Martin Simpson

On Friday I’m heading up to Maine to spend a long weekend with an old grad school buddy.  He’s the guy through whom I met the great and powerful CO, and we always have a great time when we get together.  There will be talk of politics and sports and books, and some rum may be consumed.

Because Father’s Day is Sunday, I thought I’d re-post a column I wrote two years ago about my dear departed dad.  This one will be a departure from my usual snarkfest columns, but I hope it doesn’t disappoint, with its lack of jokes aimed at various mock-worthy leftists.  (That reminds me: Elizabeth Warren is as white as a curling competition in St. Paul in January.  #wemustneverstopmockingher  #evenonfather’sday)

If you’ve followed the CO site for more than two years, you might have read this column already, in which case I apologize for the self-indulgence.  But if you haven’t – or if you don’t remember what you read two years ago – I hope you enjoy!

As this Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad.  He died not long before Christmas in 2014, and time has been doing its work, to the point that thoughts of him have shifted over to a mix of many happy memories of him, to go along with the pain of his loss.  I’m a father to two daughters, and have known hundreds of other fathers as friends, relatives, co-workers and acquaintances, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who carried out that role any better than my dad.

He was born into a family of four boys and four girls to working class parents in Illinois in the late 1930s.   He married my mom not long after high school, and had me and my younger sister, and raised us while working at the Northern Illinois Gas Company, until he was forced into an early retirement at the age of 57 by injuries.   He operated a variety of heavy equipment, and he took great pride in his work.

When I was little, I can remember him pointing out subdivisions or houses that he’d run services to, and whenever we’d pass a parking lot with heavy machinery, he’d brag that he could operate anything on that lot.  My mom had to explain to an excited young me (at maybe age 5 or 6?) that no, she was not going to let dad scratch my back with his backhoe.  (He’d assured me that he could do so, no problem.)

He was not perfect, as none of us are.  He could be short-tempered and impatient, for example.  But even then, he was the most unusual of people: he was a short-tempered man whom I never heard swear.  Not once in my life.  Not when he bounced a hammer off his thumb.  Not when the Bears or the Cubs went O-for-a-month.  Not when a Democrat got elected.

He used ridiculous euphemisms to avoid cursing – “son of a buck,” “dirty rip,” and the like – but as a grown man who rarely makes it across town in heavy traffic without dropping at least one trenchant Anglo-Saxonism at one of my many brain-dead fellow citizens who cannot seem to master a turn signal or figure out which lane is for passing, that’s almost more than I can comprehend.

People are freaking idiots all the time — I am too — and my dad was surrounded by them his entire life, but he never swore in front of his son!

In the summer of 2014 dad had cancer surgery that we initially thought had been successful.  But a month or so later we found out that it has metastasized, and a month after that we learned that it would be fatal.  I spent much of the fall of that year with my mom and dad in Tennessee, and I’ll always be grateful for that time.  I recorded dad sharing a lot of memories from his life, and I saw the evidence of how many lives he had touched in the form of a steady stream of visitors who came to see him, and to see what they could do for him and for my mom.

He kept his sense of humor throughout his final illness.  One of my cousins was visiting not too long before dad died.  That cousin is known for sarcasm and smart-assery – even by Simpson standards – and he has some Scottish background on one side.  Dad was sitting in a recliner and drifting in and out of the conversation, and the cousin was joking that he was going to try to learn the bagpipes.  He promised (tongue-in-cheek) to play them at dad’s funeral.  Dad delivered his line with a perfectly dry tone: “That’s it.  I’ve changed my mind.  I’m not dying.”

Dad died on a Sunday evening, and he told me his last joke two days earlier.   He and I had both been Chicago Bears fans for life, and the Bears really stunk in 2014.  In the last couple of months in that season, they were on tv unusually often for a team that bad.  On the final Thursday of dad’s life they were on Thursday Night Football, and dad and I watched from our dueling recliners.  He was pretty heavily medicated and drowsed on and off; each time he woke up a bit, he’d ask me the score, and I’d report that the Bears were down by another touchdown or so, and he’d roll his eyes and make some comment before sliding back to sleep.

The next day, he asked me for a favor.  He had been unable to make it to church for a while by then, but his church made each week’s services available on DVD for members who had been unable to make it on Sunday.  Dad had several of those stored up to watch, and on that Friday, he asked if I could put a DVD in for him.  He seemed a little drowsy, but I put in the DVD and handed him the remote, asking if he thought he could stay awake for the sermon.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “But I don’t want the last tv I ever watch to be that stinking Bears’ game last night.”

To end his good life, he died a good death.   He had hospice care in his home, and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and I spent some time with him every day in his final months.   He had the chance to tell everyone he knew how much he loved them, and that he was ready to go, and he was solicitous of others at a time when most of us can focus only on ourselves.  Because of great hospice workers and morphine (which by itself is proof to me that God exists, and that He loves us), he was able to die at home.

He slept for most of his final day.  In the evening, mom and I arranged a schedule; I would stay up with him, and give him morphine twice, and then she would get up early and administer the morphine while I was sleeping in.  She spoke to him the last time, kissing him and telling him that he had been a great father and husband, and that he could go.  Then she went to bed, and I’m convinced that he passed before she fell asleep.  I had some papers to grade, so I went down the hallway to get my computer, and brought it back to set up in the chair next to his.   By the time I got the computer plugged in and checked on him, he was gone.

Ronald Lee Simpson was born on January 22, 1938, and died on December 14^th, 2014.  In between he lived a loving and generous life.  I think it is hard for some people to come to faith in a loving heavenly Father if they have an abusive, or neglectful, or absent earthly father.  I am a Christian because of both of my parents, but my path to God was made much easier by the example of a father’s love that I witnessed all my life.

I can’t wait to see him again.

I wish for you all that you have had a father like mine, or that you marry a father like mine, or that you are a father like mine.  Happy Father’s Day!

After a week when I mostly didn’t pay attention to the news, I dipped into a few web sites this evening, and found some stories that provided food for thought.

First up was some Iowa polling and the latest on the Dem presidential race.  One of the themes is how awful most of the candidates are doing, which I guess is inevitable when there are two dozen candidates.  And they’re Democrats.  And the terribleness of their ideas is only exceeded by the terribleness of their personalities.

The uptake is that Biden still has a considerable lead, and that there are only three main contenders: Bernie, Grandma Squanto and Mayor Pete, in descending order.  (Although, doesn’t it feel like any order in which you list their names is descending order?)  Skateboarding Doofus spoke to a mostly empty church in Iowa, and his 15 minutes of fame now seem to have started about 22 minutes ago.

I think that Biden’s sizeable lead is more a commentary on the weakness of the field than any indication of his electoral greatness.  The guy’s been around for decades, and he’s crashed and burned in previous attempts.  He only stops sniffing women’s hair for long enough to plagiarize.  And he only stops plagiarizing for long enough to spit out a gaffe or two that must then be cleaned up by his spokespeople.

He’s a glad-handing BS artist, and the Dems who absolutely detest Trump for those qualities are going to pick Biden for their candidate?

But worse than that, how would you like to be one of the Dems who is losing… to Joe Biden!?  That’s like adding insult to injury, and then injuring you again.  And then pouring salt into the wound of that second injury.   And then making fun of your mother, while poking your original injury with a stick.

I’ve got to say that I’m surprised that Grandma Squanto is still in the top tier.   (And yes, that is the most ironically self-satirizing use of the phrase “top tier” you will ever hear.)  I thought that she was electorally dead long ago.  (But you know her favorite saying:  “Better red(skin) than dead!”  #wemustneverstopmockingher)

After her tussle last week with that goofy black radio personality who calls himself “Charlemagne tha God,” I’m surprised she can show her (pale) face in public again.

And think about this: not only is she losing to Biden, but she got outfought in a battle of wits against a guy who spells “the” as “t-h-a.”  Yikes!

Maybe the funniest statistic I saw is that the bottom 9 Dem candidates all garnered 0% in the latest poll.

Which is the same percentage of the Democrat primary vote that I’m getting.  And I’ve spent zero dollars on my campaign, and given zero speeches.  And my campaign slogan is: “Democrats: Terrible policies, terrible people. Vote Trump.”

 

Speaking of Trump – I often find myself wishing that he’d only say about half of the things that he says.  But man, that other half can be pretty great!

My latest favorite came in response to London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, who I think would feel right at home with our own HJTs (hateful jihadi twins Omar and Tlaib).  As so often with Trump, the other guy threw the first punch.  Before Trump got to England, Khan took time out of his busy schedule of not stopping jihadi knife attacks in London to pen an anti-Trump editorial that included the sentiment that “It’s un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump.”

