Martin Simpson

As another Thanksgiving is almost here, I am grateful for CO, COW and Laura Belveal, along with the entire CO nation for the chance to get to meet you – most only from a distance, but some in person in Denver last year.  It has been great fun to have a place to rant and mock and celebrate and commune with a lot of smart, good-hearted people.  In a society that sometimes seems to be losing its mind and its way, it’s a great consolation to know that you all are out there, fighting the good fight, thinking things through, and appreciating a good joke from time to time.  God bless you all, and I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Having said all of that sincerely, let me now turn to the goat rodeo that was the Democrat debate this past week, which I haven’t had the chance to comment on because I was too busy skewering the insane impeachment three-ringer.

You know that a Dem debate was bad when even Saturday Night Live felt compelled to mock the candidates, and managed to do so through some actually insightful barbs.  They’ll never savage a lefty pol the way they routinely do all right-wingers, but they got some shots in that cast light on some of the candidates’ real-life weaknesses.  Woody Harrelson’s Biden was frank about the candidate’s gaffe-prone inanity, the guy who played Spartacus made him look almost as dumb as he is in real life, and the callow ‘tweener Mayor Pete in his communion suit had the ring of truth.  The other minor candidates – Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer – came across as accurately vapid.

Kate McKinnon has Grandma Squanto and her energetic grandma/con artist/social justice warrior act down pat.  And Larry David IS Bernie Sanders AS the 1000-year-old Socialist IN “Let Me Run Your Life, and Give me My Senior Citizen’s Discount, Part 2.”

The strangest part of the actual debates was how the candidates mostly didn’t tear into each other as if they were actually trying to defeat an opponent and win the nomination.  In such a target-rich environment, where every candidate has such dramatic, obvious and mockable flaws, it’s baffling why not even the long-shot candidates were willing to throw caution to the wind and go all in.  After all, what do they have to lose?

Is Kamala Harris afraid that her 0.7% support is going to plummet to 0.5% if she gets aggressive?  Is Cory “I call myself Spartacus” Booker worried that he might lose his dignity?  Does Andrew Yang risk having people notice that he’s a Dem candidate for president?

One of my favorite moments was Joey Gaffe’s amazingly tone-deaf answer about violence against women and sexual harassment.  After a little boilerplate about how he’s written legislation to fix it, and how we must all change the culture, Biden said, and I swear I am not making this up, “We have to keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it.”  When the audience began to laugh at that insanely inappropriate figure of speech given the context, he noticed, and said, “No, I really mean it.”

We know, Joe.  That’s what scares us.

Think about that answer!  Someone asks how we should deal with violence and sexual harassment, and Biden’s response is that we need to beat the hell out of it, striking it over and over again.

I guess we can be thankful that he didn’t also directly address the second part of the question, about sexual harassment.  Because you know that would have gone something like this:

“Well, we’ve got to let the issue know that we’re never going to stop pursuing it.  Sometimes we’ll confront it head-on, walking up to it and grasping it firmly in both hands, and telling it that we won’t take no for an answer.  Other times we may sneak up on it from behind, using the element of surprise.  We need to let sexual harassment know that every breath it takes, every move it makes, we’ll be watching it.   In conclusion, I guess my main message to sexual harassment is that, ‘We are coming for you, and we’re never going to stop.  We’ll never stop texting, we’ll never stop calling.  We know where you live, and where you work, and when your boyfriend is out of town.  We’re going to counter your every move, and beat the pants off of you, until you know who’s boss.  Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a cigarette while I wait for my next question….  On an unrelated note, why is everyone looking at me like that?”

By the way, technically, THAT guy is still the front-runner.  Which is why the Dems have more motivation than ever to try to impeach Trump, instead of just trying to beat him in the election.

 

Elizabeth Warren didn’t do unusually terribly in the debate, but she did manage to put her moccasin in it outside of the debate. #wemustneverstopmockingher.  When an African-American woman and school choice advocate said that she’d read that Grandma Squanto sent her own kids to private schools, Warren corrected her, “No, I sent my kids to public schools.”

Warren must never have heard of the old adage, “Facts are stubborn things.” (Or however that is translated into Iroquois.)  Because a little digging turned up that while her daughter – to protect her identity, I’m going to call her “Running Deer” — did go to public schools, her son – I’m going with “Samoset Warren” — did not.  One of her poor campaign aides, when confronted with the question, said that Warren’s son did go to public schools “until the 5^th grade.”

So I guess we are to conclude that maybe young Samoset dropped out of formal education after 5^th grade to go on a vision quest into the Black Hills and get in touch with the Great Spirit’s path for his life?  Or did he just go to an elite private school from 6^th grade on?

If you answered the former, you may be smart enough to run for the Dem nomination.

So what do we know about Elizabeth Warren’s life story?  She is an Indian maiden, raised on the various crab dish recipes from her native Oklahoma, who got zero affirmative action advantage from her Native heritage in her pursuit of a teaching gig at Harvard, and who was fired from an early teaching job by a patriarchal sexist pig because she was pregnant.  Also, her son Samoset went to public schools, where he was undoubtably mocked and bullied because of his dark skin and his buckskin clothing and bear-claw jewelry.

In conclusion, #wemustneverneverneverstopmockingher.

In a move that should be beneath me – but really, not that much is beneath me, if I see a joke in there somewhere – I’ve actually been enjoying the speculation about the jam that Mummified-American Nancy Pelosi has gotten herself into by letting the impeachment hearings go this far.  If the Dems don’t actually have an impeachment vote in the House, they’ll be tacitly admitting how disastrous the attempt was; their base will be 28% more livid than usual, and Trump will pound them about their failed impeachment from here until election day.

If they do hold an impeachment vote, they will manage to impeach, but almost certainly with less Dem votes than they had going in – which most non-partisan observers will see as at least a quasi-indictment of their goofy hearings.

And then comes what might be a great karmic comeuppance, if the GOP boneheads in the senate don’t manage to blow it: a real impeachment trial, with the Chinless Cartoon Turtle in charge.  And you know that Cocaine Mitch is going to turn this into an exercise in political water torture for the Dems.  He won’t have to do anything under-handed or cut any ethical corners, the way Schiff did.  He can just conduct a fair and transparent trial, which will be devastating to the Dems.

To determine whether Trump was justified in thinking that the Ukrainian government was corrupt, Mitch will have to call Biden’s son, and that can’t go well for the sibling’s-widow-jumper.  Either he testifies, and has to explain how a dope like him could legitimately be worth 50 large per month as a Ukrainian energy consultant.  Or he pleads the Fifth, and sits there sweating like a sex worker in church while some GOP lawyer asks questions like, “Can you find Ukraine on a map?” or “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Or, “Your dead brother’s wife? Really?! You couldn’t find a random waffle house waitress to cheat on your wife with?”

McConnell can also call all of the witnesses the Dems either didn’t call, or whose testimony they suppressed, which will both completely undermine the case Schiff tried to build, and reveal the sleaziness of the Dems’ phony outrage.  Best of all, he can call the whistleblower, and reveal what everyone in Washington knows but won’t say: the guy is not an impartial patriot who just wanted to protect the country, but a Trump-hating lefty hack who colluding with Schiff and his hatchet men to get the whole mess started.

And then McConnell can put Schiff himself on the stand. That guy’s mewling, bug-eyed sweat act made him look like a serial killer, perpetually on the verge of breaking and telling the cops that the women’s bodies are buried in his mother’s dirt-floor basement – and that was when HE held the gavel!  Can you imagine how it’s going to go when he’s in the dock?

If McConnell plays his cards right, he could wipe the floor with the bad-faith mooks on the other side.  As an added bonus, he’ll tie-up the Dem presidential candidates/senators for weeks in a political bloodbath in DC, while they desperately want to be in Iowa and New Hampshire, pandering to primary voters with their grab-bag of unsustainable give-aways and appealing to their base instincts by inflaming their envy and hatred for their fellow countrymen.

Sweet merciful crap!  If Nancy Pelosi was capable of making a human facial expression, I’ve got to think that she’d be looking pretty worried right about now.

Big picture: the Russia hoax didn’t work, and now the Ukraine molehill didn’t work.  I can only speculate that the Dems are going through pseudo-scandals in alphabetical order.

So I guess that that means that they’ll be looking into phone calls to Uruguay next, with Zambia on deck, and Zimbabwe hopefully hitting clean-up.

 

The only person I can think of who had a week that was even close to as terrible as the congressional Dems’ – other than Jeffrey Epstein, who definitely did not kill himself – is Elon Musk, who staged a photo-op of a prototype truck that was supposed to be able to withstand a direct nuclear strike.  Yet when an underling tossed a velvet-soft peach at it – underhand — its windows shattered.  Twice.

The Dem impeachment hearings ended just like that.  Except that if those hearings were a proto-type truck, their windows wouldn’t have just broken.  The entire truck would have been spider-webbed by a series of lightning-fast cracks, and then splintered into a million shards.  And just as those shards hit the ground, they would burst into flames.   And then the resulting fireball would explode outwards, immolating all of the sleazy hack politicians within lying distance.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Avenatti/Schiff 2020!

I must be honest with all of you: I have not watched a minute of the impeachment-palooza live.  As part of my painstakingly developed and richly rewarding philosophy of “life is too short to focus on petty Schiff,” I’ve devoted most of the last two weeks to my usual stuff: being a world-class husband and father, making the world a better place, taking long, meditative walks with Cassie the Wonder Dog.  That kind of thing.

But I have watched some nightly excerpts from the hearings, and I have to admit that – in small doses – it was pretty entertaining.  But also, pretty sobering.  Because these people are the elected representatives of a great nation, yet these hearings were one bearded lady short of a freakshow.  And not in a good way.

Not since a gallant young Joey Gaffes faced off against the dreaded gang bangers Bran Flake, Corn Pop and Sugar Smack has a fight been so over-promoted, and ended up being so lopsided.  On one side, there were Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (mmmkay?), a cavalcade of witnesses to nothing, and the entire MSM.  On the other side, there were Jim Jeffords and a handful of competent GOP questioners.

It was as if Mike Tyson in his prime got into the ring with Stephen Hawking in his prime.  Only if instead of being a genius trapped in a wheelchair and suffering from a terrible disease, the guy in the wheelchair had been a hateful moron.  And you can guess which side was Mike Tyson just by counting the number of times a GOP questioner asked the simple question, “Can you identify a single impeachable crime that you know that Trump committed?” only to receive the answer, “No.”

Ouch.  If you look up the meaning of the phrase, “If it were a fight, they would’ve stopped it,” in the dictionary, you’d find a reference to these hearings.

