Martin Simpson

I was putting together some thoughts on the contrasts between the two parties’ conventions, but I came across an interview today with Michelle Obama, and it was so perfectly emblematic of many Dem elites’ attitudes, I felt that it must be dissected…

Compare the first ladies who spoke at both conventions.  Michelle O displayed the dour outlook and instinctive disdain that we’ve come to expect from the woman who had never been proud of this country until it made the tragic mistake of electing her husband.

Melania, on the other hand, was great.  Of course the leftist shrews and harpies – of both genders – were hateful toward her, making fun of her clothes, her looks and her accent.

Which… great job, condescending faux-feminist crones!

A dignified, above-the-fray gentlemen wouldn’t stoop to your level, and criticize the appearance or speaking voice of the first lady from your party the way you did to Melania.

Luckily, I am NOT that kind of dignified, “when you go low, we just clutch our groin and drop to the ground choking” kind of guy.  So here goes.

A few years ago, some cruel, sharp-eyed fellow said that Michelle Obama looks like a scowling wookie, with the demeanor of a dyspeptic misanthropist, the pinched, pained expression of Louis Farrakhan at a Yom Kippur celebration, and the shoulders of an outside linebacker from Arkansas State.

Okay, that guy was me.  And I stand by every one of those fantastically accurate words.

Lest you think me unfair, consider the way that Michelle moaned, and griped, and maligned our country.

After a little rhetorical throat-clearing about how she “loves this country with all of her heart” (!) and a nod to the sacrifices that past Americans made – all good stuff, that – at around the 3 minute mark she made a turn for her natural wheelhouse: bitterness and anti-American libel.

She diagnosed the causes behind Trump’s election as not just millions of bad people voting for a bad man (though that is a near constant, if sometimes only implicit, theme among national Democrats who despise the deplorables who make up half the country), but also as the result of “too many people feeling like their votes didn’t count, or they were fed up…”

She’s pretty close to the heart of it there: after 8 years of Obama’s desultory leadership, and his race-baiting, hyper-partisan betrayal of his campaign persona as a unifying moderate, a lot of people were fed up indeed.

If you’ve got the stomach for it, cue up a video of Michelle’s speech and just freeze the frame at any points between minutes 4 – 18.  I guarantee you’ll catch her in one of her three habitual expressions: disappointed, disgusted, or angry.

The lowlight for me comes at around 4:40, when she recites the poisonous lie about American racism that is this campaign year’s leftist mantra:  “As George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and a never-ending list of  innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a black life matters is still met with derision from this nation’s highest office.”

The malicious dishonesty of that statement would be breathtaking, had we not heard it over and over for several years now!  Trump has never said anything like “black lives don’t matter,” nor has literally anyone with any power, prominence or influence anywhere on the political right, middle or left in this entire nation.

The many principled people who reject thuggish demands to parrot the phrase “black lives matter” do so for a transparently obvious reason: the anti-American hate-mongers who formed and animate BLM as a movement have wrapped a malevolent Marxist agenda in that phrase that has NOTHING to do with the value of minority (or any) lives.

The giveaway is that if you counter by saying “All lives matter,” or even “All black lives matter,” you’re met with spittle-flecked rage, and – if you’re not exercising your 2^nd amendment right by carrying a thug-blasting little gift from God — by physical violence.

Also, in case you missed it, our former First Long Day – um, lady – claims there have been a “never-ending list of innocent black folks murdered” by cops.

Really?  Because I’ve seen statistics that say that 9 such killings happened in the entire last year, in a country of 330 million people.  (And 9 is not a big number.  AOC’s IQ is 9.  Joe Biden can still count to 9, if you’re willing to spot him 3.  So, not exactly a “never-ending” list kind of number.) And those stats don’t refer to “innocent” people, but people who were “unarmed.”

In fact, if you look a little closer, while those few people may have technically been unarmed, at least one of them was trying to run over cops with a car (which can cause an extreme case of deadness), and several were trying to get their hands on a weapon when they were killed.  A few more were doing their best to kill or injure cops with their bare hands when they won their Achieving Room Temperature awards.

(A few famous examples: Trayvon was technically unarmed when he was in the process of murdering George Zimmerman, and Michael Brown – who never had his hands up or pleaded “don’t shoot” – had struck the cop and was trying to take his gun when he earned his bullet. I guess Michelle would include those two in her “unending list of innocent people?”  Bah!)

Sure, Melania’s speech contained a lot of clichés, just as Michelle’s did.  But Melania’s clichés were positive and uplifting, unlike Michelle’s, and they had the added benefit of being true.  “America is a great country, and I’m lucky to be here.”  Well it is, and she is.

And sure, Melania has an accent.  And it is adorable!  The way she pronounces her “w”s like “v”s, like a lovable, female Count Dracula? When she said that we should not judge people “by the color of their skeen” I swooned.  Because that was a more positive and truthful thing than anything said at the 4-day mope-a-palooza that the Dems put on last week.  And it sounded so darn cute!

By the way, English is her fifth language.  How many of her hateful critics speak even two languages?  And no, Chelsea Handler, drunken slurring doesn’t count as a language.  And no, Whoopi Goldberg, screeching obscenities doesn’t either.  (And no, Michelle O, there is no “sh” in the word “struggle.”  Stop saying that wrong!)

Can you imagine listening to Hillary Clinton if she spoke 5 languages?  “KA-OW, KA-OW, KA-OW!”  Which, as some of you linguists may know, is Romanian for “CAW CAW CAW!”

Not that I can picture Hillary speaking Romanian.  In fact, if she spoke only one other language, I’m guessing that it would be “offensively fake Ebonics,” because I’ve seen her try that out, when she was pandering for votes at an African-American church:  “Ah ain’t no ways ty-urd.  Ah’ve come too fur to turn back na-ow.”

Yikes.  Where was I?  Oh yes, Melania’s speech.

It was positive, and charming, and full of patriotism and big-hearted affection for her often-boneheaded husband.

As regular readers of this column may know, when I first caught sight of my wife across a crowded room 34 years ago, I lost my ability to see other women.   But I am told by reliable sources that in addition to being likable and kind, Melania is also quite easy on the eyes.

Unlike some other super-tall, Han Solo sidekicks whom I could mention, if I weren’t too classy for that.

Speaking of which, Michelle’s recent interview, during which her questioner asked how the terrible racism of America has affected her.

Here is the only reasonable response to that question for someone in her position:

“No nation is perfect, and all of us have our small irritations in life.  But I am well aware of the great hardships that black people in the past have suffered in this country, when under the control of vicious Democrat politicians.  And I would never in a million years compare anything that has happened to a lucky, pampered, elite person like me to what Democrats forced onto my fellow black people, from the nightmares of slavery and lynching, to the institutional discrimination of Jim Crow and segregation.  I’d have to be a complete moron in a hairy costume with crossed ammo belts and able to make only incoherent roaring sounds to complain about racism’s affect on my life.”

What was Michelle’s ridiculous response, instead?

A white lady ignored her once when she and her daughters were in an ice cream store.

I am not making that up.

Don’t believe me?  Here are the quotes:

“There was a line [in the ice cream place] and once again, when I’m just a Black woman, I notice that white people don’t even see me. They’re not even looking at me. So I’m standing there with two little Black girls, another Black female adult, they’re in soccer uniforms, and a white woman cuts right in front of us to order. Like she didn’t even see us.”

I know, right?  Traumatizing.

But Rosa Parks Obama was not about to take that kind of genocidal hatred lying down.  “So I stepped up, and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I was like, ‘You don’t see us four people standing right here, you just jumped in line?'” Obama said. “She didn’t apologize, she never looked me in my eye, she didn’t know it was me. All she saw was a Black person, or a group of Black people, or maybe she didn’t even see that because we were that invisible.”

But that’s not all.  Obama had more tales from the American hellscape she’s had to suffer through.

“I can tell you a number of stories like that when I’ve been completely incognito, during the eight years in the White House, walking the dogs on the canal, people will come up and pet my dogs but will not look me in the eye. They don’t know it’s me.”

Fortunately, Philosopher-Queen Sojourner Truth can interpret the world-shaking meaning of such metaphysical wounds to her tender psyche.  Plus, as a bonus, she gets to insult all white people, too!

“What white folks don’t understand, it’s like that is so telling of how white America views people who are not like them,” she said. “You know, we don’t exist. And when we do exist, we exist as a threat. And that, that’s exhausting.”

I wish she could feel my pain.  Between not being able to see other women (because of my infatuation with my wife), and not being able to see black people (because of my horrible, autonomic racism), I am constantly bonking into unseen people all over the place.  I’m lucky I haven’t snapped a clavicle or broken a femur!

But back to Michelle O, and her terrible dilemma.

When I contemplate the circumstances of female slaves who were routinely beaten and raped, and had their husbands sold by their masters; or their children 30 years later who were tormented by the KKK (i.e. the armed wing of the Democrat party); or their grandchildren who had dogs and firehoses turned on them by Democrat officials when they protested segregation, I can still take comfort in one thought:

At least they never knew the trauma of almost having to wait several minutes to get their Haagen-Dazs, or the soul-crushing exhaustion that comes with someone petting your dog without making sufficiently reverential eye contact with you first!

Ugh.  This petty, grudge-carrying, whitey-hating woman used to be our first lady.

