Martin Simpson

As April comes to an end, I thought I’d write about a bunch of more or less random things that I’ve noticed but haven’t written about this month.

First, our main stream media have once again really covered themselves in (bias-drenched) glory – for the 378^th consecutive month!

(I decided quasi-randomly to start counting from October of 1987, when – with MSM help – Senior Dirigible from Massachusetts and Aquatic Homicide Aficionado™ Ted Kennedy led the first Borking of a Supreme Court nominee.  But one could easily start counting earlier than that.)

You may remember that when a white supremacist murdered 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand in March, it was a worldwide story.  And well it should have been.  But you may also remember that the news coverage was not shy about mentioning several facts.  For example, the victims were Muslims.  (Not “Ramadan worshipers.”) The killer was a white racist guy.  And therefore probably a member of a rising, terrible movement of Trump supporters that is a huge threat to all of humanity.

Upon hearing of that incident, I went to my hat closet and sorted through my collection: cowboy hat, sombrero, Martacus-style Roman helmet, old-timey leather aviator helmet with goggles.  And finally… my tall, pointy wizard hat that I use for all of my prognosticating.

I put it on and meditated for a moment, and then predicted that the shooter would turn out to be a loser lone wolf whose only friends would be other anonymous losers in sicko internet chatrooms.

Six weeks later… turns out he was a lone-wolf loser with no friends outside the dark web.  Respect the wizard hat, people!

So then Easter comes along, and there is a coincidental attack on “Easter worshippers” in Sri Lanka.  (Whom you can recognize by the giant bunny statues in their houses of worship, which are topped by gigantic rabbit ears with bells inside.)

Or, as Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Some other guys did something else, and now Muslims are being oppressed again.”

And immediately, the MSM leapt into action, marshalling their forces to devote wall-to-wall coverage to…  Lori Laughlin’s decision to plead not guilty in “Getting-my-dumb-kids-into-USC-gate.”

The MSM’s hot take on the story?  “Well, there weren’t that many deaths, all things considered.  And it was probably just a lone wolf, who was likely a white nationalist, and definitely not connected to any organized group.”

Compare that to my initial impression, arrived at as I sat cross-legged on my library floor, wearing my wizard hat: I bet it’s going to be a bunch of guys – heavy on “Muhammad”-adjacent names – carrying out a coordinated attack under the orders of some hateful weird-beard leader of one jihadi caliphate or another.

And what do you know?  The perpetrators were 7 moral dwarves, operating as part of a coordinated jihadi operation, at the behest of a creepy, bearded lunatic.  Also, none of them were named either Nigel or Alan.

Though one survivor, oddly enough, was called Jussie Muhammad.  Apparently he was ambushed by some Sri Lankans in white face, who put a noose around his neck and stole his Subway sandwich, only for him to escape, and live to tell his heroic tale.  True story.

But that wasn’t the only bit of the religion beat that the MSM screwed up in April.  When Notre Dame caught fire, news-weasels around the country said, “Good!  Football is an evil manifestation of toxic masculinity.”  When a Catholic janitor walking by in the hallway explained their mistake, they turned on a tv, just in time to hear it reported that a priest ran inside and retrieved several sacred items, including “the body of Christ.”

Intrepid New York Times reporter – and, I’m guessing, not a Biblical scholar — Elian Peltier garbled that into a report that the priest rescued “a statue of Jesus.”

Well done, NYT.  Now we’ve got to add “Christianity” to the list– which already includes “history, economics, biology, logic, fairness, truth, science, objectivity and basic math” – of topics about which you idiots know NOTHING!

Speaking of knowing nothing, rich socialist Bernie Sanders got his house slippers caught in his dentures when in a New Hampshire town hall, he boldly came out in favor of letting convicted felons vote.  Not after they’ve served their sentences and had their civil rights restored, but while they are still in jail.