It’s difficult to isolate the worst aspect of the hearings, but no list would be complete without the dim-witted, bug-eyed Ring Master, Adam Schiff.

Like most of you, I tend to associate Adam Schiff with the number 2.  Sure, the familiar Number 2 pencil reference is obvious.  But perhaps the more relevant connection is between the “evidence” that Schiff came in with and the kind of number 2 that Nancy Pelosi’s voting base has coated the sidewalks of San Francisco with.  Because Schiff really had nothing.

A low point might have been reached when Schiff looked straight into the camera and insisted that he does not know the identity of the whistleblower/leaker.  Everyone in Washington knows the identity of the whistleblower, and everyone in the country knows that Schiff knows the identity of the whistleblower.  Not since Bill Clinton pointed his bony finger at the camera and angrily insisted that he had not had sexual relations with that woman have I seen someone lie so blatantly, and so unconvincingly.

Another low-light came when someone named Holmes was testifying.  (I don’t know who he is, except that his first name is most definitely NOT Sherlock.)   He had some sweet second-hand gossip about conversations that some guys had about Trump’s Ukraine phone call.  He said that one of the other guys was – and I quote —  “nodding knowingly, as though he’d been briefed on it,” and went on to say that all of the nodding gave Holmes the “clear impression” that everyone obviously thought that Trump was quidding and pro-ing, with a heavy does of quo-ing in there too.

That is really part of the official transcript now: nod interpretation, and the consequent impressions given by such portentous nodding.  That’s considered “evidence” in an effort to impeach an American president.

Would I be out of order to suggest that sometimes people mis-interpret non-verbal signals from other people?

In fact, despite my well-known reputation as an astute observer of humanity in all its forms, even I have mis-read a signal or two in my time.  For example, at a party in high school I was convinced that a young woman was winking at me in a seductive manner, though it tragically turned out that she just had something in her eye.  And a boyfriend who outweighed me by 35 pounds.  I was also quite convinced that a different young lady had a crush on me, only to find out later that she was in fact a lesbian, who thought of me as a brother.  (When I asked her whether she meant the kind of ruggedly handsome brother who might be the rare guy who could turn her from her lesbian ways with his potent combination of charm and sex appeal, I was not pleased by her answer.)

On the other hand, I was once certain that yet another young woman I fancied did not care for me at all, until she approached me at a party and slapped my behind while whispering something in my ear that would have made me blush, were I not a worldly, man-about-town sophisticated type.  Because this was years before I’d been enlightened by the #metoo movement, and therefore didn’t realize that I’d been the victim of a traumatizing sexual assault, I responded by immediately leaving the party with her.  On the way out, I held the door open for her, and returned the gesture.  Because I am a gentleman.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Anti-Sherlock is sure that Trump is a traitor, because one time this one guy winked, and nodded, and tapped the side of his nose while raising his eyebrow.  So, treason, I guess?

 

While some of the specific moments were entertaining, there is no getting around the monumental absurdity at the center of this impeachment process: The Dems’ original intention had been to weaken Trump politically – and maybe get rid of him completely — by layering all kinds of sinister interpretations onto Trump’s executive-privilege-protected phone call with the Ukrainian president.  Then Trump wrong-footed them by releasing a transcript of the call.

Any intelligent partisan hacks would have then folded up their tent and gone on to the next pseudo-scandal.  But not these geniuses.  They forged – and I do mean “forged” — ahead, and after months of laying the groundwork, they started impeachment hearings in which many witnesses argued for many hours about interpretations of that sinister phone call.  A phone call that – I know that I don’t need to remind you, because you don’t have a Biden-esque attention span – WE ALREADY HAVE THE TRANSCRIPT OF!  OH! OOHHHH!

Sorry about that.  I forgot that I had my Sam Kinison filter turned on.

It really was amazing to watch.  It was as if I drove up to some buddies in a new vehicle, got out, and they immediately began arguing:

Buddy 1: I think Martin’s new car is a sweet Lexus.

Buddy 2: I’m pretty sure that it’s a Chevy Volt.

Buddy 1: No way.  I heard that it has 4 doors!

Buddy 2: My impression is that it’s a 2-door.

Me: Guys, it’s right behind you.  Just look at it.  It’s a Ford F-150.

Buddy 1: I heard from a guy who’s dating the best friend of a secretary at the dealership that Martin’s car is a midnight blue Japanese luxury sedan.

Buddy 2: I asked a guy in the hallway if it was a white Chevy Volt, and he pointed his finger at me like it was a gun, which gave me the clear impression that it is.

Me: Guys, turn around.  It’s a red F-150.

Buddy 1: I know my cars, and sources of mine have been to the Lexus plant in Tennessee, so I know my Lexuses.

Buddy 2: You may know Lexuses, but do you know anything about Chevy Volts?  Because to the best of my recollection, that’s what Martin’s car is.

And then, because in my hypothetical example Sam Kinison is still alive, and staying at my house for some reason, he jumps off of my porch, slams my two friends’ heads together, and screams, “IT’S RIGHT BEHIND YOU, YOU IDIOTS!  JUST TURN AROUND AND LOOK AT IT!  LOOK AT IT!!!  OH, OHHHH!!”

And, scene.

 

It just went on and on.  Sondland was supposed to be the star witness — after earlier “star” witnesses turned out to be “homeless schizophrenics mumbling to themselves about how their ex-wives are possessed by demons” witnesses – and he was forced to reveal maybe the most damning detail in the whole debacle.  He was asked, “What did Trump actually say he wanted?”  He had to admit that Trump said, “I want nothing.  I want no quid pro quo.”

Again, in a sane world, the only reasonable response to that would have been, “Good night folks.  We apologize for putting you through all of this, but you can all go home now.  Don’t forget to tip your waitress.”

But in a world with a Democrat-controlled House, what followed was 6 hours of speculation that what Trump REALLY meant by “no quid pro quo” was actually “yes, give me that quid pro quo.”

 

How did the MSM cover this giant nothing-burger, served on a zero-bun, with a side of zilch fries and garnished with some zip-lettuce?  (Also, I’d like nada for the drink.  And hold the substance.)

They went out of their minds, and began spitting out breathless military metaphors and Armageddon-level hysteria.  Everything was a “bombshell” or an “IED” or a “devastating attack.”  The testimony was explosive, the president’s defenses are crumbling, his supporters are abandoning ship, our constitution is being sexually assaulted, and today was a turning point and a tipping point, and the beginning of the end.  Schiff was galloping down Pennsylvania on a pale horse, and death was riding with him!!  DEATH, we tells ya!!

Over THIS.  Over repeated rounds of, “Do you know of any crime the president committed?”  “No.”  Over speculative interpretations of third-hand innuendo from anonymous sources who everybody knows are partisan hacks.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I didn’t vote for Trump in the primaries, and he’s far from my dream candidate.  But compared to THIS motley collection of stooges, hacks and partisan hatchet men, Trump is looking better and better.

To summarize, the smartest leftist comment of the entire week came from Eric Swallwell, and that didn’t come from his mouth.

 

Avenatti/Swallwell 2020!

Well, the elections last week certainly didn’t go the way I would have liked.  Kentucky elected a Dem governor, and Virginia’s state government went solidly Dem, too.  I can’t pretend to have followed these elections real closely.  As part of my “life is too short to spend too much of it on following politics” philosophy, I try to restrict my political attention span to those issues which might directly affect me (national elections and those in my home state and town).

What little I’ve read suggests that the GOP KY governor was very unpopular  (MSM message: It’s a referendum on Trump!), and the VA elections have been increasingly shaped by a burgeoning population of immigrants, and government workers in the DC ring counties (MSM message: It’s a referendum on Trump!)

(By the way, the only election that was NOT a referendum on Trump, according to the MSM: that time when Trump won the presidency.)

But I wish my fellow citizens in VA good luck with their choice.  And because they don’t have my sweet, prognosticating wizard hat —  which I keep in my climate-control hat-storage unit, between my high school football helmet on one side and my Martacus-style Roman centurion helmet on the other – I’d suggest that they look to Detroit, Baltimore and San Francisco for a preview of their bright future under leftist governance.

In other words, stock up on your fecal shovels and those inversion table things that allow you to be suspended upside down, so that your wallet and all of your change will fall out on the ground, to be snatched up by your greedy local pols.

(By the way, I saw the Fecal Shovels open for the Sex Pistols in 1975.  Killer show!)

 

In sports news, the World Series was played a week or two ago.  Unfortunately, since they scheduled it during football season, I had to miss all of the games.  Still, the late, great Charles Krauthammer was one of my heroes, and he loved the Washington National, so I’m glad that they won.

Speaking of blindingly obvious left-wing media bias – and though you didn’t know we were speaking of that, we were — how about that MSM coverage of the World Series?  It seems that Trump went to see one of the games, and received a lot of booing, along with some cheering.   So naturally, Brian Stelter ran and leapt into the “Giant-Dishonest-Human-Thumb-mobile,” raced it across town to CNN headquarters, and sprint-waddled in front of the cameras to gleefully crow about Trump’s getting booed.  The rest of the MSM – Squinty, Snarly, Butch-Cut, and even Dan Rather, who’d wandered into a coat closet in a Radisson and started babbling into a coat hanger that he thought was a microphone – followed suit.  They could barely contain their excitement.

Several days later, the Nationals win, and go to the White House, and one of their star players puts on a MAGA hat and makes the kind of fawning, pro-Trump speech that all of the other athletes aimed at Obama for 8 solid years.

The total number of minutes that the entire MSM devoted to the pro-Trump baseball story?  Think of AOC’s IQ.  Then subtract 27.

That’s right: zero.

 

And on the topic of zeroes, Kamala Harris seems to have stabilized her support in the primaries.  But don’t worry: she’s got a plan to get herself back up into the 2s and 3s.  And then — if Deval Patrick is flying with Michael Bloomberg on his private jet, and that jet ingests a flock of Canadian geese and then plunges into a high school gym in Iowa where all of the other Democrat candidates are debating, and the jet fuel ignites and burns the gym to the ground – Kamala Harris will be ready to make her move!

Her latest exploitative publicity stunt was to appear on MSNBC’s ironically named program “Live” (reaching an audience in the dozens) in the wake of a high school shooting in CA to push for a gun law that would have had no effect whatsoever on the shooting that she was there to exploit.  But at least she made a cogent, clear-headed, logos-filled argument on the topic.

HA!  I kid.  She made the kind of cringe-inducing fallacy-laden emotional screed that we’ve come to expect from her: “I have looked at autopsy photographs. I have hugged the parents of murdered children. This has to stop being a partisan issue, an intellectual issue, an ideological issue. I dare the people that stand on circumstances. I dare them to look at the autopsy photos of their babies, I dare them, and then vote their conscience.”

