to the effect of, “I don’t condone when big corporations come in and take tax dollars from citizens just to get a profit.”

Got that?  Running a business that gets customers to exchange money for your goods or services voluntarily, thus funding your city government – and earning an evil profit! – is worse than going on a feral, destructive rampage.

By the time he put out a statement the next day, Brandon demonstrated the old adage that when it comes to public statements, “everything that comes before the ‘but’ is meaningless.”   

As in, “I’m a pacifist, and never intended to hurt anybody… but I did massacre all of those nuns.”  Or

“Dad tells me I’m the smartest person he’s ever met… but I did record all of that ‘Caligula in a den full of crack whores’ stuff on my laptop.”

Brandon opens with 2 brief sentences of rhetorical throat-clearing: “In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend.  It is unacceptable and has no place in our city.”

But then: “However… it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities…” followed by 57 words of blaming everybody but the bad guys.    

Watching the video of that mindless, anarchic violence, I was reminded of one of my favorite Shakespeare lines from The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

By the way, if someone putting dark make-up on is doing “black-face,” and Dylan Mulvaney is doing “woman-face,” can’t we say that when he doubles down on Lightfoot’s racist, ideological idiocy, Brandon Johnson is now doing “carp-face?”

Asking for a friend.  (Who got out of Chicago and down to Boca Raton just in the nick of time!) 

Speaking of hell being empty, and all the devils being here…

(that’s what we in the professional writing biz call a top-shelf transition)

Hey, if you’re like me, you probably won’t make it to SatanCon 2023, which I swear I am not making up, and which will take place in Boston next weekend. 

I’ve got the same reason for skipping it that you probably do: it’s just not the same as the SatanCons of my childhood, because it’s been ruined by all the commercialism!

But for those who are going, you can rest assured that the brilliant minds running SatanCon have got your best interests at heart.  Because nobody is going to be allowed into the events – including the totally not made-up “Satanic Marketplace” (or as you may know it, the Democrat National Committee) – unless they are fully vaxxed and masked! 

Naturally.  Because one of the Satanists’ 10 commandments is a total devotion to capital “S” Science. 

And nothing just screams “SCIENCE” like a fat guy with facial piercings and dark eye shadow struggling to get into a set of goat-skin chaps and explaining that as soon as he can get the outfit and his ram’s head mask on, he’s going to ritually defile you from behind, before cutting your throat and dismembering you on a stone altar dedicated to Lucifer.

But don’t worry: he’ll have an N-95 on under the ram’s head the entire time! 

Speaking of defiling yourself from behind…

(Man, that is two world-class transitions in a row!)

Actress, health nut, and leftist goofball Gwyneth Paltrow was asked by an interviewer last month to describe what was the “weirdest wellness thing that you’ve done.”

And she went for it!

Quoth Gwyneth: “I mean, I have… used ozone therapy… rectally.”

Because I am AT LEAST as much of a Man of Science as the next guy in a set of ass-less goat skin chaps and fogged-up glasses wearing an N-95 under a ram’s head mask, I immediately started wondering how in the world administering ozone can be healthy or therapeutic.  I also racked my brain to remember what role ozone plays in our troposphere. 

And then, because I am basically a child trapped in a man’s body, I quickly brainstormed several hilarious jokes involving the ozone hole.  (Which, if I remember correctly, was all the rage amongst the big brains on tv in the 80s and 90s, and had almost nothing to do with a young Gwyneth Paltrow.)

And then, because I am both a child trapped in a man’s body and an astute political commentator, I realized that Gwyneth Paltrow is attending to her health in the same way that Joe Biden and the Democrats are ruling our country:

Rectally.   

I can’t think of a better way to “end” this column. (HA!)

Other than…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Paltrow’s Proctologist 2024!

Before I conclude my thoughts on this contentious topic, I’ve got to compliment the Cautious Optimism community here.

I’ve seen some pretty heated discussions on this topic, and I thought that my first piece would likely bring out some rhetorical rough elbows.  That would be a good and healthy part of the process overall, but I would always prefer that we treat each other with the camaraderie and good humor that this site is known for.

And boy, did you all come through!

More people agreed with me than I had expected to – we’ll all support the eventual nominee, but there’s a lot of conflicting thoughts out there – and even the solid Trumpsters and the uncommitted showed the class and wit rarely seen on political sites. 

My favorite response might have been from the inestimable Don Deere: “Excellent piece as always.  Having said that… #TRUMP2024!”  

That’s the spirit!

As we left off yesterday, I was saying that we conservatives need to be careful about attacks on each other, and save our heaviest fire for the Bidenistas who are damaging our country…

DeSantis has been very slow to attack Trump, which is very smart/Machiavellian: it’s hard to win a slugfest with Trump, and the process gets mud on you too, and RDS will need as many Trump fans as possible to stick with him if he can win the nomination. 

So it’s in his best interest to try to stay above the fray for as long as he can, and then to respond to Trump’s jabs judiciously, with a “more in sorrow than in anger” posture, as the saying goes.   

Trump’s attacks on DeSantis, on the other hand, would also benefit from being less personal and more substantive.  As it is, they’ve too often been personal, petty, and – worse yet – obviously false, and/or leftist talking points.

When Trump found old pics of DeSantis with a couple of young women from a class he taught, Trump turned that into perving on underage girls, then to grooming and infidelity, and possibly even pedophilia!

