Martin Simpson

Tomorrow I’m going to be heading up to TN, and then IL for a 12-day trip.  Every fall I try to get up north and see some leaves changing, so that’s part of this trip.  But I’m also going to get to spend some more time with my mom in TN.

After my dad passed in 2014, my sister and her excellent husband sold their house, and mom sold hers, and they bought a nice two-story place together.  Mom had her own set-up on one floor – kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms and a bath – and everything has worked out great.

My sister and her hubby are taking a trip to see his family in up-state New York, leaving in the middle of next week.   Mom is 84 now, and her Alzheimer’s has been progressing, so she’s not really up for long trips or staying alone.  So I’m going to pass through on my way up to hang out with the cousins in IL for a few days, and then come back to TN, where I’ll get to spend a week with my sweet mom, while Rhonda and Jimmy are on their New York trip.  

My better half is not able to make the trip with me, but Cassie the Wonder Dog is looking forward to going up and seeing her grandma, plus her two dog-cousins, Raven and Edgar.  (Yes, my sister is an Edgar Allen Poe fan, as one should be.)  And I’m looking forward to taking mom on a bunch of day trips to see some Fall colors, do some window shopping, and eat at some mom-and-pop places in the small towns around there.

Mom is still in good spirits, and the blanks in her memory are uneven.  A month ago she moved upstairs, because she’d left her stove on several times and was starting to “sundown” in the evenings. Now that she’s happily settled in upstairs, she doesn’t remember that she lived downstairs for the last 7 years.

But all my sister or I have to do is sing the first line of her Ottawa, IL high school fight song from 70 years ago (The first line is, “Crimson and white, we’re moving onward!”), and she’ll join in and sing both verses to the end. 

The last several times we tried to play cards with her, she said she’d forgotten how.  But we reminded her of some rules and started a game, and it gradually came back to her.  About five minutes in, one of us had missed our bid and started leading trump to screw up everyone else’s hand too, and mom said, “Oh, dad used to do that all the time, and it made me so mad!”

She looked about 20 years younger when she said that. 

She still remembers her family, and all of us, and dad, and a lot of Bible verses.  She remembers a lot of funny stories, and a lot of tough times that she and dad lived through.  She has a lot of friends at her church, and she’s surrounded by people who love her. 

We could all do a lot worse.  Death is coming for all of us, but mom is hanging in, and she’s facing her decline with grace, and grit, and good humor.   And I get to spend a week with her all to myself.  With any luck we’ll create some more memories, and if she can’t hang on to them, I’ll remember them for both of us. 

Also, I should be able to talk her in to writing Rhonda out of her will, and leaving everything to me.

HA!  I kid because I love. 

Speaking of things in decline, how about Biden’s performance, and the Dems’ election hopes?

The last monthly inflation numbers before the election have come out, and — hold on to your hat –the “experts” are surprised that they are “worse than expected.”

Which makes a string of 20 consecutive months of surprised experts and their inaccurate expectations.

Biden asked the Saudis to not cut their oil production, and they replied with whatever is Arabic for, “Stick it, Brandon!”

Which lead to a great Daily Caller headline: “Biden’s October Surprise is Even Higher Gas Prices, Experts Say.” It’s almost like he doesn’t understand how an “October surprise” is supposed to work.

Or how counting works.  I’m sure you saw his brilliant opening when he addressed some union guys last week: “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.”

That quote leads me to this week’s entry in my new “Find a Mirror” series. 

GOP congresswoman Lauren Boebert is working on her black belt in lib trolling, so she posted a tweet saying, “Two words: Let’s Go Brandon.”

Predictably, a clot of lefties who wildly over-estimate their own intelligence fell all over each other to be the first one to stomp on the self-beclowning metaphorical rake that Boebert had laid out before them.   (And yes, “clot” is the correct collective noun.  A murder of crows, a pride of lions, and a clot of lefties who over-estimate their own intelligence.  You’re welcome.)

George Takei – whose only contribution to society was playing a bit part in a campy tv show for 3 seasons 60 years ago – tweeted, “She can’t…count.”

Anti-gun irritant David “Publicity” Hogg said, “Three words: You’re an idiot.”

A lefty talk show host whom no one has ever heard of named Chip Franklin speculated that Boebert is either “dumb as dirt or just unable to count.”

Former Obama and Biden minion Jon Cooper said, “That’s THREE words.  She’s such a friggin’ moron!”

It’s so satisfying to see half-wits like that get out-played by someone they think is super dumb!  If any of them were better men, when they discovered their mistake, they’d be sheepish enough to actually be chastened by their self-own.

Guys, you were actually right, for just a moment – someone who announced “two words” and then said three words would actually be just what you said.  An idiot.  A moron.  Either dumb as dirt or unable to count.

That’s YOUR guy!  He did that.  And YOU got outwitted by dopey ol’ Lauren Boebert!

Find a mirror! 

Finally, let’s close with a quick round of “compare and contrast,” this time with crime-fighting ideas and results in blue and red states.

If you’ve been following the crime stats in Chicago, I hope you’ve been doing it from a distance.  Because otherwise you’d be dead right now.

It turns out that allowing murderers to murder and robbers to rob while simultaneously stopping police from policing has produced one long crime wave.  (Experts shocked!  Again!)

The latest trend was captured in a Chicago Sun Times headline which I swear to you I am not making up:  “After second shooting in a week at a Chicago police facility, top cop says department looking at making stations safer.”

That’s right.  Criminals have lost interest in committing crimes in darkened alleys or abandoned buildings.  Now they’re going into POLICE STATIONS and aiming guns at cops!

You can read the story for details, but the most shocking one to me was that both thugs in the two different incidents were only wounded, rather than killed.

I’m no police procedures manual writer, but I’d think the protocol for this kind of situation would be pretty straight forward: 

“In the event an armed criminal comes into a police station full of cops and aims a firearm at them, please follow these three steps:

1. Every officer present should empty his or her magazine into the suspect.

2. When all weapons are clicking on an empty chamber, the senior officer on site should say, “Cease fire.”

3. The most junior officer on site should then find a mid-sized waste basket and place what’s left of the suspect into it.   

Now to the free state of Florida, where every piece of plywood in the state is festooned with messages such as “You loot, we shoot!” and, “Try to Loot, I’ll Eat your Face!” and the Governor (peace be upon him) reminds potential looters that this is a 2^nd amendment state.

Result?  Very little looting.  (Experts shocked! Again!)

DeSantis also spoke for most of us when he reacted to the news that the Parkland school shooter received a life sentence rather than the death penalty:

“The only appropriate sentence for the massacre of 17 innocent people is the death penalty. That the jury had a single holdout refuse to authorize a capital sentence represents a miscarriage of justice…. And so I was very disappointed to see that. I’m also disappointed that we’re four and a half years after these killings, and we’re just now getting this. You know, they used to do this he would have been executed in six months.”

Cut to me, doing my Meg Ryan impression during the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally.  
“Yes! YES! YESSSS!”

Sure, there were some flaws in old-timey frontier justice, with its tendency toward, “catch him, try him, and hang him” in a fortnight.

But is everybody okay with our current system, where the leading causes of death on DEATH ROW are old age and natural causes?

Apparently Chicago Mayor Fright-Wig River Carp and Illinois Governor “Round Mound of Unsound” Pritzker are.

DeSantis isn’t. 

I know whose side I’m on.

It’s been a long 14 years, but the election is in 28 days.

If there’s one thing I know about, it’s dim-witted English professors.  (No, not yours truly.  The other ones.) And so I’ll open today with the recent appearance on the Dr. Phil show by ASU English prof Neal Lester.  

The topic of the conversation between Dr. Phil and Dr. Lester – throw in Dr. Jill and you’ve got yourself a trifecta of useless doctors — was “cultural appropriation.” Lester, an African-American wearing long dreadlocks, was against it.

Lester claimed that adopting a style or interest from another cultural group is “reductive,” and he finds that “disrespectful” to that other culture. 

Of course this is one of the classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bad-faith games that many leftists like to play.  If you don’t like rap, or celebrate black celebrities or cultural figures, or appreciate black clothing or food or speech patterns, you’re an anti-black racist. 

But if you listen to rap and you don’t conjugate “to be” conventionally, and you wear dreads and a Snoop Dogg t-shirt, you’re a culturally appropriating racist.

It’s the old, “Heads I win, tails… go f*** yourself, whitey!” conundrum.   

As someone who once — for a short but dark time in my youth — had a mullet, I am usually loath to cast aspersions on the hairstyle choices of others.  But find a pic of Neal Lester, and look at this guy’s dreads, and ask yourself how many people want to wear their hair like that. 

I mean, God bless, and you do you, but seriously. Not since the pudgy North Korean dictator forbade any other norks to adopt his monstrosity of a ‘do has there been so little to worry about, hairstyle-imitation-wise.

And by the way, who does this dope think he is to try to dictate people’s hairstyles?

It’s not even like he’s following his own arrogant pronouncements.  Because during the entire interview, he was appropriating whitey’s stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

He wore a suit (invented by Brit Beau Brummell in the early 19^th century), a necktie (attributed to Louis XIII, who liked part of the uniform worn by Croatian soldiers, which gave him the idea) and glasses (attributed to Salvino D’Armate in 1285). 