How many kinds of wrong are there in that short quote?  Let me count:

1. She’s looked at some gross autopsy photos, which I guess proves that she has a higher tolerance for the grotesque than the rest of us. But I think we already knew that, because during the crucial part of the job interview that got her her first high-profile political job, she looked at the naked body of creepy old Democrat power-broker Willie Brown.  So… yikes.
2. She said she doesn’t want this to be an intellectual issue. You don’t say.
3. She also hates when gun control becomes a partisan or ideological issue. If only the evil, deplorable, Nazi right-wingers could just stop with their fascist partisanship!!
4. If I weren’t so emotionally mature, I’d double-dog dare her to look at all of the autopsy photos of people killed by criminals because they lived under arrogant far-leftists who restricted their access to a handgun that they might have used to defend themselves.

But I am too emotionally mature for that.  So I’ll just quietly continue working on my draft of a haiku to commemorate that happy day when Kamala drops out of the race.

 

Finally, though the impeachment circus has barely begun, it’s already produced at least one towering, brain-dead quote for the ages.  I refer, of course, to the work of Illinois Democrat congressman Mike Quigley.  If you were watching the hearings with the sound off to prevent yourself from instinctively plunging any handy sharp instrument into your ear drums, he’s the one who looks like Garrison’s Keillor’s dim-witted second cousin.

When Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (Mmmmkay?) had called his first two “star” witnesses, and all of their “evidence” turned out to be fifth-hand or worse (“I heard from a S’Barro’s janitor who got it from an Uber driver who once drove Donald Trump’s accountant’s secretary’s step-mom that Trump was out to get Joe Biden.”), Sophocles Quigley leapt in to shore up the case.

Thus spake the Quigler:  ““Hearsay can be much better evidence than direct evidence.”

“YES!” said O.J. Simpson.

“Exactly!” said Harvey Weinstein.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” said Bill Cosby

“It’s like Vernon Jordan said, I never had sexual relations with that woman!” said Bill Clinton.    Then Hillary smashed a lamp over his head, screaming, “If it weren’t for you and the Macedonians, I’d be president right now!  CAW, CAW!!”

 

In any sane world, the people running and covering this circus would be mortified by the kind of naked partisan stupidity represented by Quigley’s statement.  Listen to it again,  and contemplate how long it would take you to come up with something as intensely stupid as “Hearsay can be much better evidence than direct evidence.”

This is the best I can do, and none of these are even close:

A plastic blow-up doll can be much better than a real woman.

A vegan soy patty can be much better than a hamburger.

A soccer match can be much better than a football game.

Jeffrey Epstein definitely killed himself.

 

Clearly, we are not living in a sane world anymore.

So…

Avenatti/Quigley 2020!

Before I get started, I have to mention the head-dress-wearing elephant in the room: Grandma Squanto has proposed a health care plan that will cost $52 trillion (with a “T”!) over 10 years, without costing middle-class families one extra penny in taxes!

Read that again.  Now consider that the ENTIRE US GDP last year was the highest it has ever been.  And it was 18.6 trillion. So the Indigenous Magician (#wemustneverstopmockingher) is going to spend 2.8 years’ worth of our total GDP in 10 years, without it costing a single penny from about 2/3 of the population.   She says that that’s a promise!

Also, eat all the ice cream and cake you want, and never gain a pound.  And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  And the check is in the mail, and I will respect you in the morning, and this horse is a sure thing in the 5^th race at Pimlico.

I can only conclude that Lizzie no longer identifies as an Indian princess.  She now identifies as a Nigerian prince, and she has a multi-million dollar account that she will happily transfer to you, if you can just send her $3200 first, to pay the taxes on your windfall.

#wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Sad news about Beto O’Rourke giving up on his presidential bid, isn’t it?  Remember when he appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with an accompanying gushy profile story, and was a Kennedyesque young firebrand who was going to parlay just barely losing to Ted Cruz into skateboarding his way into the White House?

And then… we saw him.  And listened to him.  And it turned out that he was pushing a typical 50-gallon barrel full of far-left snake oil – government control of everything, skyrocketing taxes, no borders, and we’ll confiscate your guns, thank you – and that he was a phony Irish rich kid with a fake-Hispanic name.

Plus, we noticed that he’s a twitchy weirdo, and basically just a conglomerated jumble of odd physical and verbal tics.  He jumps up on tables for no reason, and he has trouble modulating the volume and speed of his speech.  He randomly over-gestures like one of those wacky inflatable arm-waving tube-man things that desperate retailers put up outside of their tire store or mattress outlet or vaping emporium when they want to goose foot traffic.

After the most enthusiastic young progressives’ first-date-with-Beto afterglow wore off – and (I’m just speculating here) their blood alcohol and THC content dissipated — they looked into the mirror and said, “Yikes!  Let’s take another look at the Indian white scold lady, and the 1000-year-old socialist crank, and the judge-y little gay teenager, and the old man who told Corn Pop to get off his lawn.”

So on Friday, Beto called it quits.   In keeping with my pledge to you, I’ve written a haiku to commemorate his exit from the race:

Skateboarding doofus,

Empty-headed arm waver,

You will not be missed.

 

But cheer up, progressives.  Because Hillary is considering throwing her feedbag back into the ring!

Sorry, “hat.”  She’s thinking of throwing her hat back in the ring.

And why not? When polls show that almost half of Americans don’t mind seeing Trump investigated for a possible impeachment, and the Dems are convinced that he’s a Hitlerian threat to our democracy and is in the midst of the worst first term since Bush caused 9/11, or something… and yet those same polls show that he’s either neck-and-neck with or leading the “strongest” of the current Dem candidates?  Maybe it’s time for a little of the old Clinton shock-and-CAW again!

I mean, she’s tanned, she’s rested, she’s freshly shod.  She’s got a clear handle on the Macedonians, Russian bots, sexists and white nationalists and deplorables who were behind her defeat last time.  And as she said in a recent interview/fever dream, “I’m sure that I could beat him again!”

And I think she’s got an advantage when it comes to the theatrics of a modern political campaign.  For example, do you remember how Bill used to pull up his pants and then enter one frenzied arena after another to a high-decibel rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing?”

Well Hillary has a ready-made, awesome entrance/theme song that is sure to get her crowds on their feet.  It’s a raucous little high-energy ditty by Mr. Elton John.

No, it’s certainly not “Tiny Dancer.”  “Don’t go Breaking My Heart” and “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues” are closer, but not right.  And Elizabeth Warren already has dibs on “Honky Cat.”  (HA!) (#wemustneverstopmockingher) (And yes, that’s three hashtags for Grandma Squanto, to make up for a few of my recent columns being hashtag-less.)

You’ll think of it.  And when you do, you’ll recognize that it is perfect.

 

Finally, I’ve been enjoying even more of the fall-out from the story of our American hero dog who hounded (HA!) the smelly terrorist Al-Baghdadi during his last, miserable moments.

First, I was surprised to hear that despite the fact that the courageous canine’s name is Conan, she is actually a female.  Which only makes the story sweeter.  Given the Islamic disdain for both dogs and for females, it is doubly funny to think that it was literally a bi*ch that cornered the fleeing thug.

However, this news does change a few details from my Friday column. Please re-read it, and replace all of the “GOOD BOY!” references with “GOOD GIRL!” Also, when I wished that Conan would have raised his leg on Al-Baghdadi at the end, that is obviously an inoperative wish.   She clearly should have squatted over him… which I hope that she did.

Additionally, when she thought Conan was male, Cassie the Wonder Dog seriously considered giving him a carnal reward for a job well done.  But since Cassie does not play for Katie Hill’s team (so to speak), that offer is now off the table.  (Although Cassie tells me that if she ever were to… experiment… a gallant girl like Conan would be top of the list.)

By the way, how cool is it that even our female war dogs have badass macho names?  I look forward to hearing how the next four heads of ISIS are chased down and bitten to death by four female German shepherds named Chuck Norris, John Cena, Mike Ditka and George Patton!

Also, as a lover of language, I must point out that Al-Baghdadi’s middle name – Bakr – is an anagram of “bark.”   I can only hope that in his final, disorienting panic, he believed that the infidels had somehow come up with a dog that speaks his own language, and that she was yelling his name as she chased him.  “Bakr!   Bakr!  I’m coming for you, Bakr!”

Man, I love everything about this!  Zero Bark Thirty.  Jokes about how our military is obviously racist, since it deploys dogs in black face!  (GOOD GIRL!)  And I never thought I’d write this sentence: Arnold is now my SECOND-favorite Conan.

Love, love, love it!

 

But the best part of the whole story involves two of my favorite things: Trump trolling the MSM, and the MSM falling for it and beclowning themselves.

You’ve probably heard about the smart, funny conservatives at Daily Wire (if you don’t already follow them, you should) making a meme in which they used the magic of photoshop to replace a Medal of Honor winner from a past WH ceremony with Conan.  The resulting image showed Trump putting a ribbon and “Medal of Pawnor” around Conan’s neck.  Someone sent the pic to Trump, who tweeted it with a laugh.

So naturally the MSM lost their minds.  They recognized the terrible, constitution-endangering fraud involved in sending out such a specious image, and they responded proportionally.  Totally, rationally, proportionately.

An earnest young Washington Post reporter emailed Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boring, seeking confirmation that they had actually put out a false image of Trump giving a medal to the dog.   Boring responded with an email for the ages: “You must be f-ing joking.  And please quote me on that.”

Other leftist fact checkers went into overdrive, running down this earth-shaking story.  The Huffington Post breathlessly described for their reader (and yes, I’m assuming that noun should be singular) the WH image, but then broke the case wide open:  “However, the photo didn’t really happen. Someone Photoshopped a picture of the hero dog over an Associated Press photo of 2017 Medal of Honor recipient…”

I did not make that quote up.  Maybe the best part is that they try to build suspense by reporting that a shadowy “someone” did the photoshopping.  How do we know that Sherlock Holmes is not doing fact-checking work at the HuffPo, you ask?  Because the picture had a watermark saying “Daily Wire” on it.  My dear Watson, that could almost count as a clue!  In fact, a paragraph later, the story mentions the Daily Wire.  So…cue the sad trombone, I guess?

Not to be outdone by the brain-trust at HuffPo or the WA Po, the Old Gray Lady — not Hillary, or Grandma Squanto.  I mean the New York Times — was also on the case, publishing a story entitled, “Trump Tweets Faked Photo of Hero Dog Getting a Medal.”

Ah, groundbreaking NYT headlines!

Move over, “Germany Surrenders!”

Step aside, “Man Walks on the Moon!”