When he attacked RDS’s record in FL, he just sounded silly.  He claimed that Charlie Crist was a better governor than RDS, thus causing 500,000 spit-takes from Floridians.  (Crist is a turncoat ex-Republican who became and Independent and lost, then became a Dem and lost again.  The guy’s picture is next to RINO in the dictionary.)

He even bashed RDS for opening FL too soon during Covid.  (This repeats the discredited Dem label of “Death-Santis.”)  But Trump is on record several times since then, praising DeSantis’ handling of covid.  Besides which, this is 2023, and NOBODY thinks DeSantis opened FL too soon anymore!

He also claimed that Florida has always done well because of the sun and water and beautiful beaches, rather than because of DeSantis. 

But you don’t have to be a FL resident to know that it’s been sunny here since the end of the last Ice Age, whereas GOP governors didn’t start winning elections by 19 points until the end of last fall.

And it’s really aggravating when Trump uses leftist leftist talking points!  The old “he wants to cut medicare and social security” canard has been a cliched Dem scare line for my entire life, and I winced when Trump used it. 

The fact is that both programs are going broke if they aren’t fixed, and the necessary job of eventually taking that on (I give the Bushie and RINO Paul Ryan credit for even trying) is only made more difficult if our guys are giving aid and comfort to the lying leftists who have mendaciously clubbed us with that attack for decades!

If I could write for Trump, I’d create a still Trumpy but higher-road approach:

“Ron’s done a very good job in Florida.  If you’ll remember, I helped put him over the top in his first, tight race in 2018.  I endorsed him and campaigned with him, and we got him to the finish line together.

Then he governed the way I’d taught the Republican party to govern.  He chose excellent policies – only the best, such great policies! – and then fought for them.  He didn’t surrender when the Democrats attacked him, as so many Republicans so often did before I became President. 

Instead, he became kind of a mini-Trump, and that’s why he won so big for the people of Florida. 

Ron can’t know what I know, and that’s not a knock against him.  But he’s been a great governor while I’ve been a great president, and those are not the same thing.  I’ve been unfairly and viciously attacked more than any president in history – never happened before! – but it’s toughened me up. 

It’s given me the skin of an elephant.  The beautiful, tough skin of the finest elephant – the great animal mascot of our incredible party!  And it’s also taught me things that only a president can know.

Now many people say that Ron shouldn’t run this time around.  I’m not saying that, but I’ve heard it from many people.  Fine people.  “He shouldn’t run yet,” they say to me. “It’s not his time,” they say.

But I disagree.  In fact, I’d be honored if Ron ran with me, as my Vice President.  Together, we’d be a formidable team – so formidable! – and after four years of fighting together to finish the job I started, and truly Make America Great Again – I would happily pass the baton to Ron.” 

3. There’s an old truism that a politician’s two jobs are to make it harder to vote for his opponent, and easier to vote for him. 

Trump’s strong suit has always been making it hard to vote for the opposition. The nicknames, the combative style, the “they don’t hate me, they hate you, and they’re only attacking me b/c I’m in the way” helped him win his long-shot bid in 2016.

But his greatest weakness is the flip side.  While he sometimes uses his charm and authentic magnetism to attract people to him – I thought his visit to East Palestine, OH was a great example of Trump at his best! – he too often makes it very hard for anyone not in his camp to vote for him.  Huge swaths of the electorate hate him, and his smearing of DeSantis makes it harder for even ME to vote for him.

And I’ll crawl across broken glass to vote for him if he’s our nominee!

RDS on the other hand, has been aggressive with the press, but not usually in ways that will needlessly drive away voters.  The only political misstep I think he may have made is the new bill to drop the abortion ban from 15 weeks down to 6. 

The left has an awful, extremist position that most semi-informed voters don’t know about: abortion right up until the moment the baby crowns.  We should highlight that obscenity – demolish their dishonest “women’s rights to healthcare” euphemistic obfuscation – and make it harder for people to vote for that.

At the same time, achieving our ultimate goal is easier if we take a more moderate step first (a 15-week ban with exceptions for rape and incest), and take the wins everywhere we can get them.  Especially if the alternative is to be more morally correct (IMO) by going for a near-total ban that means that we lose what might have been a winnable result, i.e. reducing the number of abortions in the short run, with the possibility of more progress in the long run.     

In addition to his policy successes, DeSantis’ biography gives Dems very little to hit him with: 

He’s smart – having degrees from both Yale and Harvard.  (Sure, those don’t carry the impressive imprimature for conservatives as they do for independents and libs – academia has so besmirched itself over the last 25 years that we now know better – but the libs will have difficulty painting him as a dummy, try though they will.)

He joined the Navy and served overseas.  This is a bigger plus for us and some independents than for libs.  And we shouldn’t over-play it: he wasn’t in a combat role, and he didn’t fast-rope down onto a rooftop in Kandahar from a helicopter, with machine guns in both hands and a combat knife clenched in his teeth. 

But he had a law degree from Harvard and joined the Navy, instead of either joining daddy’s firm or becoming a career pol and sucking at the government teat for the rest of his life, like everyone else in DC. (Cough <Joe Biden> cough.)

His personal life appears to have been impeccable: married to one wife for 14 years and counting, 3 cute kids.  His wife is a cancer survivor (!), and the commercial she taped for him last year almost brought me to tears, and I normally hate that kind of soft-focus, touchy-feely ad.  The soccer moms and independents should eat that up.     