Because when you’re trying to get a fix on whether something is super-British or not, you skip past the guys named Winston or Nigel or James Bond and ask a guy named “Sadiq.”

Trump responded that Khan is “the twin” of NYC mayor Reinhardt Di Blasio, “only shorter.”

In Khan’s defense, a president taking that kind of shot is pretty much the definition of “punching down.”

But in Trump’s defense, how else are you going to punch a guy like Sadiq “Keebler Elf” Khan, except down?  Have you seen the size of that guy?   (By the way, if you’re keeping score at home, my favorite Coleridge poem is – you guessed it – “Keebler Khan.”  That Coleridge was ahead of his time.)

I’m not sure about the cost/benefit calculation of Trump’s instinct to constantly punch back at all attackers, large and small. I know that most conservatives have been so starved for a candidate who will fight back that we can’t help but love him for it.  But I also know that a lot of voters dislike it, and see him as a bully.

For those people, when a London mayor insults Trump and he responds, it starts to look like a Dinklage and Goliath situation.  (Boom!)

To make that story even more laughable, the intrepid investigative “journalists” at NPR (by all means, let’s force taxpayers to subsidize those hacks) really outdid themselves on this story.  When they heard that Trump said that Khan was, “half the height” of Di Blasio, they leapt into action.

In an interview, NPR reporter Frank Langfitt said, “One difference, Trump said, between the two mayors, he said that Khan is only half the height of de Blasio.”  Then he dropped the bombshell, which I swear I am not making up: “That’s not true. Mayor Khan is 5 foot 6.”

You just know that NPR threw all of their resources into nailing down that story.  A three-reporter team established that Di Blasio is 6’ 5” while the Editor-in-Chief turned to their most valuable source – Wikipedia – to discover that Khan is 5’6”.

Then, amidst the clacking of an abacus, a white board was filled with formulae:

“half of 6’5” is around 3 feet.”  (“around” gets crossed out, replaced with “a little more than”)

“5’6” is taller than 3 feet”

“Are you sure?”

“Somebody check that!”

“There’s NO TIME TO CHECK!  We need to go to press with this immediately!”

Great job, NPR!  You may have missed stories like Bill Clinton raping one aide and assaulting many others, and Obama using the IRS against his political enemies, and Hillary paying for a false Russian dossier to accuse Trump of working with Russians.

But when the chips were down and the fate of a nation was on the line, you broke the “5’6 is more than half of 6’5” story wide open!

Look for NPR’s next blockbuster story in October: “Trump says he could ‘eat a horse,’ yet our investigation shows that he only had a salad!  Impeach him!”

 

Finally, in the “Martacus Moral Equivalency Round-up,” I have two stories for you.

Last week the Democrat-dominated New York state assembly passed a bill outlawing the declawing of cats, which legislators called “brutal.”  They noted that it causes pain for the cat, and is done only for the owners’ convenience, to prevent cats from scratching furniture.

(For the record, I agree with that bill.  We have three cats, and although none of them are at the level of greatness achieved by Cassie the Wonder Dog (obviously), I love them, and the scratched-up furniture in our house demonstrates our commitment on this issue.)

The second story involves our always-stable friends at PETA, who celebrated “World Oceans Day” by releasing a video in defense of oysters, noting that, “Bivalves are animals that deserve our consideration and should never be eaten or used in any other way.”

The video highlights the damage that evil, oyster-eating humans do to the mollusk-American community, pointing out that, “Their shells are torn open and their bodies are cut up,” and that, “Oysters can sense danger and hide inside their shells.”

PETA also used the occasion to throw in a little extra nagging about those who like to fish or eat fish, reminding us that, “Fish are sentient individuals who feel pain.”

So to recap, our leftist moral betters want you to know that you should never de-claw a cat out of a selfish desire for convenience or couch-preservation, and that oysters should not be torn from their shells or cut up, and that fish feel pain, so you can’t catch them.

Also, you’re a patriarchal, fascist pig if you object to aborting human babies minutes before they are born.

Because they aren’t the kind of higher life forms that have claws or have to be torn from their shells, and they can’t feel pain the way, say, a catfish does.

Got it?

Five different stories have caught my attention this week, and that’s not including Trump’s performance in England, which even his MSM critics have had to admit (through gritted teeth) has gone well.

Story #1:  As I’ve said in earlier columns, I almost feel sorry for Nancy Pelosi as she tries to herd the rabble of miscreants and moonbats that make up the Dem House majority.  Almost.

She’s been trying to keep them from their own extremist instincts, even if only for pragmatic reasons.  She’s counseled against a futile impeachment drive, and has attempted to rein in AOC and the HJT (hateful jihadi twins Tlaib and Omar).

But she may have given up.  On the top of Drudge yesterday was a big picture of Rictus-Grin Pelosi over a giant headline: Pelosi Wants Trump in Jail!

Hold your breath, Nance.  Here’s a partial list of other things Pelosi wants that she is NOT going to get:

The ability to change facial expressions.

The ability to control her trembling, dessicated mummy hands.

The ability to come back to the House floor after a bathroom visit without trailing her rotting burial wrapping behind her.

The ability to retreat to her palatial estate behind giant walls protected by armed security while she lectures the rest of us that walls and guns are evil.

Correction: She has gotten #4.  But she won’t get the others.

 

Story #2:  Joe Biden plagiarizes.  AGAIN!

After getting in trouble for plagiarizing a law review article when he was in law school, and having an earlier presidential run derailed for plagiarizing various other politicians’ speeches, you’d think that Creepy Joe would have made Job #1 the obvious one: don’t freaking plagiarize again!

But he just couldn’t do it.  After a week of Hyding out (Get it?) from the press and promising a great new plan for saving the planet, the Biden campaign put out a bunch of talking points lifted verbatim from some lefty enviro site.

The saddest thing might be what banal, boiler-plate talking points they are.  I’m sure that everyone reading this could come up with the basic beats without even breaking a sweat.

Biden tried to contain the damage as best he could, by releasing a prepared statement:

“Four score and seven hours ago, I had a dream.  The dream police, they live inside of my head.  But I cannot tell a lie: this plagiarism business is not serious, just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  I think, therefore I am.  I came, I saw, I conquered.  And as I’ve always said, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, and you can take that to the bank.  Remember our new campaign slogan: Biden 2020 – I’m with Her!”

“In conclusion, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”

This guy is leading all other Dem candidates by double digits, people.

Which, sadly, sounds about right.

 

Story #3: Lizzie Warren goes nuts at a Boston gay pride parade.

If you haven’t seen the video, do yourself a favor and watch it now.  In a parade full of moral exhibitionism, Grandma Squanto outdid everyone else by a long shot, dancing and laughing and exhibiting manic, over-the-top attention-seeking behavior that should have its own chapter in a psych textbook.  She made the most flamboyant drag queens look like austere Puritans in a coma.  No straight person could possibly be this enthusiastic about gayness.

So I can only draw the obvious conclusion that she’s going to start pretending to be gay, as well as Indian.  Be on the lookout for a sequel to Pow Wow Chow that targets the “native women who enjoy comfortable moccasins” demographic.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Story #4: Whoopi Goldberg is disgusting.

If you — like me — have spent the last two weeks fighting the scourge of OGI (ocular gouge instinct) at the thought of Bette Midler and Alyssa Milano ending their sex strike and forcing themselves on you, do NOT search for Whoopi Goldberg’s recent criticism of Nikki Haley’s position on abortion.

Normally, any mention of Nikki Haley is worth at least one instinctive “giggity” from your humble Martacus.  But the mental image that Goldberg created…

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you must call up that video, for the love of all that is holy, lock up your cutlery and put on some oven mitts before you press play, lest the OGI overwhelm you!

 

Story #5 is my favorite: the morally superior hobgoblins from Hollywood have spoken, and now Georgians must start aborting their children, or else!

If you haven’t heard, Georgians recently passed a bill restricting abortion in their state, which is approximately 2000 miles from California. So when the Polanskis and Weinsteins of the world heard about that, they naturally got up off of their latest underaged victims, pulled their pants back on, and erupted with righteous anger.

The elite of California – home to the casting couch and the porn industry and poop maps, and the land where they give out roofies to adolescents like they were m&ms on Halloween – are threatening that if Georgians don’t get with the aborting post haste,  the film industry is going to boycott the Peach State.