Make way, “Some People Did Something, and Now the World Trade Center Has Disappeared!”

Save a 2020 Pulitzer-trophy-sized space on the bookshelf for “Trump Tweets Faked Dog Photo!”

The Times even tracked down the Medal of Honor winner whose picture the hero dog was superimposed over, apparently expecting that he’d be a Bradley/Chelsea Manning type, and burst into tears before running into a corner, pulling his gender-ambiguous undergarments over his head, and start sucking his thumb.

Instead, because he’s a normal human and a military hero, he laughed, and praised service dogs, and said that he wasn’t offended.   So, a sad trombone duet, I guess?

The funniest thing about this story is that it took TWO NYT reporters to write it!

Now if you have been reading this column for very long, you know that I do not like to sing my own praises.  Sure, in the past I’ve been forced to admit that I am a hilarious genius, I’ve shaken hands with a man who pissed in Hitler’s bathtub, and have the meniscus of a better-conditioned Usain Bolt.  But I am not comfortable with that kind of praise.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’ve written this entire column BY MYSELF, with no help from fact checkers or a research team, or even the powerful and mysterious CO!  And this column has contained three hashtag shots at Lizzie Warren, a Longfellow-esque Beta O’Rourke haiku, and a trenchant John Cena reference!  You think you’d find that kind of range in an entire year of NYT stories?  Don’t make me laugh.

I guess what I’m saying is, when can I expect my phone call from the Pulitzer committee?

 

Avenatti/Skateboarding Doofus 2020!

So I leave for a short trip, and all kinds of hilarity ensues.

I’m going to save the best news for last, and catch up on a few other highlights of the last 10 days or so.  Starting with the implosion of the Dems’ secretive, not-really-impeachment impeachment hearings in a basement room at the capitol.

First, I love a good acronym, and SCIF – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility – is a great one, with just the right quasi-sinister, Dr. Evil overtones for a place in which a Star Chamber of angry leftists would gather in secret to overturn election results with which they disagree.

Second, I love the way the GOP actually stood up to the Dems and created good optics for themselves, when they showed up and demanded entry to the secret hearing room.  After all of the selective leaking that had been going on, the closed-door hearings appeared patently unfair to any even partially neutral observer, so it was good political theater for the GOP pols to force their way in.  And it was icing on the cake to see Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (mmmkay?) flee the room immediately, the way one does when caught in the act of doing something underhanded.

The fact that Pelosi has found it necessary to call for a vote to make the ongoing proceedings at least nominally more open to the public is a tacit admission that the Dems were in the wrong.

One of my favorite board games as a kid was the murder-solving game Clue.  I’m sure you remember it: the point was to be the first to solve the mystery by identifying which character was the killer, in which room the murder took place, and the murder weapon.  (“Miss Scarlet, in the conservatory, with the lead pipe.”)

The GOP showdown at the SCIF was called “a political stunt” by the MSM.  (Funny how when a bunch of Dems lay down on the House floor and hold their breath to demand a never-going-to-happen vote on repealing the 2^nd amendment, the MSM calls that a “sit-in in the grand tradition of civil rights protests,” and not a stunt.  Or when leftists exploit an autistic Swedish teen by letting her rant about manbearpig at the UN, that’s a brave youngster speaking truth to power, and not a dishonest political stunt.)  But the proof is in the pudding: the GOP called the Dems’ bluff, and the Dems’ subsequent retreat and reluctant pseudo-impeachment vote show that their secretive hearings were a political blunder.  In trying to take down Trump from behind closed doors, they only screwed themselves.

I guess what I’m trying to say is:  Schiff.  In the SCIF.  With a marital aid.

 

In other lefty self-destruction news, Democrat California congresswoman Katie Hill’s sex scandal led to her resignation last Sunday.

The dissolution of a marriage is almost always a sad story, and I would normally take no pleasure in discussing it.  That being said, the way that Hill lashed out as she resigned is worthy of comment, and the way the MSM covered the story is enough to trigger one’s gag reflex.

The story’s details are partly just good, old-fashioned tabloid fodder: bisexual female pol brings a young female employee into a three-way sexual relationship with her odd husband, then spurns both of them to cheat with a young male staffer.  Add in some nude pictures that also feature drug use and a Nazi-era tattoo in the crotchular region, and you’ve got yourself the makings of an “Elvis Spotted in Three-way with Elon Musk and Lady Gaga” sized headlines.

But take away the titillating details, and you’ve got a textbook #MeToo story: powerful, rising-star pol exploits and takes sexual advantage of powerless young employee.  To cite the tired old rhetorical question: can you imagine how much more attention this story would have gotten if the creepy pol were a Republican?

What makes the story less sad and more karmically satisfying is the way that Hill lashed out in her resignation speech.   After a little perfunctory rhetorical throat-clearing along the lines of “I regret my mistakes,” Hill laid into the evil, sexist conservatives who are REALLY to blame.  “I am leaving now because of a double standard,” she said. “I’m leaving, but we have men who have been credibly accused of intentional acts of sexual violence and remain in boardrooms, on the Supreme Court, in this very body and, worst of all, in the Oval Office.”

Yes.  She’s just like Brett Kavanaugh.  Except that instead of being falsely accused of sexual misbehavior by a partisan hack 30 years after the fact and with no evidence at all, she was photographed 10 minutes ago hooking up with a subordinate employee, while doing drugs and flaunting a tattoo you might expect to find on any trendy, lesbian Hitler-enthusiast.

And the MSM played the story right down the middle, as you might expect.  For example, a Slate story (I read that trash so that you don’t have to.) (You’re welcome.) on the scandal had a subtitle claiming that “Right Wing pundits are harming” the young staffer she seduced.  (Because that is Logic 101: A leftist pol sexually exploits an underling.  Who is to blame?  Right wing pundits.  Duh!)

From the Slate story:  “Other right-wing pundits have rushed to depict Hill as an inconvenient example of liberal hypocrisy over the #MeToo movement.”  (Damn those evil right-wingers, with their rushing, and their accusing liberal hypocrites of being… liberal hypocrites!)

The Slate writer generously concedes that, “Hill very well may have committed an ethical breach by engaging in a relationship with a subordinate…”  Ya think?!

But she goes on to denounce the real bad guys: “Now, the conservative pundits denouncing Hill’s supposedly predatory behavior are treating the woman they claim is a victim as a prop for their own political purposes.”

Got that?  Her behavior was “supposedly predatory.”  (A phrase you may remember from the Harvey Weinstein coverage, as in “Weinstein’s supposedly predatory behavior amounted to little more than coercing dozens of young actresses into a satisfying sexual relationship with the supposedly repulsive studio boss.”  Or not.)  And the conservatives are the ones treating the young employee as a prop.  Not her lecherous, unfaithful boss.  Nope. It’s those nasty conservative pundits.  Have they no shame?

For me, the worst part of the story is that Hill introduced a repulsive new word into our lexicon: the “thruple.”

It’s an ugly word, to describe a creepy practice, and it brings to mind an unpleasant hypothetical to me:  If I were to come home from work one day and say to my world-class wife, “Hey honey, I’ve got an idea I’d like to run by you.  What do you say I invite a 20-something girl from my office into our marital bed for a very modern, progressive three-way romp in the sheets?”

After she fired a crisp right jab into my solar plexus, what sound would my body make as I collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath?

“Thruple.”

 

Finally, the news of the month was the oh-so-timely death of evil ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.  Cue the video of Ray Charles singing “Oh Happy Day!” with a horde of dashiki-clad church goers, because this was the story that just kept on giving!

First, it’s so great to be reminded what an amazing collection of special forces studs we have protecting us, and putting fear into the hearts of evil men all over the world.  Any one of those guys is worth more than all of the politicians in Washington, with every actor in Hollywood and every “journalist” in the MSM thrown in.

Second, how about the picture of the war dog that helped chase Mr. Weird Beard Rapist into the tunnel that he died in?  I’d expected to see something like a cross between a werewolf and a giant pit bull, with blood dripping from bared fangs.  Instead, it’s a sweet-looking dog with a goofy smile, and his tongue lolling like he’s ready to tear off and chase down a frisbee – or another black-hearted jihadi freak – at a moment’s notice.   All I could think of was, “Who’s a good boy?  YOU ARE!”

And Trump was at his Trumpiest in his announcement, saying, “Our ‘K-9,’ as they call it,” Mr. Trump said, “I call it a dog. A beautiful dog — a talented dog — was injured and brought back.”

Of course Cassie the Wonder Dog was ecstatic when the story broke, and she saw the hero dog’s picture.  She’s been trotting around the house with her head just a little higher, wearing her canine pride on her sleeve, ever since.  I get the distinct feeling that if she hadn’t been fixed, she’d eagerly go visit that brave war dog and show him her gratitude, if you know what I mean.  Unless he was married to a Democratic politician who wanted Cassie to become part of a thruple.  (A “pupple?”) Classy Cassie wouldn’t go for that, because we’ve raised her right.

It’s especially satisfying to think that one of the last things that panicky, running jihadi creep heard was an American dog (GOOD BOY!) closing in on him.  The Islamic disdain for dogs as unclean animals is incomprehensible to me, but it adds an extra layer of gratification to know that Al-Baghdadi felt just a little extra humiliation in his last moments.

Another great thing to come out of this story?  The MSM took it as another excuse to absolutely cover themselves in shame.  Everybody has commented on the Washington Post’s initial idiotic headline – “Austere Religious Scholar Dies at 48” – and the mocking parallels almost write themselves.  (“German Shepherd Owner and Promising Artist Adolph Hitler Dies at 56,” “Transylvanian Patriot and Stake-Decorator Vlad the Impaler Dead at 49”)

And one reporter after another squirmed and twisted and grimaced as they grudgingly reported the good news, finding fault with everything about Trump’s announcement.  It was terrible the way he mocked Al-Baghdadi in death.  He sounded more like a terrorist himself. All of that gloating was so distasteful!

By the way, do you remember how the MSM hammered Obama for taking a victory lap after he ordered the raid that killed Bin Laden?  Me neither.  I mean, sure, Obama didn’t get all Trumpy about it.  (“Bin Laden died like a dog.  One minute he was watching porn, and the next he was whimpering and running and screaming like a beeyotch.”)  And more’s the pity.  But for years afterward, Joey Gaffes constantly bellowed the gloating refrain, “Bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive!”  And MSM never got their dresses over their heads, worrying about how such bragging might make those nasty jihadis REALLY mad at us now!

The delicious cherry on the schadenfreude sundae was Mummified-American Nancy Pelosi whining that Trump hadn’t informed the Democrats about the raid before it happened.  Trump’s response was perfect: “Why would I tell you leaking SOBs?  Bite me, Botox face!” (I’m paraphrasing, but I think I’ve caught the gist of it.)

