Martin Simpson

Well, obviously my wizard hat is on the fritz, my crystal brain has some kind of wiring issue, and my gut has betrayed me.  I expected a red tsunami, and we all know how that worked out.  

Many conservatives are now looking for someone to blame, and there are a lot of candidates.  Feckless Rinos, lying Dems, Trump, bad GOP candidates, a corrupt MSM, suspicious poll malfunctions in AZ, pollsters who couldn’t pick the winner of a one-horse race, and on and on.

There’s probably some truth in each theory, because there is plenty of blame to go around.

For example, many have pointed to bad GOP candidates, and said Walker and Oz lost (though Walker could still prevail in a run-off) because of their manifest flaws.  And yes, if the GOP had nominated better candidates in those cases, they may have won.   

But are Rafael Warnock (a phony, unqualified and racist “pastor” who preaches racism while he’s also evicting poor blacks from his shady, church-owned real estate) and John Fetterwoman (a hulking combination of life-long failure, leftist extremism and crippling cognitive dysfunction) better candidates?

The latter is especially hard to understand, because PA has voted for years like a purple state, which means that a moderate – on either side – should get way more votes than an extremist on either side.  In which case a mushy moderate quasi-conservative like Oz should get a lot more votes than a far-lefty like Fetterman, even without the stroke.

And if bad candidate quality were the reason so many GOPers lost, how can we make sense of Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon and Lee Zeldin all losing to absolutely awful candidates?

Yes, the pollsters were terrible, again!  But for the first time, they were terrible in the opposite direction, over-estimating GOP performance, as in races where Bolduc, Zeldin, and Dixon were supposed to be tied, but lost by close to double-digits.    

There is so much in this election to be confused by.  But let me suggest a theory that none of us really want to hear: Many, many of our fellow citizens voted for Democrats, despite claiming to dislike the policies that those Democrats have been pushing, and while fully knowing that those Dems have pushed those policies. 

I know.  That doesn’t make sense to me either.  But hear me out.      

It’s a core part of human nature to want to blame the other side when things aren’t going well.  In years when the federal government is split, with one party holding the White House and the other in charge of congress, partisans easily do that.

Conservatives with a GOP congress blame the Dem president for everything bad, and lefties with their president and a GOP congress blame the congress, and vice versa. It’s an easy and a natural argument to make, for both sides.

But for the last two years, one party has been in total control of the government. And for the last year and a half, including all the way up through election eve, the vast majority of American voters have told pollsters that they hate the results.

Biden’s overall presidential approval is in the low 40s (among the lowest of the last half century), and his approval by independents – the group that has determined election outcomes in the last half-dozen cycles — on election eve was 28%!  The other most reliable election outcome predictor is the right track/wrong track number, and that is around 33/66 – again, one of the lowest recorded numbers in more than half a century! 

Those two numbers alone should guarantee a disastrous outcome for the president’s party.  When you add the fact that the Dems have had total control of the WH and congress, you remove the only reasonable counter-argument for why they would get the slap on the wrist they got, rather than the Tyson-ian beat-down that those numbers should portend.

Tens of millions said that the biggest issues for them were inflation, the economy, crime and the border.  And then many of them voted for the party and the politicians who have demonstrably increased inflation, harmed the economy, increased crime and flooded the country with illegals by opening the border. 

After a couple days to sift through the data, I still don’t understand it.   I’m going to be interested to see what smart people on our side come up with in terms of analysis or explanation, but in the meantime, I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that millions of people who are disgusted by Dem policies gave them only the mildest of rebukes.

But the Simpson coat of arms has a Latin motto on it, which I am not making up:  Nil desperandum.  Which means “never despair.”

And even though these are the times that try cautious optimists’ cautious optimism, let’s look at the silver linings on Tuesday’s gray cloud.

Three of the most obnoxious Democrat candidates were soundly thrashed on Tuesday.  President of Earth Stacy Abrams is once again Governor of Nowhere, Beta O’Rourke became a three-time loser by losing a butt-kicking contest to a man in a wheelchair, and Charlie lost to RDS by 20 points!  (I could have lost by less than that, and my closing statement would have been, “Please vote for Ron DeSantis.”) 

For the first time in over 40 years, the congressional leader of a party — Sean Patrick Maloney – lost his seat.  To make that even sweeter, his seat was in a blue district in the blue state of NY! 

Barring some real long-shot reversals, we are going to have a majority in the house, which means that we’ll have a check on Biden’s worst impulses, and in January we’ll get to see the Speaker’s gavel torn from the desiccated mummy hands of Imhotep Pelosi.

And then there’s Florida, the state the tsunami did not forget. 

How do I feel about my adopted home state of over 30 years, you ask?

If I may paraphrase the Canadian national anthem, “O, Florida, our home and native land, true patriot love, in all thy sons command!”

Not only did RDS and Rubio beat their opponents like rented mules, we also turned Miami-Dade red, added 4 house seats (single-handedly giving the GOP a big chunk of their congressional margin of victory nationwide), and achieved super-majorities in both state houses. 

After barely edging out a meth-head, gay-hooker-enthusiast opponent by only 30K votes four years ago, DeSantis won this time by 1.5 million votes! 

THIS is how the entire national election was supposed to look.   

Which brings me to some closing thoughts on a debate that has begun among those of us at CO nation, and around the country: Trump or DeSantis in ‘24?

Since this column is getting long, I’m going to save my thoughts on that for Monday.

I closed my column this past Monday by referring to our long, dark night of the political soul, and hoping that the dawn would begin to break on Wednesday. 

Unfortunately, the demented Fetter-biden staggered out of his fetid cave and saw his shadow.  So while I still believe that springtime is coming, it looks like we may have two more years of winter.