A normal human in attendance then did a double-take, and asked if that should apply even to evil people like the Boston bombers.  (Or, as Ilhan Omar refers to them, “Two guys who did something, and now people stare at me every time I tell them the Jews have hypnotized them.”) Bernie doubled down: Yes, let Osama bin Weinstein Manson-Bundy vote!

Hilariously enough, when a reporter put the same question to Willie Brown’s former mistress, Kamala at first agreed.  When the reporter seemed incredulous, she hesitated, and settled for a lukewarm cliché: “I think we should have that conversation.”

Which is leftist speak for “I think we should have that monologue.  So zip it.”

Not to be outdone, Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher) came out in favor of letting another group vote who should obviously never be allowed to vote:  16-year-olds.

Here is a partial list of things that 16-year-olds think: Rap “music” is music.  Global warming is going to boil us all in 12 years. Texting and driving is a great idea. So is socialism. And piercings.  If you think you’re a girl, you’re a girl.

Here is a partial list of things 16-year-olds do NOT know: Don’t draw to an inside straight.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Soccer is a terrible sport.  Don’t go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Speech that offends you is not violence.  Who fought in the Civil War.  Or World War 2.  Or any other war outside of Game of Thrones.

Oh, yeah… one more: WHO TO VOTE FOR!

It’s very telling to see which groups the Dems are trying to get to vote: Criminals. Impressionable children. Illegal immigrants.  The mentally ill and the addicted (i.e. most homeless people, who suffer from one or both conditions).

I can’t see how that could possibly go wrong.

In other news, “Plugs” Biden has finally joined the dementia of Democrats currently crowding the primary stage, which promises even more train-derailing humor in the coming months.  He launched his campaign with a video, and his very first point was a lie: the smear that Trump called neo-nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville “very fine people.”

I know that Trump says lots of stupid things, and often those things involve being too complimentary to those who don’t deserve it, as when he flatters Porky Nork (hat tip to CO), and speaks positively of Putin.  And he expressed himself clumsily – and vaguely – in that infamous press conference.

But in that “very fine people” line, Trump was not talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, whom he believes should be condemned totally.

Where do I get that crazy idea, an incredulous leftist might ask?

Allow me to quote Trump in that same press conference, about two minutes after the “very fine people” line: “And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Sound vaguely familiar?

Anyway, Plugs came out of the gate with a smear, and promises more of the same.  It’s going to be fun to watch the other Dems’ reactions to him, not least because after a decade of stressing intersectionality and women and minorities and gays, the two top Democrat candidates are… two old, straight, white guys!

And now, because I fancy myself an astute observer of global news and American culture, I’d like to close by touching on one story from each realm:

On April 28^th, Spain held an election, and although a far-right party had some sizeable gains, Spaniards elected a socialist government.

Excuse me for just a moment while I put on my wizard hat.  Annnnndd… Two years from now, things will be worse in Spain.

Mark this date on your calendar.  And respect the wizard hat.

 

In culture news, over the weekend, one guy came out of a movie theater in Hong Kong after having just watched the new Avengers movie.  In front of a line of people waiting to get in to watch the movie he’d just seen, he started loudly revealing spoilers from the movie.

And the crowd gave him a sound beating.  (You can see a picture of someone wiping a little blood off of his big, stupid head.)

To which I say, “Good for you, unruly mob!”

Mobs have a bad reputation, and for good reason.  They’re known for mindless behavior: rioting, looting, clogging up DC while marching in ridiculous female-genitalia-evoking headgear.  Trampling each other to get into a Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving to buy a tv for $7 less than they could buy that tv for one week later.

Plus, I’m a Christian, so I should be against violence on general principle.  I just enjoyed a great Easter.  (Or, as Ilhan Omar might refer to it – if she were way smarter, and me —  “Some Guy did something, and now my sins are forgiven.”) I try to practice restraint and non-violence in my day-to-day life.

But there is such a thing as the social contract.  And if small violations of that contract – vandalizing others’ property, shouting down people you disagree with, ruining a movie out of spite — go unpunished, worse things will follow.