Granted, someone named “Salvino” probably isn’t Liz Warren white (#wemustneverstopmockingher), but he was a European, so not one of the dimwit prof’s favored Africans.  

Lester projected his voice through the use of a microphone (invented by Emile Berliner in 1877), and tv cameras (white guy Philo Farnsworth in 1927), on tv (the origin of which is disputed, but perhaps is best attributed to a fellow named Vladimir Zworykin – working for RCA — in the early 1930s).

And before you can ask: no, he was neither one of those rare black Vladimirs that you’re always hearing about in Kanye songs, nor one of the Kinshasa Zworykins. 

Also, Lester made his ridiculously idiotic arguments in English, a Germanic language which was pioneered by Anglo-Saxon types around 450 AD.  The Angles and the Saxons were both Liz Warren white.  And don’t get me started on the Jutes, who were as pale as Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season.  And the Frisians?  Wow. 

To summarize, around the time Rome fell, it was cracker city from one end of England to the other!

In fact, if you were a typical British guy from around 450-1200 and had a son, he would have looked like Harald Hardrada.  (Boom!  Obscure historical white guy reference for 1000!)

Later on, English grammar had an influx of vocab from French, Latin and Greek (white, swarthy-white, and olive-skinned white, respectively).

If Lester were judged by his own standards, he would have arrived in a dashiki, squinted at his surroundings, and spoken in an African language — Twi, Shona or Swahili, for example – thus making himself incomprehensible (but no less unpersuasive) to 99.9% of his audience.

Except that his audience couldn’t have heard his inanities anyway, since he would have had no microphone, and they couldn’t have seen him to appreciate his dashiki-and-dreads combo, because he’d have had no cameras.

I thought about making this story the next in my “Find a Mirror!” series, wherein I highlight some goofball who is totally lacking in self-awareness.  Neal Lester certainly fills that bill.

But alas, I cannot tell him to find a mirror.  Because the modern mirror was invented in 1835 by German chemist Justus vol Liebig, and I don’t want to offend Neal’s delicate sensibilities by asking him to look in a mirror invented by white devils. 

Speaking of dumb people, I’m always grateful to God that most criminals have AOC-level IQs.  If they’re not getting facial tattoos with their names and gang affiliations to make them stand out in a line-up, they’re posting accounts of their crimes on social media, or making other similarly bad decisions.

Consider the case of Zyeama Johnson, a 27-year-old New Jersey resident who had 11 bench warrants out for her arrest – for fraud, and failure to appear on multiple traffic charges – in Jersey and PA.  Apparently the fraud wasn’t paying the bills, because she recently applied for a regular job.

Sure, it probably wasn’t brilliant to bring two stolen credit cards with her to her job interview.  But she probably didn’t think the interviewers would be going through her purse, because why would they?

Well, they might do that if the place she applied for work was the Hudson County Sheriff’s Office. 

Yes, that’s the law enforcement agency that, among other things, specializes in finding and arresting people with active warrants.  And I don’t know if they checked her references, but they damn sure checked her criminal history.   And found her basket of active warrants, and arrested her at her interview.

And then found the stolen credit cards in her purse.

I feel sorry for her.  She looks so sad in her mug shot, and I really do hope that she gets her act together.

Besides, say what you will about Zyeama — I’d still rather have her as my president than the Scranton Stutterer.

Speaking of crime, and lefties not being good at dealing with it, let me close with a humorous tale of the funniest final line I’ve ever heard in a television show.  It comes from a sympathetic story on sex offenders in the leftist program Vice News. 

Okay, that doesn’t sound like a laugh riot.  But hear me out…

The program does its best to present a sympathetic take on the plight of sex offenders.  While it makes some good points about the obstacles they face when getting out of jail – the stigma, their difficulties in finding employment or housing, etc. – it struggles mightily to NOT see the elephant in the room:

Sex offenders have the highest recidivism rates of all criminals, and their crimes are especially devastating to the victims and their communities. 

The interviewer, Alice Hines, focuses on a paroled offender named Aishef, whom she follows through his struggles as he tries to get back on his feet, dogged by the legacy of his past crimes.  She is honest enough to show the way he tries to downplay or deny some of his crimes, and she does interview a victim of his, too. 

Her heart seems to be in the right place, as many leftists’ hearts are, but her ideology interferes with her ability to recognize the flaws in the advocacy position she takes.  Ultimately, her message about Aishef is clear: he is mostly a victim of a dysfunctional and unfair justice system.

At the end, she gives him what she intended to be the last, uplifting words, in answer to her question about his hopes for the future. He replies, “I ain’t going to let stuff stop me.  Not even this, or DNA, or a person’s opinion.  We all out here in this world, and we all gotta make it happen.  Ain’t nothing stoppin’ me.  I’m very hopeful, and confident.”

Then… wait for it…

“After this interview, Ashief sent a picture of his penis to our producer.”

And, scene.

I am breathlessly awaiting the announcement that Alice Hines has been nominated to become the new head of the Biden DOJ.

Avenatti/Ashief 2024!

I spent some time this week catching up on some Gutfeld episodes that I’d recorded over the last 10 days or so, and I came across a monologue from last week that gave me pause.  When Gutfeld discussed Biden asking where deceased congresswoman Jackie Walorski was, he jokingly referenced Biden’s habit of shaking hands with ghosts, and also using a Ouija board.

You may remember that I made a variation of both of those jokes in my column last Friday.  I wrote my column on Thursday night, without having seen that Gutfeld bit, and as a former English prof for whom plagiarism was a cardinal sin, I feel compelled to say that. 

I’m guilty of many things: low-brow humor, sometimes cruel lampooning of those I think deserve it, and repeated mockery of all those times Liz Warren appeared in redface during her vaudeville years.  (#wemustneverstopmocking her) 

Having said that, I think it may be that Biden’s bizarre behavior makes séance-adjacent references fairly obvious.  On the other hand, its also possible that Gutfeld and I think very much alike.

I’m not sure which of us should be more alarmed by that thought!

The mid-terms are only a month away, and I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the polls, even though I’m happy that they seem to be moving away from the Dems lately.  Polls are problematic because while they are generally skewed to the left, the natural instinct to dismiss all polls that look bad for one’s side can lead to being in a bubble, and disconnected from political realities.

A lot of MSM polls are not much better than “push” polling, whereby the pollster skews answers by using deceptively loaded language: 

“How do you feel about women’s reproductive health care?” (That means abortion, possibly up until the baby crowns.  Or after.)

“Do you approve of gender-affirming care?” (That means dangerous chemical and surgical intervention in a futile attempt to deny one’s actual gender.)      

“Do you think toddlers should be given assault-style weapons of war?” (That means, “Do you think citizens should be allowed to bear arms to defend themselves, like it says in the constitution?”)

More subtle skewing depends on the population sampled.  Surveys of “likely voters” invariably find more support for conservatives; surveys of “registered voters” find less support, and surveys of “adults” find still less. 

Many polls also over-sample lefties and under-sample righties.  In a district where the GOP, the Dems, and Independents each represent a third of the voters, you can get an unrealistically sunny poll for Dems by polling 50% Dems, 25% independents, and 25% GOP.

In the last 3 national elections, national polls obviously skewed toward the Dems.  In 2016, polls had Hillary killing it in WI and MI, and with small but significant leads in PA, FL, NC – all of which she ultimately lost.  (Oh, the joy it still brings me to write that sentence!)  The NY Times famously gave her a 92% chance of winning on election eve, and most MSM electoral vote projections had her taking somewhere in the 315-325 range. (She actually got only 232.)  

In races across the board in 2018 and 2020 – whether the GOP ultimately lost or won them – polls consistently erred in favor of the Dems.  And the polls had Terry MacAuliffe easily beating Youngkin in VA last November.

On the other hand, ignoring polling that you don’t like is foolish, and has come back to bite many candidates and voters over the years.  It’s sometimes hard to predict turnout, and with shady practices like massive mail-in voting, ballot harvesting and fraud, it’s tough to be confident of the outcome, even when you feel confident about how the voters actually feel.

I generally try a couple of tactics when handicapping an election:

1. I give more credence to final polls than earlier ones, because earlier polls can be used to influence voting patterns by skewing left, while final polls are the ones by which pollsters are ultimately judged.

2. I try to judge polling outfits by past performance.  Who was closest to the actual results over the last half-dozen election cycles? 

3. I consider historical trends, though with a grain of salt.  The party out of power tends to win congressional seats in a new president’s first mid-term.  If an incumbent is under 50% in approval ratings late, s/he is vulnerable.   High presidential approval ratings pull his party up in midterms, while low prez numbers pull it down.  The right track/wrong track answers usually predict incumbent party success or failure.

4. I adjust for bias by adding anywhere from 2-4 points to the GOP candidate in most races.  So this year, the GA, PA and AZ senate races show a slight Dem lead, but I’d guess that there is a slight GOP lead in all of them.  Kari Lake for AZ governor, Laxalt in NV and Vance in OH all have small poll leads, so I’d probably guess that they’re up more like 5 points.