Of course, the left will still try to smear his personal life anyway.  They’ll dredge up a middle school classmate who says she once heard him say the “n” word, or they’ll try to pull a Kavanaugh, and get some unstable loon to say he assaulted her, but she can’t remember when or where, and there’s no evidence that he ever even met her. 

But to any uncommitted voters, those attacks will look super-thin and desperate, especially compared to Biden’s entire corrupt family kicking up 10% to the Big Guy from Burisma and the ChiComs, while
“smartest guy I ever met” Hunter was videotaping himself hip-deep in crack and hookers.  (“[Fredo] was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time!  Players couldn’t get a drink at the tables!”)

(Semi-obscure yet appropriate Godfather reference? Check.)

One other bonus for RDS: as far as I can tell, he’s not made any mortifyingly bad hires or appointments.   I’m sure that it will come out that some assistant to an Ag commissioner somewhere got a DUI, but his high-profile appointments have all been solid and even boringly competent.

I don’t blame Trump too much for his bad appointments as prez, because every POTUS has to rush to staff so many positions that mistakes are inevitable.  And that process was bound to be even tougher for an outsider like Trump, who had no deep connections and layers of networking to rely on when hiring.

But it’s still a fact that most of the administration figures he ended up firing and/or lambasting — the Mooch, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Pompeo, Sessions, Bolton, Barr, even Mike Pence – were all people he either picked, kept or elevated. (I don’t even dislike all of those guys.  But Trump does, and he picked them all!)

I think it would have been politically tough for him to fire Fauci by mid-summer or so, when it was clear that he was a dishonest, self-serving hack.  But he kept him in place, and allowed him free reign all through the election season.

Having said all that, I don’t want to overdo it on praising DeSantis.  (“Too late,” many of you may be thinking.)  He’s a fallen man like the rest of us, and a politician, and I’m sure that time in the national spotlight wielded by our corrupt media and political elites will highlight all the flaws that are there. 

And as good conservatives, we shouldn’t be putting too much faith in any politician anyway. (“Put not your trust in princes,” the Psalmist says.)  We’re in the “let us run our own lives as much as possible” business, not the “putting pols on pedestals” business.

But DeSantis has made the fewest unforced errors of any politician I’ve seen.  And I salivate at the thought of him in a debate with Joey Gaffes, or Ken Doll Newsom, or any of the other dullards who might rise to the top of a Democrat nomination process.

By contrast, I always went into Trump debates knowing that he would probably land some haymakers – and Oh, how I loved those! – but also fearing what might come out of his mouth.  I can’t imagine being that worried before a DeSantis debate.

I’ll end this with my biggest election fear: the Dems use serial illegitimate and unfair indictments to maneuver us into defending Trump (as we should) and giving him the nomination, after which they capitalize on Trump hatred and fatigue in much of the nation to get the same results they got in ‘20 and ‘22.

I’m as concerned about voter fraud and a rigged election as all of you are, and I don’t have any confidence that we are doing anything now – or maybe even that there is anything we CAN do, considering corrupt Dem control over the states in question – that will prevent a repeat of ’20 in ’24.

The only way I see to overcome that is to win by so much that they aren’t able to steal it.  And I’m really sad to say this, but I don’t think Trump can do that.  I think he might be able to thread the needle and narrowly carry enough close states to just barely win, as he did in 2016.

But my gut tells me that that is exactly what happened in 2020.  And we all know how that turned out.

As a newcomer – with discipline that Trump doesn’t have, and with opposition that is not as hardened and immovable against him as Trump’s opposition (unjustly, IMO) is – DeSantis gives us the best chance to win by an “outside the margin of fraud” vote total.

Ugh – that was too gloomy of a note to end on. So I’ll close with a throwback to one of my favorite politicians in history: Cato the Elder (234-149 BC).

Roman soldier, senator and historian, Cato lived during a century-plus period when Rome’s great rival was the city of Carthage.  Cato was so focused on the threat posed by Carthage that he ended every speech – no matter what the topic – by saying, “Carthargo delenda est!”  (Carthage must be destroyed!)

That’s how I feel about the necessity of beating the Dems in 2024.  For the next year we’ll have our primaries and tout our favorites (and live our lives and try to give politics little room), but in the end our focus has to be on defending this great country from the leftist hordes who are doing so much damage.

Say it with me, people: “Biden delenda est!”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Other Terrible Choice, 2024!

As I promised on Friday, I’m going to risk the good will – and, let’s face it, the near-worshipful admiration – of many in CO nation by declaring my ‘druthers in the upcoming Trump v. DeSantis primary battle.

I hesitate to do this, partly because I think I’m going to be disagreeing with the esteemed CO, and as we all know, if you’re on the opposite side of an issue from CO, you’re almost guaranteed to be wrong.  (Except when he’s in a dispute with the COW, in which case we all just huddle in a corner and wish that dad and mom would stop fighting.)

CO wrote a rightly outraged piece after Trump was indicted, saying that after that illegitimate exercise, he is backing Trump.  Many on our side have obviously done the same, since Trump’s poll support and fundraising have jumped post-indictment.

So I know that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination right now.  But I’m going to make the case for DeSantis anyway. 

I actually made part of this argument in a column that is now posted at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and dated 11/14/22.  So if you are interested, please go there, scroll down the right side list of my columns, and read that piece first.  I still believe that what I said then is correct, but in this column I’m updating and expanding my thoughts based in part on the added data that I’ve seen over the last 5 months.