And now we’ve got a piping hot supermodel with an adorable accent who loves our country, and judges people by the content of our character, and not by the color of our skeen.

America for the win!

I began writing this column 24 hours ago, and as you will see, I was feeling momentarily down because of the rising violence in yet another American city, this time Kenosha, Wisconsin.  But the RNC convention has – to my surprise, actually –buoyed my spirits.  I’m going to post a comparison between the DNC and the RNC convention in another day or so, and that column will be a lot sunnier.  But for now…

You may have noticed that ever since I wrote several columns touting the virtues of being an optimist, an angry God has seemingly given us nothing but an unending series of causes for pessimism.

Our cities continue to be burned, vandalized and destroyed by peacefully vicious mobs, our low-T pols continue to curl up in a corner sucking their thumbs through holes that they’ve cut in their marginally effective masks, Big 10 football has been needlessly cancelled, and the Dem convention tormented us all with its unutterable terribleness.

And now comes Kenosha Wisconsin, with yet another example of racial arson and bad-faith public well-poisoning that is nearly infuriating enough to make even a pacifistic saint like myself give up and hew to Mencken’s old saying:  “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hand, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

Yeah.  It’s been that type of week.

The most infuriating thing about the latest drama is its predictability: an African-American man is shot by cops.  The MSM and racist Left (but I repeat myself) – before they know anything about the case at all — immediately spin their narrative demonizing the cops and white folks and America, and sacralizing the  black “victim.”

By the way, remember back in 2009, when Obama was asked about the cops temporarily arresting his academic buddy Henry Louis Gates?   If you don’t, Gates was a terribly oppressed multimillionaire Harvard professor who locked himself out of his rented house, and then threw a race-card-playing fit when the cops were called by a neighbor who saw… a man she didn’t know breaking into a neighboring house.

Obama’s response has basically been echoed by one leftist rage mob after another for the last 20 years.  He said, “While I wasn’t there, and I don’t know all the facts… the cops acted stupidly.”

Which is funny, because I remember that when I was a know-it-all teenager – unlike the humble polymath that I later blossomed into, and whom you know and love today – my dad told me, “If you don’t know all the facts… shut your yap.”

But Obama’s dad was a creep who impregnated his daft mom and then was never seen again, so when he was in his late 40s, Obama still didn’t know what I had learned when I was 15.  (Also, if I’d written an autobiography when I’d accomplished as much as Obama did, the title would not have been “Dreams From my Father,” but “Eyerolls from My Father.”  And it would have been a hilariously wise book, unlike the pedestrian drivel put out by the small man who used to be our prez.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

Another African-American male gets shot, and before we hear any of the actual facts, his relatives and friends say that when he wasn’t helping old ladies across the street, he was rescuing kittens from trees and volunteering at the local soup kitchen.  Until – for no reason! — the rabid klansman cops showed up for no reason and shot him.  For no reason.

And mobs of rioting thugs whom the MSM pretends are the descendants of MLK conducting a peaceful civil rights protest go on an orgy of beating innocent victims and damaging or stealing millions of dollars’ worth of other people’s property.

Then, bit by bit, the truth starts to come out.

The “innocent” victim turns out to be a career criminal.  He never rescued a kitten in his life, and the only time he ever laid hands on any only old ladies was to mug them, or worse.  The cops showed up because they were called to an active crime scene, by non-criminal members of the black community.  The “unarmed” saint was either armed or in the process of arming himself – and virtually always either fighting with cops or disobeying their lawful orders – when he was legitimately shot.

Equally predictably, a sniveling politician comes out to encourage the rioters and insult the regular citizens who would rather not be beaten and robbed by the mob.   Wussy McPussington in Minneapolis, Beetlejuice Troll Doll in Chicago, Durkan in Seattle, Ted “I want my mommy” Wheeler in Portland.

And now Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers.  (You may be surprised that he spells with it a “y” rather than an “i.”)  From guess which party?

If you haven’t seen this guy, I can paint a word picture:  Think of actor James Cromwell, from the adorable pig movie Babe; then think of his dimwitted cousin, after having been dosed with a potent mixture of estrogen and an experimental, IQ-suppressing narcotic.   (Google them both, and then thank me for my keen powers of observation later.)

So what did this guy say, in the first paragraph of his public statement?  “While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”

Oh, Tony.  To quote a late American politician (God rest his soul) who was also prone to gaffes and stupid statements and rambling race-baiting: “C’mon man!”

You know that Evers is the kind of ineffectual pol who would watch with a smug half-smile on his big vacant head while a bunch of peace-loving rioters stomped by chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon!”   And like Obama, he’s not going to let a complete absence of facts or knowledge or judgment stop him from making a racially inflammatory slur on the cops who protect his sorry self.

So now 48 hours have passed, and we DO have a lot of the details of this case.  And you don’t have to have borrowed my magical wizard hat to have predicted what we’ve found out.  If he had waited until he actually knew something before he spoke, here’s what Evers’ corrected statement would have sounded like:

“Now that we have many of the details, we know for certain that Blake is not the first violent convict who was allegedly assaulting another woman while being wanted on a warrant for his second sexual assault charge, and who, when his black neighbors called the cops, fought with those cops and ignored their lawful commands and tried to get into his car to attempt to arm himself, as he had already done five years ago in a similar case that was ended only because a police dog took him down before he could force the cops to shoot him that time…. Um… to be… um, injured at the hands of…I guess… cops who were completely justified in shooting his violent, recidivist arse.”

That doesn’t have the same self-righteous ring to it, does it, Tone Loco?   (Yes, that’s a 30-year-old rapper reference.  Because I’m a renaissance man.)

If Evers were a better man, he would attend Blake’s trial.  And if the facts of the case turn out to be what they now look like – Blake is a repeat, violent criminal and sex offender who was only shot after he fought with cops and shrugged off a taser and went for a weapon – Evers should apologize to the cop who had to shoot Blake.

But I don’t think the cop expects that.  In fact, I’ll bet that – given what he knows about Evers’ malicious political ideology – he would settle for the milder insult of Evers sitting next to him after Blake is convicted, and patting him on the back, and saying, “That’ll do, pig.  That’ll do.”

Avenatti/ Toni Evers 2020!

I’ve read some coverage of the first two nights of the DNC rant-a-palooza, and have come away with a shocking realization: the Democrats apparently don’t have the foggiest notion of the main point of a political convention.

Traditionally, savvy parties are hyper-conscious about their image.  They craft it meticulously, especially when they are putting on their convention – the moment of peak national exposure, and the definitive opportunity to present the most carefully calibrated public face of the party and its beliefs.

This image-management goes across party lines.  The GOP knows that many people see it as too white and too identified with the rich, so the party does its best to showcase minority Republicans, small business owners, and people of modest means.

Similarly, Democrats have traditionally known that they are seen as not being too fond of this country, and as disdainful of the military, so they usually do their best to drape their convention with American flags and round up as many military members (in uniform) as they can (even though the result is inevitably a lot more Bradley Manning than George Patton).

So I think it’s a sign of how badly the Dems have gone off the rails this year that they seem to be purposefully – some might say perversely – foregrounding the darkest underbelly of their party, the rigidly radical elements and positions that they have to know are most likely to repel independents and persuadable non-partisans!

In just the first two nights of the convention, I can point to at least 5 glaring examples:

1.The Dems usually get the vast majority of Jewish votes, but by 2016 Trump had already begun to make inroads there, and since then he’s moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and established stronger ties to Israel.  Within just the last week, he’s fostered what looks like it may be the first significant Middle East treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors in decades.

So who do the Dems give a “speaking role” at their one of their convention’s key assemblies to?

Hateful, vicious anti-Semite Linda Sarsour!   Talk about an unforced error.  The Dems can’t do anything about the black eye they deservedly get from being associated with the jihadi twins, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – they are elected Dem congresswomen.

But Sarsour is a free-agent hater – she has no official role in the party, so there’s no rational reason to let her near a camera, let alone give her a sanctioned speaking slot.

The blunder was so painfully obvious that Biden’s team had to issue a same-day apology, saying that Biden “obviously condemns her views.”  If it’s that obvious, why did you give her a speaking slot?  C’mon, man!

By the way, how do we know that Biden didn’t write his repudiation himself?  Because if he had, he would have called Linda Sarsour, “Jacinda Velour… I mean, Oui Oui Monsieur.  No, that’s not right.  You know, you know the thing!  The little scarf lady who hates the Jews!”

2. It’s not unusual to give a speaking spot to the party’s past presidents. But after the #metoo conflagration – and after Cankles McPantsuit turned a very winnable race into a debacle by snapping a fetlock in the campaign’s final stretch – you’d think that the Dems would have consigned the Clintons to the memory hole, never to be spoken of again.   But no, they give cadaverous old lech Bill Clinton a prime speaking spot.

And guess what? He still feels your pain.  (Along with your supple buttocks, if you don’t keep a close eye on him.)

Clinton actually had the gall to say that, “At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it’s a storm center.”  Because that’s what we need to hear from Bill Clinton: tips on how to conduct yourself in the oval office!

But Mr. “Better Put Some Ice on That” wasn’t finished.  He continued, “Just one thing never changes — [Trump’s] determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there.”