Overall, I’m nervous and worried about fraud, but – you guessed it – cautiously optimistic about November 8^th.  What do you all think?

Okay, let me end with a quick whip-round of morons in the news:

You know I’ve got a very low opinion of the cackling dopes on the View, and Whoopi Goldberg is as bad as any of them.  So it was extra fun to read a reviewer’s analysis of the upcoming movie “Till” – about the hideous lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 – in which Goldberg has a part. 

In the review, Kyndall Cunningham (she’s black, so you know that she’s not racist) was mostly positive, but she did criticize the “distracting fat suit” that Goldberg wore in the movie.

There’s only one problem. 

One hilarious problem.

Goldberg wasn’t wearing a fat suit in the film.

D’oh!  (Also: HA! HAHA!  HAHAHA!!)

By the way, here’s my review of “Till”:  Do we need another self-congratulatory, virtue-signaling exercise in racial scab-picking about an old story that everybody already agrees on, and no one would ever defend? 

How about, NO!   

Do you remember Jacob Frey, the leftist, low-T Minneapolis mayor who infamously surrendered his city and allowed months of BLM and Antifa riots to devastate much of its business district in 2020?  (In my column at the time, I referred to him as Mayor Wussy McPussington, if that rings any bells.)

Well, the Frey-baby has learned nothing.  This week he complained that in the Twin Cities, “it is easier to buy a gun than a fresh apple.” 

I know what you’re thinking: “How am I going to terrorize and rob some white-privilege-having mother-friender by holding a fresh apple to his head?  Am I supposed to pass out a bunch of Granny Smiths to my posse the next time we want to do a smash-and-grab at a jewelry store? C’mon, man!”

“Besides, I’m sick of filling out all of those forms and then waiting days for a federal background check every time I want to buy a fresh apple!”

If you missed Biden’s remarks when he stopped by Puerto Rico on Monday, you should find a copy of the transcript.

Spoiler alert:  Apparently, Joe Biden was born a poor Puerto Rican child. 

That was way before he marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King at Selma, and even further before he drove a truck, which was right around the time he was finishing at the top of his law school class, but well after he bested the dread Corn Pop in a bout of fisticuffs.

So, yeah. That’s our president.

It’s been a long 14 years, and it’s only been 90 weeks.

I am happy to report that Ian’s path spared our town any serious damage.  We were only out of power for a couple of hours, and had only a little rain and a half-day of gusty winds.  I spent part of Friday and Saturday picking up downed palm fronds, Spanish moss and small branches and making multiple pick-up runs to the dump with them.

Between the brief power loss and the cleanup, I didn’t respond to those of you commented on my Thursday column.  But your good wishes and the kind words about my storm-distracted commentary were an excellent picker-upper to read when our power came back on.  

CO nation continues to be a shining outpost among the vast swaths of our country that seem determined to stagger, Biden-like, into error and hostility, so thank you all! 

However, I do have a couple of corrections and a clarification from that last column.

As Larry Garrett pointed out, the deceased congresswoman (Jackie Walorski) whom Brandon expected to show up at his press conference was actually a Republican.  I had misidentified her as a Dem.  (Which is arguably less serious than misidentifying her as a living person. But I’m no president, so…)

Also, the Dem Rhode Island senate candidate who recorded herself twerking upside down was not actually a narwhal.  Although if you’ve seen the video – and I cannot stress enough how much you should NOT – she was, to be fair, at least narwhal-adjacent. 

My clarification involves pointing out that entertaining but troll-y Milton Pinsky’s calling me out for wrongly saying that Dem-run cities have higher crime stats is a big swing and a miss. Mr. Pinsky said – among other wrong things – that “crime rates are actually down in NYC.” 

I point you to the NYPD site https://www1.nyc.gov/site, which reports that the “overall index crime in NYC increased by 31%” year over year to this June, and that “six of the seven major categories saw increases” between 30-41%.  And that’s not accounting for the decreased reporting of crimes by a demoralized and frightened public.

Pinsky also fantasizes that conservative red-state policies allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves with guns (per our obsolete old constitution, with its crinkly yellowed paper and high-falutin’ but graceful verbiage) somehow increases the number of non-conservative criminals committing gun crimes in big blue cities.

I don’t know how to respond to that assertion.

Oh wait, yes I do.  In the words of Dr. Evil, “How about no!”

As you might guess, the hurricane is still on my mind.  Reading some of the coverage of the storm provided even more insight into our two main parties’ approaches to governance.

The MSM and leftist pols managed to look at an enormous natural catastrophe that threatened the lives and property of millions of people, and saw two of their favorite obsessions: global warming, and racism. 

One lefty after another delivered one sermon after another about how our capitalist system and our internal combustion engines have angered Gaia, and the result is that we are having more storms – and more intense storms – than ever in all of recorded history. 

These assertions are either data-free, or data-light.  They don’t mention that “all of recorded history” amounts to about 5 minutes of geological time, or that accounts of the frequency, size or strength of hurricanes do not exist from the time the earth cooled until about 1500. 

Or that accounts of the same from 1500 to around 1900 consisted of some folklore, diary entries and a few newspaper accounts citing the number of wooden buildings and boats and docks destroyed, and people killed.  

Even if you look at the EPA’s own records of hurricanes from 1880 – 2020, there is no evidence that hurricanes have been more frequent.  And most stats on the increasing amount of storm damage being done over time is completely explained by the increasing numbers of people and buildings along the coast.  

But still.  Just trust them when they say that if we all get electric cars and solar panels, and elect leftists, there will never be another hurricane again.

Because: science.

“How could they possibly find racism in a hurricane, Martin?” you are not asking, because you’ve watched lefties find racism in roads, and food, and inanimate objects, and barely animate objects (like Que Mala Harris), and everything else in the world.

In an interview a day after Ian struck Florida, our vice president (yes, you’re a racist if you don’t think she’s brilliant) said about natural disasters in general, “It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making.”

You cannot make this stuff up.

There is an old parody of a headline that the New York Times would print in the face of a disaster:  “Meteor to Strike Earth and Destroy All Life – Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.” 

That’s supposed to be a joke.  But it’s how Kamala Harris – and many in the leftist intelligentsia — actually think. 

As if dark skin attracts high winds, and a person like Lizzie Warren doesn’t have to fear storm surges, because her paleface privilege makes her naturally buoyant. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Compare the leftist advice when a hurricane is looming – “Separate your recyclables and hate white folks, and you’ll be safe!” – to the example set by Ron DeSantis.

He was competent and in control, marshalling the resources of his state, preparing for landfall and the aftermath, and following all good-governance best practices.  

Which irritated the MSM to no end, since they had already worked themselves into a Toobin-esque state of anticipation, and pre-written a bunch of stories about how DeSantis had failed the challenge, and the terrible storm response was all his fault.

My favorite part of his approach came on Friday, when he sent a clear message on the subject of post-storm crime.  “We want to make sure we’re maintaining law and order.  Don’t even think about looting.”  He warned potential predators that Florida is a second amendment state, and that “you never know what may be lurking [in] somebody’s home.”

Yes!  Yes, yes, 1000 times yes!  If the simpering Dem castrati running CA, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Chicago etc. had taken this tack, half the country wouldn’t have been terrorized in 2020, and since. 

Anyone who preys on people who have been traumatized by a disaster is the lowest of the low, and deserves a large caliber greeting from their would-be prey.   And that’s not an eccentric, out-lying position unique to DeSantis. 

You can look through social media and find hundreds of examples of signs and painted-on-plywood messages on the theme of, “You loot, we shoot!” or “Loot here, die here!” 

My personal favorite was one from Lee County: “Try to Loot.  I Will Eat Your Face”

Just in case you forgot that Florida Man has both firearms AND bath salts, I guess.

So… do you feel lucky, punk?  If so, prepare to get gut-shot, and then de-faced!

Of course the MSM – who had only just pulled down their gender non-binary one-sies after Italy elected a conservative lady prime minister – yanked them right back up over their heads again, and started wailing. 

They blamed the enthusiasm for ballistically ventilating looters on… wait for it…

Global Warming! 

No, wait a minute.  It was the other one…

Racism! 

Joy(less) Reid, host of the unwatched MSNBC show “I Can’t Reid,” tweeted that encouraging people to shoot looters sounds just like something a racist segregationist would say.

Correction: My crack research staff tells me that Reid’s tv show is called “The ReidOut.”  Honest mistake.

But Reid really did make that argument: if you are willing to shoot criminals who break into your damaged house and try to steal what little personal possessions you have left, you’re an evil bigot.

Apparently none of the lefty spelunkers-for-racism have the self-awareness to realize that there is a word to describe someone who assumes that scumbag predatory looters are naturally going to be black or brown people.

And that word is: racist.   Avennati/ Joy “Bull Connor” Reid, 2024!

I’m writing this column a day earlier than usual, because of the hurricane.  Since we live in the north central part of the state, the forecast is that we should have nothing more than heavy rains and some gusting winds in the 40 mph range at worst. 

But we live in a neighborhood of older houses with lots of century-old oak trees, and overhead power lines.  So I expect that we’ll be out of power at some point within the next 48 hours.  Hence my Friday column is appearing early. 