Her petulant statement made her look even smaller, as she went out of her way to say nice things about the military, while pointedly not giving Trump any credit.  Again – compare that to the way the Dems and MSM credited Obama for Bin Laden’s death.  To hear them tell it, he speed-roped down onto the compound roof single-handedly, his face covered in camouflage paint and a combat knife clenched in his teeth, and he went through every jihadi in the area like John Wick on Red Bull and meth.

One other hilarious detail: at around 11:30 Saturday night, lefty weasels Alec Baldwin and Pete Davidson were in a SNL skit mocking Trump for helping ISIS. The timing could not have been better, because at that very moment, half a world away, the leader of ISIS had just made his transition to GIAT.

Not GOAT (“Greatest Of All Time”).

But GIAT:  Goo In A Tunnel.

I hope that after the explosion, that beautiful dog, that talented dog, shook his head to clear his ears, and then crept into the tunnel to be sure.  And then, I hoped, he raised his leg to give Al-Baghdadi a final send off.

GOOD BOY!

Avenatti/Katie Hill 2020!

Tomorrow I’m leaving on a short trip to visit family.  But before I go, I’ve got to carry out a little blood-pressure-control exercise. (That is, I’ve got some ranting to do, so buckle up.)

Today I bring you two sad tales, one that focuses on one poor, individual bonehead, and another that focuses on one useless international governing body.

The first story involves the GOP figure who has done the most to disappoint me in the last 10 years (and yes, I’m counting Guiliani in that group): Mitt Romney.

Romney’s “Pierre Delecto” fake Twitter identity has to be the saddest thing I’ve read since Hillary re-emerged from the woods around Chappaqua to blame her election loss on Macedonian hackers, Russian oligarchs, sexism, and anyone else in the world except herself.  Also gluten, for some reason.

In the last several years, Romney has revealed himself to be a shoddy human being in many ways.  It’s gotten so bad that many of us are now almost to the point that we’re glad that he lost to Obama in 2012.  (Almost.)

But this Twitter story is a new low.  Not just because a grown man faking an online identity to defend himself in the third person is sad.  (Though holy moly, is that sad!)

Still, that’s not the saddest part.  Nope, the morose cherry on the melancholy sundae has to be the name Romney chose for his nom de lurker.

“Pierre Delecto”?  Really?

I never thought I’d say this.  But Mitt Romney has made me admire Anthony Weiner.  Because when he needed to make up a name for his teen-girl-cruising alter ego, Weiner came up with “Carlos Danger.”

Sure, it’s something you’d expect from a junior high boy struggling with a changing voice and the least attractive excuse for a weak little mustache you’ve ever seen.  But what was he supposed to do?  “James Bond” was already taken.   So were “Mike Hammer,” “Sam Spade,” and “Martin Simpson.”

Hence, Carlos Danger.

But Pierre Delecto??

First, if you’re considering going foreign language first names, don’t go French!  That’s “Create Your Pseudonym 101.”

Spanish works, because Carlos, Mateo or Antonio can be bad asses.  So would a variety of Nordic language names: Thor, Sven and Axel are going to get some serious respect at Lincoln Junior High.

German’s a little tricky.  I don’t think “Hans Weltanschauung” is going to get many swipes right.

Russian’s out, because Cyrillic letters are just close enough to English to be creepy, like a CGI special effect, or a sex robot that is lifelike enough to make you momentarily think “mmm?” followed by, “Ugh, no!”

Polish is out too, because five consecutive consonants is an affront to all that is just and holy.

And don’t hit me with Arabic, because that calligraphy looks like a sword fight is going on, and we’re not invited.

But “Pierre?!” No.  A thousand times NO!

Pierre is a gender-confused detective who focuses on solving robberies involving garish clothing, rare perfumes, and plumed hats.  Or he’s the foppish original boyfriend who mistreats the female lead and is then tossed aside in favor of Ryan Reynolds in the third act.

And if “Pierre” isn’t bad enough… Delecto?

Didn’t that guy team up with the Green Goblin in SpiderMan #23?  He was an evil chef who gave his victims food poisoning so that his henchmen could storm City Hall and take over the metropolis, right?

It almost shakes my confidence in my own judgment that I once thought that Mitt Romney was the strongest candidate in a Republican field.

But then I remember that I also chose my wife out of a sizeable pool of piping hot Norwegian-American girls who were going at each other hammer-and-tongs competing for my affection in the late 1980s, and that I chose Cassie the Wonder Dog out of the herds of fine canine companion options in the world.  And I realize that I’m like 64,349-and-1 in fantastic life choices.

64,349-and-2, if you count selling my Apple stock to go all-in on MySpace in 2005.

But still, knowing that I once respected Mitt Romney really stings!

 

The second sad story involves the worst international governing body to blight our planet since Germany, Italy and Japan formed the Axis.

I’m speaking, of course, about the execrable UN, and their unutterably terrible Human Rights Commission.

How bad is the UN?  The number of reasons to oppose the existence of the UN is larger than the number of fantastic life choices that I have made.   It’s that bad!

Consider:

Reason number 1: the UN charter granted permanent membership on the 5-member UN security council to Russia.

Reason number 2: the UN charter granted permanent membership on the 5-member UN security council to China.

Reason number 3: the UN charter granted permanent membership on the 5-member UN security council to France.  (Sure, France is not Russia or China.  But the last time the French were militarily impressive was in 1066, and that was because their army were basically French-speaking Vikings.  And don’t give me the Grand Armee, because they were mostly grand because they were led by a short Corsican with a grudge and a Napoleon complex.  Literally.) (But I’ll grant you Lafayette.)

Any club you belong to that includes two of the worst mass murdering leftist slave states in the galaxy has gone wrong from the beginning.  And they didn’t stop there: over 30,000 of the reasons to despise the UN involve the number of anti-Israel resolutions alone!

And that’s not to mention reason number 41,556: a creepy devotion to the metric system.

 

Anyway, reason number 65,213 happened this month, when the wretched hive of scum and villainy voted Venezuela onto the Human Rights Commission.

You read that correctly.  Venezuela.  Human rights.

“Venezuela” and “human rights” should never appear in the same sentence, unless separated by the predicate “lacks even the barest traces of.”

Once-proud Venezuela was the wealthiest Latin American country not much more than a decade ago.  Then — in a disaster of such epic scale that you would usually only see it unfolding in times of plague, famine, or in the wake of Nazi armored columns roaring into a wooden-hut village populated entirely by orthodox Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur — Venezuelan society was utterly destroyed.

The culprit?  Not typhus, or ebola, or an ELE (Extinction Level Event).

But close: the systematic application of the governmental/economic philosophy that is currently being pushed by Bernie Sanders, Grandma Squanto and AOC. I.e., socialism.

 

You don’t have to believe me.  (Although, c’mon.  You really should.)

Listen to this opening from a story in – I kid you not – the New York Times from this May: “MARACAIBO, Venezuela — Zimbabwe’s collapse under Robert Mugabe. The fall of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s disastrous unraveling in the 1990s. The crumbling of Venezuela’s economy has now outpaced them all.”

Do you notice anything that those four econo-cides (term trademarked by me, right now) have in common?  And before you can guess: no, it is not a slavish devotion to free market economic principles.

Anyway, super-thug Hugo Chavez took control of formerly successful Venezuela, and after accepting hugs and kisses from know-nothing celebrity American leftists like Sean Penn, Oliver Stone and Bernie Sanders, he promptly drove the country into the ground.

When a vengeful God struck him with a fatal cancer of the ego, he was replaced with blocky ex-bus driver/thug/Saddamesque-mustache-wearing Nicolas Maduro, who quickly went to work proving that under socialism, the wheels on the bus do NOT go ‘round and ‘round.

Fast forward another year or two and – again according to the NY Times – “nearly all of the butchers in the main market have stopped selling meat cuts in favor of offal and leftovers like fat shavings and cow hooves, the only animal protein many of their customers can still afford.”

Fun fact: In the late 1990s, the White House Secret Service code names for Bill and Hillary?  “Fat Shavings” and “Cow Hooves.”  What about Chelsea, you ask?  “Offal.”  True story.

Anyway, the UN continues a long and shameful tradition of appointing bloodthirsty dictatorships – past members have included Cuba, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Somalia, among others — to the Human Rights Commission.

I saw we withdraw from the UN, then evict them from the gigantic building that occupies prime New York real estate and bulldoze the entire site.

Then, just to watch Chuck and Nancy’s heads blow off, we give Trump a 99-year lease for $1, and let him build a gold-plated Trumpatorium to house his presidential museum there.

Avenatti/ Pierre Delecto 2020!

In large part because I am mature, and keep politics in their proper perspective – i.e. I recognize it as something which should never occupy too much of our time and energy, and as a sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying cavalcade of elected narcissists who reflect the manifest failings of us, the muddle-headed electorate – things have been looking up for me lately.

After a month or so of physical therapy, my meniscus is back at Olympic-athlete level, my family is healthy and happy, the weather is starting to get cooler, and football season is in full swing.  And because I live in the best country in the world, I don’t have to lose sleep over things that have kept most of humanity awake at night for most of human history, and I take for granted so many blessings that I can’t count them.   Thanksgiving will be here before you know it, and I’m feeling grateful already.

For example, the Democrat debate last week made me super grateful.

I’m grateful that my eye isn’t filling up with blood, and that I’m not perpetually on the verge of losing my dentures, and that none of my offspring is a drug addicted ne’er-do-well who left his wife to play a sickening game of Clinton-and-the-intern with his dead brother’s widow.   Like Joe Biden.

I’m grateful that I’m not suffering from a deadly combination of restless arm syndrome and empty brain syndrome, like the Skateboarding Doofus.

I’m grateful that I’m not Spartacus, or Yang the Merciless, or Julian “wishes he were Fidel” Castro.  Because, just look at them.

 

This is how strange the world is:  Trump has somehow lost his last three press conferences, and yet he’s won the last 6 Democrat debates, hands down.

Look at the people on that stage.  Amy Klobuchar has the charisma of a piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.

Kamala Harris has the intellectual dexterity of a thicker piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.  She wants to prevent a president from being able to use Twitter to speak to the American public.  She wants to use the Justice Department to “pre-clear” any law that the legislature would pass on abortion to stop it from going into effect. The climax of her rhetorical attack on Trump was – I am not making this up – “dude gotta go.”