The mind boggles.  When Bill said, “just one thing never changes,” was I the only one who heard, “I keep getting older, and the interns always stay the same age!” ?

Also, who better to condemn Trump’s propensity to deny responsibility and shift blame than the guy who wagged his bony finger at us and insisted, “I never had sexual relations with that woman.”

And yes, Clinton can definitely criticize buck-passing.

Because for him, the buck always stopped in the same place: tucked into the g-strings of several topless interns wrestling in a kiddie pool filled with baby oil.

Well done, you creepy old horn dog!

3. The Dems finally turned on Bernie Sanders in March and gave the nomination to the late Joe Biden, because they knew that a transparently far-left socialist would poison their brand with independents. So naturally they gave transparently far-left socialist AOC one minute to speak.

One minute was about right, because that’s how long it usually took her to take a drink order when she was bartending.  Sure, she often heard someone say “Give me a G&T and a Scotch neat,” and then came back with two glasses of Pine-Sol with a slice of lime and a tiny umbrella in them.  But imagine how much more damage she could have done with more than a minute!

Well, this time she used her minute – at the political convention called to herald the nomination of Joseph “Where Am I?” Biden – to proudly nominate for President… transparently far-left octogenarian socialist Bernie Sanders!

4. Another recent embarrassment that any sane party would want to make voters forget about was Grandma Squanto’s self-immolation. Despite being whiter than a circus troupe of albinos caught in a snowstorm in Antarctica, Lizzie Warren pretended to be a proud Cherokee-American, launching a thousand hilarious hashtags. (You all know the best one: #wemustneverstopmockingher)

But instead of banishing her to the Happy Hunting Grounds, at least until after the election, the national Democrats decided to give her a high-profile speaking role addressing one specific caucus.

If you had to guess, you might think that she spoke to the “Translucent-American Caucus,” or even the venerable PCAAA (that’s right: the “Phony Cultural Appropriation Association of America”) caucus.

But no.  The Democrat brain trust, in their infinite wisdom, assigned Elizabeth Warren – the whitest woman in this or ANY convention, anywhere, at any time — to speak to … wait for it… the NATIVE AMERICAN CAUCUS!!

If I had tried to make that up, even the most loyal COers would have said, “Martin, you may be a hilarious genius – and, we cannot argue, a quite striking figure of a man – but now you have gone too far!  Even with your blackbelt in sarcasm and tomfoolery, you could not pull off the conceit that such a farcical thing could ever happen.”

And yet it did. In real life, on Tuesday night, at the Democratic National Convention.

5. Finally, you may have heard that we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. And you may also have heard that the Democrat governor of New York produced one of the highest per capita covid death rates in the country through his brilliant decision to force infected senior citizens back into nursing homes, like so many wrinkly biological weapons, killing as many as 11,000 helpless New Yorkers.

Any sane political party which included that unintentionally homicidal bungler as one of its most prominent elected officials, would do everything it could to keep him as far away from its convention as possible.

You see where this is going, right?

Yeah.  So there he was on Monday night, kicking off the festivities: Fredo’s older (and possibly even less intelligent) brother, Andrew Cuomo.

During his speech, Cuomo said many dishonest and malicious things, but this column is already getting long.  So I’ll focus on my favorite part: he called the Covid virus “the European virus.”

First, the left has been screaming for months that identifying a virus by its area of origin is a very, very bad and racist thing to do.  Unless, I guess, that area of origin is well known to be lousy with white people.  (The Worst. Race. Of. All! According to our leftist betters.)

Second, I can almost read your thoughts when you heard that Fredo Sr. mentioned the “European virus:”

“What the friend?!” you thought to yourself.  “What the actual friend is this mother-friending moron talking about?! The European virus?”

Then if you’re anything like me, you began clacking away at your Google machine, typing in such search terms as:

“What canton of Switzerland is Wuhan in?” and

“How far from Luxembourg is Wuhan, by rail?” and

“Do the Wuhanians speak French, German, English, or all three?” and

“Which side of the Iron Curtain was Wuhan on, after the Russian socialists were helped to defeat the German socialists in WWII?”

Ugh.  These people have lost it.

If I were a bigshot in the GOP, I’d offer two pieces of advice about next weeks’ Republican convention:

1.Have Trump go on stage the first night, standing between Bibi Netanyahu and whoever is the head sheik of the UAE, holding the inside hand of each man.  And then have Trump raise their hands in his, over his head, and say, “You’re welcome America!

“Also, tomorrow morning we are equipping our wonderful federal troops – so tremendous! — with amazing rubber bullets and incredibly acidic bear mace, and we will deploy them to every riot-infested Democrat city, where they will go through those terrible rioters – they’re violent people! Really bad! – like incredibly effective poop through a terrific, metaphorical goose!  God bless America!”

2. Have him walk off stage and turn off the lights.

And then replay the entire Democratic convention for the next four nights.

 

Avenatti/ Jacinda Velour 2020!

As you know, the Democrats are having their convention now, and I am usually the first one to step up and take one for the team, watching nauseating leftist misbehavior so that you don’t have to.   But there are limits even for larger-than-life characters such as me.

Sure, I’ve got the strength of ten men, because my heart is pure.  And yes, I’ve built up some immunity to political BS by watching American politics for lo these many years. And I don’t want to brag, but I’ve even found a way to watch up to 10 consecutive minutes of a Hillary Clinton speech without gouging out either my eyeballs or my eardrums.

(Hint: it involves turning the volume down very low, and sitting sideways to the tv so that I use only peripheral vision, like when you are passing a member of the Democrat voter base on a poorly lit street, and he’s got both hands in his pockets and a series of teardrop tattoos beneath both eyes.  So you have to keep your eyes on him, but you don’t want to look at him directly, because he might be rabid, and see eye contact as a challenge.)

The point is, I’m taking a rain check on this one, and counting on the hardy souls of CO nation to watch this verbal and intellectual dumpster fire, and then tell me what I missed.

In the meantime, I’m going to look back at the highlights of last week, when Kamala “empty pantsuit” Harris was announced as the Dem VP nominee.

I’ll admit I was a little surprised.  Like Tucker Carlson, I thought Susan Rice was the likely nominee.  She’s not as viscerally grating as Harris, and she got exactly as much black support in the Dem primaries as Harris – and Rice wasn’t actually a candidate!

She is also a past master at speed lying, having gone on 5 network shows in 16.7 minutes and spun a fantastic tale about Benghazi that was as true as Bill Clinton’s stories about how he had no idea how those interns got into his office and started playing bottomless Twister without him asking them to, or even noticing, really.

So when I heard it was Kamala, I’m sure I thought the same thing all of you were thinking: I’d love to see Biden’s face when he finds out that he picked the woman who was calling him a racist and a rapist just a few short months ago!  Oooh, he’s going to be steamed!

The MSM got out of the gate quickly, going on a jihad against Tucker and other GOP members for mispronouncing Kamala’s name.  “It’s not Kam-e-la, like some white suburban lady named Pamela,” they sneered, “it’s Kam-a-la.  It sounds like “comma-la,” which all conservatives know, but pretend not to, because they’re so racist.”

Which was weird, because when I think of a grammar term to help me remember Kamala Harris, I keep coming back to the colon, for some reason.

Anyway, the MSM went right past a snit and into a full-fledged hissy fit, howling about how anyone calling her “Kam-e-la” is obviously a dog-whistling racist.

And then the late Joe Biden announced that this card right here said that he’d picked her for something or other.  And he pronounced her name “Kam-e-la” several times.

You can’t make this up.

In the several days since the pick, Biden has been on a media blitz.

If by “blitz” you mean what happened in London in 1941, when people hid in the basement with their arms over their heads for weeks on end.

Even Chris Wallace and some MSM empty heads were surprised this weekend, when Joe and Kamala didn’t do any Sunday shows, and the Dems didn’t put out any spokespeople to pitch the partly line for the newly minted Dream Team in advance of their big convention.

No one has ever seen anything like this: a pivotal week in a campaign during which neither candidate gives ANY interviews.

Well, that’s not entirely fair, because each of them granted one interview this week.  And those two rake-stomping-fests speak volumes about the quality of each candidate.

Comma-la gave an interview to Stephen Colbert.  As a heavyweight political interlocutor, he’s known for an occasionally funny Bill O’Reilly impression years ago, followed by years of an unfunny comedy show.  Also he’s shown a slavish devotion to leftist pols.  He makes Don Lemon interviewing Jussie Smollett look like H.L. Mencken savaging some flack from the chamber of commerce.

And somehow, Comma-la screwed up the interview!  To call it a train wreck would be an insult to derailments everywhere.

To his credit, Colbert asked her the one blindingly obvious question that even a hack like him couldn’t get away with not asking: how could she attack Biden so viciously in the debates (“you landed haymakers!”), and now be his running mate?

This is a fair and tough question that most pols have to answer when the general election looms, and they must switch to praising the competitor whom they were lambasting during the primaries.  Deft politicians walk the tightrope, alluding to their worthy opponent and the necessity of spirited competition within the party.

But Comma-la had made that challenge even tougher for herself, because her slams against Biden included gratuitous, personal attacks.  She said that she believed the women who accused him of sexual assault, and that he was the kind of racist who would have kept young Comma-la in a segregated school.