In the meantime, we’ve got to gather around our digital campfire, bind our political wounds and comfort each other, and keep that fire burning until 2024.

And with the powers vested in me by the great and powerful CO, allow me to deputize you all as honorary Simpsons (malfunctioning wizard hats and all) with these solemn words:

Nil desperandum, people!

As we face the long-awaited election, I have two ways of looking at the various races: with my gut instinct, and with my brain.  Both are giving me contradictory input.

My brain tells me to try to honestly consider poll numbers, because the human tendency toward confirmation bias – I’ll seek out and cling to info that I want to be true, and overlook/dismiss info that I don’t want to believe – leads to self-deception and heartbreak.

But my trusty martino oblongata also tells me to take all polls with an entire shaker of salt.  The national polls over the last three cycles (2016, 2018 and 2020) have been more inaccurate than I remember them ever being before, so it’s hard to put a lot of faith in them.  

Many of them are obviously biased, partisan push-polls, meant to shape the election rather than accurately report on it.  Others that might not be consciously partisan are either sloppy or lazy, or both, as when they report on the opinions of three different groups – all adults, registered voters, and likely voters – as if they were interchangeable.

As I understand it, those groups consistently behave differently.  “All adults” are always farther to the left than “registered voters,” who are farther to the left than “likely voters.”  In the last three cycles, the “likely voters” have been much closer to the final outcome than any other groups, which makes perfect sense. 

Given that, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why any pollster would even survey the first groups or cite their opinions within the last week or two before the elections.  And yet many of them do.

For example, on Friday I was watching Bret Baier reporting on a Fox News poll, and the storyline was that Oz and Walker have almost caught up to Fetterman and Warnock.  Which struck me as strange, since I’ve been reading that both GOP hopefuls have had slight leads for over a week.

Then I looked at the bottom of the screen, and saw it: “poll of registered voters, taken between 10/26 and 10/30.”

So the poll was between 5 – 9 days old – in a fast-moving environment in which both states have been trending toward the GOP – and surveyed registered voters, whom Fox knows to be skewed to the left by at least a couple of points.

Polls like that – the old saying goes – should not just be put aside lightly.  They should be thrown with great force. 

As an outsider and an amateur, my impression is that the Real Clear Politics method – they aggregate a bunch of polls and report on the average of them – is probably more accurate than most individual polls.  At least they give a clearer sense of the trends in public opinion.

But as soon as I’ve said that, it sticks in my craw.  Why should we toss a bunch of polls that we know are outliers and very likely skewed into the entire data base?  Wouldn’t doing so necessarily erode the accuracy of the aggregate?

So I looked at an intriguing page on the Real Clear Politics site, which showed a ranking of the track records of the biggest multi-state polling outfits, in two separate listings.  One displayed the accuracy of pollsters in just the 2020 presidential and senate races, and the other displayed the average accuracy of the pollsters in the presidential, senate and governors’ races, in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 races.

Both seem valuable to me.  The 2020 ranking shows the accuracy of pollsters last time around, and the other one shows who was best over the last three cycles.

The accuracy rates varied a little, but there is also a lot of consistency in both lists.  Of the 18 pollsters ranked on the 2020 list, Monmouth was 18^th, Quinnipiac was 17^th, and CNN was 16^th.  Of the 23 on the three-election averages, Quinnipiac was last, Monmouth was 18^th, and CNN was 15^th. 

So why are those pollsters even in business anymore?  Why would anyone take them seriously when they screwed the pooch consistently, over three cycles?

There are a lot of familiar names in the bottom half of both lists: NY Times, Marist, ABC, Fox and PPP.  

Four pollsters were in the top 5 of both lists:  Trafalgar (tied for #1 in 2020, #5 on average), Susquehanna (tied for #1 in 2020, 4^th on average), Insider Advantage (#3 in 2020, # 2 on average) and UMass Lowell (#5 in 2020, #3 on average). 

So my brain says to pay attention to the best of the polls, and the RCP averages.

But my gut says to tweak that data , to take into account what I feel confident about, even though I can’t put any numbers to it.

For example, I know that the Dems have been metaphysically horrible over the last two years.  They’ve screwed up foreign policy, domestic policy, the border, the economy, and covid response.  Biden is dead, Que Mala is brain dead, Mayor Pete likes dudes but is lousy at his job, Kewpie Doll KJP likes chicks but is lousy at her job.

The entire Dem leadership is a drunken Halloween party gone terribly wrong: a Mummy (Pelosi), an Indian (#wemustneverstopmockingher), a guy in drag (“Admiral” Rachel/Richard Levine) a Valley Girl cheerleader (AOC), the Creature from the African-American Lagoon (Maxine Waters), Lurch (Kerry), drunk uncle (Schumer), Sea Biscuit (Hillary), the Thing (Jerry Nadler), a human whoopie cushion (Eric Swallwell), the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse (the Squad), and Michael Strahan in drag (Stacy Abrams).    

So these people cannot (please God!) hold on to either house of Congress.

Also, I’m not convinced that all of the GOP momentum in the last several weeks is what the pundits say it is: a significant shift in public opinion, right at the end.  Their candidates have been bad all along, and the state of the nation now is only slightly worse than it was in the spring and summer.

So my gut tells me that the latest polls are finally beginning to show a more accurate version of reality, mostly because a poll’s reliability is judged by its final numbers, rather than its numbers from earlier in the year.  

In addition, late deciders generally break against the incumbent.  Especially in this cycle, when virtually nothing has been an October-surprise-style news story that worked in Dems’ favor, I would expect a significant GOP advantage in late-breakers.

Finally, while the accuracy of polls has been questionable at best, they’ve been consistent in one way: they’ve always erred in favor of Dems.  I recently read that on average, polls have given Dems 3-4 points more than they actually got in recent elections. 