And if you thought that she couldn’t say anything more stupid than that, she would only reply, “hold my comically over-sized ganja spliff and watch this,” and proudly recite a challenge that she recounted giving to Brett Kavanaugh.  She defied him to name any criminal charge that sought to control men’s bodies.  To which he was apparently too deferential to reply, “How about rape to start with, you dimwit?  Followed by ALL OF THE OTHER ONES!, since you need to use your body to murder someone, or rob someone, or make an obscene phone call, or drive your car off a bridge and then leave Mary Jo Kopeckne to drown in it while you go shopping for phony neck braces.   Also, are you under the impression that a baby in the womb is ‘a woman’s body’?”

And Kamala didn’t have the worst night, because that honor belonged to Grandma Squanto.  Everybody took shots at her, and she looked ridiculous as she contorted herself into pretzels to avoid giving an obviously truthful answer to the question about whether her obscenely expensive plans would require middle class tax hikes.  As she continued to duck and dodge, it almost looked like – for the first time ever – she got a little red in the face.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Only two of the Dems looked even intermittently good – Mayor Pete and Tulsi Gabbard – and then primarily because they looked comparatively moderate and reasonably smart.  On the other hand, in the middle of that crowd, Chairman Mao would look comparatively moderate, and Forrest Gump would look reasonably smart.

 

As bad a week as the Dems on stage had, CNN’s week was worse.  First, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas came out with several recordings, one of which featured CNN boss Jeff Zucker urging his staff to keep focusing on impeachment, no matter what else happens in the news.  As the head of a purported “news” network, Zucker – who I pointed out earlier looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses — is supposed to at least pretend to behave in an even-handed, unprejudiced manner.  Of course he is nothing of the sort, and he does nothing of the sort, as anyone who has watched his network already knows.

Still, it’s fun to watch the truth laid out there, so that Zucker can squirm and twitch like he just got hit with a giant hammer.

I really admire O’Keefe, but his repeated successes should shame our entire MSM.  As a young kid with a dream and a cheap camera, he’s been able to expose one corrupt leftist institution after another, while the entire bloated, over-compensated army of MSM hacks stumbles around in the dark.

Sure, if a nobody like Joe the Plumber dares to ask Obama why he wants to slap the middle class with ruinous taxes, the MSM is all over that story, and before you know it, they’ve interviewed a girl whose pigtails he pulled during recess in pre-school.  They also track down the Kentucky high schoolers who smiled at a crazy Indian activist who was trying to provoke a fight, and they find decades-old emails from the Iowa fan who donated a fortune to a children’s hospital.  And if you want someone to sniff out a flatulence joke made by Brett Kavanaugh’s buddies in a high school yearbook, they’ve got you covered.

But if a Democrat president is banging interns two at a time like Fredo doing cocktail waitresses, the MSM is mum.   If another Dem president uses the IRS to go after his political enemies, or gets caught on a hot mike promising Putin to remove armaments from our NATO allies who might use them to resist Putin’s aggression, the MSM marvels at his “scandal-free” administration.  If Joe Biden coerces a Ukrainian pol to fire an administrator who is looking into Biden’s son’s $50K per month no-show job – not to mention his shady ground-floor investment in a porn site called SWILF.com  (the S & W stand for “Sibling’s Widows”), the MSM no habla Ukranian.

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Thumbkin hates the Trumpkin.  But he also loves him some Grandma Squanto.

So as soon as the debate is over, CNN had multiple spokes-hacks grilling the other candidates about why they went after Land-o’-Lakes Lizzie.  These are just a few of the actual examples from the post-debate questioning:

Van Jones to barely-mirror-fogging Klobuchar: “Is there something that you’re aware of now, you’re seeing the ascendance of Elizabeth Warren, and some of these other ideas that have you afraid?”

Fredo Cuomo to mayor Pete: “Warren was a target for you and others. Why?”

Dana Bash to Mayor Pete:  “Why — I have a question specifically on Senator Warren’s answer to you on Medicare for all and how she’ll pay for it. But just broadly. Why did you think it was so important to go after Senator Warren tonight in a way that you haven’t before?”

Yes, you creeps!  Why on earth would you ask pointed questions to the front-runner in the race that you are trying to win?  What do you think this is, a competition for votes or something?!

When Tapper finally got the chance to interview Warren, he said, “I have to say based on the amount of incoming going your way, it seems like whatever the Democratic voters think, your colleagues think that you’re the frontrunner. Do you think any of the attacks that you faced tonight were out of bounds?”

I am not making that last question up.  That’s the kind of hard-hitting journalistic question that General Tom Thumb’s foot soldiers tossed at their Cherokee champion: Do you think that the attacks on you were unfair?

Can you imagine living on a planet when any of those cretins would ever ask any GOP politician such a disingenuous softball of a question?

“Mr. Republican nominee, did you think it was fair when Joe Biden told black people that you’d like to enslave them again?”  “Hey, Generic Conservative, do you think it crossed the line when every Democrat in the House called you a Nazi and a fascist?”   “Yo, Orange Man Bad, would you say it was legitimate when we allowed a succession of lunatics to use our airwaves to accuse you of treason and call for your execution?”

 

CNN’s week might have been even worse, if ABC News hadn’t stepped on a bias landmine that drew attention away from CNN.  In their rush to report how badly things are going in Syria – which had been a bucolic paradise for several millenia, until Trump got elected and ruined the world – they aired some footage of a vicious firefight, which they described as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town.”

Even for people who have gotten all their knowledge of armaments from watching The Dirty Dozen, the Rat Patrol and Saving Private Ryan, that description didn’t seem right.  Because as everyone knows, bombs go “wooooooooooooooo KA-BLAM,” whereas machine guns go “rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat-tat,” with an occasional bullet-whistling sound thrown in.  The footage sounded like the latter, rather than the former.

Alas, as it turns out, the video wasn’t from Syria.

“Big deal,” you’re probably thinking.  “So the footage was from Kurdlvania, or Turkey, or Iraq.  All of those places over there are pretty much alike.”

Au contraire, my gullible friend.  The footage was actually from… drum roll… wait for it…

Kentucky.

Not “Kentucky” as in, “Kentucky province, Syria.”  “Kentucky” as in, “right next to Tennessee.”

The geniuses at ABC couldn’t tell the difference between one of the biggest armies in NATO bombing civilians in the Middle East, and cell phone footage of a bunch of hillbillies blasting away with machine guns near Louisville.

I haven’t been to a prestigious J-school like those trench-coat-wearing wanna-bes, but the following details MIGHT have made me suspicious:

1. Do that many people really have Southern accents in Syria?
2. Weren’t there a suspiciously high number of powder blue t-shirts with a big “K” on them being worn by Kurdish civilians?
3. Would ISIS members be quite so likely to holler, “Yee hah! I bet they heard that one prit’ near all the way over to Paducah!”
4. Is there quite that much kudzu in the arid regions of Syria?

 

Nice job, media.  Really.

 

Avenatti/”Dude gotta go” 2020!

 

It’s been another good news/bad news kind of week, and I’m going to get the bad news out of the way first: the Kurds are in the process of getting screwed, and it looks like the Trump impeachment circus is going to be with us for quite some time.

I will not claim to be an expert on all things Kurdish.  I couldn’t even find Kurdlvania on a map.  (I know that’s not the name of their homeland.  I’m not actually that uninformed.  But I’m damn close.)  And I am as annoyed as anyone else to see a bunch of empty talking heads on all of the networks bloviating about how there’s an obvious solution for all of the Kurds’ problems, and of course Trump is blowing it.  (Or conversely, Trump is totally crushing it, and everyone else is wildly wrong.)

But what little I know about the Kurds is enough to know that there is no obvious solution to their problem.  Why?  Let’s try this hypothetical.  Say you wake up tomorrow morning, make yourself a cup of coffee, and walk out onto your front lawn and look around you.  And you find out that during the night, your neighbors have all disappeared, and they’ve been replaced by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

That’s right.  You’d spit your coffee all over yourself, race back inside, throw the deadbolt and head straight for your gun safe.

Other than Israel (and if you don’t see Israel as our best ally in the region, I shake my head at you in disdain), the Kurds have been our only reliable allies in the Middle East.  They are tough fighters, and they’ve responded to our calls since the first Gulf War, fighting with us or parallel to us in a lot of locations for a number of years.

I don’t mean to romanticize them.  They’ve fought primarily because they are surrounded by evil scumbags like Saddam Hussein and Assad and the Iranian mullahs and Erdogan, and it’s been in their best interest to fight with us.  They’re mostly Sunni Muslims, and I’m sure they’ve got a lot of the societal dysfunctions inherent to that region.  At the same time, to the extent that we will ever have any presence or influence in that region – and complete withdrawal and isolationism is a tempting but utopian pipe-dream — we are going to need to choose allies from among the available options in the region.

And pacifistic Jeffersonian democrats don’t last long in their neighborhood.

You don’t have to be Sun Tzu or Von Clausewitz to know one basic thing: if we screw our allies, no one is going to want to be our ally in the future.   And it looks like we are screwing the Kurds, by abandoning them.

Again, I don’t see any perfect solutions.  The American public has no appetite for a lot of American boots on the ground in the Middle East, fighting for other peoples’ interests.  I don’t either, and I think Trump’s heart is in the right place about that.  But that’s not the only other option other than abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered.

We should at least arm the Kurds to the teeth, and give them any air or logistical support that we can.  I’d like to see us do more of that around the world – give the Poles, Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans the armaments to allow them to give Putin a huge fight if he’s tempted to encroach on their territory; give Taiwan and Hong Kong and maybe Japan the same kind of strategic support against Chinese aggression; and give Israel and the Kurds the ability to defend themselves, and deter the Erdogans, Iranians and ISIS of the world.

If any country or people won’t fight for themselves, we shouldn’t fight for them (or maybe even with them).  But if they are our allies and are willing to fight for their own freedom, we should give them our moral and political support, and a boatload of weapons.

Yikes.  I guess I can do a little bloviating on my own, can’t I?  But I just hope we don’t see the Kurds getting destroyed, while Trump pulls an Obama (i.e. talks tough but does nothing).

 

The other bad news is the Dems’ impeachment circus.  But I’m already exhausted by that.  I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I’m going to try to ignore it as best I can, but I’m reasonably hopeful that if the “whistleblowers” and wildly over-played charges are as transparently bogus as they so far appear to me, the public will take it out on the hypocritical left, and thrash them at the polls.

 

Moving on to the good news, I have three feel-good stories: an Iowa “journalist” opens a can of kharmic whup-ass on himself, Ilhan Omar files for divorce from Ahmed II, and Grandma Squanto is caught lying about herself again.