So how would an intelligent, nimble thinker respond to that challenging question?

We will never know.  Because Colbert was asking Comma-la Harris.

What follows is an exact transcript of her response.  (For the laughter, imagine the sound of the unhinged giggling of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, mixed with Caesar Romero’s maniacal Joker, and crossed with the disingenuous CAW CAW CAW of Hillary Clinton.)

Unfunny O’Reilly:  “How do you go from being such a passionate opponent, on such bedrock principles for you, and now you guys seem to be pals.”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE!  HA HA HA HA HA!”

Unfunny O’Reilly: “Not everybody landed punches like you did, though.”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE.  HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

Increasingly uncomfortable Unfunny O’Reilly:  “So you don’t mean it?”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE.  HA HA HA!  The whole reason… HA HA! … Literally, it was a DEBATE!  HA HA HA HA!  It was called a DEBATE!”

Increasingly desperate Unfunny O’Reilly: “I understand.”

Harris:  “Everyone travelled to the DEBATE!  HA HA!  There were journalists there covering the DEBATE!  HA! Where there would be a DEBATE!”

Yikes.  She’s not just obnoxious, and she’s not just phony.  She’s the kind of dim-witted, obnoxious phony who doesn’t have enough sense to NOT say the quiet part out loud, and admit that she’s a soul-less hack who would stop at nothing to win a debate.  Which, in fact, she lost badly anyway.

The only moment when her laughter would have been appropriate would have been when Colbert referred to her as having “bedrock principles.”     Now THAT’S funny!

 

You wouldn’t think it was possible for a major nominee to do worse than Comma-la, whiffing on a series of softball questions from a slobbering sycophant like Colbert.

But then Joey Gaffes said, “Hold my Mueslix and watch this!”

And he gave his one interview of the week to… Cardi B.

You may remember her from such efforts as… um…

Well, you wouldn’t remember her.  Because she’s a sub-literate, pornographic moan-talker who puts out guttural, synthesized “songs,” none of the titles of which I could say at the dinner table without my wife slapping me in the face.

And I am freaking adorable, with a face that is well-nigh unslappable!  So you can imagine how terrible those titles are.

Apparently, when a minion told Biden he should give someone an interview, he said, “Let’s get David Frost.”

And his minion said, “He died in 2013.”

“How about Tim Russert?”

“He died before David Frost.”

“How about Corn Pop?”

“He never existed.”

“Well who else is there, then?”

“How about that foul-mouthed woman who used to pretend to be a hooker, only to drug and rob men?

“Perfect.

So the would-be President of the United States sat down across from the “singer” of “WAP.”  (Don’t ask what that means.  And DON’T look it up!)  And she came across as at least as smart as he did.

Sure, she expressed the same thoughts that naïve young people on the left often have.  She wants free health care, and free education, and for cops to stop slaughtering millions of black men every week.

And Plugs pandered like there was no tomorrow.

Afterward, when his handlers helped him back down into the basement – which took a really long time, because he walks with those tiny, very slow steps that people in his mental and physical condition walk with – he had a conversation with his handler, whom he thought was his wife.

Joe: “Jill, I—”

Jerry the handler:  “I’m Jerry, sir.”

Joe: “I know that.  Anyway, I was really impressed by that nice Car Max lady that I talked to today.”

Jerry: “That was Cardi B.”

Joe: “That doesn’t sound right.”

Jerry: “I know.”

Joe: “Where was I?  Oh yeah, that Busy Bee seemed really nice.”

Jerry: “Cardi B.”

Joe: “Anyway, I’m glad I picked her for my MP.”

Jerry: “MP is military police.  You picked someone for VP.  And it wasn’t Cardi B.”

Joe: “Oh, that’s right.  It was that other woman.  Camelback? Comma Splice?”

Jerry: “Kamala.”

Joe: “C’mon man!  That’s not a real name.  That’s just a bunch of macadamia.”

Jerry: “Do you mean ‘malarkey’?”

Joe:  “Look, fat—”

And, scene.

Avenatti/ Cardi B 2020!

So half of our society has gone insane.

I don’t mean harmless, eccentric, “Get a load of those loons on the left coast, with their vegan diets and their fully aligned chakras and their voting for outlier third-party whackos who are entertaining in their quixotic campaigns against everything rational” Insane.

I mean “insane” as in hamstringing, reducing, or getting rid of cops in the middle of a bloody, ruinous crime spree in a dozen major cities in the country.

As in allowing politics to contaminate every area of life, from sports to comedy to the arts, to the point that people are being censored and cancelled for saying the most innocuous, transparently true things.  (That 2 + 2 = 4, that men are men and women are women, that Joe Biden is mentally deteriorating, that Grandma Squanto is as white as the Ivory Soap girl.) (#eventhoughshe’snottheVPnomineewemustneverstopmockingher)

One main consolation of conservatism is that reality always re-asserts itself, eventually.  But it seems like “eventually” is taking longer to get here than it has in the past.

The citizens of Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, not to mention Chicago and New York, should have seen enough long ago to have done some hard course correction.  The elected leaders of those cities – after allowing roving bands of violent rioters to prey on innocent citizens and productive taxpayers for weeks and months – should be ashamed to show their faces in public.  They should fear being tarred and feathered.

Not to mention being run out of town on a rail, and hoist on their own petard, and any other old-timey punishments that sane societies doled out for the worst amongst them.  (Drawing and quartering might be a little too harsh for them.  On the other hand, when I think about the cops blinded by lasers, and the murders of David Dorn and Italia Marie Kelly and many others you’ve never heard of, I think… eh.  Let’s not hastily rule out a few good, old-fashioned drawings and quarterings.)

But no, these boneheads are proudly standing in the smoldering ruins that their policies have produced, and railing against capitalism and white folks and patriarchy and the president.  And they’re going full speed ahead with the same policies.

A BLM spokes-weasel said that it was good for people to loot Gucci, because that way they’d have something to eat, and something to wear.  Also, looting is a form of long-overdue reparations.

What can you say about people that stupid and venal?   Especially when it seems like a 50/50 proposition that there are enough of them to elect the party that has degenerated to the point that it cheers these developments, and promises more of the same?

It is seriously baffling, and incredibly frustrating.  I’ve always loved reading history, and doing so has allowed me to vicariously witness the fall of other societies at other times, and to think through the events that led them to fall.

But I’m not sure I know of a precedent for this.  Even the most frail and decadent societies, when they were on the precipice, did not have a substantial portion of their own population cheering on the invaders.  You didn’t see huge groups of Europeans siding with the Mongols or Huns as they raped and pillaged their way toward Europe.  Romans didn’t welcome the sack of Rome by Germanic warlords.  French peasants didn’t sympathize with Viking raiders as they looted their villages.

But one of our two major parties openly sides with criminals over cops, and non-taxpayers over taxpayers, and America-haters over corny, old-fashioned patriots, and foreigners who illegally enter our country over our own citizens.

Never has so much blind, unreasoning hatred been directed at a nation that deserves it less.

 

As an optimist, I am pulling for a well-deserved Biden loss in November. But the fact that it’s even close is sobering!

Even in some leftist circles, red flags are being noticed.  Andrew Cuomo recently delivered a pathetic acknowledgement of leftist policy failure when he admitted that many rich people have wisely left New York.  But even then, he demonstrated the tone-deafness that comes from living one’s whole life in a bubble of partisan obliviousness.

He said that he is constantly talking to people who fled NYC, and he says, “You gotta come back, when are you coming back?  We’ll go to dinner, I’ll buy you a drink. Come over, I’ll cook.”

Andy, are you going to cook them a meal worth the tens of thousands of dollars that your greedy city is gouging them for every year?  Also, why did you kill their parents by forcing Wuflu patients into their over-priced nursing home?  And can you do something about Fredo?  That boy’s just not right.

To his credit, Cuomo knows what a disaster Democrat governance has been.  He’s trying to push back against the radical dopes who are trying to load yet another tax increase onto the poor saps who already pay most of the taxes.

To fight that effort, he is forced to say the painfully obvious truth out loud.  “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? If I stay there, I pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

Thanks, Comrade Obvious.

And if you think NYC has it tough, think about poor Chicago!  Governed by a bug-eyed troll doll, forced to raise drawbridges to stem the onrushing hordes of professional useless people who think they’re entitled to steal and vandalize.

We have modern technology in America, like tear gas and rubber bullets and drones.  And Chicago is pulling up drawbridges like it was Avignon in the Middle Ages?  What’s next, pouring some boiling oil onto the raiders from a few stories up, and strafing them with crossbow bolts?

No, seriously.  How about you try the oil and the crossbows, and tell us how it works?  Asking for a friend in Minneapolis.

To give you an idea of how badly things are going in Illinois, they lost me to Florida in the mid 1980s, and now they are losing CO and the COW, also to Florida.   So, yeah.  That’s what I call a brain drain.

Or at least a sarcasm drain.

Meanwhile, with all of that rot in our country, little outposts like the CO nation are holding out, and winning at life.  This past weekend, my wife and I took our youngest off to college.  She’s going to major in a STEM field – if she wanted to pursue grievance studies, I’d disown her! – and she won a great scholarship.

