Martin Simpson

I’d like to introduce what I hope will be a recurring series of posts, in which I review my favorite things to happen in the previous month.

I give you The Best of January, 2017

1. Chuck Schumer crying. When Trump’s perfectly justifiable but badly handled executive order temporarily banning foreigners from terrorism-riddled countries rolled out, Chuckie actually cried about it. In public. I was raised in the Midwest a hundred years ago, where there was a code about grown men crying. A few tears were acceptable if your spouse died in childbirth, or your son died in battle, or you lost a limb in a farm accident. If my sister or I had ever seen my dad in tears and ran to tell mom, I can predict her response: “Oh lord! Which arm is it, and can we pull it out of the thresher so the doctors can re-attach it?!”

You know what she would NOT have asked in a million years? “Good God, how many foreigners have been momentarily inconvenienced at an airport?!”

2.Barack’s new rental. Shortly before the inauguration, media reported that the Obamas were going to be renting a big house in DC for a year or so while his youngest daughter finishes high school. News reports mentioned that a team of workers would be adding an architectural feature to the former president’s new rental. I assumed that it would be a bridge, which would obviously give the common people greater access to make their way right up to Obama’s front window, where they could press their filthy faces against the window like Dickensian orphans, hoping to catch a glimpse of the great man, muttering into his New York Times as he read about Trump dismantling his legacy.

Imagine my shock when I found out that it was – wait for it – a wall!

That’s right, the things that are despicable, and don’t work, and are Not Who We Are. Yet somehow, when it comes to his own family’s security, Obama is building not a bridge but a wall.

What’s next? Will we find out that the secret service team assigned to protect him for the rest of his life will be doing so not with sweet reason and strongly worded letters to the editor, but with filthy, horrible firearms? (And if so, can we say that he is going to be bitterly clinging to his guns, from behind his wall, the big racist xenophobe?)

3.Chelsea Handler insults Melania. When someone was inexplicably interviewing human train wreck Chelsea Handler, and asked whether she’d ever have Melania Trump on the show that she apparently has for some reason, Handler’s response was the ne plus ultra of unearned leftist condescension: “Melania? To talk about what? She can barely speak English!” Just for the record: Melania speaks five languages, while Chandler speaks almost one. Almost two, if you count “slurring” as a language.

4. How will the new CIA Director deal with global warming? When questioning the CIA head honcho nominee, brilliant Dem senators rose to the occasion by getting right to the question of the age: “What are you as our nation’s spymaster going to do about global warming?” I’m not making this up. The CIA Director. Asked about the weather.

Because you know how often you turn on the news and hear about the troposphere screaming “Allahu Akbar” before blowing itself to bits on a crowded street, or an occluded front blasting away inside an Orlando gay nightclub, or an extra degree of ocean temperature over a century blowing up the Boston marathon.

5. Inauguration day. And not primarily because of Trump. It was an amazingly great inauguration solely because the hand on the Bible was NOT Hillary Clinton’s. If you pushed me, I’d have to say that I’d rank the best inaugurations in our history as follows: 1. George Washington’s.

2. Abraham Lincoln’s.

3. Anybody’s who was not Hillary Clinton’s. (And yes, that includes William Henry Harrison’s, whose speech might still be going on right now had not a merciful God struck him dead 30 days into his inaugural oration.)

6. The Atlantic article about ultrasounds. Moira Weigel wrote an article in The Atlantic about how creepy right wingers have used ultrasounds as cruel political tools. The thrust of the article is that by showing more clearly and accurately the fetus in the womb, ultrasounds give the impression that the entity in the pregnant woman’s womb is a baby.

In other breaking news that is sure to shock the savants at The Atlantic: Telescopes give the impression that the sky is full of stars. And taste buds give the impression that ice cream is delicious. Also, functioning human eyes give the impression that Melania Trump is attractive.

Like many leftist attempts at persuasive argument, the article unintentionally insults its target audience, casting women as gullible dopes, susceptible to falling for deceptions at the hands of their wily, so-called “doctors.” (See also: “Of course African Americans can’t possibly be expected to attain photo id so that they can vote. Who do you think they are, sentient adults who can tell time and respond to verbal requests and find a DMV all by themselves?!”)

The best part of the article is the corrections list at the end. There are 5 corrections to this short article, and they’re not counting the part about saying that a baby is not a baby as an error. In the original presentation, each error was listed separately, with “We regret the error,” following it. But someone at the Atlantic must have seen how much that repetition hurt, so they re-formatted them – now all of the errors are listed in a long paragraph, with one, “We regret the errors,” at the end.