So if we’re going to keep letting immigrants come here illegally, can I request that the next immigrants to be let in are those Hong Kong movie fans?  I saw we fill the front rows of the first Dem debate with those folks, and provide them with translators, so they can understand every stupid word that comes out of the candidates’ mouths.

Then, make like you’re in a Hong Kong movie line, and commence the pummeling!

Donald Trump is a confident/arrogant guy, and is no stranger to narcissism.  I’ve written before that I think most presidents and presidential candidates are full of themselves, and as presidential egos go, I’d much rather have the transparent, cartoonish Trumpian flavor, as opposed to the deadly serious kind of Obamian hubris.    (Trump might want to see his name everywhere in big gold letters, but at least he didn’t say – in public, and not ironically – that his election would cause the oceans to recede and the earth to heal.)

But when it comes to real, unmitigated self-love taken to self-parodic levels, Trump has been outdone recently by two leftist egotists: The Skateboarding Doofus and AOC.

Beta’s big moment came when he was caught up in “charity-gate” – as no one but me is calling it.  As the bumbling lefty candidates have started to release their tax returns, they have lived down to the stereotype of socialists who are profligately generous with other people’s money, but downright Scroogian with their own.

Decades ago it came out that Richie-Rich Gore had given almost nothing to charity, as had Bill Clinton, who actually wrote off old pairs of underwear that he donated.  (I am not making that up.  And can you imagine any worse luck for a down-and-out person who is reduced to accepting used underwear from a charity?  The poor guy gets a pair from the future Rapist-in-Chief, wears them for a day, and then is rushed to the nearest hospital with a near-fatal bouillabaisse of venereal diseases the likes of which medical science has never seen.)

Beta was right in there with the rest of his moralizing, stingy co-religionists.  But it wasn’t how little he gave — $1167 out of earnings of $365K in 2017 – that made him an early contender for Narcissist of the Year.

It was his reaction when a voter called him on it.  He said, “I’m doing everything I can right now, spending this time with you, not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso, because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything that we’ve got.”

Got it?  His presence is the real gift, you dolts!  In fact, he tells you what he thinks of you: to “spend time with you” is akin to “sacrificing everything.”

Try that the next time the IRS audits you: “Sure, I may have paid almost no taxes.  But I’m wasting my valuable time talking to you idiots.  Isn’t that WAY more important than trivial facts like how much I may or may not have paid in actual dollars?”

 

But as bad as Beta was – and this is a phrase I fully expect to be saying many, many times in the future – AOC was even worse!

Or better, depending on your point of view.  I prefer “better.”  Because what could be better than a big-headed juvenile making a self-flattering opposite-day video that predicts a future in which all of her ideas are implemented, and prove to be brilliant!

 

If you haven’t seen the video yet, you must find it and watch it.  Otherwise, you will believe that Ol’ Uncle Martacus is putting you on, with more of his exaggerated sarcasm.  But I swear to you that I am not making this up.

Her video is a literal cartoon, entitled, “A Message from the Future, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”  Future AOC opens by thinking back to when she first got elected, with a little self-congratulation about being part of the most diverse congressional class ever.  She then glides through a list of future accomplishments straight out of an under-educated leftist’s dream journal: the Dems win the Senate and White House in 2020, then launch a decade of huge government legislation.  A smart grid is built, “every building in America” is retrofitted, bullet trains are built and run everywhere.

Then AOC introduces us to the character of Ileana, a young girl who could only exist in the notebook doodles of a dreamy C- student who wants to run for her junior high class president so she can bring about world peace.

Ileana gets out of college – no mention of her degree field, though the smart money is on a major in Women’s Studies with a minor in Social Justice Puppetry – and her first job is with “Americorps Climate, restoring wetlands in Louisiana.”  She moves through a few other jobs, one of which is being a solar plant engineer” – apparently that Social Justice Puppetry curriculum really gives you some diverse job skills – before making a career as a teacher.  Did I mention that in AOC’s fantasy world, teacher salaries skyrocket?