The irony is staggering.  Major Hollywood studios and newer players like Netflix have filmed all around the world in recent years, including such places as Northern Ireland (where abortion is illegal), most European countries (virtually all of which have stricter abortion laws than we do), and exotic Muslim-ruled locales including Egypt and Jordan, where the only sport that competes in popularity with soccer (ugh!) is a spirited round of “toss-a-gay-fellow-off-the-roof.”

Yet Hollywood does not lecture the Europeans about their benighted anti-infanticide prejudice, or explain to the Muslims of the world why women should not be trussed up in black beekeeper outfits when they go out in public, or why they should replace all of their madrassahs with satellite campuses of the RuPaul Drag Queen Academy.

I was confused about why our celebrity betters would tolerate the backward beliefs of all of those countries, so I did a little research and found – mirabile dictu! – that all of those places are cheaper to film in than the tax-happy leftist greed-ocracies of California and New York.

Imagine that.

All of this reminds me of the eternal truth of the principle that I introduced in this column a year ago, along with its catchy acronym of MYOBYTJ: Mind Your Own Business, You Totalitarian Jerks!

Perhaps the most obnoxious tendency of the left – along with terminal humorlessness and unchecked hubris – is the urge to micromanage everyone else’s lives.  They are congenitally unable to mind their own business!

Conversely, one of the best of our Founding Fathers’ many great ideas was the concept that the states should control as much of their own self-government as possible.  Beyond the few, crucial unifying ideas and tasks of the federal government, the founders argued that the states should be what a later Supreme Court justice would call the “laboratories of democracy.”

Each state could decide for themselves how to approach various governmental tasks – involving education, the penal system, regulations, and more.

Thus Texans have decided that if you kill someone in Texas, they’re going to kill you back.  But Massachusetts residents have rejected the death penalty, and opted instead to give murderers weekend passes. (Admittedly, that was under Dukakis, and may not still be going on.)

Red states opt for less regulation, and if you want to start a business there, they welcome you.  Blue states regard your idea for a business with suspicion, and then present you with a list of demands.

Red states allow for educational innovation through ideas like charter schools and vouchers, while blue states do everything they can to force your kids into failing public schools where great teachers go unrewarded and terrible ones can’t be fired.

The verdict is in, and Americans are voting with their feet – they’re leaving blue states for red ones.

But that doesn’t mean that conservatives want to dictate how leftists live.  If San Franciscans want to dodge junkies and poop piles and dirty needles the minute they step out of their over-priced houses, go nuts.  If New Yorkers want to turn their city back into a Dinkinsonian hell of crime and filth, have at it. If the people of Detroit and Baltimore want thugs to victimize them because it’s racist to fight crime, God bless ‘em.

Just don’t try to make the rest of us live the way you do.

MYOBYTJ!

June is already upon us, and thus it is time to look back at the best and worst of May.

I’ll start with the worst, which is something that actually happened in March, but that I didn’t hear about until May.

Before you can object to the apparent inconsistency of writing about things happening in March in a column on things that happened in May, let me remind you of these words from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  Also, that “hobgoblin” is a fine word that is not used nearly enough anymore; I suggest that we all start trying to work it into our everyday conversation.

So back in March, another upstanding abortion advocate happened upon a peaceful pro-life protest outside of a Planned Parenthood Clinic in San Francisco, and he delivered an inspired and trenchant critique of the pro-life position that left all who heard it in awe of his wisdom.

HA! I kid.

Actually, the mouth-breathing young male – who would usually be precluded from having a position on abortion, on account of his not having the requisite lady parts to comment – stole a banner from an 85-year-old protestor and took it to his bicycle.  When the old guy followed him to block his escape by trying to push a stick into one of the bicycle’s wheels, the brave young leftist shoved the man down.

The old guy tried to hold onto his banner, so the young punk gave him a few vicious kicks, warning him to “Stay down, old man.”

When I heard about this story on Adam Carolla’s podcast, I looked it up, and saw the sickening video. As far as I can tell, the cops have been unable to identify the cowardly creep.  Which makes sense, because the SF police have their hands full trying to keep the streets free of the mountains of dirty needles and human feces left by the Democrat voting base of their fine city.

I’m not sure why I haven’t heard of this story before, especially since the assaulter demonstrated all the hallmarks of a contender for the Democrat nomination: he doesn’t respect his elders or the private property of others, he is a bully, he is completely intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him, and he throws a violent tantrum if anyone crosses him.

If the white male candidates for the Dem presidential nomination hadn’t already promised to choose a token female for their VP, this guy would be a prime contender.

 

The best story of the month might appear to be superficially similar to the worst story, since it too involves a violent confrontation.  But the similarities end there.

Because this fight did not start over a trivial issue like abortion.  No!  This donnybrook originated in the kind of deep-seated, intractable dispute over which nations have gone to war many times in the past.  I refer you to the May 1st headline from a newspaper in Bedford, Virginia:  “Ford-Chevy Dispute Leaves 3 People Shot at Virginia Home.”

The reporting is frustratingly thin, but the major facts of the case seem pretty clear.

56-year-old Mark Edwin Turner was having a pre-Easter dinner at his home with his unnamed girlfriend, and her son Logan Bailey and his girlfriend.  I’m assuming that the dinner conversation about who is going to get the starting QB spot for the Cavaliers this fall and the relative merits of each family member’s favorite Federalist Paper had waned, because the family was out in the yard after dinner when talk turned to the relative merits of Ford vs. Chevy trucks.

Naturally, tempers flared.  Turner pulled a knife – as one does, when one’s truck of choice is unjustly maligned – and his girlfriend got in between Turner and her son Logan.  The news report notes that at this point “she got stabbed in the lower back,” though in Turner’s defense, maybe the knife was loaded and “just went off.”

Turner went into his house and came back out with a gun.  Obviously.

Turner’s girlfriend – because she is apparently not a quitter – once again got in between Turner and her son.  This time she ended up getting shot 5 times, “all of those injuries occurring to her legs.”

Because the reporting doesn’t include any actual quotes, I’m going to give you my best guess as to what was said:

Turner:  You know what FORD means?

Logan: What?

Turner: Fix Or Repair Daily!

Logan (furious): Well… you know that Chevy stands for (pause) Crappy Hellish… Embarrassing…

Turner: HA!  You can’t even think of an acronym!

Logan: Oh yeah?!  Well my F-150 has pieces of your Silverado in its stool!

Turner: That makes no sense!

Turner’s girlfriend (holding up her hands, palms out): Let’s not get into this again.  I’m sure that each truck has its good points.

Turner: Are you taking his side?

Logan: Of course she is, because Chevy makes a terrible product!

Turner: My Silverado could mount your Ranger like Mayor Pete turning out his (making air quotes with his fingers) “husband.”

Logan: Nice!  Homophobe much?

Turner: Truth hurts, don’t it?

Logan (after fuming silently for a minute, in a cold, dead voice): “Like a Rock” is the worst song Bob Seeger ever wrote!

Turner: That’s it!

Gunfire ensued.  Apparently rage interfered with Turner’s aim, as he never managed a center mass hit on his girlfriend, and he only hit that Ford-loving common-law son-in-law once, in the arm.  The kid’s girlfriend also caught two shots, which the police described as ricochets.

You’ll be shocked to know that according to police, “alcohol was involved.”  Also, that Turner had a previous felony.  I can only assume that conviction arose from an incident after a fender bender with a Fiat driver, which turned violent after Turner noted that “Fiat” stands for, “Fix It Again, Tony.”

The moral of the story is obvious: when you are tempted to engage in gunplay over your vehicle preferences, ask yourself, “What would Martacus do?”

Then buy a rear window decal of cartoon character Calvin urinating on the corporate logo of your disfavored auto maker.

Problem solved, and you’re welcome.

 

The best political story of May came at the end of the month.  It seems that FireEye, a California-based  cyber-security company, was planning its annual summit, scheduled for October in Washington DC.  But they needed a cybersecurity expert to give the keynote address at the summit.

Who to choose?  They considered a crack team of 20-somethings from MIT who had come up with facial recognition software that can identify any individual on earth within 12 seconds, and a Poindexter consortium from Israel who perfected a retinal scan that can be done from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

Then they chose a crotchety old hobgoblin with the littlest of little minds: Hillary freaking Clinton.

I’m not making that up.  On May 30^th, FireEye announced that they had chosen Hillary to give a keynote address.  On cyber-security!

I’d like to predict her talking points.  So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over to the new climate-controlled glass cabinet that I’ve built to display my prognosticating wizard hat on a back-lit, rotating base.  I’ll just let the scanner confirm my fingerprint, and…

Okay, the hat is in place.