To summarize that piece, I give Trump huge credit for far exceeding my expectations when I voted for him in 2016, I voted for him in enthusiastically in 2020, and will do so again if he’s the nominee in 2024.  He has more conservative presidential governance accomplishments than anyone since Reagan, and the heart of my argument is really more pro-RDS rather than anti-Trump.

That said, I have three main theses today.  (Martin Luther had 96; Martin Simpson has only three.   Does that mean that I’m better than Luther?  Probably.  Also, suck it, all you who say I’m too long-winded!)

(Okay, that last thought clearly proves that I’m not better than Luther.  Because no one can imagine Luther saying, “Suck it, Zwingli and the current Pope!”)

(Although don’t you think I should get some extra points for that deep pull from the semi-obscure Protestant reformers category?  How many of you have a relevant Ulrich Zwingli reference chambered and ready at a moment’s notice? Show of hands?)

Where was I? 

Oh yeah. 

3 Theses:

1. We have to win!

2 Leftist Dems are the real opposition. 

3. Politics 101: make it as easy as possible to vote for you and as hard as possible to vote for the other guy. 

1. Ultimately I think that RDS has the better chance to win in ’24, for several reasons:

He’s got the crucial upside that Trump has – the willingness/appetite to fight back – but with much greater target discipline.   (I can’t imagine RDS spending time on Rosie O’Donnell’s weight, or the equine qualities of a porn star’s face, for example.)   

His executive performance as governor is easily better than anyone else’s since Reagan.  It’s true that presidential experience is at a higher level, but governing a huge state is the closest a non-prez can come, and RDS has nailed it.

He’s taken principled, conservative stands on one issue after another, and many of them have been quite risky: he re-opened the state and lifted mask and vax mandates very early during covid; he’s taken on education behemoths at the K-12 and university levels that no governor ever has; he punched back on tourism/financial giant Disney, and took away their sweetheart tax breaks.

He’s been very strong on gun rights, and on abortion, the latter of which opens him to a lot more political risks than if he had stuck with a 15-week ban (already the strongest in all but the reddest of states).  He’s also been excellent on taxes and fiscal responsibility, as well as strengthening voting integrity, which might be the most important single issue, since all other political outcomes depend on clean elections.

And the results have proven him right. 

Florida has been the most purple of battleground states for two decades.  Our nation was spared an Al Gore presidency in 2000 by less than 800 votes here!  In the last 7 presidential elections, FL went GOP in 4 and Dem in 3, and the winning percentages in the last 4 have been 50.9% & 50.01% by Obama, and 49.02% & 51.22% by Trump.

It was still that tight when DeSantis won in 2018, squeaking by a terrible, little-known Dem candidate by less than half of one percent, and only 30,000 votes.  Four years later, DeSantis won in an unprecedented landslide, beating a high-name-recognition FL ex-governor by almost 20%, with a winning margin of over 1.5 million votes!

DeSantis did in a divided state what the GOP has not been able to do in a divided nation since 1980: win going away.  He even won in deep-blue, urban Palm Beach and Dade counties, which hadn’t happened since the Conquistadors overcame a huge panhandle majority for the Seminoles to take the 17^th century!   

Next, I hate this fact, but I have to say it: most presidential elections are determined by the votes of independents in the middle.  The mushy, moderate, “thou art lukewarm, so I spit thee out of my mouth!” middle.  

Committed Dems will vote for a barely animated corpse if he’s got a “D” by his name.  They’ve voted for a fake Indian (#wemustneverstopmockingher) and a real socialist (dozens of them, in fact), and they’ll continually re-elect the locust-swarm of career pols who have been destroying their cities for decades.   

They voted for John Fetterman even though he opened a debate by saying goodnight, and then stood there swaying and drooling on his shoes for 90 minutes!

Similarly, committed Republicans will hold their noses and vote for RINOs and weirdos against Dems, and I’m no different than the rest.  (If I woke up on election morning and found out that Satan was running at the top of the GOP ticket, I’d have to hesitate. But if Satan was even half-decent on immigration and a few other issues, I’d be Team Satan ’24!)

I voted for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, for crying out loud!  (And yes, I’ve compulsively showered ever since.  And no, I can never completely wash the shame away.)

But we shouldn’t ultimately pick a candidate who can win the GOP base, but is a toss-up at best in a general election.  And this is where I think DeSantis has a definite edge over Trump. 

I’m going to cite some general trends in polls, but I must state up front the caveats that polls can be biased and wrong and all the rest.  Everyone cites them when they’re good and bashes them when they’re bad.  But in the aggregate and over time, they’re the only info we’ve got, absent an election.

Obviously Trump’s poll numbers in the GOP primary are strong, and getting stronger since the indictment; he’s the smart money bet to win the nomination right now.  But RDS consistently polls better with independents than Trump does, averaging around 15 points higher with that group.    

Trump has a much higher floor so far – many GOP voters will stick with him no matter what – but he’s got a carved-in-stone ceiling, too.  Trump-hatred is now irreversibly baked into the cake for many non-GOP voters.  Some large proportion of the country – 40%?  45%? – hate his guts, and they will never, ever vote for him.

DeSantis partisans shouldn’t be too sanguine about that, because the Dems and the dishonest MSM – but I repeat myself – are going to smear RDS and bring his numbers with independents down, just like they do with every GOP candidate.  