So my hunch is that I should add 3-4 points in most races to the GOP contender.  If that hunch is accurate, then the neck-and-neck races are actually GOP wins, and the slightly trailing GOP contenders might actually be neck-and-neck.

Predictions

While I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have my crystal brain (hat tip to Adam Carolla) and my purple-felt-embossed-with-gold-stars wizard hat, which I’ve retrieved from its bullet-proof Lucite case just for this occasion.

As soon as I lowered the wizard hat onto my head, the mists parted, and I realized that my gut is more optimistic than my brain. So here are my slightly bi-polar predictions:

Senate:  

Brain – GOP ends up with 53 seats; Gut – GOP gets 55 or even 56. 

GA and PA – Walker and Oz are mediocre candidates, but Warnock and Fetterman are worse

OH, NC and FL – once GOP leaners are now comfortably Red

NV and WI – once tight races are now R + 2-3

NH, AZ and WA – formerly long-shots, Bolduc and McMasters are only down 1, and Smiley is only down 3.  If the polls are off by 2-3, two of these three races – possibly all 3! — could all break our way.

House:

RCP gives a range of between 14 – 48 GOP pick-ups, which is a comically large spread.  It’s like saying, “Next year we’ll earn between $100 and $1 million.”

Considering that the Dems are throwing money into what should be deep blue districts, and the GOP is too, it doesn’t make sense that the wave won’t at least double the low-end estimate. 

Brain – we pick up 34 seats; Gut – we pick up 40

Governors:

Brain – GOP picks up 3 seats; Gut – we pick up 5, and possibly even 6 or 7

Kemp stomps Abrams in GA, DeSantis drives all before him in FL, Abbott savors the lamentations of the Beta male in TX. 

Lake (AZ), Michels (WI) and Lombardo (NV) win by more than the narrow margins that RCP has for them.  

RCP has Whitmer winning by 4 in MI and Hochul winning by 6 in NY, but the former is the Wicked Witch of the Mid-West, and the latter is the Wicked Witch of the Northeast, and my gut tells me that we may just drop a house on both of them.

RCP has Grisham (D) in NM and Walz (D) in MN both up by 4.  But if my adjustment of adding 3-4 to most GOP candidates’ totals is accurate, my gut says we’ve got a puncher’s chance.

Okay folks, it’s time to cowboy up, and prove my gut right.    

Get out there and vote!

It’s been a long, dark night of the soul, but tomorrow the dawn can begin to break.

Since every sensible writer in Christendom is talking about Tuesday’s election races – and since I’m not smart enough to come up with anything they’re not already chewing over – I thought I’d wrong-foot you, and discuss two other stories.

First, I’d like to give a sincere tip of the hat to my second-favorite Supreme Court Justice – no one can top Clarence Thomas for me – Samuel Alito. 

Regular readers may remember that I wrote a couple of columns in June and July about the clear thought and strong writing from Thomas and Alito in the guns and abortion cases.  (If you are interested and haven’t read them, you can go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com and scroll back to the last column in June and first in July.)

Now we come to this week’s court hearings of affirmative action cases, and my heroes are back at it again.  Both justices reduced the pro-AA lawyers to stuttering incoherence, though to be fair to those lawyers, they were trying to defend an argument that is logically and morally indefensible.

At one point, Alito asked how the discriminating colleges decide what metrics to use for determining ethnic heritage.  The poor lawyer had to admit that they rely on self-reporting from the students.  Then Alito took him down a rhetorical path filled with roots to trip on and rakes to step on.

And the lawyer tripped over and stepped on every one.

Alito asked if having just one minority grandparent would allow a student to claim minority status.  The lawyer said, “Yes, we rely on self-reporting.”  Alito said, “All right.  One great grandparent.”

The lawyer sounded like someone explaining how boys can really be girls.  “If that person believe that that is the accurate expression of their identity…”

Alito said, “One great-great grandparent.  Are you going to make me go on?”

And the point was made: the current discriminatory system is arbitrary and irrational, and wide open to illegitimate manipulation.

And then he brought up the mastodon in the room. 

As in, the Pale Powhatan.  The Albino Apache.  The Translucent Tonto. Grandma Squanto herself.

That’s right, people: Slammin’ Sammy Alito went full Lizzie Warren on their arses! 

“It’s family lore that we have an ancestor who was an American Indian.”  [The lawyer stammers something about, “in that circumstance…it would not be accurate…”]  “Well, I identify as an American Indian because I’ve always been told that some ancestor back in the old days was an Indian.”

The lawyer finally had no other option than the last resort of the leftist official: tell the truth.  “Yes, so in that circumstance, it would be very unlikely that that person was telling the truth.”

Yes!  Yes it would. 

Finally, and maybe for the first time ever, Elizabeth Warren’s face must have been really and truly red!

#alitomustneverstopmockingher

On another subject, I have one other note to add to my recent thoughts on the Paul Pelosi attack. 

Pelosi’s attacker was mentally ill and in this country illegally, in a Democrat-run state that has been obsessed with making sure that the police are powerless to stop people in both categories from committing crimes.  That obsession made the attack possible.

To be clear, I am very sorry that Pelosi was attacked, and I pray that he will make a full recovery.  Any injury at 82 is scary, and being struck by a hammer is serious no matter the age or condition of the victim.

But as I’ve written before, it would be a much fairer world if the people who pay the price for the Democrats’ horrendous crime-encouraging policies were the Dem politicians and the most committed of their supporters.   

If they insist that illegals must be allowed to flood the country, those illegals should be funneled straight to deep blue areas at least, and straight into the yards and houses of the rich/extremist Dems if possible.  If car jackers are to be immediately released, release them as close to the garages of Dem pols as possible. 