While we count our blessings here, we are thinking about and praying for the many people in southwestern Florida whose lives and property are at risk right now.  And yes, I know that the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is sneered at by smug sophisticates nationwide, and I’ll give their sentiments all of the deference they deserve.

Which is to say, in the words of Darrell Hammond, as the late great Sean Connery, “Suck it, Trebek!”

So let’s go quickly today, before the electricity flickers out and I’m left here without a candle, to curse the darkness. 

As if this storm wasn’t enough bad news, we also have to contend with the catastrophic prospect that if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, Liz Cheney is threatening to leave the GOP and become a Democrat!  But it’s even worse than that, because she is vowing to throw all of her political weight and acumen behind the Democrat candidate, and campaign hard for him or her.

I know.  Stand strong, people.  We got through the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, and the speakership of Imhotep Pelosi, and that video of the Dem congress-narwhal twerking upside down in a horrifically overtaxed thong.    

We can get through this.

The funniest part is that she’s talking about possibly joining the Dems in the future.  Lizzie, you’ve said that DeSantis and pretty much every other high-profile Republican are as bad as Trump, and you’ve spent the last year being a useful idiot for the Dem Hypocrite Squad in their January 6th show trial.  

You left the GOP a while ago.   

To the relief of pretty much everyone in the GOP!

Speaking of delusional Dems, did you catch NYC mayor Eric Adam’s comments last week?

In a press conference, he put down Kansas – which, as far as I know, has not been bad-mouthing NYC – in order to praise the amazing city that he and a small army of Dems have been running into the ground for several decades. 

He said these words, which I am not making up: “New York has a brand.  And when people see it, it means something.  Kansas doesn’t have a brand.”

He’s not wrong, because New York does have a brand.  And that brand is, “Failed State™.”

It used to have the affectionate moniker of, “The City that Never Sleeps,” but that’s been replaced by, “The City that Never Stops Financially (and sometimes sexually) Assaulting You.” 

Which isn’t as catchy. 

With the exception of being Lizzie Warren’s moccasin cobbler (#wemustneverstopmockingher) or Imhotep Pelosi’s burial-clothes-re-wrapper, I cannot think of a job I’d hate to have more than the poor ad agency who gets the contract to write the next tourism campaign catch phrase for NYC.

What must that whiteboard look like after everyone commits suicide at the end of a three-day brainstorming session?

“NYC: Come for the Street Crime, Stay for the Racial Hatred!”

“Try our World-Famous Subways, Where Deranged Bums Fight to the Death, and Then You Get to Take on the Winner!”

“Where Else Can You Rent a Broom Closet for $4800, Get Cursed out in 57 Languages, and then Murdered With an Exotic Edged Weapon From a Foreign Land?  Not Kansas!”

“Got Squalor?”

“At Least DiBlasio and Cuomo are Gone!”

The last one is the only even marginally palatable choice.

Meanwhile, the poor saps in Kansas have to tolerate peace and quiet, nature, a reasonable cost of living, and dying at a ripe old age of natural causes, surrounded by their loved ones.  In the meantime, they can buy a house and raise some kids, without either of them being covered with graffiti or gunshot scars. 

Sure, they don’t have people of many races from many lands all getting along together; or a clean, safe, reliable subway system; or the reputation of being a functional, attractive metropolis.

But neither do New Yorkers.   

Find a Mirror, Eric Adams!

In international news, a nice conservative lady has become first female elected leader of Italy in history.  So the feminists and the left broke out into a heartfelt celebration of yet another glass ceiling being broken, and everyone wished her well.  The end. 

HA! I kid because I love.

The first part is true: a conservative woman won in Italy.  I won’t pretend that I know anything about her, or about Italian politics.  Of course, neither does the left.

But they don’t need to, because she had them at “conservative,” which obviously trumps genitalia, skin color, IQ, qualifications, or anything else.

So when the news hit that Italy was having an election, and then that it was won by a conservative person, the socialists on both sides of the ocean did what they always do:  

They wept and gnashed their teeth, tugged their gender non-binary onesies up over their heads, and raced around hysterically until they ran into a solid surface and knocked themselves out cold.   

A typical reaction came from French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne – not to be confused with Jason Bourne, who was resourceful and cool, and not a snooty bureaucratic hack – who gave an interview about 10 minutes after the election, to let the Italian chick know that the honeymoon was over. 

Borne said, “In Europe we have a set of values, and of course, we will be mindful that these values are respected when it comes to human rights.”

We’ve seen those European values of yours, Liz.  If I remember correctly from the way my buddy who peed in Hitler’s bathtub told it, those human rights values were typified by looking the other way while Europe’s Jews were slaughtered, and maintaining healthy trees on both sides of the Champs-Elysees so that the German soldiers would have plenty of shade, whichever direction they were marching.

More valuable input came from the European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen.  And I’m thinking what you’re thinking:  Is that a better name for a Bond villain or a porn star?  Because it’s a good fit for both.

Ursula stated, “We have tools [if Italy is not] willing to work with us.” 

Okay, it’s Bond villain. 

And if you were reading that out loud, you’d want to put the sinister Germanic “v” sound in that “we have tools…”  As in every Gestapo interrogation you’ve ever seen in the movies, which begins, “Ve haf vays of making you talk!”

Okay, the winds are picking up outside, and I could lose power at any minute.  But does that mean that I can close without mentioning Biden asking where the dead lady was in the crowd at his latest press conference?

It does not. 

You know the details by now: GOP congresswoman Jackie Walorski helped organize a conference on hunger, before she died in a car wreck on August 3^rd.  Biden addressed that conference yesterday. 

He slurred his way through a few sentences, thanking “repsntuhv govrnr” (check the transcript – I think that spelling is accurate) among others, before saying, “Representative… Jackie, are you here?  Where’s Jackie?  I think she was uh… she was going to be here.”

If you didn’t laugh, you’d have to cry.

And lest you think WH spokeswoman KJP — she’s attracted to women, so shut up! — couldn’t make it worse, you’d be wrong.  But you’re not, because you didn’t think that, because you’ve been watching this imbecilic circus for the 14 years that Brandon’s been in power.

When even the lapdogs in the MSM had to meekly point out that the president asked if a dead woman was in the crowd, KJP should have said that it was just a faux pas, and moved on.

Instead, she denied that Biden had made a mistake.  He was just listing the pols who contributed to the success of the food insecurity conference.  And he knew she was dead, because he was planning to meet with her family on Friday to sign a bill in her honor.  She was just on the “top of his mind.”

Got it?  He knew she was dead.  That’s why he asked if she was in the room, and then covered for her by saying that,“she was going to be here.”

Far be it from me to try to correct such a historic practitioner of the sapphic arts as KJP, but I think I’ve got a better explanation:

Because he is as close to death as he is, Joe Biden has gained a heightened awareness of those who have crossed over to the other side.   

That’s why he makes it a practice to shake hands with at least one ghost at the end of every speech he gives.  And it’s why he asked if Jackie was with him at the press conference.  Because the WH staff doesn’t let you take a Ouija board to the podium.  Duh.

Just keep saying it to yourself:  November 8^th.  November 8^th.  November 8^th.

Avenatti/ Oddjob von der Leyen, 2024!

I’d like to open this column with a new feature idea I’m calling,“Find a Mirror.”  Every other week or so, I’ll choose a person or group who is behaving so egregiously that they need to sit down in front of a reflective surface and think long and hard about what they’ve just done or said.       

Here’s an example from the last week.

I saw a clip from The View – I know, that’s beneath me, and life’s too short, but hear me out – that featured the ironically named “Sunny” Hostile exposing both her low IQ and her nasty racism in the most efficient way possible. 

Hold on.  My crack research team tells me that her last name is actually “Hostin.” 

Huh. If you had told me that one of those two names was NOT hers, I would not have bet on “Hostile.” 

Anyway, when Nikki Haley was being discussed as a possible future GOP presidential candidate, this moron played the race card in the clumsiest way imaginable.  She said, “What is her real name again?”

One of the other women – I’m guessing she was a guest, because she was very attractive, and not mind-bendingly dense – pushed back, pointing out that Haley has used “Nikki” instead of her first name of “Nimrata” since childhood, likely to avoid the prejudice that might have accompanied the unusual, foreign-sounding name.

Sunny jumped in with a little of that 80-proof bigotry that is her stock in trade: “There are some of us that can be chameleons, and decide not to embrace our ethnicity so that we can pass—”

At this point there was some interrupting cross talk, during which another panelist said, “Sunny, YOU go by a different name!” 

Which is true, since Sunny’s real first name is actually, “Asuncion.” 

2 quick thoughts:

1.  Since she brought up “not wanting to embrace your ethnicity,” I think any self-respecting Latina would hesitate to admit that she shared the same ethnicity with a smug little bigot like Sunny Hostin.  (Just as a panel of influential Latinos passed a resolution asking crazy Ramon Estevez to use his super white name of “Charlie Sheen,” instead.  Thanks for sticking us with him, mi amigos!)