But even that lofty achievement is not enough for ambitious young future AOC – er, I mean, Ileana.  Because she eventually runs for public office (due to a new program that provides public funding for political campaigns) (by the way, still not making this up!) and reaches the apotheosis of human excellence: “she now occupies the seat that I once held,” says future AOC.

But that’s not all, because AOC next pronounces, in the most sincere voice I’ve ever heard her use, “I could not be more proud of her, a true child of the Green New Deal!”

It’s very telling that the person AOC is most proud of in her whole life is a pretend doppleganger of herself from the future.

In good leftist fashion, AOC’s fairy tale bounces from one hideously expensive government plan and benefit to another, while not ever devoting a single syllable to how any of it would be paid for, or by whom.  It’s just welfare and boondoggles, all the way down.

Any fan of AOC who criticizes Trump for his ego ought to be ashamed of themselves, not least because they can fall for such a facile, juvenile, self-flattering exercise as this cartoon.  Anybody over the age of 4 could come up with such a self-aggrandizing fantasy about the future.

In fact, here’s one I just wrote about myself:

“As I look back from 20 years in the future, I smile to think of how my plans have all come to fruition.  In the summer of 2019, everything started going my way.  First, People magazine contacted me with the news that they’d made a counting error, and I actually had defeated Idris Alba for Sexiest Man of the Year.   When Donald Trump read my tweet about forcing all social media to stop discriminating against conservative writers and sites, the CO membership quickly topped 10 million viewers.  These viewers soon overwhelmed my Tip Jar, making me an instant billionaire.

I spent part of my fortune on starting a think tank which I called The Simpsonian.  I collaborated with Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson on a few position papers, which were widely read, and then implemented.  By July, the Democratic party realized the error of their ways and began to dissolve, and prosperity broke out immediately.  We retired our national debt by Labor Day, and my wife began adoringly referring to me as #hilariousgenius.

Elizabeth Warren’s husband called a press conference in which he announced that I was right, and we all should really never stop mocking his ridiculous wife.  A red wave swamped the hideous Dem candidates in 2020, and Grandma Squanto was sent packing.  AOC lost, along with the fresh leftist faces of 2018; Ilhan Omar was last seen wandering the streets of Minneapolis, screaming about how the Jews had hypnotized the voters of Minnesota.

And now I can’t go out in public without a crowd of people hoisting me onto their shoulders and carrying me around joyously, chanting “Simp-son, Simp-son!  I spend most of my time accepting the thanks of a grateful nation.”

See.  Not that hard.

 

But while Trump was out-done on the narcissism front, he held onto his title of King of the Trolls.

After the Mueller report exposed the collusion hoax, he posted a pic of himself with the Game of Thrones logo, changed to read “Game Over.”  He also ran an ad featuring Ilhan Omar’s insulting “somebody did something” speech along with images of the aftermath of 9/11, setting off paroxysms of guilty howls on the left and in MSM newsrooms (but I repeat myself).

But his crowning achievement was his proposal to release all of the illegal immigrants into the Dems’ sanctuary cities.

My theory is that Trump and his cabinet were sitting around the Oval, watching Cocaine Mitch put the Green New Deal up for a vote in the Senate – sending the Dem hypocrites running for cover and resulting in a vote that came up 60 short of the 60 required for passage.

Cheering broke out all around, and Mike Pence said, “No one will ever top that!”

And Donald turned to an aide and said, “Get me a beer.”

The room went quiet, and someone whispered, “But I thought that he never drinks?”

The aide returned with a beer, poured it into a glass, and handed it to the president.  He looked around him at all of the shocked faces, and then gestured to Pence.  “Hold my beer, and watch this.”

Then he picked up the red bat-phone that I assume he keeps under a clear glass dome, and said, “Get me the guy in charge of the border, and the one in charge of sanctuary cities.”