If recidivist, predatory criminals must be put back on the streets, put them on streets as close to the pro-criminal Dems as possible, so that their future victims will be those who worked hardest to get them back on the street in the first place.

If not for the actions of his wife and her political party, Paul Pelosi would never have been attacked, because the whack-job, hemp-peddling BLM enthusiast would have been deported back to his native  Canada.

Which would have been a win-win.  First because he would have been Black-Face Trudeau’s problem.  (And that is one fascist creep who deserves more problems.)

Second, because the whack-job would have inflicted on the world much less of his gross nudism, since freezing temperatures are not congenial for uncovered genitalia.  Especially male genitalia, which I am reliably informed, begins to mimic female genitalia, in terms of becoming… um… internalized.

(If you just thought of California Governor Newsom, there’s a reason.)

As we head into this weekend – which we pray will be the last one before our partial deliverance from the gloom, despair and cultural sclerosis of malevolent leftist rule – I thought it might be fun to see what CO nation’s predictions for Tuesday are.

I haven’t run this by the Great and Powerful CO, but maybe he can put up a thread where we can all post our predictions?

I know:  it feels like making overly sunny predictions might somehow jinx us, and we don’t know how much we can trust any polls after they’ve been so erratic and flawed in the last several cycles.  And in close contests, how confident are we that there won’t be cheating and shenanigans?

But I’d like to hear what you all are expecting on Tuesday.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, these prayers aren’t going to pray themselves, and this bourbon isn’t going to drink itself, and I’ve got a column of my predictions to write by Monday morning.

It’s been a long 16 years under Brandon the Incontinent, but Tuesday is coming.

I know I just posted a column yesterday, but multiple readers asked for my take on the Pelosi attack story, and I’m always flattered that anyone cares enough to ask.  (I realize that you’ve got many choices in deliverers of political analysis and snarkery, and I appreciate that you follow the CO site and read my columns, too!)

So here are my trigger-warning-accompanied thoughts on the MSM coverage of the Pelosi attacker, which I have tried to soften and sugarcoat for my high-class, clean-cut readers:

Our “journalists” are mostly degenerate scumbags.  

They are nothing more than mendacious, ethically desiccated hacks in service of leftist causes generally, and the Democrat party specifically.  I don’t know how they can look at themselves in the mirror, or sleep at night, or live with their choice of profession.

I’d sooner trust one of Hunter Biden’s bargain-basement hookers if she told me that she loved me before I’d trust anything coming out of the mouth of any reporter at any of the networks.

When I think of the high ethical standards typical of our partisan press, I always think of Nina Burleigh, a former White House correspondent for Time magazine covering the Clinton White House, as well as a frequent contributor to every leftist rag you’ve ever heard of (HuffPo, Salon, Rolling Stone, WaPo, NYT, Salon, Slate, etc.).

Burleigh’s most significant contribution to the history of journalism is her archetypally perfect summary of the viewpoint of an enlightened leftist journalist.  To wit, her infamous quote, which I swear I am not making up, after covering Clinton’s rape-tastic gropey-ness for 8 years: “I’d be happy to give him a b*** j** just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”   

So, yeah.  That’s the kind of strong, empowered lefty feminist I think of when I think of our political press.

But in the 72 hours since Paul Pelosi was attacked, the desperate MSM has behaved in ways that make “Knee-Pad Nina” (nickname copyright by me, right now) look like the Virgin Queen of Chastity Island.

Never mind that leftist pols and celebrities have been spouting inflammatory, violence-urging language for the last 6 years straight.  (You can give examples as well as I can: Melting-Face Maxine Waters’ exhortation to “get in their faces in public,” Tim Ryan’s “we’ve got to kill MAGA supporters and target them,” Pelosi’s daughter and a dozen other Dems’ variations on “Rand Paul’s attacker was right,” slutty old Madonna’s fantasies about blowing up the Trump White House, etc. and etc.) 

And never mind that a bunch of leftist dimwits and mentally ill people have acted on their inflammatory language: 

• The Bernie bro who shot up the GOP softball game and nearly killed Steve Scalise.
• The afore-mentioned would-be murderer of Rand Paul.
• The disturbed young man who travelled cross-country to try to kill Justice Kavanaugh. 
• The adult idiot who a month ago murdered a young Republican by running him down with his car because he thought the kid was – in Biden’s favorite phrase, after “mmm, your hair smells good, little girl” – “a Republican extremist.”
• The dozens of anonymous, cowardly infanticide-enthusiasts who have torched or vandalized many pregnancy centers.
• The mobs of cowardly antifa and BLM rioters who murdered, looted, vandalized and torched their way through many American cities for months in 2020.  

Again, I could go on with more examples, and so could you.

Even though the MSM knew the pattern of commonplace and widespread leftist political violence –and the comparatively extremely rare pattern of right-wing political violence – within 24 hours of the attack on Pelosi, they had jumped to the immediate conclusion that the attacker was a right-wing MAGA extremist.

Here is the evidence they had to go on:

He is a long-time resident of Berkeley, California.  (Yes, THAT Berkeley.  The hotbed of MAGA fanatics.)

He is a maker of hemp “jewelry.”  (I’m looking at my hemp wedding ring right now.  It says, “Co-Exist.”)

He is a nudist.  (I don’t have to tell you about those Heritage Foundation dinners, with their “no tie, all tail” debauchery.)

He most recently lived in an old hippie school bus covered with mostly crazy and/or left-wing slogans, parked outside his ex-girlfriend’s house.  (I’m sure that describes the living arrangements of most of CO nation.)

His girlfriend goes by “Gypsy.” (The top three most popular conservative women’s nicknames?  Gypsy, Saffron, and Fang Fang.  True story.)