2.  If you’re criticizing someone for not using their real name, it’s not a good look when the person you are criticizing is actually using her real, middle name instead of her more ethnically distinctive first name (“Nikki” is Haley’s middle name), while the name you replaced your own ethnically distinctive first name with was a made-up one you just pulled out of your Hostin.

When confronted with her own blatant hypocrisy, Sunny had a perfect comeback, if you’re a clueless leftist.  (And boy, is she!)  She didn’t drop her Hispanic first name because she’s a creepy “Uncle Juan,” trying to “pass” as white.

No, no, no. SHE calls herself “Sunny” because Americans are too stupid to properly pronounce “Asuncion.” 

I’m not kidding.  Here are her actual words: “That’s because most Americans can’t pronounce ‘Asuncion’ because of the under-education in our system.” 

Got that?  “Sunny” is not a vile race traitor like Nikki Haley, and she only changed her name because you’re too stupid to pronounce her Hispanic one.

The segment was mercifully ended by Whoopi Goldberg (real name: Caryn Elaine Johnson) while Joy Behar (real name: Josephine) sat there like a block of wood, which is her sweet spot.

Sunny Hostin, please, for the love of all that is holy: Find a Mirror.

If you needed more proof of why the Dems have made Brandon available for the fewest media availabilities of any president since tv was invented, his séance with Scott Pelley provided it.

Everybody has commented about some of Biden’s consequential gaffes in that short exchange – the pandemic is over, we’ll send American soldiers to Taiwan if China attacks, we now measure inflation rates in inches, etc.

But the part that caught me most by surprise was his response when Pelley asked a few questions about Biden’s age and mental fitness. 

Pelley: “You are the oldest president ever…”

Biden: “Pretty good shape, huh?”

Every Sane American: “What?!  No!  You’re not in good shape at all!  You can’t walk right. You can’t talk right.  You’re the Crypt Keeper in a suit.  You make Imhotep Pelosi look young and vivacious.  You pooped on the Pope!”

Pelley: “Some people question whether you are fit for the job, and when you hear that, I wonder what you think?”

Biden: “Watch me.  Honest to God, that’s what I think.  Watch me.”

Every Sane American (sounding eerily like the Office’s Michael Scott when he finds out Toby is back):  “NO, God, no! God please, no! No! No! NOOOO!”

Sam Kinison’s Ghost: “We HAVE been watching you!  That’s why we doubt your abilities!  Oh, Ohhhhh!  You’re stumbling up staircases, and wandering around on stages looking for exits, and shaking hands with ghosts!  It took you several minutes to get your arm into your coat, which you still did not manage to do without the help of your creepy fake-doctor wife!  OH!  OHHHHHH!

And, scene.

We’re all watching you, Joe, in the same way that you see a bad car wreck on the side of the road, and can’t look away.  Please make it stop.

Finally, I’ve got a crime story that should remind us all of just some of the stakes in the next several elections.

In 2012, one Jose Rafael Solano Landaeta came to the US on a tourist visa from Venezuela, and when that visa expired, he stayed here. 

Was he immediately caught and sent back to Chavez-land, maybe with a few bruises and a stern warning, you are not asking, because you already know the answer?

He was not. 

Instead, he stayed here, and within a year he expressed his gratitude to those in his new home by raping an unconscious person.  Oh yes, and that person was a girl under the age of three.

If you are morally normal, you are now asking, “Where is his grave, because I have a full bladder, and would like to go there to express my thoughts about his evil actions?”

Unfortunately, he is not dead.

“Well, then,” you are now asking, “where is the penitentiary where he is serving his long sentence, so that I can go there and inform the other prisoners that he raped an infant, so that they can express their feelings about that crime to Mr. Landaeta?  Perhaps with a sharpened toothbrush, or a shiv made out of some other everyday implement?”

Unfortunately, he is not in prison.  In fact, because he raped the infant in California – which is run entirely by guess which political party? – he plead to a lesser charge, and was sentenced to a commensurately harsh sentence of… wait for it… three years of probation.

That’s right.  He broke into our country and raped an infant, and he wasn’t executed.  He wasn’t imprisoned and then deported.  He wasn’t even imprisoned, and he was NOT deported.

“That’s outrageous,” you are thinking, even though you have to be tiring of asking such naïve rhetorical questions, “But maybe such a close call with consequences got his mind right, and he’s been on the straight and narrow since then?”

To quote a recently deceased president, “Come on, man!”

I’m not sure what else Landaeta has been up to in the intervening decade, but I’m guessing that it’s not been working hard, paying taxes, and treating his neighbors with respect.  I do know that he’s fathered at least one child during that time, because he was in some kind of relationship with Karina Castro, who had his child a year ago, in addition to the 7 year old she had from a previous relationship.

But apparently Landaeta and Castro had a few domestic problems – I’m guessing he kept leaving the toilet seat up, no matter how many times she asked him to put it down? – and she ended up getting a restraining order against him in April.

“Problem solved!” you are not thinking, because you are not a Democrat who hates guns, but loves pieces of paper, and their magical ability to influence the behavior of criminals, who are after all really just misunderstood people who have been mistreated by our evil capitalist system.

And you are finally coming around to common sense.  Because on September 8th, he violated his protective order – SHOCKING! – and confronted her in front of her house, as she was putting her two kids in the car. 

“Did he ask her to meet him somewhere for a cup of coffee, so that they could discuss their differences rationally, and out of earshot of the children?” you are absolutely not asking, because you are tiring of this charade.

He did not.  Instead, he used the sword he just happened to be carrying – as one does on a typical Thursday – to cut Karen Castro’s head off, in front of her young children. 

Maybe now he’ll get some actual, serious prison time.  But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Compare this story – and so many tragic ones like it – to the many stories of recidivist criminals breaking into regular citizens’ houses in red states. 

Most of those end with the criminals getting shot a lot, followed by the homeowner greeting a stream of neighbors bearing well wishes, covered dishes, and more ammunition to replace that which had been absorbed by the bullet-magnet home invader. 

Who, by the way, will never rape an infant, or cut off anybody’s head with a sword in the future. 

The local authorities usually do a quick investigation, after which they praise the homeowner for improving the community, and give her back her gun.  Sometimes accompanied by a key to the city. 

Sure, there’s no guarantee that every such story will end well, and some homeowners may be wounded or die in the defense of their homes and families. 

But I know the kind of community I’d rather live in, and it’s not the one where the homeowners are harassed and charged, while the criminals get the sympathy.  And sometimes bail money from Que Mala and her lefty co-religionists.

It’s been 14 long years, but the election is in 44 days.  Ignore the gaslighting, and the polls, and the MSM slander.  Think about evil Jose Landaeta, and about poor Karen Castro.

And vote!   

Any non-Democrat/ Any other Non-Democrat, 2024!

Before I start today’s column, I thought I’d provide an update on the renovation work that is going on at my Victorian house that was burned back in April.  I’ve added some new pics of the interior; the ceilings are now all down, and the upstairs walls have been taken back to the lathe and plaster.

If you’d like to see the pictures, you can go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and click on the “Rosewood” tab on the top of the page – the newest pics are on the bottom.

Things are progressing more slowly than I would like, and we are now currently waiting for city permission to have a new power pole installed, and to block the street so that we can get a crane in and take off the roof, then fly in and fix the new trusses in place.  The goal is to tear off the existing roof and get a new one framed and dried-in within about 7-8 days.

To achieve that, we’ll need cooperation from the weather and the city – and don’t ask me which of those is more easily secured!

Now on to our political follies, starting with Don Lemon.

Ahh, Don Lemon.  Now that Fredo Cuomo and the newest doughy Harvard prof Brian Stelter have been shown the door at CNN, Lemon is locked in an 18-way competition for dimmest bulb in the pack over at “the most trusted name in news.”  (Now with 120% more sarcasm in the sarcastic scare quotation marks!)

If you didn’t see his interview with British royals historian Hilary Fordwich, you owe it to yourself to find it.  And then sit back with a stiff Scotch-and-schadenfreude cocktail and savor the logical buzz saw that poor Donnie walked into.

He posed a ridiculously uninformed question – as is his wont – about whether Britain shouldn’t pay minorities “reparations for colonialism.” And Hilary spent a glorious 52 seconds rhetorically laying waste to Lemon’s victim-riffic premise.    

She started by agreeing with him that reparations might be due, but then wrong-footed him with a string of historical facts: the beginning of the “slavery supply chain” was in Africa, where Africans enslaved and sold their fellow Africans to Arabs and Europeans; England was the first nation to abolish slavery; she sacrificed tons of treasure and the lives of 2000 sailors in a tenacious sea-borne campaign to end the slave trade that had been going on in Africa for centuries before the first European stepped foot there.

Never has the cliché, “If that debate was a fight, they would’ve stopped it,” been more appropriate!  I could almost hear the dulcet tones of the late Howard Cosell, shouting, “Down goes Lemon!  Down goes Lemon!”

Not-so-Dandy Don, who virtually never allows his total ignorance to prevent him from speaking about any subject, just sat there meekly, like a dishonest, slow-witted deer caught in the headlights. 

Then he muttered, “It’s an interesting discussion,” and changed the subject. 