If political philosophies had mottos, you couldn’t do better than that: “Leftism – We Regret the Errors.”

Except that they don’t appear to actually regret the errors, I mean. (You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, etc.)

7. “Lunatics, start your engines…” In preparation for the announcement of Trump’s Supreme Court nomination, some leftists had pre-printed signs made up, with a red band across the top with the word “Oppose,” and a blank white band below. The idea was that the perpetually aggrieved lefties could just write the nominees’ name in as soon as it was announced, and thereby not lose any precious pre-protest time to wasteful, unnecessary processes like informing themselves about the nominee, or thoughtfully considering his or her judicial record.

8. More women’s march signs. Speaking of brilliance expressed on a poster, here is my personal favorite sign spotted at our local women’s march the day after inauguration: “Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.”

Move over Aristotle, because that is one philosophically unassailable bit of magic marker on a piece of cardboard right there.

Cut to me, using the time machine that I definitely do have (take that, leftist fact checkers!) to transport myself back to 1861, where the local Democrat great-great-grandmothers of the anti-Trump marchers are also marching, with pieces of slate on sticks, onto which they’ve written their brilliant thoughts:

“Don’t like Slavery? Don’t own a slave.”
“My chattel, my choice.”
“Get your rosaries off my n-words.”

The only way to make those marchers’ messages more convincing? You guessed it: vaginal bonnets.

I’m sure that there were lots of well-meaning, good-hearted people who took part in the march in DC; I know at least one of my coworkers who did so, and she’s a good person. And I know that it’s probably tough to police the group yourself, and to keep idiots from joining your group and discrediting it.

But Man o’ Manischewitz, what a menagerie. The usual black-masked anarchists destroying property. Unattractive people of indeterminate gender carrying signs forbidding evil males from impregnating them or telling them what to do once they are impregnated. (I speak for all male-kind when I say, don’t lose any sleep over the possibility of the former. Because, nope.) Crude drawings of female organs, internal and external. Obscenity-scrawled signs alongside marching children who should be taught not to say those words. Shrieking celebrity harridans hollering about blowing up the White House. Formerly attractive actresses screaming poems about incest.

And by the way, no decent poet ever had to scream his or her poetry. No one in Christendom ever said, “Hey, you want to come down to the coffeeshop? Emily Dickinson is going to give a high-decibel poetry wail.” Or “Save the 15th, because Alfred Lord Tennyson is doing a standing-room only couplet yelping at the top of his lungs.” Or, “You know what I like about Shakespeare’s sonnets? They’re f**king deafening!”

(And yes, English majors, I’ve read self-proclaimed poet Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and it’s no exception: it might as well be screamed, and it’s terrible. I’ve read the best minds of your generation too, and there’s a good reason they were starving. No one in their right minds would buy that crap.)(To get that last joke, you may have to re-read the opening of “Howl.” But don’t hold me responsible for any ill effects.)

Who exactly do the marchers think they are reaching with their subtle, persuasive message? Think about it: a bunch of women marching in vagina-simulating hats? Because if anything connotes well thought-out moral seriousness, it’s genitalia-evoking head gear! Can you picture the impact of a million male march, all of us wearing phallic-symbol chapeaux? (The ear flaps mimic testicles! Get it?) THAT would really make the matriarchy stand up and reconsider our point about the appropriate size of government!

Or would it just make us look like an army of un-telegenic lunatics? And launch a thousand late-night comics’ routines about whose hats were flaccid, and what the guys in the 10-gallon-size phallic hats were insecure about. And what that Jenner person was doing there in a phallic hat and a vaginal scarf?

I know that I’m biased. (“What? You?!” I can hear you saying.) And I know that both sides of the political aisle contain some good and bad actors. But it seems to me that the Left has a strain of bullying deep in its DNA, of which these protests were just one more example.

Consider: Many conservatives enjoy listening to right wing radio (Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity et. al.) and watching a right-leaning news network like Fox, just as lefties enjoy lefty radio (NPR) and tv (PBS). But it never occurs to righties to try to force non-righties to subsidize their radio and tv preferences, while lefties have for decades been forcing all taxpayers to fund their choices. (I’m not even running down NPR or PBS in their totality, since there is some good stuff on both.)