Look, we all know that this guy is a drugged-out and/or mentally ill loon, or both.  To the extent that he has any coherent political thoughts at all, they are more left-wing than right, but they are irrelevant to his depraved and violent actions.

The leftist media spinners’ brigade knows that too. But they’ve sold their souls to a failed and destructive ideology, and they’re desperate to turn the tide of the red wave that is going to hit them (please God!) next Tuesday. 

And just when we think they’ve sunk as low as they can go, they take a hit of mouthwash, strap on the knee pads, and try to sell the story of the right-wing, Berkeley-ite, nudist hemp-peddler whose deranged behavior was caused by his devotion to Trump.

Those poor, benighted idiots are in an even worse position than Nina Burleigh was in.  Because they’ve debased themselves completely, and they STILL got Hillary-slapped by the Dobbs decision.

And now they’re facing what looks like the loss of both houses of congress, with their dignity tattered, and their reputation left in ruins.

And a really bad taste in their mouths.

Avenatti/Knee-Pad Nina, 2024!

I have four quick stories to comment on today.

First up, Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter makes me very happy.  He’s got his quirks, and he’s no conservative.  I think he paid too much, and he’s going to be battling uphill against an entire lefty media machine in everything he does there.

But he appreciates freedom of speech, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is, so I’m rooting for him. 

I normally don’t celebrate people losing their jobs, but I will happily make some exceptions:  leftist politicians, some lawyers, Tony Fauci. 

But nobody deserved a good firing more than the top dogs at Twitter, and their smug little mini-me woke censors/employees.  Musk immediately fired CEO Pagan Narwhal (I’m not going to waste time looking up his actual name), and the arrogant bully in charge of their Big Brother speech suppression team, Vijaya Gadde.  (Oddly enough, I think “Vijaya” is Hindi for “John,” and her last name is pronounced “Gotti.”) (Or it should be.)

I loved reading all of the pseudo-brave tweets that a parade of hateful lefties posted after Musk took over, to the effect of, “I’ll stay on here speaking truth to power until Fuhrer Musk throws me off!”

Their clueless obliviousness is inspiring!  After they’ve spent years censoring and cancelling everyone who disagrees with them, they are dumb enough to: 1. Act morally outraged at the prospect of being given the same treatment, and 2. Not understand that our side is not like them, and won’t kick them off. 

We don’t want to silence people who disagree with us.  We actually like a free marketplace of ideas, and a healthy debate.  Their ideas have been failing since 1917, when the Russians first established a Marxist theocracy, and we like nothing better than watching them expound and expose their self-refuting ideas repeatedly.

And to the extent that some of our beliefs and ideas are wrong – and because we’re human, that will regularly be the case – a vigorous back-and-forth will help us discover the error of our ways.  And then we’ll trim our sails and change course accordingly. 

In the meantime, it’s fun to watch the squealing of the wokesters, as they prepare to depart.  Don’t let the door hit you on your non-binary butts, kids!

2. The lead-up to the mid-terms is getting more and more enjoyable.  

I know that the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) will try to get away with as much cheating, fraud and propaganda as they can, but the last 21 months of their total control have been so horrific that I don’t think they can escape the well-deserved whipping they’ve got coming.

It’s especially satisfying to see the way they’ve so misjudged the most important issues to most Americans.  In the leftist bubble – which must prevent any independent thought from escaping more than a black hole prevents light from escaping — the most pressing issues are pronouns, trans-ing as many kids as possible, January 6^th, and abortion.

They can’t believe what a non-event their January 6^th show trials have been.  They really seem not to know that regular people watched leftist mobs vandalize and destroy thousands of buildings and assault thousands of people all over the country – doing literally billions of dollars of damage, and killing several dozen innocent citizens – for over half a year in 2020.

Compared to that, the vast majority of Americans recognize that several hundred yahoos acting like idiots and doing some damage during a three-hour mini-riot at the capitol is a bad thing.  But when they hear it called worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, they roll their eyes and turn the channel.

Thus fewer Americans tuned in for the 1/6 clown show than watched the semi-final Korean soccer league match between Busan and Incheon.  (Go Snow Dragons!)

In normal America, most people laugh at those who declare their own pronouns, and are befuddled by the obsession over the idea that there are dozens of genders. 

When I asked my college students what all of the elements of “LGBTQIA+” even stood for, not one of them could give me a straight answer.

Boom!  Dad joke, when you least expect it!  

3. After the Fetterman debate debacle, I need to know about Pennsylvanians and how they vote, in order to understand how that Herman Munster with a goiter got to be their senate nominee in the first place. 

And it has nothing to do with the stroke.  God bless him, and I hope he recovers.

But he had a terrible resume before that.  As I understood it, he was the mayor of Braddock, a very small, very poor town in PA.  Less than 2000 people live there, and he won his first term as mayor by receiving 149 votes – one more than his rival.

He stayed for three terms, during which time the town lost about 1/3 of its population.  Unemployment and crime both went up.  He continually failed to pay his own taxes, and ended up with more than 30 tax liens, and was sued by the school district twice.  He also was a serial no-show at council meetings, skipping at least 53 of the supposedly compulsory sessions.  

His mayoral salary was $150 per month.  He had a roof over his head only because his mom and dad gave him a $50k yearly allowance until he was 49 years old, and his sister sold him a house for $1.

His wealthy parents sent him to Harvard, but he was basically a failure in life until he was almost 50.

Then he got elected lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania.

How?!  Seriously, who did he defeat to win that position?

Then he somehow won the Dem senate primary this year, AFTER he had his stroke.  Again: how?  He was a complete failure, with far-left views, before the stroke. 

Afterwards, he was a complete failure with far-left views who couldn’t think clearly or say things.