Her biggest problem is that she’s not going to have any hardship stories to tell her kids, because she’s had it so good.  (Someday I’ll regale you with the tales of my un-airconditioned upstairs bedroom, with the kind of creepy wallpaper with old cars on it that you see in every serial killer’s bedroom after he’s been caught.  Or my first job weeding bean fields for $1 an hour when I was 13.  Or getting edged out by Idris Elba for People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year award.  Which still really stings.)

The point is that we live in an amazing country, with boundless opportunities.  Let’s not let a bunch of nihilistic leftists ruin it the way they’ve ruined the cities they run!

Avenatti/BLM Spokes-weasel 2020!

I started off Monday with a dour recitation of some of the lowlights of July, so let’s now turn to the sunny side.

Story 1: On July 22^nd, the mayor of Portland  – apparently a first-cousin to fellow Democrat and Minneapolis mayor Wussy McPussington – decided he’d celebrate the 56^th straight night of rioting in his city by taking his special brand of sniveling appeasement to the streets, and receive his well-earned hero’s welcome from the merry band of peaceful rioters.

And… it didn’t turn out so well.

The guy’s name is Ted Wheeler.  If you haven’t seen him, the video of his shenanigans that night is worth watching.  But if you’ve got a life to lead, I can give you a quick description to save you some time.  He looks to be in his mid-50s, wearing both goggles and a mask, and not exactly giving off a Chuck Norris vibe.  He’s the kind of guy who, if he told he’s had three girlfriends lately, you’d be thinking, “Two imaginary, one inflatable.”

Anyway, he joined the peaceful mob, but things went wrong from the outset.  Individual dimwits immediately began challenging him — because racism — and one dope dumped a plastic bag of garbage on his feet.

When she saw the littering, Grandma Squanto stood by the side of the street, with one tear dramatically running down her cheek.  #wemustneverstopmockingher.

Okay, I made that part up.  Not the part about the garbage, though.  That really happened.

A minute or so later, the classy protesters began chanting, “Friendly Ted Wheeler,” over and over again.  Except that the “F” word they used was not actually “friendly.”

But our delusional Dem was not deterred.   He tried to have a “listening session,” but when one spokes-moron in the mob – media reports that it was Joey Gaffe’s old nemesis Corn Pop have not been confirmed — asked whether he’d agree to abolish the police completely – in the middle of a two-month orgy of lawlessness and destruction! — he said no.  And just as in Minneapolis, the crowd jeered and screamed at him.

He ended up at the fencing surrounding the courthouse that the peaceful rioters had been peacefully assaulting.  His taxpayer-paid bodyguards tried to protect him from the super-peaceful thugs around him, who began “throwing flaming bags of garbage at the courthouse.”

(By the way, if there’s a more accurate branding slogan for the Democrat campaign this year than “Flaming Bags of Garbage,” I have not heard it.)

Still undeterred, Wheeler pompously announced, “The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you. If they’re launching the tear gas against you, they’re launching the tear gas against me.”

To which the federal cops in the courthouse responded, “Works for us.”

And they tear gassed the bonehead.

Not since Eric Swalwells’ last press conference has a gassing been so hilarious.

 

Story 2.  But Mr. Wheeler’s Wild Ride wasn’t the only heart-warming tale of useful idiots getting blowback from the mindless mobs they are trying to appease.  You may remember that in early June, a couple of knuckleheads – I’m not sure that they are snowflakes, but they are most certainly as white as snowflakes – were watching a clot of peaceful rioters marching down the street outside of their second-floor apartment.

So the SJWs in the apartment showed the super-pacifist mob that they are down with the struggle, by flashing enthusiastic thumbs-up gestures in their windows.  And of course they were recording their noble gesture.

Because signaling your virtue is okay.  But recording yourself signaling your virtue is even cooler.

And… a brick came smashing through their window.

Said moron #1: “Holy sunshine!  We’re on your side!”

And… another brick came smashing through a second window.

Said moron #2: “Friend!  We’re on your friending side!!”

Said moron #1: “Holy friend!  We’re on your side, man.”

Now that’s entertainment!

So a little while later – after the dimwitted snowflakes played their game of “hot bricks” (it’s like “hot potato,” only with bricks) and before Ted Wheeler ran for his miserable life through clouds of tear gas and screams of, “That’s right, mother-friender, run for your life, you stupid friend-stick!” – gay Democrat Wisconsin state senator Tim Carpenter thought he’d take a stroll through the peaceful riots in Madison and capture some video.

I’ve never met Carpenter, but I do have a magical wizard hat that allows me to read people’s thoughts.  So here are the two thoughts running through Carpenter’s head as he left his (I’m guessing fashionably decorated) house:

“I hope I’ll come across some of those Republican white supremacists that I’ve hearing about in the news but have never actually seen, so that I can record them doing their evil Republican things amidst our utopianly peaceful riots.”

And
“I know I’ll get some great video of our righteous army of peaceful progressives vandalizing or tearing down statues, and if anyone sees me recording, I’ll smile at them and say, ‘Look at me, I’m a gay Democrat state senator Tim Carpenter!’  And they’ll cheer for me, and raise me up onto their shoulders and sing my praises.”

Spoiler alert: that’s not what happened.

When Captain Terrific and his Technicolor Dream Camera arrived at a government office in Madison, some totally chill and peaceful socialists had just peacefully tossed a Molotov cocktail into the government building.  (You guessed it: the cocktail peacefully ignited, and produced a small, but oh-so-peaceful fire.) They had also peacefully torn down two statues.

Well Timbo just had to capture this moment.  Because as his socialist co-religionists in Germany in the 1930s learned, mobs with fire at night makes for a great visuals!

But when Carpenter turned his camera on his fellow peaceful rioters, they took exception.  (According to my infallible wizard hat, they thought, “Who is that rotten friender over there, and what’s he doing?  Is he recording us?  Let’s friend him up!”)

So at least three people rushed him. Rather than hoisting him onto their shoulders, the first one to arrive knocked his phone out of his hand, and the second one sucker punched him.  Then he fell to the ground, and a group of roughly 10 people, and I quote a local reporter, “proceeded to punch and kick Carpenter as he ‘tried to explain’ that he was an ally to the demonstrators’.”

Excuse me for a moment, while I collect my thoughts.

HA!  HA HA HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

I’m back.  Fast forward to July 28^th, and you can find mug shots of the two people charged with bravely assaulting Timmy the Terrible.  They appear to be women — though these days, who knows how they identify.  One of them looks relatively normal, except sad.  The other one has a striking combination of hair colors not found in nature, including bluish, greenish and purplish.

Purple Hair is a physical therapist in Madison.  Sad Trombone lady is… wait for it… employed by the local public school district as a… wait for it… social worker!

Because nothing says, “Let’s talk this through, and find a constructive way to address your problems,” like, “Put down that friending camera phone you FRIENDING FASCIST!!”

“Hey Martin, you hilarious genius,” you are probably asking yourself, “is there any way you can wring one more joke out of the comedy shammy that is this hilarious story?”

Yes, thanks for asking.

One of the two statues that the peaceful mob tore down right before they turned their homophobic rage on the first available leftist state senator was dedicated to which historical figure:

1. Democrat and founder of the KKK Nathan Bedford Forrest?
2. Democrat fire-hose enthusiast and vicious dog aficionado Bull Connor?
3. Democrat Grand Kleagle Robert “Sheets” Byrd?
4. Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist Republican who died while fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

You can’t make this stuff up, people.  But you can laugh your friending arse off over it.

 

Okay, more quick happy story from July:

On July 24th, egregious hive of far-left journalistic hackery the Washington Post followed in the equally egregious slime trail of CNN and paid Covington high school kid Nicholas Sandmann an undisclosed sum to settle his lawsuit against them.  The lawsuit stemmed from their stories that accused the Covington kids of being smirking, Trump-supporting, racist bullies who threatened a respected, noble Indian elder during a protest several years ago.

The story was very close to the truth, in that the kids were Trump supporters, and Sandmann does have an unfortunate case of “resting smirk face.”

On the other hand, the kids were not racists and not bullies, and they didn’t threaten anyone.  Also, the old Indian guy was a toothless freak show who came up to them unprovoked and starting smashing an idiotic drum in their faces.

(Luckily for him, I was at work that day, and not on those steps in DC.  Because if I had been there and he pulled that Little Drummer Boy routine in my face, he would have had to be a contortionist to be able to keep hitting that drum after I repositioned it.  Also, he would have had a difficult time recovering the drumstick.)

So Sandmann has gotten some money out of CNN and WaPo, but he’s still got suits pending against such “journalistic” giants as ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR and Slate.

So if you find yourself feeling down about the state of our country, remember St. Paul’s advice:  “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.”

Those words have many different meanings for different people.  But for this humble, hilarious genius, they can be summed up by the following image:

The dishonest, partisan bosses of ABC, CBS, NPR et al are sitting in a fancy conference room, giving each other worried looks as they hear that Nicholas Sandmann has gotten a big bag of money out of CNN and WaPo.  Then, from the hallway outside of their double doors, they hear the faint, familiar, building guitar opening from a great Metallica song.

As the noise approaches, a throbbing base line begins.  Their coffee cups on the table begin to vibrate as the sound grows louder.  A driving, thumping drumming begins, and the leftist oligarchs become more and more frightened.

Finally the doors burst open and a smirking high schooler strides in, accompanied by the roaring crescendo of “Enter Sandman!”