But Trump’s negatives are set in stone, while DeSantis has the chance to conduct a strong campaign and good debates – if he’s as disciplined in ’24 as he has been for the last 5 years – to limit or even counter much of the damage. 

2. The leftist Dems are our real opposition, and I think that fact gives RDS an advantage, too.

DeSantis has been very effective and disciplined on the attack, and always against the Dems and on strategic policy grounds.  And he has the sense of humor of a happy warrior (which Trump, at his best, also has).  Flying the illegals to Martha’s Vineyard was a wry shot at leftist hypocrisy.  He announced one conservative policy in tiny little Brandon, Florida, just for the winking joke.   

And he deftly skewers reporters and counters leftist smears in press conferences with just the right touch of pugnacity without red-faced anger.  The cliché of “an iron fist within a velvet glove,” comes to mind. 

For Trump, unleashing strong, often entertaining attacks on opponents has always been a strength.  He’s all iron fist and no glove, and the iron fist has little spikes welded to each knuckle. And it’s holding a mace, with bigger spikes on it.

But he tends to wield it in all directions, and against all foes, including non-politicians (fat Rosie, horseface Stormy, Megyn Kelly, etc.), Republicans (Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb), and the Dems.

I’ve never been that bothered by his insults, because they were often just returning fire, and they were mostly against people who deserved it.  And I understand the rough elbows during a primary, where you need to beat your GOP rivals to get to the general.

But some of Trump’s insults are gratuitously mean enough that they reflect worse on him than his targets.  To call Ted Cruz’s wife ugly and say that his dad killed JFK is just creepy.  To mock McCain for having been a captured POW is not a good look, especially for someone who hasn’t served.

In general, I think most hard-edged insults to decent conservatives – even if they are too moderate for my taste, as most of them are – don’t help. When it came to governing, he needed people like Rubio and Cruz, and if they had been as petty when he was president as Trump had been during the primaries, they could have crippled his agenda.

McCain WAS that petty, and he killed the repeal of Obamacare as a consequence.  That’s primarily on McCain, but it’s no credit to Trump, either.  

One other issue on which Trump has been attacking in all directions involves the way he’s driven to relitigate and get vengeance for 2020.   I completely understand this, and empathize with his justified anger, as I’ve said elsewhere.  If I had been in his shoes, and had been as thoroughly screwed as he was in that election, I would probably spend a lot of time seeking revenge, too.  (Have I mentioned that I’m an Appalachian-American, and prone to feudin’?)

But it’s not useful, and a disciplined candidate would eschew it.  It takes the focus off of your opponent’s weaknesses, and frustrates and exhausts everyone who doesn’t already love you.

And when one of your negatives with many independents is your ego, it makes the next election an individual psychodrama that is all about you, instead of a fight for the future of the nation that is all about delivering us from the disastrous reign of Biden!

In fact, his anger over 2020 helped us lose the 2 senate seats in GA in 2021 that allowed Biden to spend 6 trillion, open the border completely, etc.  Trump’s personal grudge against Brian Kemp in GA led him to push a hugely unpopular Perdue gubernatorial campaign in ‘22.  Only Kemp’s primary win and strong performance spared us from Governor Stacey Abrams!  

His attacks against other GOP candidates before and since the midterm election were especially ill-considered.   He held a rally a week before the expected “red wave” election, and he criticized DeSantis and Youngkin (2 GOP bright spots in the last several years) as much as he did the Democrats.   

Even if you argue that GOP-on-GOP attacks are justified during a primary, nobody can say that they’re helpful on the eve of an election, when the real fire should be focused on the opposing party and their terrible candidates and policies!

Darn it!  After making an early crack about how I’m not too long-winded, I realize that this column is too long, and will need to be broken into two parts, for those of you who care to continue. (Oh, the irony!)

So I’m going to stop now, and ask you to look on the bright side, cautious optimists: I’ll post the second half tomorrow, making this a rare, three-column week!   

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Satan (D-Hell), 2024!

I’ve tried to make this my best column ever, because on Monday I’m going to be taking a big risk of alienating some in CO nation.  That’s right, I’m going to give my thoughts on the contentious “Trump vs. DeSantis” debate. 

I may even partially disagree with the great and powerful CO.  So prepare for chaos: tectonic plates shifting, cats and dogs living together, who knows what else?  But in the meantime…

Here’s some news that will make you laugh, and then cry.   Or vice versa.

Chicago has been selected to host the 2024 Democrat National Convention!  Mayor J.B. “Jabba the” Pritzker announced the news with a giddy tweet: “I look forward to welcoming everyone to the Midwest and showing off our diverse communities, impeccable hospitality, and world-renowned venues.”

By “diversity” he is referring to the Benetton rainbow of ethnic diversity that peoples the violent rioter community.   (We’re so diverse that even our Maga-hat-wearing Jussie Smollett muggers are from Nigeria!)

By “impeccable hospitality” he’s referencing the new policy amongst Chicago carjackers: if you survive the first three gunshots, the next bullet is free!  (Chicago puts the “hospital” in “hospitality!”)

My first thought on reading this was that I’m going to get a huge tub of popcorn next August, and sit back with my Wonder Dog at my feet, and watch Democrat delegates running serpentine into and out of the United Center as the echoing gunshots evoke the ambiance of Mogadishu in the springtime. 