How would you like to be the person he beat in the primary?  That guy had to be sitting in a bar, drinking with both hands while the tv behind the bar showed Fetterman’s forensic Gotterdammerung (I’m loving German!) with Dr. Oz.

If his friends are anything like my cousins, they’d be mocking him the whole time.  “HA! That bumbling dope beat you!”

Seriously.  There are 13 million people in PA, and they only have two US Senators.  How could the Dems not find anyone more qualified to run than John freaking Fetterman?!    

4. Let me end with one of my favorite topics: a criminal getting what’s coming to him story.

This one comes from Arkansas, where just after midnight on October 13^th, cops spotted a moron who they later identified as 38-year-old Christopher Gaylor driving a motorcycle with no license plate on it.  They later learned that his license was suspended, and the bike was unregistered and uninsured.

When they hit their lights, he took off, leading them on a chase that topped out at 100 mph, before he reached a residential area and dropped the bike and ran.  The cops pursued him on foot, and one of them hit him with a taser.

Hilariously, Gaylor was somehow carrying a gallon of gas in his backpack, and when the taser hit that, he exploded in a fireball.  He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, so if you can find the video online, it’s worth watching. 

I recommend that you get some popcorn, and watch it with the Benny Hill theme song playing.   After the initial explosion, he gets up and runs a few steps, then executes a pretty good example of the old “stop, drop and roll” routine.

Unfortunately for him, that doesn’t put out the fire, so it becomes more of a “stop, drop, roll and set some of the surrounding grass on fire” situation.

Fortunately for him, the cops grabbed a fire extinguisher and doused him a few moments later.    

The RedState story called Gaylor “Captain Kerosene,” which is pretty good.  I was thinking of a throw-back to an old Dan Akroyd SNL skit about dangerous Halloween costumes: Johnny Human Torch.

Gaylor was a white guy, but right now I’m guessing that he’s either red (in which case he could move to MA and challenge Lizzie Warren in the next Senatorial election — #wemustneverstopmockingher) or black (watch out, Cory Booker!). 

But say what you will about the wisdom of driving an unregistered, unlicensed motorcycle and carrying a gallon of gas on your back while you run from cops with tasers.

Christopher Gaylor would still be a better candidate for a US senate seat in Pennsylvania than John Fetterman. 

Happy Halloween everybody!

Avenatti/ Human Torch Gaylor, 2024!

I’m back after a fantastic but sometimes heartbreaking week visiting my mom in TN.  We took a trip to a new location each day, and though her memory issues manifested themselves regularly, we really did have a good time together. 

We saw downtown squares and old house districts in Franklin and Murfreesboro, and some great Fall colors and elaborate Halloween yard decorations in every nearby town. We drove part of the Natchez Trace Parkway and saw Meriwether Lewis’ grave.  Even on the day when we didn’t do any traveling, and the biggest event of the day was to get an oil change in my car, we had fun.

I’ve decided to try to learn some conversational German, so on my trip I listened to German lessons on cd.  Mom’s grandparents and dad spoke some German around the house, so she was interested, and had me play bits of the lessons during parts of our drives.

She thought my attempts at pronouncing some of the back-of-the-throat consonants were hilarious.  I could not say “nicht” without her laughing like a schoolkid. 

So we sat in the car while the oil was being changed, asking each other directions to Goethe Street and saying “not very well” until we both had tears in our eyes.  (Vo ist die GUR-TA SCH-STRASSE?  Nicht sehr goot!)   

The oil change guy thought we’d lost our minds.

On my last day there, we put in more than 6000 steps walking through the pretty neighborhoods in Columbia, not far from the President James K. Polk house. 

Of course I’d introduced my mom and sister to the great They Might be Giants song, “James K. Polk” when they first moved to Columbia, years ago.  And no visit is complete without me belting out at least part of one verse and the chorus.  (“Having done all this he sought no second TERRRRMMMMM!  Mr. James K Polk, Napoleon of the Stump!”)   

If you haven’t heard it before, find it on YouTube immediately.  For my money, it’s the best rock song about the 1844 electoral contest among Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan and James Polk ever recorded!

While I was gone, the polls have been breaking for the GOP, helped along by some truly amazing debates.

Everyone is talking about the Uncle Fester in the room at the Fetterman/Oz conflagration: a candidate who is incapable of thinking coherent thoughts or saying intelligible words.

Sorry, that’s “elephant” in the room.  Honest mistake.

I caught myself starting to feel sorry for Fetterman, just as a fellow human being.  But when I remember what a radical and horrible pol he was before his stroke, my sympathies are dampened.

Along with the usual terrible Dem policies – tax everything that moves, anti-school-choice, abortion even after the Braxton Hicks contractions have started – he’s as bad on crime as any of this year’s Dems.  And that’s saying a lot!

When he was asked what he’d do if he had a magic wand and could fix one thing, he said that he’d end life without parole for murderers.

Good lord!  Even 18-year-old beauty pageant contestants know that you’re supposed to answer the magic wand question with something like “world peace” or “end cancer.” 

But not Fetterwoman.  He’s all, “Open the prison gates.  You’re free, recidivist predators!  Go forth and prey on the citizens whose votes I’m trying to win!”

The three best things about the Fetterman implosion:  

1. His opening with a closing: “Hi, goodnight everybody!” (In retrospecticus, he should have just waved to the crowd and left right then.  You had us at “goodnight,” Lurch.)

2. The train wreck/dumpster fire/Hindenburg disaster of a performance offered the truly egregious mainstream media the chance to beclown themselves for the thousandth time this election cycle.  And before you could say, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” they were decked out in floppy shoes, red noses and fright wigs.

Some “journalists” said Oz was an able-ist bully for actually debating Fetterman.  Others said that Fetterman’s meltdown was actually pretty effective, since he provided an inspiring and transparent role model for stroke victims.