Pull it up on Youtube, CO Nation, and turn it up!

And if any of you musically talented types can re-write those Metallica lyrics to mock the leftist hacks in the MSM, post them here, and we’ll all raise our glasses together!

 

Avenatti/Flaming Bags of Garbage 2020!

I haven’t done this in a while, but now that August has begun, let’s take a totally subjective, unscientific look back at the best and worst of July.

I’ll get the worst out of the way in this column, and then I’ll cover the ‘best of’ in a day or two.

1.Early in July, the two towering intellects of Chris “his brother was worse” Cuomo and Don Lemon were bemoaning the way that most Americans don’t know enough history, and aren’t willing to think deeply about how many statues should be taken down.

No, really.  That was a thing that happened.  Don Lemon and Fredo, complaining that people should know more things before they talk.

Then Lemon, not content to have demonstrated that he is an economic and political dunce, proved that he’s a three-tool player — okay, sure: a three-tool tool — by showing that he’s a theological dunce as well.

Quoth the Lemon, “Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe in… admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.  So why are we deifying the founders of this country?”

Now I don’t want to split hairs, but Citrus-for-brains is not dealing with some obscure point of theology here.   This isn’t, “What’s the difference between the Anabaptists and Baptists?” or “What do the different beasts in Revelation symbolize?”

This is kind of an important point in Christian theology.  As in, there wouldn’t BE Christian theology if Christians didn’t believe that Christ was perfect.

Worse still, Lemon compounds his mistake by arguing the opposite of a logical point.  It makes sense to say that our founding fathers weren’t perfect, so yes, we shouldn’t deify them.  But you know who we SHOULD deify?  The DEITY!  (Cue Sam Kinison, from heaven:  “OH! OOOOHHHH!)

What can you say about Don Lemon?  Other than, “Forgive him Father, because he knows not…“ any single thing, I guess.

 

2. Toward the end of the month, Barack Obama gave us the occasion for another round of “Stupid or Liar?” — Adam Carolla’s party game that involves guessing whether a horrible politician is being the former or the latter.

In Barry O’s case, the question arises from his politicizing a funeral with a bunch of leftist talking points and lies.  (But I repeat myself.)  John Lewis, once an impressive civil rights leader (but sadly, in recent decades a mediocre pol more given to race baiting than racial healing) died recently, and Obama spoke at the funeral.

After a little rhetorical throat-clearing about what a great guy Lewis was, Obama unleashed a graceless political attack on Trump and conservatives.  A particular lowlight was this little nugget of dishonesty, braised with bad faith, and glazed with malice:  “Bull Connor might be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”

Let us never forget – like we must never forget that Grandma Squanto, though she is as white as Obama’s super-white mother, made an academic and now political career out of pretending to be an Indian (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – that Bull Connor and George Wallace were Democrats.  Just like the founders of the Klan.  Just like the bigots who created and enforced Jim Crow laws, and turned water hoses on black folks, and sicced dogs on them.

All Democrats.

Also, no federal agents are using tear gas and batons against “peaceful demonstrators.”

So is Obama stupid enough to not recognize that there is a difference between peaceful demonstrators and violent, thug-filled mobs attacking federal buildings with incendiary devices and purposely blinding federal cops?  Or is he just a racial arsonist liar?

I’m going with big fat liar on this one.  And once again, I am so grateful that this small, small man is no longer our president.

 

3. In an enraging and yet highly entertaining confrontation, the Democrat brain trust in the House finally got their chance to go toe-to-toe with AG Bill Barr, and really grill him.

Of course, he immediately rhetorically stomped on their toes, which caused them to hop around spraying themselves with the lighter fluid that they’d brought for the grilling, then set themselves on fire. When the flames spread to their pants, they pulled those off and ran around shrieking and trying to beat out the flames like a bunch of hysterical, bottomless Nadlers.

Which was about as pretty as it sounded.  And which also explains why you can go into restaurants all over this great nation and get grilled tuna, chicken, steak and shrimp, but you will never EVER find a place that offers grilled Nadler.  Because, yuck.

I’m sure you’re all aware of how badly all of the Dem inquisitors acted.  One after the other, they rolled out a series of sleazy and delusional attacks – Barr is a murderer, federal storm troopers are brutalizing peaceful protestors, etc. – and then interrupted Barr’s attempts to answer them.

In what was supposed to be a hearing, they made mendacious speeches, and then as soon as Barr started to mop the floor with them by responding, they stuck their fingers in their ears and shrieked, “Reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time!”

I’ve chosen one short interaction, just because I think it sums up the Dems’ shabby behavior throughout.

This exchange happened when Dem congresswoman Lucy McBath of Georgia had the floor.  She blathered on for 375 words, taking up 2 minutes and 52 seconds.  Most of what she said was partisan question begging (Obamacare is great, and represents the only chance we have “to be able to live in this country freely with quality healthcare) or source-free nonsense.  She closed by playing the emotion card, saying that as a two-time breast cancer survivor, she is just the sort of sick American that the Bad Orange Man doesn’t care about.

Barr responded by deftly seeing her cancer-victim card, and raising her: “I have two children who are cancer survivors, so I feel very strongly about this issue as a matter of policy.  And I believe that the president’s made clear that he will ensure—”

After Barr had spoken those 33 words in 13 seconds, McBath interrupted him. “Sir, please answer my question. Will you stop playing politics with Americans’ health care in the middle of a pandemic?”

Barr then spoke 15 words, the first four of which were, “I’m not playing politics,” before she starts CAWing over him again.

To sum up: leftist hack uses nearly 3 minutes to make a bad-faith attack posing as a question.  Barr opens with a little cancer story jui jitsu, and she can only allow him 13 seconds before she has to interrupt him with a political “When did you stop beating your wife?” question.

Ugh.  I know, Trump has some outsized flaws, and someone should monitor his tweets before they are sent, and the congressional GOP are mostly spineless mopes who aren’t fit to carry Ronald Reagan’s briefing book.

But the national Democrats are absolutely, metaphysically, existentially awful.  Their standard bearer is barely functional, their congressional leadership is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and their left wing (which appears to constitute around 90% of their national leadership) hates this country and wants to burn it to the ground.

In November, they’re coming to kill cops and censor speech and chew gluten-free, locally sourced bubble gum, and they’re all out of bubble gum.

I’m praying that enough Americans recognize the threat that the leftist mob poses to our country and our future, but right now the outcome seems far from certain.

Hey, Happy Monday, folks!  I know that sounded grim, but some good things happened in July too, and I’ll get to them in a day or two.  In the meantime…

Avenatti/Bottomless Nadlers 2020!

I’ve described conservatives as more optimistic and leftists as more pessimistic, but there is a pretty big exception to both of those generalizations.

Conservatives see a lot of critical flaws in human nature, which would seem to be a hallmark of pessimism.  Religious conservatives (especially) hold the paradoxical Christian view that while people are made in God’s image and capable of great good, they are also fallen and broken, and capable of great evil.  The Founders – most of whom were Christians, but all of whom were philosophically grounded in the Judeo-Christian worldview, even if they were Deists or agnostic or atheists – built a political system that depends on a non-rose-colored-glasses view of human nature in general.

Because they knew that humans would seek power over others, they created a set of governmental checks and balances, “setting ambition against ambition” to counter the natural impulse toward tyranny.  They believed that economic and other freedoms would help counter the self-serving greed of the human heart.

The great conservative thinker Adam Smith (peace be upon him) pointed out that it’s not from the benevolence of the brewer or baker that we get our beer or bread, but from their self-interest.   A baker might well be greedy, but in a free market economy, his best path to making money is through serving his customers well; if he provides the best quality product he can at the lowest profitable price, he will be better off, and so will his customer.

(Sidebar: One great advantage of conservatism over leftism is that the former turns one of the common sins of humanity to a positive purpose, while the latter makes a related but different sin even worse.  Free market economics diverts greed toward a benign purpose, because to prosper I must serve my fellow citizens, by providing them with goods or services that they want.  But leftist ideology takes one of the 7 deadly sins – envy – and inflames it.  Socialism tells you that to envy your more successful neighbors is not only NOT a sin, it’s a righteous act.  It’s not right that they have more than you do.  They didn’t build that!  Those evil 1%ers need a holy jihad brought down on them!  Power to the collective!!)

So while conservatives and conservative philosophy has a strong pessimistic streak too, I would argue that it’s a mostly functional and useful pessimism.  Because conservatism recognizes human flaws and weaknesses, it establishes a system in which incentives and disincentives redirect such flaws toward positive ends.

Similarly, mostly pessimistic leftists also have a strong strain of optimism, in the form of a near-utopian confidence that a small elite – themselves, naturally – have the wisdom needed to re-design society from the ground up, and eliminate all social ills.

The USSR was continually coming up with new pie-in-the-sky 5-year plans that would create a glorious socialist future… never mind that the previous six 5-year plans had produced the grim, impoverished socialist present.  The French revolutionaries confidently tore down centuries of political, social, religious and economic traditions – because their ideas were better.  Perfect, in fact.  They even re-started the calendar at Year One, to correspond with their glorious revolution, which would fundamentally change the world forever.

Now THAT is optimism!