I predict that Hillary will grace her audience with a six-step plan to ensure their cyber-security:

1. Buy an off-the-shelf private server and install it in the utility closet of an off-site small business about which you know nothing. (Make your monthly checks out to “Definitely-not-a-Putin-front, LLC.”
2. Connect that server to your mansion in Chappaqua using knob-and-tube wiring from the early 1930s.
3. Set up a password, preferably either the word “password,” your birthdate, or “#atthispointwhatdifferencedoesitmake?
4. Give your husband access to your computer. Immediately get buried in spam from “Zaftig-Topless-Interns.com”
5. When the cops are onto you, try to clean your hard-drive, “with a cloth, or something.”
6. When that doesn’t work, herd your underlings into a room full of hammers, and smash every bit of hardware in sight.

So as June begins, I have two bits of advice:

1. Google the Grandma Squanto interview with some left-wing radio guys, and savor the part when they ask, “When did you know that you were white?” #wemustneverstopmockingher
2. Call your stockbroker, and short FireEye Cybersecurity.

I spent a lot of the last week on the road, going to Tennessee and then Illinois to see family.  On the trip, I listened to several books on cd — I recommend Daniel Silva’s novels featuring Gabriel Allon if you haven’t read them – and attended several cookouts to celebrate Memorial Day.  I played golf and ate with a gaggle of cousins, and celebrated one of their birthdays, and my own.

No politics were discussed, and by the time I got home, I felt the strange mix of disconnection and contentment that always comes from brief sojourns away from all things political.

But then I caught up a bit, and several fragmentary thoughts hit me:

I wish Trump would talk and tweet less.  Yes, Plugs Biden is manifestly a low IQ individual, and in some sense, the truth is an absolute defense against slander.  On the other hand, don’t publicly agree with Porky Nork (hat tip to CO) about anything.  Even if you privately agree with Porky Nork about something.

I wish Nancy Pelosi would talk more.  Mostly because I like seeing her getting her karmic punishment: for her greed and pride and lust for power, she has been sentenced to try to hold together the malevolent, quarrelsome Children of the Corn that make up the Democrat House majority.

Her moon-bat base is baying for impeachment proceedings against Trump, and she knows how futile and self-defeating that will be.  (Can bats “bay”?  For purposes of my tortured metaphor here, I’m going to say yes.)  On the other hand, all of the energy on the left is coming from downtown Crazyville, and they’ve darkened the skies with their massive flocks of ceramic chickens.  If she doesn’t try to appease them, she’s going to have a scat-throwing mutiny on her hands.

One Dem commenter advised splitting the difference, and moving ahead with more investigations and eventual impeachment while simultaneously advancing legislation, under the theory that Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Then she turned away from the podium, tripped down the stairs, and swallowed her gum.

 

My first night back, I was skimming through Breitbart when I came across an ominous headline: “Lena Dunham Poses Nude to Encourage People to Love Themselves More.”

I have no excuse for reading that story.  I immediately knew that if I didn’t close that page, I was embarking on a path with only one possible outcome: me rolling on the floor in the fetal position, moaning.

And yet, as Saint Paul said, “That which I want to do I don’t do, but what I hate, that I do.”

So, long story short, I’m elbows-deep in a kitchen drawer, desperately searching for something long and pointy to shove into my eyes, when a thought occurs to me: suddenly, the idea of having sex with Bette Midler or crazy Alyssa Milano doesn’t seem quite so repulsive after all.

HA! I kid.  It still seems pretty repulsive.

But I thought the Dunham story included a few teachable moments, once you got past the OGI.  (Ocular Gouge Instinct.  Duh.)

First, as most bad leftist ideas do, her point actually contained a nugget of truth: she argues against judging yourself on your weight or appearance, and as far as that goes, she’s right.  It’s shallow and creepy to assign value to people based on how they look, and our self-esteem shouldn’t rely on our meeting an unrealistic beauty standard.

On the other hand, purposely making yourself look hideous might not be the best way to protest look-ism.  And tattooing yourself from flank to fetlock, then mowing down a battalion of glazed donuts like they were Germans charging your trenches at Ypres might not be the best way to prepare for your nude photoshoot.

Second, Dunham has perfected the leftist approach to reality: ignore it, and it will go away.  In a video accompanying the article, she records herself breaking off what she calls a “25 year relationship” that “isn’t working anymore.”  The camera pans back, and we see that she’s holding a scale, which she then tosses into a garbage can.  (I thought I could hear the scale saying, “Oh thank God!  My long nightmare is over!”  But that may have been my imagination.)

I get it.  Acknowledging unpleasant facts can be painful.

But Lena, that’s not a passive-aggressive Mean Girl friend you are tossing in the trash.  It’s a mechanical device that provides you with empirically true data.  Throwing it away is not going to make you less obese any more than standing in a freezing room and throwing a thermometer away is going to make you warmer.

What is it with leftists and the inability to see basic truths?  NYT “reporter” Walter Duranty traveled to the Soviet Union in the midst of a murderous, government-caused famine and saw a workers’ paradise.  MSM reporters looked at Michael Avenatti and saw a truth-telling presidential contender.   Cory Booker looked at his weak-cheese Walter Mitty self and saw Spartacus.

Liz Warren looked at her pale reflection in a mirror and saw head-band-wearing Indian hottie Leilani from the original Star Trek series episode 58, “Paradise Syndrome.” #wemustneverstopmockingher (I know, pretty obscure reference.  I may be running out of Indian references with which to mock Grandma Squanto.)

The bottom line is (warning – if you looked at those pictures, hearing the word “bottom” may give you traumatic flashbacks) that body shaming is not a nice thing.  But body flaunting is also not nice, especially when you look like Lena Dunham, and seemingly don’t care that you’re forcing many heterosexual males to reconsider their sexual orientation.

But as bad as that photo shoot was, at least one feminist icon had a worse week than Lena Dunham did.

That feminist is Naomi Wolf, whom you may remember as the author of books such as The Beauty Myth.  (Thesis: female beauty is a myth made up by diabolical men to make you feel bad about yourself if you totally let yourself go and become Dunham-esque.) She has also been a high-profile political consultant; she advised Al Gore to wear more earth tones, and Bill Clinton to be less rapey.

So you know that she’s just brilliant.

And yet she somehow wrote a new book, the premise of which is hilariously wrong.  Her book is called Outrages: blah, blah, blah.  (I hate the academic practice of giving books pretentiously long titles with a portentous colon in the middle.)

(Although it can be a fun quirk to parody.  E.g.:  “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: the Elizabeth Warren Story,” or “Cankles Falls at the Last Hurdle: How Hillary Clinton Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory in the Most Shocking and Hilarious Upset in the History of the Known Universe.”)

Wolf’s thesis is that gay men were so oppressed in 19^th century England that they were routinely executed for having consensual sex.

Instead of going on tv with empty heads like Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or anyone else at CNN or MSNBC, she made the fatal mistake of submitting to an interview on BBC radio with a man named Matthew Sweet.

Sweet played the dirtiest of dirty tricks: he did some research.  He found out that in British courts, the description that someone had been sentenced to “death recorded” meant not that they had been executed, but that they had been spared execution by a judge.

I’ll grant you that that phrasing is counter-intuitive, and that you or I would not have immediately reached that interpretation.  On the other hand, you or I have not spent the last year or more researching and writing a book on the treatment of gay men in 19^th century England.

But Naomi Wolf has.  And she never checked to see what “death recorded” actually meant. Which led to a beautiful exchange, live on the radio.

Sweet explained to her that a court case listing a gay man as being sentenced to “death recorded… doesn’t mean that he was executed…. I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

After a stumbling response from Wolf, Sweet hammers in another nail.  Referring to the case of a Thomas Sylva, whom Wolf had cited, he says that he’s found “newspaper accounts and prison records which show the date of his discharge.”

Ouch!  But Sweet isn’t done.  Wolf had already laid out her idea that these death penalty sentences were egregiously applied to adult gay men in consensual relationships with other adults.  But Thomas Sylva was only 14.

Sweet goes in for the kill:  “Also, it’s the nature of the offense here.  Thomas Sylva committed an indecent assault on a six year old boy.”

So great job, Naomi Wolf.  You wrote an entire book based on the premise that gay men were routinely executed, when it turns out that they were not.  And you claimed that the non-fatal non-executions happened to adults who had consensual sex with other adults, but a case you cite involved a gay teen who raped a child.

Other than that, you nailed it!