Or consider their approaches to the constitution. Conservatives are fond of the second amendment, but we’d never dream of forcing our fellow citizens to pay for our guns. Leftist are fond of the non-existent amendment that magically grants the right to abortion, but are they satisfied with the right to have their abortions?

Spoiler alert: they are not. The rest of us must be forced to pay for them, even if we have a basic biological understanding of what is being ended in abortion. And we have to pay for their condoms, which they were apparently using to make balloon animals at the birthday parties of the children they don’t have. Since we also have to pay for their abortions, I mean.

Or consider Obama’s unilateral wiping out of the country’s laws against illegal immigration. Faced with a congress and populace opposed to open borders, did Obama get down to the hard work of patiently reasoning with and persuading the American people to his point of view?

HA! He did not. Instead, he proclaimed, “I have a phone, and I have a pen.” He used the pen to scratch through the offending sections of our nation’s laws, and he used the phone to call Tijuana and holler whatever is Spanish for “Olly olly oxen free!”

Think about how the left would feel if right after Trump got sworn in, he went on tv to announce that since the GOP believes that our corporate tax rates are too high, and inheritance taxes are immoral, he’s using his big gold pen (“It’s huuuuuge. The gold is the best quality ever. You’ve heard of 24 carat? This one is 25 carat, believe me.”) to write an executive order eliminating both taxes?

The MSM talking heads would explode, and rightly so. But how did they react when Obama pulled his pen-and-phone routine?

“El chirpo. El chirpo.” (Which, as the bilingual entomologists among you know, is the sound made by a Mexican cricket, in a village that is silent and empty because everyone got Obama’s phone call and vamoosed for ”El Norte.”) (Which is also Spanish.)
(For “the north.”)
(You’re welcome.)
(Also, I defy you to think of a better name for a band than “Buddy Holly and the Bilingual Entomologists.”)

And there’s my entry for “Best Comedic Use of Parentheses in a Political Facebook Page.”
Please vote early and often.

Addendum:

After the above post appeared, I received a great deal of positive responses, along with an aggressive fact-checkers who insisted that I was wrong about Planned Parenthood getting taxpayer dollars.  I wrote the paragraphs below as a follow-up:

I can’t tell you all how gratifying it is to read your kind comments – I really appreciate them all!  For years I’ve dashed off little rants like this for my own amusement, and for that of a couple of friends.  But when the Great and Powerful CO asked if he could share them on his site, I jumped at the chance, and it’s great to know that other people are enjoying them.

Because I’m nothing if not a humanitarian — Ask my fellow cabal member Mr. Trump: “Simpson’s a huuge humanitarian.  The best.   Mother Teresa looks like H.L. Mencken next to him.  He really puts the ‘human’ in ‘humanitarian,’ believe me!”  — I also feel compelled to share a few words with the tireless left-leaning citizen who took time out of his busy schedule to fact-check my last post.

Sir, let me confess a few errors, to save you some valuable fact-checking time:

1. There is no such thing as a “vaginal scarf.” Nor is there a fallopian cravat.  But I’m almost certain that there IS an ovarian sweater.   I think Lady Gaga wore it on stage during her last tour.
2. Emily Dickinson never yelled her poetry in a coffeehouse.
3. Mexican crickets do not in fact chirp in Spanish.

However, I made one point that apparently stuck in your craw, and that I feel compelled to defend.

Planned Parenthood does receive federal funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars) from sources such as Medicaid and Title X.  And contrary to its name, “Planned Parenthood” is not a think tank filled by people in lab coats, working with charts and graphs and protractors and space-age polymers, engaged in a tireless pursuit to unlock the mysteries of how one becomes a parent.  (“Dammit man,” they do not say to themselves in frustration, “we’ve put a man on the moon, we’ve refined the 46 defense, we’ve developed the spork.  But we just can’t crack this ‘where do babies come from’ conundrum!”)

No, contrary to your confident assumptions, that’s not what they do at P-squared.  They do abortions.  Lots of abortions.

And before you say it, I know: the federal dollars never, ever go to fund an abortion.  Those dollars  parade through the front door, chastely averting their eyes, and take a hard left down the hallway, where they swan dive into neatly stacked piles to pay for tongue depressors and utility bills and mounds of “I’m with Her” posters, while totally, pristinely separate dollars pay for the abortions.  (wink, wink.)  If I can interrupt your fact checking, could I humbly suggest that you google “money is fungible?”

And then, hold on to your non-genitalia-evoking hat, because you are going to be shocked to learn that… wait for it… taxpayer dollars pay for abortions.