The move is so freaking beautiful because it forces the Democrats’ hands in multiple ways:

It would put the burdens created by an influx of illegals most heavily on their districts, which is only fair, since they are the ones doing as much as they can to create the influx.

As soon as they protest the move, it reveals the utter hypocrisy of the moral preening that they’ve been doing for years.  They’ve postured as loving, charitable souls who want nothing more than to take care of the noble illegals, but at the first suggestion that they might actually have to pay or care for them themselves, they squeal like stuck pigs.

Their protests also reveal them as absolute liars. (Surprise!) For years – and especially since Trump’s election – they’ve insisted that all illegals are the salt of the earth, a collection of saintly, productive citizens who rarely use the welfare system, and pay far more in taxes than they cost in support.

The only rational response from them – if they truly believe what they pretend to – would be to welcome all of the illegals whom Trump could drop off for them.  Soon they would have full employment and giant mounds of tax money to pay for an amazing array of public services and infrastructure.

The fact that they’re reacting like Trump is threatening to deposit a pillaging horde of TB-infected mongols on their doorsteps tells you all you need to know about their character and honesty.

But I don’t think Trump goes far enough.  Instead of just bussing the illegals to Nancy Pelosi’s district, I think he should bus them to her estate, which I understand is luxurious, and also surrounded by a wall.

I’m sure that that wall was built by a previous owner, who was racist, and xenophobic, and Not Who We Are.  I’m also sure that Trump can agree to join hands with Nancy and the illegals to tear down that wall.

Let the festivities begin!

A couple of days ago I took as my theme the unutterable terribleness of high-profile Democrats who aren’t running for president.

Unfortunately for us all, the Dems running for president may be even more terrible – a feat I would have thought impossible!    But consider:

Al Sharpton is a truly horrible person.  He made his name 30 years ago as a chubby, oleaginous race hustler who created a long and ignominious resume.  Some lowlights:

• he launched his career by helping an unstable teenage girl named Tawana Brawley (she was the 80’s Jussie Smollett) create a racist hate crime hoax that nearly ruined the lives of NYPD cops and a prosecutor
• later he inflamed racial tensions that resulted in riots and the murder of an innocent Hasidic Jew (Sharpton had called Jews “diamond merchants…with blood on their hands”)
• still later he led protests against a Jewish tenant (whom he called “white interloper”) that culminated it an arson and shooting that left 7 employees dead

In the intervening decades he has changed a lot.

In the sense that he’s lost weight.  Other than that, he’s the same creepy, exploitative grifter that he always was.  Given all of that, any decent political party or employer would totally disassociate themselves from him.

Which explains why he was a candidate for president on the Democrat debate stage in 2008, and has had a gig on CNN for years, and is treated like a respectable man of the cloth by the Left, rather than as the withered, vile homunculus that he is.

I don’t care for the guy, is what I’m saying.e.

So of course between April 3-5 – three days which should live in infamy — the leading Democrat presidential candidates all went to Sharpton’s lair at the National Action Network and kissed his ring, in hopes of getting the support of the holder of the “Most Ironic Use of the Title ‘Reverend’ Award.”  (Jesse Jackson took the silver.)   That act alone should disqualify all of them from seeking the highest office in the land.

But there was Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and Skateboarding Doofus (#wemuststartmockinghimtoo), and Spartacus, and the Centenarian Socialist.  Not to mention Hillaries 1 & 2 (Gillibrand and Klobuchar).  Kamala Harris was there too, but some observers think she may have hurt her prospects.  It seems she initially mis-took Sharpton for the equally dessicated sleazeball Willie Brown, and instinctively offered to sleep with him to get his support.  (Even though Sharpton is not married, and therefore not her type.)

Shockingly, in the last week Bernie Sanders may have done something even more egregious than sucking up to Sharpton: admitting that he’s a millionaire.

Since all of Bernie’s socialist followers are the very picture of integrity, they immediately turned on him in fury, demanding that he divest himself of his ill-gotten gains, and give it to the faceless masses whom evil 1%ers like him exploit. Naturally, he did so, apologizing for his greed and withdrawing from public life.