Next, I’ve been enjoying the latest developments in Martha’s Vineyard-gate.  Not since Ted Kennedy (D-irigible, MA) killed Mary Jo Kopechne on that island have Vineyard residents looked so transparently phony and depraved.

They whined about how their uber-rich island couldn’t possibly take care of 50 immigrants, then kicked them out within 48 hours, then patted themselves on the back because of how “enriched” they felt because of their contact with the illegals whom they’d just shown the door. 

Their every action shone a spotlight on two truths:

• the actual, destabilizing, resource-consuming impact of illegal immigration
• their own colossal hypocrisy   

And the MSM couldn’t keep themselves from revealing their own bigotry, attacking the GOP governors for doing the exact same thing that they’ve been praising their lefty co-religionists for doing: shipping illegals all over the country.

My favorite example was briefly aired on NBC news… until they deleted the tweet and tried to pretend it never existed.  But the tweet is the textbook definition of a “gaffe” in Washington: a moment when someone inadvertently says what he actually believes.

The bigot in question is Max Lefeld, who lovingly compared the action of sending illegals to “sanctuary cities” — where liberals had falsely said they’d be welcomed — to “driving to different areas… and throwing my trash there.”

The punch line?  Lefeld is the founder of a “charity group” called “Casa Venezuela Dallas foundation.” 

For you Spanish speakers out there, I’ll point out that the group’s name is NOT “mi Casa….”  In fact, if I remember my high school Spanish (“Silencio, por favor, Martino!”), that group’s name has an understood “su” in front of it.   

To be fair to Lefeld, the group is “Casa Venezuela Dallas,” NOT “Casa Venezuela Martha’s Vineyard.”  So… yeah.

On the bright side, Lefeld’s vile comparison of brown folks to garbage does make Dr. Jill’s comparison of those same people to breakfast tacos look pretty darn enlightened, don’t you think? Or at least just stupid, rather than genocidal.

Which, sadly, is about the best you can hope for from the Bidens.

I’d like to end by giving some advice to GOP politicians who are trying to close strong in the mid-terms.  Will it be brilliant advice?  You’ll have to make that call.  (But spoiler alert: Yes.  Yes it will.)

Here it is:

Make EVERY Democrat-run city a border town.

Send a thrice-daily convoy of buses full of illegals to Chicago and NYC and DC.  Darken the skies with plane loads of illegals landing at Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons, and any other tony hamlets where virtue-signaling leftists go to escape the deplorable white trash and the icky brown trash (their words, not ours).

I want the airspace over those Woke-villes to look like O’Hare the day before Thanksgiving!    

In fact, force the Dems to live with the consequences of ALL of the policies they foist on the rest of us:

If they’re going to harass us with their environmental alarmism, confiscate all of their private jets (we’ll use them to parachute illegals down onto Martha’s Vineyard like every day is D-Day over Normandy), plus their yachts, all of their luxury cars – both the gas-powered ones, and the coal- and natural gas-powered “electric” ones – and every one of their houses that contains more than 800 square feet of carbon-devouring living space.

If they’re going to fight our ability to own guns to protect ourselves, take away their armed bodyguards.

If we can’t have a border for our country, bulldoze the walls around their mansions and estates.

If they won’t jail criminals, force them to take those violent offenders into their own neighborhoods and houses.  (A car jacker in every leftist driveway, a murderer in every leftist living room, and a sex offender in every leftist bedroom!)

If they’re going to force anti-white racism on us, take away the job of every white leftist CEO, professor and MSM talking head and give it to a BIPOC transgender double-amputee immediately.

Do the same with the homeless.  If addicts’ bowels are to be moved on sidewalks or a front door stoop, make sure that those sidewalks and door stoops belong to a Democrat politician, or donor, or voter.  Let them and their families have to tiptoe through the feces and syringes (worst Tiny Tim song ever, by the way) every time they step out of their houses. 

Now, in the words of the Great and Powerful CO (who is not me, but who created me out of his forehead, like in a Greek myth), go and tell others what you’ve learned here today:

Build a red wave in November, by making every Dem-controlled locale a border town!

Avenatti/ Max “-imum racism” Lefeld 2024!

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Over the weekend I read CO’s story of his brief return to Chicago, and his update on how the good people of that once-great city are faring under the maladministration of Governor Big Jay Pritzker and  half-socialist/half-river-carp Mayor Lightfoot. 

It’s a poignant, somber tale with a dusting of optimism, or at least hope, as you might expect from the mind of CO.  If you haven’t read it yet, you should. 

As a Floridian for 36 years now – I wasn’t born in Florida, but I got here as soon as I could – I still love my home state of Illinois, and I’m depressed by the morons who have been running it into the ground, along with the dopes who keep electing those morons.  

(If you’ve ever thought that the blind leading the blind was a recipe for disaster, that’s nothing compared to the morons leading the dopes!)

(Coincidentally, if the Dems haven’t come up with an official name for their 2024 convention yet, they could not come up with a more accurate one than “Morons Leading Dopes, 2024!”)

But let’s leave the sad story of the slow, political exsanguination of the Windy City and turn to several stories that have entertained me over the last fortnight. 

First we have the spectacle of watching leftist elites losing their minds when confronted by a relative handful of illegal immigrants showing up at their sanctuary cities.  

After pontificating for years on how much they LOVE the huddled foreign masses, and publicly Toobin-ing themselves over their own moral superiority, the egregious snobs actually got to meet some of those illegals, face to face.  

And immediately called for security.   

I love that Abbott and DeSantis have hoist the Dems on their own petard by forcing them to confront the consequences of their destructive policies.  Of course, the MSM is doing everything they can to protect them from their “emperor has no clothes” moment, screaming that this is just “a stunt.”

If by “stunt” you mean “forcing people who claim they welcome illegal immigrants to… welcome illegal immigrants.”  

Bah!  At this late date, no sentient person needs to be told that the top leftists in our country are obnoxious hypocrites.  But it’s still fun to say it, and watch them squirm.   

AOC said that sending illegals to NYC or Chicago is a “crime against humanity.”  (Given the frequency of gunfire and machete attacks there, she might be half-right.)  The mayor of DC said that sending a handful of illegals is turning her city into a “border town.”  (Ick!)  Rich lefty Karens said that uber-rich Martha’s Vineyard didn’t have the “resources” to accommodate 50 migrants!

I love that DeSantis sent that flight to Martha’s Vineyard, of all places, not least because the Obamas now own a $12 million estate there.  That little shack contains 7 bedrooms within its 6900 square feet, and sits on 29 ocean-front acres. 

Which raises an obvious question: How many Venezuelans can you fit into 7 bedrooms and 29 acres? 

Let’s find out!   

Oops, we can’t.  Because within 48 hours of the illegals landing on their precious island, the open-hearted, open-minded supporters of open borders rounded up the immigrants and sent them packing back to the mainland in several small buses.  (“Hola!  Bienvenidos! …  Now beat it, muchachos!  Andale!  Don’t let la puerta hit you on your culo!  Mi island NO es tu island!”)

Rumors that they “helped” the immigrants onto the buses by surrounding them on horseback and whipping them with their reins are as yet unconfirmed.   

Second, I loved that Biden decided to throw a big political celebration of the “inflation reduction act” on the day when the CPI numbers came out and showed that … wait for it … inflation is still rising. 

The “experts” expected a number around or below 8% — still horrific, compared to the 2.01% core inflation rate when the Orange Menace was president.  But the number came in at 8.3%.

By the way, can I find an old sword lying around the house, and use it to dub myself an “expert?”  

Because I’m pretty sure that if I used a three-pronged scientific strategy that I am making up right now – I’ll put on my pointed, velvet wizard hat, examine some spilled chicken entrails, and stick a wet finger into the wind – I’ll be able to achieve a record of prognostication that will beat the hell out of Janet Yellen’s and Paul Krugman’s track records.

Any competent administration wouldn’t have scheduled the big “Joe has Conquered Inflation” party on the day the numbers were set to come out.  You know, just in case their previous record of going 0-for-435 in predicting their policy outcomes might be an omen of some kind.

But not Velcro Joe!  So there were the top Dem staffers and big shots, sitting in their party hats, ready to blow on their party horns, and kick some inflationary arse.  And then the numbers came out, and the market immediately dropped 1200 points. 

Cue the sad trombone. 

And the sad Imhotep Pelosi, who had the unenviable task of giving a rousing victory speech after Joe’s Big Idea had just mortifyingly flopped.  (Or, as political insiders call it, “pulled a Hillary.”)

Even in an audience full of hand-picked ringers – Dem polls, staffers, and other soul-less hacks – Pelosi’s speech was as flaccid as Eric Swalwell after Fang Fang fled back to the politburo. 

At one point she said, and I swear I am not making this up, “Mr. President, thank you for unifying and inspiring a vision of a stronger, fairer, safer future for all our children.  Your extraordinary leadership has made this glorious day possible.”

Naturally, this line was followed by the kind of silence you experience when dozens of people are simultaneously trying to fight back against the fact that they just threw up in the back of their mouths.  The same way that you are probably struggling right now, even though you only read those words.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, having spent most of the last 2300 years in the airless stillness of a crypt beneath an Egyptian pyramid, Nancy recognized that deathly silence.  And she raised her desiccated right hand, fixed her somnolent audience with her hideous rictus grin, and said, “That was an applause line.”