You’ve probably heard about the Iowa story already.  Carson King is a regular Joe watching a football game, holds up a sign asking for Busch beer, and ends up getting $1 million in donations.  Then, because he’s a better man than me, he donates all of that money to an Iowa children’s hospital.  He becomes an instant celebrity, and everybody’s happy.

Everybody except a social justice warrior nitwit named Aaron Calvin, who works as a “reporter” for the Des Moines Register.  I did 90 seconds worth of looking into the story, which was enough to discover that Calvin has written for such leftwing echo-chambers as Buzzfeed and some other one exactly like Buzzfeed, and that he (and I’m guessing just a bit on that pronoun) looks to be about 2% more masculine than Rachel Maddow.  And just so you know that he’s a serious journalist, he’s written about white privilege.

So Calvin looks into Carson King’s social media history, and finds some posts he’d written when he was 16.  Shockingly, the 16-year-old’s posts were not erudite dissertations on Proust.  They were, instead, sophomoric references to an unfunny tv comedian who says crude things.  But to be fair to King, he likely was a sophomore when he was 16, so I’m not even sure that “sophomoric” is an insult.

In fact, I was called “sophomoric” many times when I was in 8^th grade, and again in my freshman year.  I naturally took those as compliments.

Anyway, Calvin knows a world-shaking story when he sees one, and he wrote a hard-hitting story that crapped all over the guy who just donated what is likely the only million dollars he’s ever going to see to a children’s hospital.  Thankfully, while the corporate weasels at Busch immediately denounced Carson’s ancient tweets, the general public lashed back at the Des Moines Register, and at Calvin.

While the backlash was going on, some intrepid fellow looked at Calvin’s own social media past.  And wouldn’t you know it, the gender-amorphous little leftist poke-nose had written a few offensive things himself.  Things like dropping the “n” word – and I don’t mean “narwhal,” which is a damn fine word, and appropriate for all occasions – all over the place.  And wishing that the police would be [a verb that starts with an “f” and can be either transitive or intransitive], and demonizing the Christian types who voted for Trump in spite of his moral failings.

Hilariously enough, the last tweet he’d written before those that focused on Carson King was a re-tweet of a lefty article in the New Republic which praised the outing/condemning of people for their old social media posts.  The title of that article?  “The Cancel Culture Con.”

HA!  You know the rest: Aaron Calvin loses his job because of his old tweets.  HA! And again I say HA!

Calvin had only been hired at the Des Moines Register in February.  So I guess you could say that his Iowa newspaper career was nasty, brutish, and short.

And yes, that’s a bank-shot Calvin and Hobbes joke that I am not ashamed to have made!

 

Next, up Ilhan Omar.  Mother to Ilwad.  Wife to at least two Ahmeds that we know of, one of whom is likely her brother.  (Ilhan to Hunter Biden: “Oh, so you think you’re so transgressive, just because you ran off with your brother’s widow?  Well hold my hummus:  I ran off with my brother!”)

She  has now filed for divorce from Ahmed 2: Electric Boogaloo.  (See my column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com from June 28^th, in which I explain the twisted matrimonial history of Omar.)  Apparently she had been carrying on an affair, and the heart wants what it wants.

In her case, does the heart want to destroy America?  I’m pretty sure it does.  Does it also want to smite some infidels?  I’ll let you be the judge of that.  But it definitely wants a third Ahmed, or at least a third Ahmed-adjacent type.

I’m not usually one to see the bright side of divorce, especially when there are kids involved.  But there is at least one silver lining here:  Boogaloo, you have definitely dodged a scimitar with this one.

 

Finally, Lizzie Warren is back in the news for another lie that she has repeatedly been telling about herself.

Is it the one about that time she ran off with a boy from a neighboring tribe, and they took a canoe down the Father of Waters for a romantic honeymoon?  It is not.

Is it the one about how she got mad at her folks, and went off into the woods and gathered all of the necessary materials, and built her own tepee from scratch? It is not.  (To quote a scowling old white lady:  You didn’t build that!)

This tall tale is one she has been telling on the campaign trail for years, and always with the same lines.  When she was a young teacher fresh out of school, she was offered a second-year teaching contract, but when the principal found out she was pregnant, she was fired. Because, sexism.

You can see video of her delivering that story with great conviction, over and over and over again.

The only problem is that there is also video of her from the early 2000s, explaining to some earnest interviewer that she voluntarily took a couple of years off from teaching to have that baby and another.

There are also records from the school board that was involved, proving that they offered her a second-year contract, and when she turned it down, they were disappointed to lose her.

You’ve got that right.  After decades of lying about being discriminated against because of her race, it turns out that she has also been lying about being discriminated against because of her sex.  What’s the over-under on her hitting the leftist victim sweepstakes trifecta, by claiming that she has also faced brutal discrimination because of her lifelong lesbianism, which I’m guessing she’ll make public in…. 3… 2… 1…

At this point, what can you say about this woman?  Other than, “Grandma Squanto speak with forked tongue!”  #wemustneverstopmockingher

#seriously

#never,never,ever!

 

Avenatti/Ahmed 3 in 2020!

Politics has seemed a pretty small and petty arena this past week. I’ve been reminded again and again of all that is repugnant in politics: the hypocrisy and vanity and low character of politicians, and the corresponding flaws in ourselves, as we vote these knuckleheads into office, and overlook the flaws in our own side, while we exaggerate those in the leaders of the other side.

The leftist elite always provide fodder for much-deserved mockery and ranting, as well as much schadenfreude-y entertainment for me.  But the GOP are no big prize either, as they proved when they had both houses and the White House for two years, and managed to not try to get control of the border, or cut the budget, or definitively repeal and replace the “You-Can’t-Keep-Your-Doctor Dumpster-Fire Health-Care Monstrosity Act of 2009.”

And I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Trump.  He’s an out-sized character, with out-sized flaws, including some especially obnoxious ones.  But I’ve never really been able to get too far down on him, partly because most of his flaws seem like misdemeanors – his juvenile braggadocio and ego, his lack of discipline and too frequent blowhard-y tweets – and partly because his opponents are virtually always SO MUCH worse.

But Trump’s congratulatory tweet to the thugs who run the leftist slave-state of communist China on the 70^th anniversary of their bloodthirsty kleptocracy was a low point.

The 20^th century was the bloodiest in history, and dictators had to slaughter overtime to even get noticed  If there were an Olympics for mass murder, Hitler would have barely made the medal stand, taking the bronze for his national socialists, behind Stalin and his soviet socialists.   But leading the pack with a death toll of around 65 million were the ChiComs and their “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  (Pol Pot might have been more murderous than the big three, in terms of per capita deaths.)

While China’s totalitarians are not still killing at the pace they were in the old days, they’re still an oppressive, leftist dictatorship.  Their bullying of plucky little Hong Kong should outrage us all, and the bravery of the protestors should inspire us.  They are risking prison or worse, and flying our flag while doing it, because they understand the greatness of our country and its message better than most of us seem to.

I’ve been heartened to see Trump getting at least intermittently tough with the Chicoms on trade, and he’s pushed back on them more than any recent president.  But no conservative should ever have been able to congratulate that oppressive regime, even though much diplomacy seems to involve that kind of moral relativism and unmerited politeness.

Having said all that, the national Democrats are so much worse!  The measurement system does not exist which can plumb the depth of their unrelenting terribleness!

Consider the case of Hunter Biden and his dad.   Sure, Trump often seems to speak bloviation as a second language.  But Joey Gaffes is freaking fluent!  Trump may brag about his crowd sizes and his perfect conversations with heads of state, but have you ever heard him go on and on about how he vanquished the Dread Gangbanger Corn Pop with just a steely expression and a length of chain?   Has Trump ever talked any bigger than Plugsy McBloward when he bragged to an audience about how he threatened to withhold US military aid and forced the instant firing of a Ukranian prosecutor who was looking into his son’s manifest corruption?

Speaking of his son, how much has our unbiased media done to report on his background?  How many average Americans know that young Hunter’s resume consists of lines like “cocaine enthusiast and frequent arrestee,” “did a one-month stint in the Navy before being kicked out because of the Navy’s judgmental intolerance of cocaine enthusiasts” and “betrayed his wife by carrying on a sexual relationship with his dead brother’s widow?”

You read that right.  Of all of the women in all of the world with whom he could have cheated on his wife, he chose his dead brother’s wife.  Good lord, even Ted Kennedy didn’t take a run at Jackie O after JFK got killed!

I hope.

But hey, maybe I’m being too hard on Hunter.  Maybe there’s more to him than being a degenerate, addicted, quasi-incestuous widow-jumper.  For example, he must be pretty smart, considering how many high-powered jobs he’s had.  He probably double-majored in physics and classics, before going on to get his doctorate in Ukranian energy production.

Well, he did go to Yale and get a law degree.  Which I’m sure had nothing to do with his powerful dad.  And he did get a job with a huge bank… which coincidentally had contributed to the Corn-Pop-Slayer’s political campaigns.  And he did get that $50K per month job as a consultant to a Ukranian energy company.   And before you ask, yes, I said $50k per MONTH, not year.

Maybe Hunter is smart after all.  Because he found a way to get paid $50K per month consulting on energy issues for Ukranians, despite his knowing nothing about energy except how much of it is required to run back and forth between your bedroom and your brother’s widow’s bedroom, and his inability to find Ukraine on the map.

Fun fact: to her fans in Ukraine, my Aussie shepherd is known as “Cassie, the Wonder Sobaka.”  Because “sobaka” is the Ukranian word for “dog.”

Congratulations!  You now know more Ukranian than Hunter Biden does.  Please provide your banking information so that Ukranian oligarchs can deposit your first monthly payment of $50 large by November 1^st.

 

But it’s not just the Bidens.  First the Dem hypocrites accused Trump of colluding with the Russians when it was actually the DNC and Hillary who paid for a phony dossier put together in part by Russian spies to hurt their political opponent.  Then it was the Bidens who got a pass from the Dems when they shook down Ukranians for their own political gain, right before the Dems decided that Trump’s alleged shaking down of Ukranians for political gain was an existential threat to our country.

Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (mmmkay?) is outraged that Trump would allegedly ask a foreign official for dirt on his political opponent.  But that very same lying, bug-eyed creep is on tape – you can easily find it and listen to it with a quick online search – with a guy whom he thinks is a Russian insider peddling a salacious tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel.  The Russian is actually some shock jock pranking the hapless Schiff-for-brains, putting on a thick Yakov Smirnoff accent to tempt him with video of “naked Trump.”

Listen to Schiff’s eager gullibility as he desperately tries to secure the non-existent dirt on his political opponent.  Which he now says is the worst thing you could ever do.  Even worse, presumably, than banging your brother’s widow.  (No, I cannot get over that.)