The opinion writers of the Philly Inquirer actually scored the debate and said that Fetterman won!

The man couldn’t have done worse if he’d confessed to Nazi sympathies, revealed a long-term amorous relationship with a farm animal, then knocked himself out cold by hitting his head on the podium as he jackknifed forward to vomit on his shoes.

And those dopes said that he won.  They should be driven from public life in disgrace!  (Instead of getting hired to teach at some Ivy League J-school, which we all know is where they’ll end up.)

3. While that performance should end Fetterman’s chances in PA, at least he made Biden look like a silver-tongued devil by comparison. 

Well, that might be going too far. 

Biden has been plumbing new depths in presidential performance this month, but I’d like to defend him. Or at least one of his most recent gaffes.

After Liz Truss’ fruit-fly lifespan as British Prime Minister, somebody named Rishi Sunak is the new one.  And Biden immediately called him “Rashee Sanuk.”

Of all of Biden’s flubs, this is one is both understandable and acceptable.  Because everyone knows that a British leader should be named something like Winston or Nigel or Henry.  Or Richard. 

“Rishi Sunak” might be a good name for a Persian satrap, or possibly a Klingon warlord.  But I don’t blame Biden for mangling that name, especially since he’s got an advanced degree in English word mangling. 

He’s not even good at counting words.  See his recent performance at a DC-area Denny’s that he mistook for the Democrat National Convention: “I’ve got two words: Four score and seven years ago… um… you know… you know the thing.”

Also, he thinks dead people might show up for press conferences, and he can’t tell the difference between his wife and his sister.

So is anyone surprised that THAT guy bungled a name that looks like a series of random tiles in a Scrabble game?  (Which he hasn’t played since he was a middle-aged man, during the Truman administration.)  

The new PM has only been in office for a few days, and I’ve already caught myself calling him “Maha Rishi” and “Poison Sumac.”  And I’m four standard deviations better than Joe Biden with language.

By the way, I’ve got an unrelated theory about Biden: his handlers hate him.

How else can you explain the way they NEVER are standing next to him when he finishes a mumbling, regurgitated word salad? 

Sorry, a speech.  They’re never standing next to him when he finishes a speech.

For a regular politician, that wouldn’t be a big deal.  But by now, everybody knows that when he’s done speaking – you can tell because he trails off from grouchy disoriented rambling, to mumbled nonsequiturs, to baffled silence – that he’s going to stand there blankly. 

Then he’s going to turn in one direction – inevitably the wrong one – and give a nod or a hand gesture to one of the dearly departed whom no one else can see, before he takes a few shuffling steps toward the closest hedge, tree trunk, or blank wall.

Then a minion, a flunky, or Dr.  Jill will intervene with brisk alarm, just in time to keep him from falling off a stage, or down a staircase, or into a nearby poison sumac bush.  (Double points for two poison sumac references in one column!)  Then they’ll redirect his halting steps in the right direction.

The effect is to reinforce what a doddering husk he has become, and to make him look awful.  In other words: it makes for terrible optics.  And yet none of his people ever plan for that, or make the slightest effort to avoid it.

And it happens every time!

Thus my theory: his handlers hate him.

So yeah, that was my defense of Joe Biden.  Stirring, wasn’t it?

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but if the red wave on 11/8 is as big as it looks like it may be, the Democrat long knives will be out for Biden right after the new year, if not before.  I expect something like the scene last week in China’s big CCP Noodle-Hall Putsch, when Winnie the Xi sat there with a poker face while his predecessor was pulled from his seat by a couple of thugs and hustled out of the room, never to be heard from again.

Except with Joe, they’ll probably just hold a bowl of ice cream out in front of him, and walk slowly toward the nearest exit.  He’ll shuffle after them like a somnambulant mummy with a sweet tooth, until they’ve led him into the back of a windowless van. 

Then it’s off to a farm upstate, where he can run and play with the Fettermans, Feinsteins and Pelosis of the world. (Until they each break a hip, and have to be put down.)

Either way, Brandon is going to join James K. Polk as one who “never sought a second terrrmmmm!” (Sing it with me: “He’s Joseph P Biden with the acuity of a stump!”)

And then things will get really interesting.  Normally his replacement would be the VP.

But Dios mio, it’s Que Mala!

So then we go to the Democrat bench, which is loaded with such has-beens and never-weres as ancient Bernie, Mayor Pete, Sandy “juicy booty” Cortez (her words, not mine), and the Unbearable Whiteness of Lizzie. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

2023 is going to be interesting.

But in the meantime, what are the Dems’ chances on November 8^th? 

I don’t want to count my chickens, but… NICHT SEHR GUT! Avenatti/ the Ghost of James K. Polk, 2024!

A couple of political targets are especially deserving of mockery today, but first, I’ve got a quick update on my trip north.

I spent several great days in Illinois with three of my cousins, and since we didn’t go to Chicago, I have survived to tell the tale.

The leaf colors were near their peak, and we hiked for about 10 miles each day on canal paths and in Starved Rock state park, which is just downriver from my birthplace.  (Tragically – and really, inexplicably — there is no flattering equestrian statue of me there to mark the place or the event.)  

The daytime temps both days were in the low 40s, which is just about perfect for hiking.  The first day, we even had about 10 minutes of snow flurries, despite the above-freezing temps.   The experience triggered a lot of happy memories from my childhood.  The crisp, bracing breeze; the birdsong and sounds of leaves crackling under your feet; the clean, tannic smell in the air.  

If I could have gone to a small-town football game, and then taken a hayrack ride and had some apple cider, the experience would have been perfect.

One downside of living in north central Florida is the lack of a real fall and winter.   When it does get down into the 20s at night about half a dozen times in the winter, everyone loses their minds.  The local news anchors shriek about the three “P”s – pipes, plants and pets (cover the first two, bring in the third) – in the same tone you’d expect if they were delivering the news of incoming nuclear missiles. 