HA!  I kid, of course.  What Bernie actually did is give the most hypocritical justification of financial success since Karl Marx said, “Hey, is it my fault that Freddy Engels’ daddy owned a profitable cotton mill, and he supports me from those profits, so that I don’t have to get a job?”

When a reporter raised the issue of Bernie’s millionaire status, he said the following (and admit it, you’re hearing his ridiculous voice as you read this quote): “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Yes, we know, Bernie, you colossal hypocrite!  We’ve always said that: if you write a best-selling book, or create a useful product, or deliver a useful service, or learn some other valuable skill, you get the chance to be a millionaire.  (I mean, as long as greedy jerks like Bernie Sanders aren’t allowed to gain power and destroy the free market system that allows all of those opportunities.)

But YOU haven’t said that.  You’ve said the opposite of that – that people who earn that much money are evil exploiters who should have their ill-gotten gains taken away from them.  Until you sell a bunch of books to a bunch of dopes who don’t know any better.  Ugh.

 

Which leaves just one Democrat candidate: Mayor Pete.

As you may remember, I was initially willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, when all I knew about him was that he grew up gay, in the Midwest, and had “Butt” in his last name. (And come to think of it, “Peter” as his first name.  Good lord!)  That was enough for me to give him some underdog sympathy.

Don’t get me wrong, he still seemed ridiculously inexperienced.  For most of our nation’s history, presidential contenders were nearly always either military men, or previous governors or VPs.

Then along came Obama, and after 10 minutes in the IL senate, and 7 minutes in the US senate, he became the most powerful man in the world – and world-class example of the Peter Principle in action — as his entry-level executive gig.  After that, it seemed a little silly to object that all of Trump’s executive experience had come in the private sector instead of government.

Which brings us to Baby-Face Pete, whose only executive experience is as mayor.  And not even mayor of a major city.  Running NYC or LA or Chicago might be seen as quasi-equivalent to running a state, given their size and complexity.

But South Bend, Indiana?

Because I take my responsibilities as CORCA seriously, I did a little research on South Bend.  (Cue the 1950’s jumpy-projector educational filmstrip music.)  Located on the St. Joseph River, it’s the county seat of St. Joseph County. With a population of around 100K, it is the fourth largest city in Indiana.  Which, as everybody knows, puts it right behind mighty Evansville – and way ahead of ridiculous Hammond.  (Suck it, Hammond!  South Bend rules!) It has been called “the economic and cultural hub of northern Indiana.”  (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Now I don’t mean to mock Indiana, or midwestern small towns in general.  I grew up in two of them, and I would gladly choose to be governed by any random 300 midwesterners drawn from a phone book than by the elite in Washington DC (to paraphrase the late great William F. Buckley).  And it goes without saying that anyone currently trapped in the grip of leftist tyranny in Illinois has got to be looking with envy on the green grass of Indiana.

But there’s a reason that most of you know of the titanic struggles between cities such as Rome and Carthage, or Athens and Sparta, but not of the fierce rivalry between Evansville and South Bend.  No A-list actor in a big-budget movie has ever held his sword aloft after kicking an envoy from perfidious Hammond into a bottomless well, screaming, “THIS … IS … SOUTH BEND!”

And no one has ever said, “As goes northern Indiana, so goes the world!”

So Mayor Pete is a little light on the resume, and in a normal world, someone would get him in a headlock (and I have not kept up on gay slang, so if that phrase has any alternative meanings, I truly apologize) and advise him to try running for state senate or governor before he shoots for US president.

But what’s worse is that he’s shown himself to be a moral exhibitionist – and, strangely, a judgmental scold — on the issue of sexual preference.

Instead of appreciating the amazingly fast public turn-around on attitudes toward all things gay, Mayor Pete is going full steam ahead (again, that sounds like it might mean something else – damn you, hip gay slang!), and using the cowed public’s deference to gays as a cudgel to attack mild mannered Mike Pence with.