(Best case scenario: enough of them end up in either intensive care or the Democrat-voting-stronghold cemeteries of Chicago to deny the convention a quorum to actually choose a nominee!) 

But then I remembered: Democrats are world-record holders in dishonest hypocrisy.  (Or was that hypocritical dishonesty?) (You say “potato,” I say “Que Mala.”)

So I’m sure that shortly before the convention starts, they’ll sweep the homeless off the streets, temporarily jail all of the gangbangers (“C’mon guys, it’s just for two weeks, and then you can go right back to preying on our helpless citizens!”), and put more cops with guns and armored vehicles on the street than Patton had when he was liberating Bastogne from another bunch of evil socialists.

I don’t know who really made this decision, but I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t Joe Biden (RIP).  In fact, I’m guessing that Pritzker paid off the appropriate grifters (by the way, “Pritzker and the Grifters” would not be the worst band name ever), and then made the following phone call:

Pritzker: “Hello Mr. President, this is J.B. Pritzker.”

Biden: “Huh?”

Pritzker: “I’m calling to tell you that the convention is going to be in Chicago next year.”

Biden: “What?”

Pritzker: “Isn’t that great?”

Biden: “I like ice cream!”

Pritzker: “Yeah… I’ve heard that.”

Biden: “Who is this?”

Pritzker: “Okay then.  Gotta run.” [click]

Biden: “Mint chocolate chip is my favorite.  Or just chocolate chip.” [long pause] “Hello?”

Biden looks at the phone, then hangs up.

“Dr.” Jill: “Who was that?”

Biden: “It was Pretzel.”

“Dr.” Jill (rolling her eyes): “What did pretzel want?”

Biden: “He said the retention’s gonna be in the Congo new year.  Or maybe… we’re gonna have detention in Cabo.”

“Dr.” Jill: “That’s nice, dear.  Do you want some ice cream?”

Biden: “Oooh yeah!  Lint droplet slip.  I mean, squint gauntlet trip”.

“Dr. Jill: “Mint chocolate chip?”

Biden (pointing one finger in the air, triumphantly): “That’s it! 

And, scene.

Whoever was writing the press release cleaned things up.  But the final draft of the announcement still had this sentence in it, which I swear I am not making up: “Chicago was chosen after getting top grades in an evaluation by the DNC’s Technical Advisory Group, a panel of experts considering factors such as hotel capacity, transportation, security, financing and other logistics.”

Wow!  Can you imagine the palpable fog of incompetence, avarice and delusion filling the room when the dunce-cap-bedecked DNC “Technical Advisory Group” gathered in one place?  In their list of criteria that made Chicago such a winner, they had the gall to list “security!”  

I would deploy my Sam Kinison filter™, but I’m afraid that plugging “security” into a discussion about Chicago would break it.  And something tells me we’re going to be needing it over the next 19 months.   

Pritzker accidentally told the truth in the last line of his announcement tweet: “There is no better place to tell the story of @JoeBiden & @KamalaHarris.” 

No disrespect to San Francisco, Baltimore, St. Louis, Sodom, Gomorrah, or the other most crime-ridden, dysfunctional dumpster-fire cities.

But, yep.

Moving on…

On Monday night I drafted some thoughts on the Bud Light/ Dylan Mulvaney fiasco which was then just breaking. (Because I’m always on the job, working for the fine people of CO Nation. You’re welcome.) But now that story is feeling like old news. 

However, a few aspects of it are representative of other stories and long-term trends.  Take, for example, Alissa Heinerscheid – and yes, her last name looks like a devastating insult in German – the PR boss who came up with the idea to use Boy Barbie to pitch Bud.  (And he looks more like a catcher than a pitcher, doesn’t he?) 

Heinerscheid is typical of our insulated, cultural elite: liberal arts degree from Harvard, MBA from Wharton, high-powered, bi-coastal job.

And yet she thought that the best way to sell a least-common-denominator product consumed mostly by blue-collar males would be to hire a grown (if cringingly effeminate) “man” pretending to be a pre-teen girl. 

Well, I guess that’s one approach, though it’s not one I’d bet my career on.  But then again, I’m no fancy, high-priced marketing expert.  I’m just an average guy, i.e. one who has to struggle manfully not to poke my eyes out with a sharp object whenever I see Dylan Mulvaney’s woman-face act on tv.

Heinersheid’s now-infamous quote that the challenge for her is that the Bud Light brand “has been in decline for a really long time” reminds me of the famous Hemingway quote from The Sun Also Rises, in which one of his characters, when asked how he’d gone bankrupt, answered, “Two ways.  Gradually and then suddenly.” 

I think Ms. Heinersheid is going to find that Bud Light may have been declining gradually.  But she’s about to see “suddenly” kick in.  

[And in the four days since I wrote the previous two paragraphs, “suddenly” has arrived for Ms. Heinersheid.]

It’s hard to imagine how any influential corporate big shots can make such disastrously risky decisions.  Until you consider the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and CEI (Corporate Equality Index) scores assembled by influential far-left groups like the Human Rights Campaign.

These scores are supposed to indicate “ethical investing,” but in this case, “ethical” means “leftist.”  (You know, the way war means peace, and freedom means slavery, and ignorance means strength.) 

Since some of the largest asset funds use those scores to steer investments, many intelligence-insulting ad campaigns have been foisted onto the public by corporations more concerned with getting leftist approval than providing a good or service that customers actually want.    