 

You can’t make this up.  It’s like God has created the karmic equivalent of the plagues of Egypt for the Democrats to torture themselves with.  Falsely accuse Trump of colluding with the Russians, then get revealed as Russian-colluders.  Accuse him of extorting the Ukranians, then get exposed as Ukraine-extorters.

When you are certain you’re going to win the White House, spend a month before the election pre-emptively braying that anybody who does not accept the election outcome would be an un-American threat to all that is good and holy.  Then fast forward three years, and find yourself pitching the fourth door-stop volume of your projected 23-volume book series, “Reasons that We Cannot Accept the Legitimacy of Trump’s Election.”

Use accusations of sexist piggery against Roger Ailes and Trump, only to turn around in time to see Weinstein, Franken, Charley Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keilor et al – not to mention our former Intern-Fondler-in-Chief — falling like dominoes all around you.

Call out some obscure GOP elected official for having worn blackface decades ago, only to learn that all but two members of the Democrat party in Virginia have old pictures of them in blackface.  And those two posed in Klan hoods.

Bah!

One of the main reasons I’m a conservative is that I want a government that is as small and least intrusive as possible.  I’d like to live in a world in which politicians have so little power that I can afford to go about my business and ignore the small-minded, ignoble games that they play.

Weeks like this last one remind me of just how right I am.   Which is always nice.

Avenatti/Schiff 2020!

Well, it’s time once again to say a fond farewell to one of the legions of Democratic presidential candidates.

This time, the dearly departed is physical giant/moral little person Bill De Blasio, who declared the end of his candidacy on Friday, to an audience of six empty plastic chairs and a folding table with uneven legs, in a lost luggage area near the bathrooms in a bus terminal in New Jersey.

Why would I kick De Blasio while he’s down, you might be asking yourself?

Have you seen how tall that guy is?  It’s very tough to kick him properly UNTIL he is down.

But that’s not the only reason.  My thesis today is that Bill de Blasio might be the purest distillation of all that is wrong with the elite left today.

Before I continue, let me reiterate that I know a lot of very fine people who are Democrats.  A few are family, some are friends, some are work colleagues.  Most of them are attracted to the ideals of a traditional, blue-collar Democrat party that once stood up for workers against larger societal forces, combined with a desire for such worthy ends as protecting the environment and fighting discrimination, goals that most conservatives (whether those Dems realize it or not) share, and would be happy to make common cause around.

Those are good people, and it’s a shame to see us becoming alienated from each other in these polarizing times.

But that’s not the people I’m talking about.  Bill de Blasio has no more in common with those folks than he does with conservatives.  He’s an archetypal lefty elitist, and I think it’s worth considering the markers of his genus, because while he may have limped ignominiously off the stage, there are many others of his type left, and one of them is almost certainly going to be the Dem nominee for president.

So let us consider my list of six identifying characteristics of lefty elitists:

1.They reflexively falsify their own identity in some crucial way.  Sometimes the fakery has to do with personal habits, as when Ted Kennedy pretended to be sober, and married, and a Catholic.  Other times it involves matters of class origin, as when Al Gore pretended to be a humble dirt farmer… raised by a millionaire civil rights-opposing Senator, and spending his childhood in a swanky DC hotel suite.   Sometimes it involves a make-believe ethnicity, as when an Irish rich kid named Robert Francis Patrick Declan Macmanus Houlihan O’Rourke poses as your quasi-Hispanic border-town buddy “Beto,” or when the whitest lady in the western hemisphere gets an academic job because she claims Indian ancestry on the grounds that she watched a lot of F-Troop reruns and had several Siouxsie and the Banshees records.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Bill fits that bill.  First, because his first name isn’t “Bill,” it’s “Warren.”  Second, because his last name isn’t “de Blasio,” it’s “Wilhelm.”  The story is that he was often called “Billy” as a child.  But then again, as a child I was often called “Carlos Danger” as far as you know, and you don’t see me adopting that nom de pol as an adult.  (Thanks for ruining that option, Anthony Weiner!) Also, he supposedly adopted his mother’s maiden name as part of “embracing his Italian heritage” at age 22, becoming Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm in 1983, and then “Bill de Blasio” at age 41.

The “embracing an Italian identity” part sounds believable, but call me cynical.  I think for a two-faced pol like would-be Kaiser Wilhelm, that change likely had at least as much to do with getting away from a German moniker that would do more harm than good in the atmosphere of identity politics in NYC.  Sure, a German name can come in handy if you’re making pianos, brewing beer, selling a well-made luxury car, or angling for command of a panzer division near the Polish border in the summer of 1939.

But when you’re up against one leftist candidate from the Black Panther Party and another from La Raza in the early 21^st century?  Not so much.

 

2. They build hypocrisy into every policy. Elitist lefties want to keep little people from owning guns, while they retain their armed bodyguards. They want to force regular folk to send their kids to sub-standard public schools, while sending their own kids to private schools.  They want to make the little people return to using trains or bicycles — or maybe oxcarts – while they fly private jets and are then driven around in SUVs with a carbon hoofprint of Hillary-esque proportions.  They want to show compassion to criminals by releasing them into your neighborhoods, and generosity to downtrodden voting blocks by giving your money to them while keeping their own fortunes in trusts that are beyond the tax code’s reach.

Again, Warren fits the bill.  He wants to disarm little people who haven’t committed any crimes, and who might live in dangerous areas where the protection that guns can provide might literally be the difference between life and death.  Meanwhile, he makes his speeches – and goes to his office, and to the gym, and to public events, and home – while surrounded by bodyguards who carry licensed guns.  He opposes or slow-walks approval for charter schools, and he’s done his best to shut down gifted programs in the public schools.  Programs like the ones that his own kids attended, coincidentally.

 

3. They prefer utopian feel-good plans, while neglecting the common sense/good governance front. They don’t maintain infrastructure, don’t fill potholes (unless you count San Francisco’s plan to fill potholes – and streets — with human feces), and preside over crime running wild. California spent billions on a now-defunct bullet train and established elaborate networks of sanctuary cities and welfare support programs for illegals, while managing to be out-performed by the 15^th century French Rat-Catchers unions in the crucial metrics of preventing typhus, smallpox, and the bubonic plague.  (LA’s new tourism motto: “What happens in LA, stays in LA!  Except for the ebola.  That you’ll be taking home with you.”)

De Blasio is totally sympatico with the downward trends in NYC, many of which (to be fair to him) he inherited, from ignoring crumbling subway infrastructure and rising crime, while micro-managing what size drinks and how much sugar New Yorkers can consume and through what kind of straws.  My favorite of his idiotic notions was his push to ban steel and glass skyscrapers.  In New York City!   Even though I never wanted to live in a huge city, I always saw skyscrapers as incredible achievements, emblematic of human ambition and abilities.

Not Big Bill.  He knows better than us that such gaudy buildings are too often just tributes to the egotistical people and companies who built them.  Plus, they’re terrible for the environment, somehow, with the climate pollution and the global warming.  So get on board with his vision, and in no time Manhattanites will be living in mud huts and yurts, saving tons of energy by not walking to their non-existent jobs.  Soon they’ll cut their carbon footprint even further, when they make the de Blasio-approved decision to stop respirating – and thus exhaling all of that nasty carbon dioxide into the air – by the simple process of starving to death.  Hoorah!

 

4. They tend to fail upward in their political careers. It’s a familiar pattern: an elite leftist becomes mayor and runs a city into the ground, then becomes governor and mismanages his state, and then becomes a candidate for national office. You don’t have to look far for examples.

Spartacus Booker went from a disastrous stint as mayor of Newark  (whose motto is NOT: “A well-governed paradise on earth!”) to representing New Jersey in the Senate (whose state motto is NOT “Come for the low taxes, stay for the Absence of Corruption!”), to running for president.  Pope Pete went from running South Bend (motto: “Tired of Indiana’s low homicide rate and lack of racial tension?  Come to South Bend!”) to running for president.  Skateboarding Doofus spent 6 years in the House with zero accomplishments, then spent a record amount to lose a Senate seat.  So he’s naturally running for president.

But Bill de Blasio might out-do them all as the most flaccid example of the Peter Principle known to history.  He’s continually underwater in his poll ratings in New York state and city; last month’s poll had him at 26% favorable and 57% unfavorable, for a net negative of 31.  And that’s in a heavily blue state, where Donald Trump only has a net negative of 27!  His presidential support never got to even 1%.   Perhaps the most telling stat of all: in that August poll, he was hands down the single most unpopular political figure in the entirety of New York!

And remember: Chucky Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Anthony Weiner and Al Sharpton can all be considered political figures in the state of New York.

As best I can tell, de Blasio’s finest mayoral achievement has been the emotional boost he’s given to 92-year-old David Dinkins, who until recently looked to be taking to the grave the title of Worst Modern Mayor of NYC.

 

5. They are extremely arrogant — It’s a hallmark of elite leftists that they know better than we do how we should live our lives. They’ll tell us what we can buy, what kind of car we can drive, what we can do with what was formerly considered “our property,” who we can hire at and what rate, and etc.

And Bill de Blasio was always at home in that world.  In the June debate, he gave us the most accurate and pithily distilled example of the leftist attitude toward the world in one quote:  “There is plenty of money in this world, and there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that.”

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

 

6. They are intrinsically unable to learn from past mistakes. After a century of trying socialism in dozens of countries all over the globe, and reaping a bumper crop of poverty, oppression, misery and gulags, let’s give it one more try. After the latest mass shooters broke 27 existing gun laws, passing the magic 28^th is going to do the trick.  After 50 years of tax increases produced less revenue to the government, and tax rate cuts have produced more economic growth… we need another massive tax increase.

Here again, Wacky Warren has established his bona fides.  He started out in the 80s as a big supporter of Nicaragua’s murderous revolutionary Sandinista party, and even after that socialist experiment dissolved into disaster, he was still calling himself a democrat socialist years later.  He got early jobs in campaigns of various leftist stereotypes come to life, from Dinkins to Charlie Rangel to Hillary Clinton, and advocated for a myriad of leftist policies that never seemed to work.  So naturally, when he came to office in a deep blue state that deeply wanted him to succeed… he followed the same failed policies over the same cliff.

Somehow, the fusillade of negative feedback produced by decades of terrible decisions has never managed to pierce the thick cloud of unwarranted self-regard with which he’s surrounded himself.

Sound familiar?  I’m looking at you, Grandma Squanto, and Crazy Bernie, and Joey Gaffes.

 

Let us end with the traditional farewell haiku:

 

Disastrous mayor

Approved by no New Yorkers

Tall as he is dumb

 

Avenatti/Wilhelm 2020!