In a smarmy, near-Spartacus-worthy bit of moral self-aggrandizement, Pete picked a fight with Pence – who as far as I can tell has never been anything but courteous and kind to Mayor Pete – by mounting his high horse (everything is gay!) and pronouncing, out of the blue, “If you have a problem with me being gay, you’ve got a problem with my Creator, sir, not with me.”  (Nice over-dramatizing there! What’s next?  Are you going to have your seconds call on his seconds and arrange a duel?)

By pounding this straw man (everything! gay!), Pete is doing the kind of self-righteous pontificating that the left absolutely hates, when the right does it.

Putting all that aside, I hate this wearing your sexual identity on your flouncy, attention-seeking sleeve.

I think I’m fairly representative of most conservatives in this regard.  Whatever my personal feelings one way or another on sexual preferences, I’m pretty laissez faire about the issue in public life.  I don’t much care, and as a proper, reticent Midwesterner, I’d really rather not know ANYTHING about any of my neighbors’ or co-workers’ or elected officials’ sexuality.  (In fact, I’ve been disgusted for my whole life at the thought that my dad ever had sex with my mom.) (And don’t get me started on my grandparents.)

But there’s a particular kind of totalitarian sanctimony about this on the left.  It’s not enough that people tolerate the sexual morays of others – they must be made to approve of and cater to them in all areas of life.  And everyone has to talk about it — in public and all the freaking time!  Why?!

Is there any reason that when I ascended to the lofty position of CORCA, I was required to let CO readers know that I’m a straight male who identifies as a male?  Is it incumbent on me to discuss the fact that while I’m fond of the missionary position, I’m also open to both regular and reverse cowgirl?  Is it anyone else’s business that my non-cheerleading wife owns a cheerleader outfit, or that I’ve recently acquired a Martacus-style Roman centurion costume?

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

And Mayor Pete definitely has!  Keep it to yourself, P-Butt.  (Ouch!  Note to self: CO is better than you are at coming up with whimsical nicknames, so leave that to him.)

So as I look back over the smoking, noxious tire fire that is the Democrat presidential field, I am faced with one obvious conclusion:

I don’t care what anybody says — Michael Avenatti is still in the top tier of Democrat candidates!

If I could start on a serious note, I really am troubled by the growing hostility between the political right and left in our country.  I want to believe the optimistic clichés — what unites us is greater than what divides us, we can disagree without being disagreeable, we all want the same things, even if we differ about how to achieve them.

And I can meet Democrats of good will half-way, and admit that our side is far from perfect.  I know that Trump has his obvious flaws, and the GOP has betrayed some of key promises that it ran on (repealing and replacing Obamacare and beefing up border security chief among them), and etc.

Bottom line: I really, honestly don’t want to turn into a one-note, leftist-criticizing machine.

But I can’t help it.  Because ALL of the nationally elected Democrats are TERRIBLE!

I know you’re thinking, “Oh come on Martin, some of them are probably oka—”

ALL OF THEM!  It pains me to say it.  Even more than it pains me to use ALL CAPS.  If I weren’t such an urbane sophisticate, I’d stoop to using many poop emojis to express how terrible they all are.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  (Though by now, don’t you know me well enough that you should just reflexively take my word for it?)  Consider the ones who AREN’T running for president, starting with the high-profile fresh faces of 2018:  Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar and AOC.

These are the new Three Democrat Stooges, only with much less intelligence and ability to entertain.  (And MUCH less Jewishness, coincidentally.)

In a recent speech, Omar said that the terrorism-adjacent troublemakers at CAIR formed their organization in the wake of 9/11.  In fact, it was actually formed in 1994.  But to be fair to Omar, that was after an earlier Islamic attack on the World Trade Center.  (You can see how she might get those mixed up, what with all the attacks by all of the jihadi groups from the Religion of Peace™ going on pretty much all the time.)