Some a-political and conservative groups are pushing back on those biased scores, and I hope that they will succeed in getting rid of them.  But until that happens, I think we need to fight fire with fire. 

To do my part, I hereby introduce the Simpson Common Sense Index (SCSI), a much more logical way to judge the merits of corporate leadership.  I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but below I offer some of the SCSI criteria for your consideration.

If the CEO and/or top executive team members have done the following listed behaviors, they receive the corresponding score adjustments:

If they’ve voted for any Democrat since Daniel Patrick Moynihan died, they start at an absolutely fair zero points. 

From that position, the following points will be subtracted from their zero:

If they’ve ever said, “My truth” non-sarcastically — minus 10

If they’ve sent their own kids to private schools while voting to force middle-class and poor folks’ kids into public schools – minus 20

If they own a gun or employ anyone who carries one, but have voted to keep law abiding citizens from owning guns – minus 20

If they’ve lectured others about CO2 levels but have ever flown private – minus 20

If they’ve ever cited The Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the UN’s Human Rights Council, or Dr. Fauci approvingly – minus 10 points each

If they’ve ever said that newborns “are assigned gender at birth” with a straight face – minus 20

If they’ve ever used the adjective “Reverend” when describing oily charlatan Al Sharpton – minus 10

If they’ve ever used the adjective “Reverend” when describing rhyming charlatan Jesse Jackson – minus 10

If they’ve ever booed anyone for saying “All Lives Matter” – minus 10

If they’ve ever put one of those idiotic “Co-Exist” bumper stickers on their car — minus 20

If they’ve ever ridden in a car with one of those idiotic stickers without berating the owner – minus 10

If they’ve ever said “LGBTQ” in reference to the gender-non-conforming – minus 1

If they’ve ever added the “+” to “LGBTQ” – minus an additional 4

If they’ve ever added “2-spirit” to “LGBTQ+” – minus an additional 10

If they’ve ever said “LGBTQ” to indicate “Let’s Get Biden To Quit” – plus 20

If they’ve ever told the following joke – “Q: What do you call it when a Pride parade float catches fire?  A: LGBBQ” – plus 20 (but with an accompanying look of mild disapproval)

If they’ve ever told that joke in a faculty lounge:  plus 100, and a pricey bottle of bourbon for their retirement party.  

If they’ve ever used pronouns in any way other than God and the Anglo Saxons intended – minus 30  

Next week, if I survive the outrage from my Trump vs. DeSantis column, I’ll offer some behaviors that will improve the SCSI scores for companies who want to actually serve in the marketplace.  Until then, have a great weekend!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Jabba the Pritzker, 2024!

I hope you all had as good a weekend as I did. 

The Good Friday service at our church was somber, and properly so.  The cross draped in black; mostly old, lovely, minor-chord hymns with upbeat titles like “Stricken, Smitten and Afflicted;” the congregation leaving the darkened sanctuary in silence at the end. 

But just like a long Illinois winter – early sunsets, dead cornstalks in bare fields, dirty slush and road salt and slate-gray skies – imbues the first day of spring with that much more manic energy, the grim darkness of an appropriately contemplative and sober Tenebrae service evokes that much more exhilaration on Easter.

At the end of the Sunday service the choir sang Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, accompanied by brass and bells, and I left feeling ready to go out and love my neighbors and my enemies, and to fight the good fight. 

And, of course, to mock those who are mock-worthy.  (Because I’m just as God made me!)

Speaking of which, after a post-church nap I took a quick stroll through some good websites.  Of course, top of that list is Cautious Optimism (duh), and I saw CO’s posting of the pic from the 1950s of the NYC skyline with multiple buildings lit up with crosses at Eastertime.

And, because I  remember 1970’s tv shows, I found myself singing, “Boy, the way Glen Miller played/ Songs that made the Hit Parade/ Guys like us we had it made/ Those were the days.”

For those of you who remember that nostalgic song, there are several verses in it that weren’t in the shortened intro to “All in the Family,” and my favorites are, “People seemed to be content/ Fifty dollars paid the rent/Freaks were in the circus tent/ Those were the days.”

“$50 paid the rent,” hasn’t held up too well.  But “freaks were in the circus tent” is dead-on perfect!

Because now the freaks are in congress, and pitching Bud Light, and on blue-state juries!  And don’t we all wish a circus would come through town and take them with it?

Case in point: lefty fossil and amateur theologian Bette Midler had an uplifting Easter message for the nation.  If by “uplifting” you mean “exploiting dead children in a cynical attempt to disarm law-abiding citizens who are no threat to anyone except school shooters and other criminals.”

Midler tweeted, “On this most Holy Day in the Christian calendar, remember the slaughter of your own innocents in school shootings across America, and let this #Easter mark a #resurrection, for them and for your commitment to change.  It’s your turn.  #MomsDemandAction”

Ugh.  After reading that, and throwing up in my mouth a little, two appropriate Bible verses came to mind:  “Jesus wept.”

And – hat tip to Michaela for reminding me of the Lazarus verse that fits here with just a slight alteration:  “She stinketh.”

And if you are a more secular sort who doesn’t need a Bible verse to point out that hypocritical Bette is protected by armed bodyguards while preaching that peons like us shouldn’t be allowed guns to defend ourselves, God bless you, too!     

My favorite response to Midler’s obnoxious tweet was from a guy who posted a picture of an AK-47 with the tag, “I find it ironic that democrats hate the only thing socialism ever produced that works…”

Buy that man some non-Anheuser-Busch beer, and some extra ammo!