As I predicted last week (through the magic of my tax-deductible wizard hat), I managed to make it through a long weekend of not having sex with Bette Midler and Alyssa Milano, and have lived to tell the tale.  In fact, and I don’t want to toot my own horn (although I’d much rather toot my own horn than have sex with Bette Midler or Alyssa Milano, if you know what I mean), I think I’m surviving quite well.

As the sex strike grinds on into its second week (and no, it doesn’t bump – only grinds), I probably shouldn’t still be commenting on it.   But it is simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, and that is a combination that I am too immature to resist.  I only have a few more thoughts about it, though,

It’s an archetypally great example of a common leftist trope that I’ve mentioned before: being totally clueless about how others perceive you.  Recent examples include pro-abortion Dem Brian Sims videotaping himself bullying a peaceful old woman and thinking that made him a hero, and ineffectual beta male Cory Booker calling himself Spartacus, and translucent old crank Grandma Squanto looking into the mirror and seeing the Indian maiden from the Land o’ Lakes butter ads. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Similarly, Alyssa and Bette must have actually had the thought, “You know what will really bring all of those conservative males — with their toxic masculinity and their socially constructed attraction to a .7 female waist-to-hip ratio that you see everywhere from cave paintings to Egyptian pictograms to Sophia Loren movies in the 1960s – to their knees?   If we say that we’re not going to have sex with them!”

That’s a big swing and a miss.  Because the first rule of strike club is that a strike has to involve withholding something that your target audience wants.  If people are boarding a plane to Orlando and the pilots go on strike, people are going to want that strike to end.  If the workers in an ice cream factory go on strike, we are going to want that strike to end, because ice cream is delicious.

But if we would not voluntarily … how can I put this delicately?… engage you… with our worst enemy’s (say Bill Clinton’s) … body part of choice… a strike is unlikely to work.

Yikes – this is a high-class website, and I am out of euphemisms.  Let me try to put this another way.

You know how in the crucial moment when a strike starts in a movie, the leaders of the strike shout to their audience, “TOOLS DOWN!”

I think I speak for all of us deplorable straight males when I say: Way ahead of you, ladies.

In other news, if you had told me in January that the national Democrats’ biggest liability in 2019 would NOT be their presidential field, I would have been shocked to the point of having my wizard hat tested to see if it was broken.

But we’re halfway through May, and I think you could make the argument that one group has done more damage than the Dirty Two Dozen: the troika of fresh (rapidly becoming stale) faces in the freshman House class — AOC and the Muslim avengers Omar and Tlaib.  (I think we need a trendy shorthand acronym for those two, and I’d like to suggest HJT, for Hateful Jihadi Twins.)

So one half of HJT took the Baton of Stupid™ this past week, and advanced it quite nicely.  Rashida Tlaib went on a podcast you’ve never heard of and excreted a few deep thoughts about the Holocaust.  Others have already had a field day with her choice of words to describe her emotional state when she thinks about the systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews.  (“Calming?”  Really?)

But what followed was more surprising to me.  She gave an impromptu history lesson on the founding of the State of Israel.

In Tlaib’s telling, “[I]t was my ancestors, Palestinians — who lost their land, and some lost their lives their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways — have been wiped out, and some people’s passports. And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right? In many ways.”

If by “many ways” you mean “zero ways.”

You don’t have to be a Middle East scholar to know that a tale of super philo-semitic Palestinians sacrificing so that the Jews could have a homeland is a tough one to swallow.  In fact, it’s harder to think of a more far-fetched take on actual events.

Here’s an example.  I might make the argument that it is a historical fact that in the late Middle Ages, the kingdoms of Europe were confronted with a blue-eyed devil-looking guy leading an army of zombies who broke through a mile-high wall of ice and almost wiped out the planet, but were stopped at the last minute when a tomboy with a magic knife stabbed the devil guy, and also a hot, crazy blonde flying around on the back of a dragon did her part too.

That argument would still be closer to the truth than Tlaib’s tale about a bunch of pacifistic Muslims welcoming Jews with open arms and lovingly giving them a country.

Not satisfied with stepping in it so badly, Rashida responded to her critics in the patient, understanding way that we’ve come to expect from her.  (Remember, this is the little gem whose first public words upon being elected – spoken into a microphone, in public – was that the Dems were going to “impeach the mf-er.”)

She went on Seth Meyer’s “crimes against comedy” late night show, and found a way to make her comments worse.  After revisiting her “the Palestinians helped the folks at Winterfell defeat the Night King and then created a warm and welcoming homeland for the Jews” fable, she followed up with another charming grace note, saying, “I got a text message from a friend who’s like, ‘Hey, next time, you know, really clarify. Maybe talk like a fourth grader. Because maybe the racist idiots would understand you better.’”

Yes.  You think that the big problem in the Muslim Middle East is the tiny sliver of land occupied by the Juden, and WE’RE the racist idiots.

Keep it up, Dems.  I’m sure this kind of gratuitous slap at most of the country is going to hit that same electoral strategy sweet spot that a certain ex-future president (CAW CAW) hit with her “deplorables” comment.

You know that there have to be some sane Dem pols and consultants who are pleading with the HJTs to just shut it.  But they can’t help themselves, and they are continually being hoist on their own petard.

For the record, I’m not sure what getting “hoist on a petard” means, and it sounds painful.  But I would still rather be hoist on my own petard – after tooting my own horn – than have sex with Bette Midler or Alyssa Milano.

You may remember that just a week ago, I’d narrowed the dementia of Democrats seeking the 2020 nomination down to the two “best” – in the sense of most representative of their far-left base – candidates:  Creepy Porn Lawyer Avenatti and Creepy pro-abortion bully Brian Sims.

But I may have spoken too soon, because Warren Wilhelm Jr. has entered the race.

You are probably saying “who?”  (Or maybe, “who cares?”)  It turns out that Bill DeBlasio – terrible leftist NYC mayor – was born Warren Wilhelm Jr.  He later changed his name to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm – I guess because he had married Hillary Rodham de Blasio? – before settling on his current nom de knucklehead.

If I were the type to engage in ethnic rumor mongering, I might point out that given the uber-Germanic name “Wilhelm,” his devotion to socialism, and his obvious urge to dictate everything from drink sizes to salt content of meals consumed in his domain, I think we might infer some Nazi sympathies in his background.

But since I’m above that sort of thing, I’ll just point out that since Kaiser Wilhelm has completely failed  at running a major city, he naturally wants to take the next step up to failing at running a country.

In his favor: if Mayor Pete can be a candidate because he’s the mayor of Hooterville, and Skateboarding Doofus can be a candidate because he almost didn’t lose a Senate race, and Bernie can be a candidate because he’s the only surviving member of Marx’s 19^th century inner circle, and Kamala can be a candidate because she slept with that married octogenarian, and Grandma Squanto can be a candidate because she once spent a night in Sioux City when her car broke down (#wemustneverstopmockingher), why can’t Heinrich de Blasio run for president, too?

Not in his favor: everything else.

Exhibit A – When polled, something like 76% of New Yorkers said that they thought he shouldn’t run for president.  I can only assume that the remaining 24% favor a presidential run only because that would require that he stop being mayor of New York City.

Exhibit B – On Monday he was scheduled to do a big photo op pushing the Green New Deal in front of Trump Tower.  But because God hates Sergeant Schultz-de Blasio, He sent inclement weather, which pushed the de Blasio speech indoors, to right in front of the escalators.  And because most New Yorkers hate de Blasio as much as God does, a group of them immediately made some cardboard signs reading “Worst Mayor Ever!” and “Trump 2020,” and rode up and down the escalators behind him throughout his entire speech.   (Just when I was ready to write off NYC altogether, you magnificent bastards do something like that!  I salute you!)

Exhibit C – A few days later, he went on GMA to tout his candidacy to former Clinton hatchet man and totally objective journalist George Stephanopoulos.  He was drowned out by protestors outside chanting “Liar, liar.”

So why am I so stoked about a Reinhard Heydrich-de Blasio candidacy?  Because I think that, of all of the ominous things said by all of the creepy leftists so far in the 21^st century, de Blasio uttered the one that best sums up the clueless arrogance and lust for power inherent in leftism.  It’s not a slip of the tongue, because he has said it multiple times in the past, and repeated it this week in his announcement video:

“There’s plenty of money in this world, there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.”

That’s our would-be leftist overlords in a nutshell.  If you are financially successful or own something, you didn’t build that, and it’s not rightfully yours.  They’ll decide whose hands it should be in.

Ugh.  Let me just go over to my hat closet to retrieve my wizard hat and do a little prognosticating.