Ugh!

I’m no White House speech writer, but I’ve done my share of public speaking over the years, and even I know that it never works to demand applause or laughter for a line that was worthy of neither applause nor laughter.

I mean, can you imagine how off-putting it would be if after every time I came up with a creative new way to refer to the unbearable whiteness of Liz Warren with a #wemustneverstopmockingher tag line, or maybe an observation about how Eric Swallwell’s favorite rock song is “Wang Dang Sweet Fang Fang,” I said, “That was supposed to be a joke.  Now is the time when you must laugh.”

Okay, those are bad examples, because all of my Grandma Squanto and Flatulent Swallwell jokes are hilarious, and you would be unable to read my subsequent command to laugh, because of the tears of laughter already in your eyes.

But you get my point. The speeches were all terrible, and everyone in the audience was going through their own dark night of the soul, contemplating whether they’d sold their souls to the devil, and at the moment of their death, would they awaken to find themselves in a place that looked very much like the setting for Biden’s Reichstag speech?

Only with 8% less Hitler, and 9% more Satan?    

Finally, I’m not sure what to think about the mid-terms.  The MSM have done their best to dishearten us with their predictions of how surprisingly well many Dem candidates are doing in the polls, and the GOP seems willing (as always) to search for new ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

But my gut still tells me that there will be a decent red wave in November.  Partly because I think the polls are artificially favoring the Dems, but mostly because I can’t bring myself to believe that a majority of Americans want more of what Biden and his co-religionists are selling.

I know one thing: if I could have any job right now, it would be as a writer of GOP ads.  Because the main difficulty would be choosing from among the depthless ocean of sound bites, video clips and facts/data/statistics with which to illustrate the comprehensive disaster that the Dems have wrought.

Talk about an embarrassment of riches!  Do I cue up several dozen top Dems saying that they are totally down with defunding the police, followed by footage of cities being burned and people being assaulted and killed, followed immediately by each Dem pol later saying that they never wanted to defund the police? 

Do I just show video of homeless tent cities, poop-filled streets, smash-and-grab looting mobs, and the floods of illegals coming across the border?  Or prices for everything from food to gas to rent, pre- and post-Biden? 

Do I show video from Biden’s inauguration day executive orders – stop the wall, kill the pipeline and oil drilling – followed by the results?

Do I take a few clips from Hunter’s laptops and emails, showing the hookers and the blow and the “10% to the Big Guy” from the Chicoms?

Do I just run together a clip of Biden’s greatest hits (You ain’t black, dog-faced pony soldier, you know the thing, pandemic of the unvaccinated, the Afghanistan withdrawal was a success, inflation is transitory, illegal immigration is a gift, poor people are just as smart as white people, plus any given examples of word salad), followed by a black screen, with a voice-over of an Obama-esque voice actor reading his words, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up?”  

Or maybe I just show a video montage of randomly chosen footage of Brandon and Que Mala, followed by a black screen with the words, “It’s been a long 14 years, and it’s only been 86 weeks.”

Avenatti/ randomly chosen Venezuelan tossed off of Martha’s Vineyard 2024!

Our Maine visit is over, and a good time was had by all.  We met our friends in Portland and drove up to Mount Desert Island, and spent four days running around Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, and the surrounding small towns.

That’s a beautiful part of the country, and our hosts arranged for several trips into the park.   We watched a sunset from the top of Cadillac Mountain on Wednesday, spent most of Thursday on e-bikes riding the carriage trails helpfully laid out by Mr. Rockefeller a while back, and took a 5-mile hike with gorgeous views all around on Friday.

Between those excursions, we ate a lot of lobster, saw a serene Japanese garden, and wandered around Bar Harbor.  We spent our last half-day walking around Bangor, before our afternoon flight home.  We made an obligatory stop at Stephen King’s house, outside of his famous wrought-iron gate with bats and spiders worked into the design. 

I’ve enjoyed many of his books over the years, but I’ve had to separate the writer from the writing, since he’s shared his vitriolic political views. (Spoiler alert: he really hates us!) Still, he has kept a place and still lives part of the year in gritty little Bangor, so I like that about him, at least.

The natural beauty of Maine can really take your breath away.  Watching the sunset from Cadillac Mountain was especially gorgeous, and as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, a round of spontaneous applause rippled through the small crowd with whom we’d been watching.

That struck me as both poignant and surprising.  As a Christian, applauding the sunset felt both appropriate and comic: “Nice job with the lakes, mountain ridges and sunset, God!” 

But I wondered about – and felt a lot of affection for – the large number of atheists and agnostics I assume were in that appreciative crowd.  It seems so odd to applaud for a performance without a Performer.  “Nice job with that sunset, unreasoning and random Nature!”

Even as that gesture makes no intellectual sense to me, I find it heartening that most people instinctively intuit that there is Someone beyond that beauty, and tribute should naturally be paid.

One of the blessings of a vacation is being only intermittently aware of world events, politics and the media.  We caught only bits of tv, and I spent a few minutes checking email and surfing through the news.  But the juxtaposition of what our Maker has done with the Maine coastline and what our political class is doing with our society is disorienting, to say the least.

Here are the random bits of news I saw:

1. Some anonymous Democrat staffers are leaking a story that is apparently well known in Washington: Jerry Nadler frequently falls asleep during meetings, and when legislation is being created and discussed.

The tone of the story was critical, but I found myself wishing that more of those boneheads would follow his example.  How much misery would our country have been spared over the last interminable 18 months if all of our congress had just pulled a Rip Van Winkle in January of 2021?

Can you imagine if, the day before the Inauguration That Will Live in Infamy, Imhotep Pelosi would have pulled that sarcophagus lid over her head for a little shut-eye; Schumer would have noticed that there were no cameras around, and thus there was no reason for him to remain conscious; and Grandma Squanto Warren would have snuggled under her deerskin blanket and pulled her headdress down over her eyes so that she could rest them?  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

When they came stumbling out into the light this Labor Day, they would have woken to a country with still-functioning borders, $4 trillion less in national debt, and inflation at a Trumpy 2.5%.  Plus we’d be down two Cuomos and a Brian Stelter, and CNN+ would just be a terrible, hilarious dream. 

And a Joe Biden deep into REM sleep would be just as effective as he is now — If he were talking in his sleep, could he possible make less sense than he does when he’s awake? – and without all of the angry yelling.

A fella can dream, can’t he?

2. Speaking of the late President, I saw a few minutes of him giving a speech, and his mood has apparently not improved since his fire-and-brimstone Reichstag speech.  At one point he was literally shaking, and hollered at the top of his voice, “We beat big pharma!  We beat big pharma!”

I immediately thought that this means one of two things:  Either there will soon be no more medications in the pipeline to help me deal with the PTSD I expect to have if I manage to survive this administration, or Corn Pop had a big brother named Pharma Pop.

Fortunately, the Big Guy beat Big Pharma.

Probably with a bicycle chain.

3. Another day, I saw Brandon speaking in front of a blue backdrop that said, “Cancer Moonshot.”

 And I thought Good Lord!  Is Joe Biden going to give the moon cancer now?!

I know that it sounds unlikely, but look at his previous work. 

At the end of his presidency – or of the world, whichever comes first – we’ll have Weimar-level inflation, a nuclear-armed Iran, more illegals than citizens, more female males than male males, and sanctuary cities machine-gunning any approaching person who is darker than Liz Warren (#don’tstopmocking)

In light of all of that, does a carcinogenic moon sound that outrageous? 

4. Queen Elizabeth died at the age of 96, and like most people, when I first heard the news I thought, that’s too bad.  It’s not my country, and I don’t really get royalty, and she wasn’t exactly cut down in the flower of her youth.

But she seemed like a nice lady, with the adorableness that many old ladies achieve, with the cute hats and the good manners and the diminutive stature and the posture of a jumbo shrimp.

Plus she had a British band play The Star Spangled Banner after 9/11, and she’s had to put up with a lot of lunkheads in her family.  And I can’t think of anything offensive that she’s done, not least because she’s a traditional figurehead with no actual political power.

So imagine my surprise when I dipped into some media the next day and found out from many leftist commentators that I was wrong about the queen, and that she was actually an evil, racist, colonizing genocidal maniac!   

One of the raving loons who got the most attention is a Carnegie Mellon professor named Uju Anya, a ray of sunshine who was born in Nigeria, but inexplicably chooses to live in terrible, racist America. 

When news came out that Elizabeth was deathly ill, Uju tweeted that the queen ruled over “a thieving, raping, genocidal empire,” and hoped her death would be “excruciating.”  Then she doubled down after the death with more hateful celebration.

This dunce then professed to be “surprised” that so many Brits were offended by her obviously offensive statements.  She condescendingly explained that her tweets were meant to educate people, saying, “I am fundamentally a teacher.”

I guess she’s correct, in the sense that teaching people how NOT to behave is still “teaching.”  In that sense, she’s like AOC (who taught how NOT to make drinks correctly), or Andrew Cuomo (who taught how NOT to protect nursing home residents during a pandemic), or CAW CAW (who taught now NOT to break a glass ceiling).