The aftermath of the Nashville shooting has provided the feckless Dems two more chances to prove what colossal jackasses they are, and they really stuck the landing on both!

First, in a patented leftist cranial-rectal inversion move, they cast their political co-religionist aggressors as the victims of those they’ve been attacking in the recent transgender wars.

Within just the last 10 days, for example, a transgender murderer killed 6 Christians in Nashville, another mob of transgenders and transgender-adjacents assaulted and terrorized swimmer Riley Gaines after a speech at San Francisco State, and ANOTHER transgender was arrested in Colorado for plotting to use guns and bombs to attack three schools along with non-specific churches.

(That’s not to mention the April 6^th Symposium in France – meant to “raise awareness of the plight of Afghan and Iranian women” – that had to be canceled after “trans activists threatened to violently ambush the event because of the presence of a gender critical speaker.”) (Because in France, irony is morte.)

Meanwhile, in that same time frame, Christian and non-Christian “transphobes” have murdered zero transgenders, been arrested zero times for plotting zero attacks on transgender gatherings, and have assaulted and held hostage zero transgender swimmers following university speeches.

So naturally, the intrepid LGBTQ army (not the cool, “Let’s Get Biden To Quit” one) has zeroed in on the real problem: imaginary violent transphobes who are threatening pacifist transgenders with genocide.

Brilliant! 

Second, in the aftermath of the Nashville shooting, three Tennessee Democrat state representatives insisted that the legislature pass new gun control laws that wouldn’t have affected the Nashville shooting anyway.  Inconveniently for them, a large majority of TN voters and legislators disagree with them, and out-voted them. 

So the “Nashville Three” (the “Stooges” on the end is understood) led a bunch of chanting, misbehaving, adult children into the state Capitol.  One of the reps smuggled in a bullhorn, and the two of the three took turns using it to amplify their screamed slogans and chants. 

For a while they were able to stop the chamber from doing its business, and many of the protestors jostled some law makers.  Finally they were removed for breaking long-standing and well-known Capitol rules, and days later the GOP-led chamber voted to expel two of them.  (The other’s lawyer argued that she had never used the bullhorn, and kept herself separate from other protestors.)

A responsible, sane Democrat party would have chastised their misbehaving members, reminding them that they have been ranting for two years about an “insurrection” in DC, most of which was no more violent than what they just did in TN. 

In fact, the TN “coup attempt” was actually much closer to a coup attempt than the events of January 6^th, since actual legislators were present when the mob was stomping around and screaming.  And no cops were allowing this mob inside, and voluntarily opening doors for them and giving them tours. 

Again, a responsible, sane Democrat party would have felt mortified and sheepish, and would have punished their own morons.  I’m not sure how a responsible, sane party of sentient fungi would have reacted.

I only say that because we are as likely to find a responsible, sane party of sentient fungi as we are to find a responsible, sane party of Democrats in 2023.

Therefore, the party fell back on its most reliable strategy: Cry havoc, and let slip the charges of racism!  (The two expelled idiots were black, while the other, bullhorn-less idiot was white.  But just to be safe, the TN GOP should expel her sorry butt, too!)

Many top Dems – the same dullards who have been howling that January 6^th was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and the Jussie Smollett pseudo-lynching, all rolled into one! – now shamelessly reversed themselves.       

Remember when being inside a government building without permission was a grave threat to democracy?  Well now, it turns out, STOPPING people from being inside a government building without permission is a grave threat to democracy.

AOC – proving yet again that she is all juicy booty (her words, not mine) and no brains – claimed that the GOP insistence on following government rules and decorum was “stoking fascism.” She also promised more bad behavior in the future, because asking those Dems to follow the rules “is only further radicalizing and awakening an earthquake of young people.”

(As a writer who appreciates a good analogy, must I point out that an earthquake can neither sleep nor awake, and it cannot serve as a collective noun consisting of many people?)

She finished with a flourish: “If you thought youth organizing was strong, just wait for what’s coming.  Gen Z don’t play.”

First, great impression of a spoiled 12-year-old girl threatening to hold her breath if she doesn’t get her way.

Second, as a factual matter, Gen Z DOES play.  It plays “dress up as a girl when you’re a boy,” and it plays soccer. 

Neither of which we find as scary as you seem to think we do.

Since AOC’s antics apparently weren’t embarrassing enough – I swear, if she was a cartoon character, all of the thought bubbles above her head would be empty – the dynamic duo of Joey Gaffes and his vapid VP got involved. 

Que Mala jetted into town to meet with “the Tennessee Three,” and then went to a church, where she tried out an angry preacher voice and waved her arms in almost human-like gestures as she screamed things like, “You don’t silence people!  You don’t stifle people!”   

She didn’t say, “You don’t arm your mentally-ill self and go into a Christian school and murder 6 innocent people!”  I guess there wasn’t time for that, when a-holes with bullhorns were being kept from disrupting the democratic process.  

I never thought I’d say this, but I found myself wishing that she would pull out that unhinged Joker cackle of hers instead.

Not to be outdone, our Cadaver-in-Chief invited the TN3 to meet with him at the White House.  He hasn’t yet had time to meet with the loved ones of the 6 murdered people in Nashville.

And for that, I’m sure they’re grateful.   

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Sentient Fungi, 2024!