But it’s a dysfunctional, delusional optimism.  It is optimistic only about your own ability to run everyone else’s lives, and metaphysically pessimistic about 99% of humans’ capacity to reason, or chart their own course in life.

Fortunately for the world, all of those big brains that plotted the French Revolution were encased in heads that soon formed a big, gory pile at the foot of the guillotine that they had built to launch their glorious new age.  (Cue whatever French instrument was the 18^th century equivalent of the sad trombone.) (The “sackbut,” I guess?)

But you can still see the disastrous effects of utopian leftist optimism in our society to this day.  The motley gaggle of antifa mouth-breathers and coddled man-buns in Seattle staked out their own little utopia of CHOP… which ended two weeks later in a miasma of chaos, violence, badly spelled cardboard signs, and body odor.

Only a utopian leftist could run on a promise that he was going to “fundamentally transform” one of the most successful societies in the history of the planet.  But Obama didn’t think twice about making that claim.

He also had no trouble saying that he could design a greatly improved health care system from the ground up, despite the fact that he had no medical training, and couldn’t tell the difference between a stethoscope and a catheter.  And AOC knows how to run the largest economy in the world, even though her previous business experience consists of screwing up drink orders in several bars where she worked.

And leftist judges know better than the Founders what the constitution should say, and if it doesn’t happen to say that, hold their Pinot Noir… and voila!  Here is a brand new right to privacy, and abortion, and taxpayer-funded sex change operations, and anything else they can dream up.

Also, that part about the right to bear arms, which would seem to be ACTUALLY written into the constitution?  The Founders were idiots, and we know better, so that is now non-operational.

So I’ve blathered on for three columns about the psychological and political implications of optimism vs. pessimism, but I’d like to end where I began.  All things being equal – and even when they aren’t – we should strive to be optimists.  Sure, you should prepare for the worst and take precautions – that’s only prudent.  But hope for the best, and look for the positive in every situation.

I’ll leave you with two of my favorite ideas on this subject.  The first I’ve seen attributed to Amos Tversky, and it says something like “to be a pessimist is to suffer twice: once when you fear that the bad thing might happen, and again when it does.”

The other comes from one of my favorite presidents, Calvin Coolidge.

(I’m going to write a small appreciation of Coolidge in a future column. He’s the most under-rated president in our history, an assertion that I can go halfway to proving just by citing his nickname: “Silent Cal.” After the last 30 years, can you imagine a more refreshing and longed-for adjective to apply to a US president than “silent?!”)

My man Coolidge said, “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.”

I don’t care who you are, your quality of life would almost certainly go up if you reminded yourself of those two quotes on a daily basis.  Throw in God, speaking through Paul (IMHO) – “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” – and you’ve got yourself a recipe for Ray Charles-singing-“Oh-Happy-Day” levels of happiness.

I can’t end these rambling without referencing the name of this website.  Why do we all congregate here?

Is it to be in the enigmatic presence of the great and powerful CO?  Is it to bask in the economic wisdom of Christopher Silber, or the good hearted sense of salon nurtured by the COSE, or the political insight and everyday common sense of the hundreds of stand-up guys and wise women and all around good eggs who comment and contribute here, or even the hilariously apt sackbut references and boyish (some might say “childish”) charm of yours truly?

I hope the answer is all of the above, but I know that it’s at least in part because this site is NOT called Cautious Pessimism!

Now let’s get out there and win the day!

Avenatti/Seattle Man-Bun Guy 2020!

As I continue to think about optimism vs. pessimism, I remember several terms from a long-ago psychology class.  The first one was the difference between having an internal vs external locus of control, which refers to whether you see yourself as mostly controlling your own life, or as primarily impacted by larger forces beyond your control.

Like the half empty or half full glass of water, both of these outlooks are partly true.  It doesn’t matter how determined or self-actualizing you are: if you are born in a socialist hellhole like Venezuela or China, or if you have a severe genetic disease, or are born to alcoholic, dysfunctional parents, your life is going to be very much harder than someone’s who is born in a thriving country, healthy, and with world-class parents like my wife and I.

But even at those extremes, and especially in between, people who see themselves as in control of their own lives will make decisions every day – work hard, don’t buy things on credit, acquire a Wonder Dog, stay off the heroin – that will make them successful.  And people who think the opposite will make decisions – work minimally, produce mostly excuses, vote for politicians to fix your life, mmmmm, heroin – that will ruin their lives.

The other psychological term is “learned helplessness,” which originally comes from some very depressing experiments on dogs and rats.  A creepy psychologist repeatedly shocked an animal when there was no way for it to escape; later, when a means of escape was provided and the animal was shocked, it did nothing to escape, because it had been conditioned to not try.

Human parallels abound.  A child who has trouble with math, absent any intervening teacher or helper, soon learns to give up on math tests.  An adult who thinks “the little man can’t get ahead” doesn’t do the things (working overtime, getting an education or job training, delaying gratification) that help little folks all around him get ahead every day.

Learned helplessness is very tightly associated with depression, as you might guess.  The self-destructiveness of others who have learned helplessness is extremely obvious, and frustrating, to those who love them.  The eight-times divorced woman says, “All men are abusive drunks.”  You ask where she met all of her ex-husbands.  She says, “in a bar.”

The career criminal says, “No employers will give an ex-con a chance.”  You ask what he was convicted of.  He says, “Stealing from work.”  You ask how many job training programs he went through in the joint.  He says, “None, because nobody will hire an ex-con.”

In my previous column, I pointed out that some nations tend to produce populations who are mostly optimists or mostly pessimists.  But even more than that, the two main political schools of thought – leftism and conservatism – tend to attract more pessimists or optimists, respectively, and also to inculcate and reinforce those views in their adherents.

Conservatism emphasizes each person’s responsibility to improve his or her life.  “That government is best which governs least” assumes that you are better able to run your own life than the government is.  “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is a mocking reference to the conservative tendency to emphasize the necessity of individual action.  Cliches from self-help books such as “If it is to be, it’s up to me,” ring true to most conservatives.

Liberalism/leftism, on the other hand, focuses on the need for collective action, and the extent to which each individual needs help (by which leftists inevitably mean government help) to achieve his or her full potential.  You can’t be a great parent on your own, because “it takes a village.”  Even if you’ve created a business by working your arse off for decades, it turns out that, “you didn’t build that.”  (Says the translucent lady who never built even the simplest campfire or tepee.  #wemustneverstopmockingher)

Leftism teaches that there are ONLY external loci of control (and yes, I’ll take “Latin plurals” for 500, Alex).  Systemic racism, and endemic sexism, and ubiquitous patriarchy will do way more to shape your life than any insignificant efforts on your part.   So stop beating yourself up for your failures, and don’t bother trying to improve yourself in our evil system wherein that is not possible.  Just vote for us – your benevolent, external locus of control – and we’ll fix your life.

Now obviously, neither outlook is completely, 100% correct.  Larger forces clearly do affect individuals, and we must try to achieve some large goals together, like whipping Nazis, or stopping jihadi domination of the world.  As a society, we need to make provisions to help those who truly cannot help themselves, such as the physically disabled, mentally handicapped or elderly and infirm.

But the tendency of leftism is toward mission creep, due to underestimating the importance of an internal locus of control.  They initially create a social security system that costs little, and is a supplement for most people, and necessary for only the hardest-hit few who make it to old age without having saved anything.  Ninety years later, it costs trillions and is going broke, and most old people feel dependent on it, and desperately fear losing it.

Leftists initially created disability payments for the very few who lose a limb or their vision, or suffer some other traumatic injury, and cannot survive without such payments.  A few decades go by, and millions of people are on the dole for such “disabilities” as sexual addiction, alcoholism, or impossible-to-confirm-by-any-objective-physical-test maladies such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or ADHD. (Because who could possibly be tempted by the chance to get drunk, have sex and sleep-in the next day?) (And no, I’m not saying that none of those exist – only that they are at best wildly over-diagnosed, and at worst fraudulently diagnosed, to attain a variety of monetary and non-monetary benefits.)

I wouldn’t argue that having an internal locus of control necessarily means that you are an optimist.  (Many times, having a sense that you are surrounded by boneheads making stupid decisions could make the most pessimistic among us even MORE determined to exercise control over everything they can!)  But I don’t see how you can be an optimist if you have an external locus of control.  Because if you are at the mercy of large and small forces beyond your control, what’s there to be optimistic about?

Look at the way that minorities have fared under leftism (in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc. etc.), and you’ll see decades of identifying external loci of control (white supremacy, racist cops, uncaring rich people, Jewish interlopers, malevolent capitalism), resulting ultimately in learned helplessness, and the devastation and blighted lives that inevitably follow.

The best case study that comes to mind is New Orleans in the lead up to Hurricane Katrina.   I grew up in Illinois, where the problem was tornadoes rather than hurricanes.  The average warning for a tornado was a minute or two; the town siren would go off, and you had to get to your shelter or the garage or the closest bathtub pronto.

But hurricanes move slowly, and with modern forecasting, people knew for four days that Katrina was going to make landfall somewhere around where it did, and when it did.  Optimistic people with a healthy internal locus of control might wait a day or two, but within 24 hours of landfall – with the predicted site and time firming up all the time – they’d get out of town.