Annnddd… Bill de Blasio is not going to get the Dem nomination.

Oooh, the pointy hat is still tingling.  (No offense, Mayor Pete.  No gay slang intended.)  I feel another prediction coming on.

No man in America is going to be taking any cold showers over the sex strike called by Bette Midler and Alyssa Milano.

The wizard hat has spoken.

Really, though.  Did any guy hear that news and groan to himself, “I have to do without sex with Bette Midler AND Alyssa Milano?  Where is my arsenic, and my handgun?”

Granted, I’m not the target audience for this strike.  When I met the CORCAW (the CORCA wife, obviously), all other women became invisible to me.  Which is a real problem in the office, because I’m constantly bumping into many women whom I do not notice.  If one of them happens to be bending over to pick up something when the collision occurs, I’m back in HR before you can say, “Mr. Weinstein will see you now.”

But there was a time before I’d met the CORCAW, and I can envision some hypothetical sex strike participants who might have moved me.  If you’d told me that a bevy of Bond girls, or a 1976 Farrah Fawcett, or a 1983 Nena (singing in German) were going to stop taking my calls, I’d have hobbled to the negotiating table.

But octogenarian Bette Midler, and momentarily-attractive-25-years-ago Alyssa Milano?  I think I can soldier through that libidinal Lent without losing my will to live.

Besides, the logic of this protest escapes me.  These geniuses are calling for women to stop having sex with men — which will mean that none of them will get pregnant – in order to preserve the right to abort the babies that they will not conceive, because they are not having sex with men.

Well played, screeching termagants.  Well played.

Finally, in case you think that sexual politics can’t get any more ridiculous, I give you the story of “feminist tax expert” Maya Forstater, who recently lost her job at the Centre for Global Development, which Breitbart London identified as an “international think tank.”  (Although after reading this story, you will believe, as I do, that the use of “think tank” is a considerable exaggeration.  Even a “think saucer” is probably over-stated.  Is there such a thing as a “think thimble?”)

Sharp CO readers have probably already spotted a few red flags.  First, why would anyone’s feminism or gender politics be relevant to the work of a tax expert?  Has anyone ever said, “Get me our Q3 results, and also your thoughts on biological males using women’s bathrooms.”  Or “I need a spreadsheet of our accounts receivable, cross-referenced with the preferred pronouns of Chelsea Manning, Caitlyn Jenner and Don Lemon!”

Also, Simpson’s Law of Ridiculously Spelled Names is violated by “Centre.”  And I know – that spelling is European, so we should all acknowledge its cultural superiority.

Well, you know what else is European?  Soccer.  French rap “music.”  Pretentious black and white films that make zero sense.  No second amendment.  No freedom of speech.

No thank you.

Anyway, what did crazy tax expert Forstater say that was so outrageous?   Here is her quote, which I am not making up, “Yes I think that male people are not women. I don’t think being a woman/female is a matter of identity or womanly feelings. It is biology.”

So obviously, we must burn her at the stake.

Or, as her boss put it in an email to her, “You stated that a man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality. A lot of people would find that offensive and exclusionary.”

Yes, and those people are raving lunatics, and Democratic primary voters.

The rest of us don’t go to our tax people – or to the fourth lead on Who’s the Boss – for advice on our sex lives.  We just want to know if there’s a way to write off our wizard hats as a business expense.

Is that too much to ask?

So last weekend I was watching Youtube videos of some old Super Chicken cartoons, and enjoying the hilarious staccato “cluck cluck cluck cluck” during the refrain of the theme song.  As one does.  (If you haven’t read my last column, that line probably doesn’t make any sense.) (If you want to read that column before this one, hop over to Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  But then come back – always come back! – to Cautious Optimism.)

But after re-living some nostalgic moments from my youth, I noticed a little video window on the screen identified as “Surprise Pregnancy Announcements.”  So I watched one.  And then another one.

And then an hour had gone by, as I compulsively watched about 30 of those videos.  And I’ll admit that I was repeatedly choked up to the point of tears multiple times.

That may shock many of you in CO nation, who think of me as tough as a two-dollar steak.  And you are not wrong.  I can neither confirm nor deny that I once won three out of four arm wrestling falls with Chuck Norris, or that the character of Ron Swanson on Parks and Rec was based on me.  On advice of counsel, I have no comment on whether I may have ever killed a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

If the mysterious CO and I ever faced off in a tough-guy contest, it would be like Batman v. Superman, and the earth would tremble.

But watching those videos had me crying like a dad walking his little girl down the aisle in a country music video.  There was a sweetness and a joy to all of them.  Even as they were all different, there were consistent themes.  All people, as they get the news that their loved one is pregnant, get a momentarily shocked look on their faces.  Then the dam breaks.

Some grandmothers-to-be get all screamy, some jump around in hysterics, and many just cry into their hands.  A few grandfathers and fathers cry, but there are also some raised arms, and fist pumps, and raucous cheering (not unlike when the Cubs sweep the Cards in a weekend series, as God intended).

You see some ethnic differences: I never saw any super-restrained black or Hispanic families, and a few patrician New Englanders (even as they teared up) said things like, “Well that’s just wonderful!  Such great news!“

You see some class differences: some announcements happen in immaculate HGTV kitchens over granite countertops or in impeccably decorated great rooms, while others take place in cramped little living rooms and dated kitchens like the houses that I grew up in.  Some happen in trailers, and you can almost see the walls shake when the news is out.

You see some religious differences, too.  Some houses have crosses on the walls, and people start crying and thanking God.  One sneaky young father-to-be managed to slip the news into his prayer as he said grace at a holiday meal, “And lord, we thank you for the four-month-old life that Kelly is carrying inside her…”  (Yes, the rest of that prayer was heard only by God, as everyone at the table erupted.)

Others start dropping instinctive, shocked F-bombs and strings of accompanying expletives.

Some of my favorite videos were the announcements of twins or triplets.  After the first wave of joyous chaos was just beginning to subside, the pregnant woman would point out the second baby on the ultrasound, or intentionally let it slip that “the babies are due in early July.”  Several clever women gave their mothers tiny little onesies labeled “Thing 1” and “Thing 2,” which produced open mouths and momentary shocked silence.

Followed by the Democrat talking points hitting the proverbial fan, as they say.

There are several constants:  Dogs always go nuts when a pregnancy is announced.  (God love ‘em!) Very old people suddenly look 30 years younger when a family member has finally gotten the message through, half-shouted into their good ear.  Everybody hugs everybody like their lives depend on it.

Most importantly, there is such life-affirming happiness in all of these videos.  I recommend them to anyone who is feeling down, and I defy you to watch just one or two, and not find yourself simultaneously tearing up or smiling as you watch them.

“Hey Martacus,” I can hear many of you saying, “all of this treacly Hallmark stuff is fine, but where is the acid sarcasm and the sharp tongue we’ve come to expect from you?  Have you gone soft on the “should we ever stop mocking Grandma Squanto” question?   Have no Dems pulled a ceramic chicken this week?

I’m glad you asked. Because what got me thinking about all of this sweet joie de vivre stuff was seeing the polar opposite of it in the miserable, malevolent face of the Worst Leftist of the Month:  Brian Sims.

You’ve probably seen and heard about this guy.  He’s the elected PA state representative – from guess which party? – who has videotaped himself harassing peaceful protestors outside a Philly Planned Parenthood abortuary.

Full disclosure: I understand why some pro-choicers are repulsed by and angry at some pro-life demonstrators, especially the attention-getting subset who carry gigantic, graphic color photos of aborted fetuses, and scream at miserable young women who run their gauntlet.

But these protestors aren’t those types at all.  The videos run around 10 minutes total, and capture a mother with three girls (ages 13-15), an elderly lady by herself, and what looks to be a lone male in his late teens.  All of them are low key, quietly protesting and praying and trying to persuade any women who might show up from going through with an abortion.

Sims aggressively harasses all of them.  He corners and then stalks around the elderly lady, who tries to avoid him, all the while snarling that she is “an old white lady,” and a hypocrite.  He taunts her, asking how many children she has fed or clothed today, and saying that she should be ashamed of herself.

Her treats the mother and girls and the lone boy the same way.  He repeatedly points out that they are white.  (Even though one of the girls – who looks to be Hispanic – says, “I’m far from white.”)  He says they are pseudo-Christians who should be ashamed of themselves.  He also threatens to dox all of them, offering $100 to anyone who will tell him their names and where they live.

In general, he is a hateful, obnoxious bully.  And thus, I would argue, a perfect representative of the far-left leadership of the Democrat party.