So I really appreciate the chance to travel up north in the fall.

On Wednesday I drove back down to TN, and yesterday mom and I took a drive to the charming town of Franklin.  It was another sunny, fall day, and we parked downtown, then took a leisurely walk along the tree-lined streets, looking at the well-kept old houses.  We ended up back in the town square, and had a nice lunch at Puckett’s, where I understand they have live music on the weekends. 

(I’d be very disappointed if the playlist doesn’t have a lot more Johnny Cash and Hank Williams than Lizzo and Cardi B.) 

We ended our rambling on the far end of town, and Waze gave me an alternate route home that took us on a winding two-lane road through the rolling hills, in slanting, late-afternoon sunshine on scenic Carter’s Creek Pike.

Which is about the most Tennessee road name you’re ever going to hear.

Now get ready for some whiplash, as I transition from all of those familial ties that bind and the beauty of God’s creation to three ridiculous stories from our political opposition.

First we go to the University of Minnesota’s most recent “white coat” induction ceremony for a new class of medical students.  That ceremony involved a doctor leading all students in a nearly 500-word, chanted pledge.

I’m not opposed to all repeat-after-me, chanted pledges or vows.  I like old timey wedding vows. I’m very fond of the Boy Scout oath and the Pledge of Allegiance, even though they both now feel a little like something from the Pleistocene era.

I’m deeply moved every time I’m in a group, and hear many voices begin, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

But those (God help us) future doctors’ chanting was nothing like that.  Their pledge was a mishmash of every hollow, woke, virtue-signaling cliché that’s ever made you throw up in the back of your mouth a little. 

Or, as the late, great Norm MacDonald would say, it sounded like, “a bunch of f***-in’ commie gobbledy-gook!”   

They started with the obligatory land acknowledgment, noting that their university “is located on Dakota land.”

If they really believed that the land still belongs to the Dakotas, they should shut down their school and give it to them.  Then, by the same logic, the Dakotas would have to give it to whichever tribe they stole it from, who would have to give it to the tribe they stole it from, until they got all the way back to an early hominid with the kind of thick brow ridge you never see outside of a museum display on Cro-Magnons.

Or a John Fetterman speech. 

That process would be almost as stupid and pointless as if they just cut out all of the gyrations and turned the place directly over to the Pale Powhatan herself, Lizzie Warren.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)   

Among other things, they then go on to “commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system,” and to fight the “inequities…and traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism and all forms of oppression.”

Which makes our medical system sound great, doesn’t it?  Come for the structural violence, stay for the oppressive and traumatic racism and colonialism. 

But that’s not all.

They want you to know that they are big on anti-racism, and they love the environment, as you can see when they pledge to “heal the planet.” They also “promise to continue restoring trust in the medical system.”

Gee, I wonder why people need to have their trust in the medical system restored?  Maybe it’s because you numbskulls are more concerned with healing Gaia than with healing grandma!

The best part – if by “best” you mean “worst” – is this sentence, which I swear I am not making up:  “We pledge to honor all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Ah yes, the indigenous ways of healing, which resulted in an average lifespan of 31 years.  When a (witch) doctor could take coursework in trepanation, do an internship in leech application, and then specialize in plant-based poultices that are most efficacious for driving off evil spirits. 

After all, who needs dialysis or cardiac stents when you can stick with a combination of feng shui and reading chicken entrails to determine which of my humors are out of whack?

And by the way, if those “marginalized” practices were unwisely rejected by western medicine, why are you all so eager to take on six figure debts to get a degree in that nasty, ableist cesspool of western medicine?

I would sooner trust the medical wisdom of my high school football coach – whose primary prescriptions were “rub some dirt on it” and, “walk it off” – than this bunch of cowed and spineless hacks.

Next we go to Wolfsburg, Germany, where 9 narcissistic “scientists” glued their hands to the floor of a VW dealership to protest fossil fuels and climate change. 

Rather than taking the Simpson approach – yanking them all off of the floor (leaving them with a lot less hand skin than they started with) and tossing them in jail – the Germans at the dealership displayed some German ingenuity.

They turned off the lights and the heat in the building and went home. 

Naturally, the protestors complained that they had been left in a dark, cold building.  But since electricity and heat are provided almost totally by fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) or nuclear energy, the VW people were just giving the foolish alarmists what they wanted, and teaching them a lesson:

A world without fossil fuels is cold and dark.

The protestors also complained that they weren’t given “a bowl to urinate and defecate in.”

You should have thought about that before you glued your hand to a freakin’ floor, Klaus! 

I’d always thought it was a cliché, but in this case it was true: these guys really didn’t have a pot to p*ss in.    

Finally, a notoriously anti-police, far-left ice cream shop in Seattle got a karma cone covered in schadenfreude sauce.

The Full Tilt Ice Cream shop has spent the last several years hip-deep in leftist group-think.  Their social media has been a non-stop screed of hatred for the cops and support for BLM and CHOP, even when such leftist hate groups were destroying large swaths of their city.

But then, on October 4^th, two males broke in and robbed the place.  So naturally, the lactose-loving Leninists turned for help to the fascist foot-soldiers of an unjust Amerikkka.

That’s right.  The commies called the cops.

I can only hope the cops told them that due to budget cuts, they’d be able to send an officer to investigate… sometime in March or April of next year.

In the meantime, I can’t suggest that everybody who likes ice cream should head down to Full Tilt and help themselves to the inventory.  But the owners have worked hard to make Seattle a police-free zone, and their ideology says that profit is evil. 

So…

It’s been a long 14 years, but November 8^th is almost here.

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.