And don’t tell yourself that poor people were trapped there.  Even the poorest of Americans either own an old car, or know friends who have one, or could buy a bus ticket.  (The average hurricane travels around 30 miles per hour.  In my life, I’ve owned a 30-year-old, rusty Silverado, a mid-70s Chevy Monza with a sewing machine engine, and a decade-old Buick landcruiser made out of a ton of American steel and a problematic head gasket. All of them leaked oil and had the get-up-and-go of Bernie Sanders before his nap.  And all of them could go faster than 30 freaking miles an hour!)

Ray “Schoolbus” Nagin, the Democrat mayor of New Orleans, earned his nickname because instead of using the gigantic fleet of school buses at his disposal to ferry poor people to certain safety, he left those buses parked in gigantic lots, so that they could be immersed in floodwaters and ruined.

Apparently, when you elect corrupt and incompetent leftist politicians for decades, the wheels on the but do NOT go round and round in your town.

By the way, Nagin is due to be released from prison in 2023.  He wasn’t jailed for incompetence — because if that were a crime, our entire Congress would be doing the jailhouse rock – but for corruption.

So the black and white and brown poor people of New Orleans, suffering from stage 4 government-induced learned helplessness, sat and waited for days, until a slow moving hurricane finally slammed into them.

In the aftermath, just to show the persistence of the external locus of control habit, whom did most of the survivors blame?

1. Themselves, for being over-run by a storm that Betty White could have outrun?
2. Their decades’ worth of Democrat city officials, who took millions in federal funding to reinforce levies and spent them instead on hookers and blow?
3. Their current Democrat mayor and city council, who spent the days and hours before the storm executing an Olympic-gold-medal-worthy cranial-rectal inversion maneuver? (And oh, did they stick the landing!)
4. Their Democrat governor, Kathleen “oh so” Blanco?

No.  They externalized the hell out of the blame, pushing it 1086 miles to the northeast, to GOP President George Bush’s White House.

Please tune in Friday, for the final part of these musings…

Avenatti/”Schoolbus” Nagin 2020!

We’re more than halfway through July, and there have already been a month’s worth of strong contenders for a vigorous Stupidest Statement of the Month competition.

One of the leaders in the clubhouse would have to be AOC’s response to a question about why the murder rates seem to be exploding in peaceful-riot-prone Dem-run cities.  The mediocre bartender’s answer – and I am not kidding — pointed to desperate people needing to shoplift bread for their hungry children.

Which would explain all of the frustration that the cops haven’t been able to follow the bread crumbs and solve all of those murders.  And also why crime scenes in Chicago and NYC have been littered with shell casings, crust, and bread ties.

Ugh.  If the polls are right –and I’m no more than 50/50 on that question – in 6 months this country may be led by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and AOC.  Or as intelligent readers of the CO site know them, the mostly dead, the undead, and the brain dead.

Rather than dwell on that grim prospect, I’ve been reading some good books, enjoying time with my family and Wonder Dog, and returning to a theme that has been pre-occupying me for much of this challenging year.

If you’ll allow me to depart from my usual snark and mockery, I’ve been thinking a lot this year about optimism and pessimism.  In the interests of keeping this column from going on too long, I’ll share a few thoughts now, and the rest later in the week…

I’ve always been a mostly optimistic person.  I’m not sure how much of that is nature – many people are obviously wired to be either sunny-siders or Debby Downers – but I’m sure that nurture plays a significant role.  An optimistic, well-adjusted and functional family likely produces more optimistic kids than the reverse.

I also think that a religious worldview can shape how optimistic your thinking may be, and in both directions.  Though I briefly studied other religions a long time ago, I know a lot more about Christianity, and I’ve seen that there are darker versions (leaning toward a Calvinist, more sin-focused fatalism) and lighter ones.  The latter ones seem to me to be more attuned to Christ’s overall outlook, with a focus on a loving God creating us in His image, and a teleology that allows us to choose (literally) paradise.

For secular folks who adopt a central philosophy for their lives – hedonism would be my favorite, if I were in that boat, with utilitarianism a close second, and nihilism my least favorite – I’m sure those ideological lodestones shape how optimistic they become.  Because I believe that doctrinaire leftism is very often more religion than political philosophy  (What is the cancel culture craze if not a good, old-school heretic hunt?), I see it as tending hard toward pessimism, about which more later.

I think nations and cultures can also have default settings – shaped by their history, to be sure — to be more optimistic or pessimistic.   I think of Russians as a generally more pessimistic bunch, for example.  I remember coming across a list of common sayings from various cultures, and the purportedly Russian saying was, “The tears of strangers are only water.”  Which… yikes!  Many Russian sayings have a way of looking on the dark side, such as,“If you know too much, you’ll age sooner.”

I also think of Scandinavians in general as a more dour group – and without good cause, when you consider that they tend to be tall and attractive, and live in clean, well-functioning societies.  Yet they’ve got a high suicide rate, and even in church, my current Lutheran co-worshippers lean more toward a curt nod of greeting, rather than the emotional hugging and infectious smiles of my Baptist upbringing.

Jamaicans, on the other hand?  And many denizens of warmer, Caribbean or Mediterranean cultures?  Let’s just say that upon first hearing the songs, “Let’s Get Together and Feel all Right,” or “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” most of us would instinctively guess that they were not written by somebody named Luther, or Lothar, or Olaf.  (That first title, especially, is all Marley and no Scrooge.) (HA!)

Americans are a famously optimistic people, or at least used to be.  Most of our ancestors, it’s true, came here at least partly because of chaos and disasters – famine, conflict, poverty, roving bands of proto-leftists stealing everything in sight — in their home countries.

But most people, in those circumstances, were fatalists.  “I know that the potato crop is failing, and that we’re at war with the next dukedom over, and the smelly horde of proto-leftists struck again last week, stealing all my worldly possessions – my nightshirt and the chair, both!  But what are you gonna do?  Life is suffering.  Hopefully smallpox will reach our village soon, and bring the sweet release of death.”

But the latent Americans in the group said, “I’m going to the New World!  Sure, I’ll have to spend a few months on a small wooden boat crossing an enormous ocean that wants to kill me, eating a scurvy-licious diet of weevils and hard-tack, and then hopefully landing in neutral-at-best surroundings, with no infrastructure and terrible cell coverage.”

“If we can survive attacks from the scowling bands of hateful Warrens who are rumored to haunt the forests, we’ll still need to get through the deadly winters.  But we’ll pray to our benevolent God to send us some blessed global warming, and we’ll invent something called a hashtag, whatever that is.  And we’ll first deploy it against the confusingly white natives, who will be enraged and disheartened when they begin to see “#wemustneverstopmockingher” carved on many trees in their forests.”

Their slump-shouldered neighbors said, “You’re crazy.  What if you drown, or starve, or get eaten by a grizzly bear, if such a thing exists?”

But the latent Americans said, “What if we don’t? What if we work hard, and improve some firearms, and invent checks and balances and the McCormick Reaper and the Mustang – the airplane and the car, which will both be things, somehow – and real football and Farrah Fawcett?”

 

Just as with nations, it seems that an individual’s default setting can become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, shaping one’s fate.   The most well-known distillation of the dichotomy is the one about the glass of water that is either half full, or half empty.  The example points out the paradox of these positions: both views are technically correct, and yet ultimately speak to very different realities.

Another famous statement is that, “optimists are more often happy, but pessimists are more often right.” (That sounds like it could have been translated from the original Russian!)

I tend to agree with the first part, but the second part gives away too much: it’s obviously written by a pessimist.  Because the point of the glass of water is that neither of the alternatives is more “right” than the other.

Sometimes the most profound truths are so simple that we lose sight of them.  The water glass example makes a point that you can confirm by looking at your own life: each event or circumstance can accurately be seen as good luck, or bad.

It works as well with my life as with yours.

I was born to relatively poor parents, with no family history of higher education or financial success… but in the richest country in history, at a time when education was more open to common people that it had ever been before.

I chose a profession in academia that takes nearly a decade to complete, and then doesn’t pay very well… which taught me to be frugal, and guarded me against financial complacency.

The job prospects in my field deteriorated further as I was earning my degrees, which meant that I had to patch together a bunch of part time jobs into my mid-30s, and still earn less than my wife was earning… which drove me to look around until I found my first run-down house to buy and rehab and rent out.

Neither of us had jobs with pensions… which made us decide not to flip the houses I rehabbed, but to keep them as rentals.  By the time we retire, those rentals will be paid off, and will give us more income than a pension would have.

I also would never have experienced one of the deepest satisfactions of my working life: the balance between intellectual work and physical work.  Each type has its benefits that complement each other.  The physical work provides tactile feedback when it’s being done right, and tangible accomplishments: drywall hung, taped and mudded; a rotten section of floor replaced by new plywood; a room painted.

The intellectual work tends to produce nothing tangible, but metaphorically seeing a non-tangible lightbulb going on over a student’s head is pretty sweet.  And writing and polishing a column feels like working craftsmanship muscles that aren’t all that different from completing a rehab project.

Also, restoring a house could never help me make a connection with many kind readers all over the country, and no one ever walks into one of my houses and says, “Look at this drywall job!  You’re a hilarious genius!”

In part 2, I’ll argue that optimism is intertwined with conservatism, and pessimism with liberalism, and I’ll try to connect that polarization to the stark political divisions that threaten to tear our country apart.