In 10 minutes of video, he demonstrates all of the dysfunctional, malicious tropes that characterize the Woke Left Resistance:

Self-righteousness:  He perfectly captures the left’s hatred for all religions (except Islam), and its simultaneously judgmental hyper-religiosity (in the name of either their secular religion of leftism, or their own eccentric version of “spiritual- but-not-religious” Christianity).  He continually mocks them as pseudo-Christians and preaches how shameful and immoral they are.  He’s a 21^st century Cotton Mather, raging that they should all be forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” – for anti-abortion.

Obsession with race and gender:  he continually berates them for being white, and for harassing women.  Meanwhile five of his six victims are women, and he’s male, and pretty white.  I mean, he’s not as white as Elizabeth Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), but neither is the hypothetical baby of Edgar Winter and Tilda Swinton.   But he’s at least as white as any of his victims.

Textbook psychological projection: He accuses people whom he is bullying of being bullies.  He accuses them of harassing women, while he (a male, and not a Mayor-Pete-looking-male, if you know what I mean) just happens to be harassing three teenage girls, a mom, and an old lady.  He accuses them of being evil white people, while he is a white guy, acting evil.

Blindness to how he comes across: In a sane world, this video would be some kind of undercover sting footage, taken surreptitiously to expose a creep, who would be mortified when it went public.  But this moron proudly took the video himself, and he thinks he comes off just great!  He turns the camera on himself and identifies himself at the beginning of each segment, before turning it on his hapless victims.

Ugh.  This guy is truly terrible.  But one silver lining is that he seems to be getting some rational blowback against his hideous behavior, to the point that he had to make a cliched leftist non-apology apology.  Usually that involves weasely phrasing such as, “If anyone was offended by my behavior…” or “I’m sorry that my totally justified actions have been taken out of context by evil right-wingers…”

But Sims can’t even do that.  He is defiant, insults his victims, and the closest he gets to “sorry” is “two wrongs don’t make a right.”  (Hey, Bri: you’re one wrong short, you pompous jerk.)

I watched Sim’s infuriatingly creepy video, and started to feel depressed about what darkness people are capable of.

But then I thought better of it.   I sought out those pregnancy announcement videos, and felt the tightness in my chest loosen up.  There’s a Hispanic woman, laughing in confusion as she holds up the small jelly bean that her son and daughter-in-law just gave her as a gift.

Then her daughter-in-law says, “That’s the size of your grandchild.” And the woman’s face transforms, and she starts jumping around like a lunatic, shouting and crying with joy.

And snarling, benighted Brian Sims seems a million miles away.  As he should be.

 

I am not a single-issue voter, but I can’t think of any clearer illustration of the stark contrast between left and right than on abortion.   The left used to at least act like they understood the moral gravitas of abortion, casting it as an option for those in extremis, and mouthing platitudes about how it should be safe and legal, but (tellingly) rare.

Those days are long gone.  Today’s avant-garde left will not be infanticide-shamed.  They’ll “shout their abortions,” as if irresponsibly sleeping with one shiftless quasi-male after another is something to be proud of, and then cancelled like an error on a math test.

They’ll reductively objectify themselves by wearing genitalia-evoking hats and costumes, and bring their small children to marches where they carry obscene signs and scream expletives at quiet and respectful opponents.  They’ll assault you, and spit at you, and they’ll force you to pay for their abortions.

They’ll bully old women and teenagers, and they’ll proudly record themselves doing it.

Which leaves me with only question:  Who is the most representative 2020 Democrat dream-team presidential ticket?

Avenatti/Sims or Sims/Avenatti?

Choose wisely, Democrat voters.

 

When I wrote about the Democrats’ pathetic showing against Bill Barr last week, I thought the Dems had sunk as low as they could possibly go.  (Proving what a naïve optimist I am at heart.)  But I spoke too soon.  Because losing a debate to a taciturn, composed opponent is one thing.

But being soundly trounced by an opponent who doesn’t even show up is quite another.

I speak, of course, of Chicken Gate.  (I had an alternative name for this political scandal.  But upon further reflection, I am far too classy to use the phrase “Cluster Cluck.”) (You’re welcome.)

After having gone through one day of listening to Crazy Mazie and the Dueling Dicks (Durbin and Blumenthal), Barr decided not to show up for an encore performance.  (By the way, if you ever get the chance to see Crazy Mazie and the Dueling Dicks in concert, take a pass, because they are terrible.  I wouldn’t go to one of their shows even if they shared the bill with Elvis Costello and the Attractions and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.) (And I love both of those bands.) (RIP Tom Petty.)

When he heard that Barr wasn’t going to show up, Democrat Steve Cohen decided that this was his big chance to finally win a debate, for once in his miserable life.  So he gathered his props, and made his bid for forensic immortality.

He placed a ceramic chicken on the table where Barr would have sat, and he put a bucket of fried chicken on the table in front of himself.

In doing so, he forgot the immutable laws enshrined in the Democrat party platform:

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Never take a black voter to your Klan rally.

Never take Elizabeth Warren to a powwow. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Never take a ceramic chicken to a Senate hearing.

They are all clichés for a reason, Stevie.

 

When a reporter asked him to interpret the deep meaning behind the chicken props, Cohen said, and I quote, “Chicken Barr should have showed up today. It’s a sad day for America.”

Which gave me two thoughts:

1. When you’re trying to project gravitas, evoke a funereal, somber tone, and warn of a great nation in political twilight, it doesn’t help establish the mood if you do so… WHILE HOLDING A CERAMIC CHICKEN! (Cue Sam Kinison scream: OH! OOOHHH!)
2. A Chicken Bar sounds like a pretty sweet entrepreneurial idea.  I’m picturing a wide selection of imported and domestic beers, happy-hour white-or-dark-meat specials, dart boards along one wall with Steve Cohen’s big, dumb face on them.  To quote another illustrious Simpson: “Mmmm, chicken bar.”

So if you’ll just give me a moment, I’m going to apply for a trademark on “Chicken Bar.”

Annnnnnndd, done.

 

This stunt was so dumb that I think it deserves a place among the all-time best TV moments that emblazoned themselves in our consciousness by adding a phrase to our national lexicon.

The best example to date has been “jumping the shark.”  For those of you too young to remember, the coolest guy on tv in the 1970s (with the possible exceptions of Jim Rockford and the Six Million Dollar Man) was Fonzie on Happy Days.  When that show had exhausted all creative story premises, an episode aired in which the Fonz – who had previously been voted the tv personality least likely to ever water ski –jumped over a shark while waterskiing, in a leather jacket.  (Because everyone knows that chicks dig leather jackets over life jackets. Duh.)

Hence “jumping the shark,” meaning that you’ve stooped to a desperate stunt which inadvertently sounds the death knell for a doomed enterprise.

I propose that we now replace “jumping the shark” with “pulling a ceramic chicken.”

Before I go on, I’d like to apologize to Mayor Pete.  I am not up on gay slang, so if the phrase “pulling a ceramic chicken” has any double-entendre meaning, it was not intended.  So mea culpa to the Pence-Slanderer from South Bend.

 

Good lord!  I tried to put myself in Steve Cohen’s mind, to figure out what he could have been thinking.  (If you’re curious, it was very dark and cold and cramped in there, with lots of cobwebs and tumbleweeds, and the sound of wind blowing through empty passageways.)

Does he think that there is a long tradition of animal figurines being deployed as devastating trump cards in debates?

Does he believe that when Roman orators Marcus Aurelius and Cassius Clay (in addition to gay slang, I am also not super-knowledgeable about Roman orators) were debating the relative merits of a Republic vs. an Empire, Aurelius carried the day when he produced a small, bronze sheep?  (To which Flavius Somebody-or-other said, “Clay may have command of Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle, along with a powerful right jab.  But Aurelius has a graven farm animal!  Huzzah!”)

Is Cohen under the impression that Lincoln was losing the Lincoln-Douglas debates, until he famously said, “My rotund, slavery-supporting Democrat friend makes a formidable argument, but has he considered…” then, with a flourish, from beneath his frock coat he sprang his surprise, lifting a wooden object high above his unattractively angular head, proclaiming, “this magnificent OAKEN COW?!!”

(Spoiler alert: the crowd went nuts, he won the presidency, and eventually defeated the slave-state Democrats in the Civil War, thanks in large part to what many later called “The Bovine Proclamation.”) (True story.)

Nicely done, Steve Cohen and Senate Democrats!  You’ve performed the equivalent of stepping into an empty boxing ring, slipping on a piece of fried chicken, and falling onto your own fist, knocking yourself out cold.