How did so many leftists get to the point where they’d pour such bile on an inoffensive character like the queen in the hours before and after her death?  Even if you dislike somebody, would you not be able to restrain yourself and be civil, at least until after the burial?

I mean, all of us had a pretty low opinion of Joe Biden when he passed away – sometime during the Dem primaries in 2020 – but you didn’t see any of us running for the nearest camera and frothing at the mouth about how he should die an agonizing death.

But let me end on a happier note coming out of the UK.  One of Queen Elizabeth’s last acts was to greet the new British Prime Minister, Liz Truss.

I don’t know much about her, but Truss is supposed to be at least quasi-conservative.  One of her first official acts was to acknowledge that energy costs for British citizens are needlessly high, and that the UK will oversee “a new round of oil and gas licensing.” 

Responding to public opinion, she said that, “A moratorium on fracking will be lifted and planning permission can be sought where there is local support.”

Meanwhile, two days ago, Joe Biden got in bed with “environmental activist groups” – sorry for the repulsive, necrophilia imagery! – and agreed to stop oil and gas drilling on more than 58,000 acres of federal land.

Thanks, Brandon.  Couldn’t you just focus more on giving cancer to the moon, instead of making Putin richer and Americans poorer?

I didn’t think I’d ever entertain this idea, but maybe it’s time we consider reaching out to the Brits, apologizing for that 18^th century unpleasantness, and asking if we could be a colony again.

Avenatti/ King Charles III, 2024!

I’ve never enjoyed those social media posts people use to idealize their lives, and generate envy in their viewers.   

You know the types: “Here we are on the Amalfi Coast, with our two daughters.  The one leaning on the Ferrari is the supermodel; the one in the back seat is the one who just got the Fullbright.  We’re about to drive down to the dock and take a ferry to the island in the azure waters of the bay – the second one on the right.  We just bought that.”

Having said that, I know that I’m sidling up to being obnoxious, but I spent this past weekend with some luminaries at CO’s place in Boca, and tomorrow my wife and I are going up to Maine for a week visiting great friends on Mount Desert Island.

I know.  I feel sheepish even writing about this.  But at the risk of sounding like one of “those people,” I’ve got to share just a little.

The Economics Correspondent (Chris Silber) came from the West Coast, and the Correspondent for Conspiracy Theories and Ill-Advised Speculation and his wife were there, along with CO and the COW. We had a great dinner, and Chris taught me a little about good wine, two bottles of which he had brought with him.

I learned about corkage fees, and the five-tier Bordeaux Wine Classification that was created in 1855 and is still used today.  CO and the COW were charming and gracious, and Mark told some stories about from his and CO’s high school days – which are naturally classified, and disclosure of which would place my life in danger.

After dinner we retired to CO’s house, where Sandra joined us, and we talked into the night on topics as diverse as politics (foreign and domestic), business strategy, stories of businessmen who torpedoed their careers with sex scandals, and little-known horror movies.  

The next day the six of us went on a boat-ride with two other guys, both of whom were also refugees from the People’s Republic of Chicago.  One of them lives on the intercoastal, and (as you may have guessed) owns a beautiful boat, which we took through a watery corridor of amazing houses and then out onto the ocean.  After a seaside lunch, we headed back to home base on the intercoastal again.

A highlight of the return trip was passing another large boat with a dozen or more young women in small bikinis on deck.  The males on our vessel noticed.  Then the females on our vessel pointed out the giant flag on the other boat: “Trump.  He’ll Be Back!”

And then we males said, “Oh yeah.  A flag.”  And we commented on the intelligence and good character of the young women on that boat.

Strangely enough, as we were departing, the one police boat on the water weaved through 40 other boats and boarded the one with the be-thonged Trump fans on it.  What are the odds? 

Insert your own “checking for flotation devices” joke here.

I couldn’t stay for the live music portion of Saturday evening, but am told that a grand time was had by all. 

I’d like to thank the lovely and gracious COW, and the equally gracious and almost as lovely CO, along with Chris, Mark, Sandra, Alan and Captain Ron for an entertaining and enlightening weekend.  I was always the least cultured and intelligent person in the room, but that meant that I could improve myself by soaking up the conversation and the culture from those around me!

I can’t leave town – or end this column – without commenting on Biden’s horrendous speech/tirade from last Thursday. 

Everyone has mentioned the terrible visuals, and so will I.  But the content was even worse.

The over-the-top demonization of his opponents would only work for the hardest of hard-core lefties.  And since that group makes up only a small sliver of the population (thank a merciful God), that negativity was a very bad choice.

He also pegged the hypocrisy meter about 20 times during the speech: 

“Don’t be angry!” he shouted, angrily.

“The other side loves hatred and darkness!” he snarled hatefully, from a circle of light surrounded by ominous darkness, in front of a brick wall where a bunch of Aztec warriors had apparently just ensured a good harvest by opening the carotid arteries of a thousand captured children.

“You can’t love your country only when you win!” hollered the guy representing the party who insists that Gore won in 2000, CAW CAW won in 2016, and Stacey Abrams is the legitimate governor of Georgia and the President of Earth. 

More seriously, we are going to have to force Brandon to define exactly who he means by MAGA Republicans.  (Not that WE don’t know who he means: everyone except Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and several dozen RINOs who hate Republicans.) 

Because after making a few rhetorical throat-clearing gestures over the last month or so – “Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans are MAGA…” – he’s slid straight into vague defamation about “extreme ideology, not respecting the constitution or the rule of law, etc.”

But if you listen to the few specifics he offers – being pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, wanting a border – you realize that he is smearing 99% of Republicans, and around 70% of the entire country. 

After the speech, you knew how badly it had gone by watching the MSM trying to downplay or deny its ugliness. It was especially painful to watch poor KJP – she might be inept at her job, but she is attracted to women, so behold the historicity! –struggle to insist that the speech was both hunky AND dory. 

I especially like her – and the rest of the MSM’s – insistence that the speech was NOT political.

Here’s an actual quote from the speech, which I am not making up: “We need everyone to do their part, so speak up, speak out, get engaged, vote, vote, vote!”

Get it?  You all need to get out there and vote, vote VOTE!!! … a-politically.

And then there were the visuals.  Oh, the visuals! 

A pulsing, angry, emotionally “hot” red color palette, especially when an angry old man is set to deliver a relentlessly angry speech?

Though, come to think of it, in light of Biden’s economic policies, red was the appropriate color.

And in light of his abortion policies, red was the appropriate color. 

And in light of the color of the faces of right-thinking Americans if they tried to watch that travesty, red was the appropriate color. 

And I know there’s at least one Democrat pol to whom all of that over-saturated red appealed to.

That’s right: Lizzie Warren.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

I kid Grandma Squanto.  But in reality, her native coloring WAS represented in that eerie tableaux. 

Remember the glowing white gloves on the two Marines in the shadows behind Biden….

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the Democrats’ media-savvy brain trust got together and came up with those optics:   

Flunky #1:  So listen, I was thinking of a setting for Biden’s big speech.  How about Independence Hall?

Flunky #2: Ugh.  I bet those MAGA types just love the name of that place.  Why couldn’t the Founders have built Dependence Hall?

Flunky #1: HA!  The mouth-breathing deplorables would have torn the place down immediately.

Flunky #3: Hey, Flunky #2, did you just capitalize “Founders?”

Flunky #2: What?  No!  I’m speaking, not writing.  We don’t capitalize words when we speak.

Flunky #3: Oh yeah?  What about every time we say, “Racism?”

Flunky #1: Or “Sexism?”

Flunky #3: Or “Pay your Fair Share?”

Flunky #2: Okay, okay, point taken.  But I was certainly not capitalizing the “Founders.”

Flunky #3: I hope not.  Bunch of slave-holding, capitalist, gun fetishizers!

Flunky #1: Can we get back on track here?  Does Independence Hall work for everyone?

Flunky #3: Okay, but we’ve got to light it in some dramatic way, so that nobody will recognize it, and actually think about [shudder] “independence.”

Flunky #2 (after a contemplative pause): I’ve got it.  Let’s base the lighting on Albert Speer’s drawings of Hitler’s planned office in the remodeled Reichstag if they’d won the war!

Flunky #3: I like that!  It will appeal to the MAGA yokels on a subconscious level.

Flunky #2 (nodding): And to our voters on a conscious level, since they’re always up for a socialist workers’ party vibe.

Flunky #1: That sounds good, but I think it still needs something more.  (He doodles on his “Workers of the World Unite!” embossed note pad for a moment.)  I’ve got it!  We’ll start with Hitler’s office, but then mix in a little of Satan’s vacation home!

Flunky #2: Ooh, let’s run with that. 

Flunky #3: What would you think about bringing him on with “Hail to the Chief,” but then fading that into “Sympathy for the Devil?”

Flunky #1: Yeah, everybody loves the Stones!  And how about we replace the presidential seal on the podium with a little Dante, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here”?

Flunky #2: I don’t like it… (he pauses for a beat)… I LOVE it!

 And, scene.

Avenatti/Lucifer 2024!