You have started with chicken soup, and ended up with chicken poop.

You have truly “pulled a ceramic chicken.”

CO Nation, please share this column, and spread the word about the phrase that should replace “jump the shark.”  I will consider my entire life well-lived if, during the Democrat primaries, one candidate accuses another of pulling a ceramic chicken.

(Doesn’t have to be Mayor Pete.) (But it would be hilarious if it were.)

Go forth now, and speak my truth!

Barr’s testimony on Tuesday showed the Rorschach test nature of congressional hearings.  MSM commentators and various room-temp-IQ celebrities who watched the proceedings were so horrified by what they saw that they got their gender-binary garments over their heads and tweeted up an obscene storm, the gist of which was: Barr must be impeached, following by Trump’s execution!

I watched the same thing, and shared CO’s take: Barr looked like a responsible adult in the middle of a disgraceful middle school mean girls performance by a parade of dim-bulb leftist hacks.  Lowlights: a pathetic, slanderous performance by nasty piece of work Crazy Mazie Hirono (the voters of Hawaii should be ashamed of themselves for electing her), and less bad but still miserable performances by Richard “everyone secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal and Dick “no one calls him Richard” Durbin.

They were obnoxious, and spent their time bloviating and posing the most transparently bad-faith rhetorical questions.  Questions like, “Do you think we should be grateful that the president gutted the constitution and pooped on all that we hold sacred?”  and “Wouldn’t you agree that it’s terrible what a partisan Trump supporter you are, when an AG is supposed to be non-partisan?”

I remember when Eric “Steadman” Holder (put his picture up against that of Oprah’s longtime eunuch-y boyfriend and see if you can tell them apart) called himself Obama’s “wingman,” and called Obama “my boy,” and proudly stated that “I’ve got his back.”

Do you remember the outraged howl that arose from the MSM when Steadman proudly proclaimed his bias like that?  Me neither.

For an even better example of transparent media bias, I give you a story from only last weekend:  a potential terrorist bombing of a right-wing political gathering was avoided with the arrest of the perpetrator, which I’ll bet you haven’t heard much about.  You can Google it to get the whole story, but the outline is familiar: FBI hears about violent nut job running his mouth about wanting to build a bomb, they get an agent posing as a fellow terrorist close to him, then record his rantings, deliver him a fake bomb, and arrest him.

The fact that you haven’t heard much about it is the first bias red flag, and that tells you that this guy was not a right-wing Trump supporter, or else he’d be the most famous man in America right now.

But look at the way that the story was covered (when it was covered at all):

The article in the LA Times has this headline: “L.A. terror suspect was ousted from U.S. Army for violent offenses, source says.”  The first paragraph begins, “The U.S. Army veteran charged with planning a terrorist attack in Southern California was kicked out of the service several years ago….” In the second paragraph, we find out that the suspect lives in Reseda, CA, and that his name is Mark Stephen Domingo.

In the next two paragraphs, we learn more about his dishonorable discharge.  At the end of paragraph 5, we get a reference to the fact that his motive for murder involved “…retribution for the killings of Muslims in other parts of the world.”

Hmmm.  Curious.  I looked back up at his name: Mark Stephen Domingo.  Not so Muslim-y.  “Mark” (white guy) “Stephen” (white guy) “Domingo” (Hispanic)

Then I considered the ambiguity of the preposition “of.”  “The killings of Muslims” might refer to Muslims being killed, or to killings carried out by Muslims.  Since the latter would seem to be a lot more frequent than the former, I thought that maybe this guy has a bias against Muslims.

Until I started on paragraph 6:  “Prosecutors said Domingo, a recent convert to Islam…”

“Aha!” I said to Cassie the Wonder Dog, who watched me with her adorable one brown eye and one blue eye.  “The game is afoot!  I think we have stumbled upon a clue.”  I assume that my brilliant deduction had bowled her over, because she walked in a circle and lay down with a deep sigh of appreciation.

Let me recap: In the headline, White-Guy Hispanic is identified as a former solider.  The first five paragraphs expound on how he, as an Army veteran, had a falling out with the army, but had done a military tour in Afghanistan, and then got a dishonorable discharge.  From the army.

Also, he was a military guy.

Then, in paragraph 6 (when most of the lefty audience of the LA Times had given up reading because their lips got tired), the writer mentions the probably irrelevant detail that he recently converted to the Religion of Peace™  Oddly enough, he soon thereafter became a member of the pressure-cooker-bomb-enthusiast community.

Well, I said to myself, “I wonder if I need to go to my closet and pull out my wizard hat, to anticipate how other MSM outlets might have covered the story?”  And Cassie shook her head at me, snorfling in derision.

So I sat at the computer, bare-headed, and looked up a few other trusty news sources.

Here’s ABC News’ (sic) headline — “US Officials: Army veteran’s plan to bomb California Nazi rally stopped.”  At least they got to the Islam connection quickly:  “An Army veteran who converted to Islam…”  But I might still make a humble editing suggestion: if you wanted to lead with the most pertinent factor in his decision to become a bomb-maker, you might try starting with “Recent Islamic convert who was kicked out of the Army years ago…”

How did CNN cover the story? you are not asking since you already know, even though your wizard hat is in the wash.  Headline: “Army veteran charged with plotting terror attacks in LA area.”  Opening sentence: “A 26-year-old former US Army soldier who served in Afghanistan has been charged…”

Not until the 7^th paragraph does the story mention that he recently converted to Islam.

Although to be fair to CNN, all of their paragraphs are one sentence long, so that delay is not as bad as it sounds. I’m not making that up: The story is 13 paragraphs long, and 12 of those paragraphs have one sentence.  The remaining one has two.  Which tells you all you need to know about CNN’s perception of their readers’ literacy rates.  The phrase “not at grade level” comes to mind.

By the way, the story’s byline is by Kate Sullivan and Josh Campbell.  Which means that it took two writers to come up with those 14 sentences.  By comparison, I write roughly a column per week all by myself in my spare time.  And they are chock full of paragraphs, most of which contain many sentences.

Except this one.

And those columns are read by CO Nation (average IQ: four quintiles higher than that of CNN’s audience).

The only editorial assistance I receive comes when I run potential jokes past my wife and daughters, and they rate them on the following descending scale:  All Hail Martacus/ hilariousgenius-level/ semi-hilarious-semi-genius level/ and CNN-worthy.

I’ve never gotten a “CNN worthy” rating yet.  Which you should know, because if I ever did, I’d immediately kill myself by impaling my aorta on the point of my wizard hat, or die trying.

Where was I?  Oh yeah: MSM coverage of the Muslim would-be LA bomber.  After a quick trip around the net, the only sources I found that led with Domingo’s Islamic conversion were partisan conservative sites.

I finally ended up at the New York Times, and their take was as predictable as the sunrise.  Assuming that your sunrise is usually accompanied by blood-curdling cries of “Allahu Akbar!” followed by gaping shrapnel wounds.

Their headline alluded to a generic “Terror Attack Thwarted.”  The slug line under their opening picture began, “Federal officials on Monday accused a military veteran of planning terror attacks…”

The opening line in the story proper: “Federal authorities said on Monday that they had thwarted a domestic terror plot by an American military veteran…”

Hey, people who are simultaneously pretentious enough and stupid enough to still be reading the New York freaking Times, did we mention that this guy is an Army man?

To give credit to the NYT, they feature mostly multi-sentence paragraphs.  To immediately remove that credit, it took them 8 paragraphs before they could bring themselves to mention that Domingo had been supportive of “violent jihad.”  (Which I would have thought the NYT editors would have identified as an oxymoron, since everyone knows that “jihad” is Arabic for “contemplative, pacifistic search for self-actualization, and definitely not beheading the infidels.”) It took them three more paragraphs before they could grit their teeth and use the word “Islam.”

Way to go, NYT!  You get a Pulitzer for burying the lede.  (Just like recent Islamic convert White-Guy Hispanic tried to bury all the non-Muslims he could get his creepy hands on.)

Moral of the story, from “Centurion Obvious” Martacus: we should never believe anything we read in the MSM.

Also, Grandma Squanto wants to forgive the student debt of all of the Social Justice Puppetry majors of the world – if by “forgiving the debt” you mean “sticking taxpayers with the debt.”   So #wemustneverstopmockingher

Sure, that last paragraph may have seemed a little forced.  But I wasn’t about to write another column without a “never stop mocking her” reference.  (You’re welcome, Don!)