But Ilhan’s faulty time-line isn’t what made her speech infamous.  That came from her super-sensitive phrasing: “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Ignore that she can’t read a calendar, and that she doesn’t know what it means to lose your civil liberties.  (Though here’s a social experiment that Omar could try:  Walk through any city in any Muslim-ruled country on earth wearing your favorite Star-of-David t-shirt.  What happens next is called “losing your civil liberties.”) (Also, your life.)

“Some people did something?!”  Nice.

Does anyone else think that if Ilhan was around in 1946, she’d say, “Somebody did something in Germany, and now there seems to be a lot fewer Jews in Europe.”?  And that she’d be smiling a truly evil smile as she said it?

When GOP freshman congressman (and one-eyed, bad-ass ex-soldier) Dan Crenshaw joined every sane person in the country in objecting to the hateful little anti-Semite’s grotesque distortion, the Bronx Bartender leapt into action.  After first stepping on three rakes in a row – each of which left her looking a little more googly-eyed than usual, AOC stumbled to her phone and launched a twitter defense of her fellow fresh-faced dimwit.

She blasted Crenshaw for not supporting 9/11-related legislation that he voted for, tossed out a laughably-wrong stat about how right wing extremists are the real terrorist threat, and then challenged him, “Why don’t you go do something about that?”

She really said that.  A woman who spent her adulthood living in mommy’s house and screwing up drink orders, while Dan Crenshaw did three tours of duty fighting the kind of evil people whom Ilhan Omar cannot bring herself to criticize, had the gall to challenge HIS commitment to fighting terrorism!

I only wish the little dope had the integrity to look him in the eyepatch and say that.

Rashida Talib also jumped into the fray, with this little verbal gem accusing Omar’s critics of distorting her meaning:  ““They do that all the time, especially women of color, they take our words out of context because they’re afraid because we speak truth, we speak truth to power.”

Ugh.  Are people really still saying “speak truth to power?”  What’s next, a timely “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” reference?

And the “out of context” is almost as stale.  No one took her out of context.  I saw the quote in a half-dozen news stories, and it was always accompanied with context.  And it’s not a subtle statement, Achmed Obvious  – no one has to bring in a squad of code breakers to decipher her sneering point.

But the Malicious Minnesota Mohammedan wasn’t finished.  Apparently stung by normal people taking offense at her obnoxious quote, Omar referenced W’s impromptu bullhorn speech: “The people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” President George W. Bush.  Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack?”

Good lord!   I don’t know which is worse: if she’s pretending to be this clueless, or if she really is this clueless.

On the off chance that she is capable of learning, I hope that someone close to her will explain the galaxy-wide difference between her statement and Bush’s.  Differences like:

1.He made his speech right after the attacks, when we didn’t yet know for sure which group of evil scumbags were behind it.  (Though the smart money even then was not on Shecky Weinberg and his vaudeville troupe, or the Quaker Resistance Movement.) In fact, if Bush had gone with everyone’s gut instinct and referred to “the Muslim terrorists who knocked these buildings down,” disingenuous hacks like you would have blasted him as Islamophobic.

2. Your speech was last week. Since I know that calendars and telling time are not your strong suits, I’m going to help you out: that’s roughly 18 years after 9/11. And we now know who the “some people” who “did something” were.  You should look into that, Ilhan.

3. Bush wasn’t downplaying the terrorist tragedy the way you were, and when he said that “they’ll hear from all of us soon,” he didn’t mean that he was determined to find a good cell number for them, you idiot. He was threatening them, and the country cheered that statement. Because that’s the natural response when a bunch of hateful weird beards attack your country and murder thousands of innocent civilians.

Yikes.  I was just about to start on the new lows reached by the Dem presidential candidates, but I fear that doing so may make me choke on my own bile.  So I’m going to write about them in a day or two, and instead turn to a palate-cleanser, in the form of a feel-good story in the news.

Julian Assange has finally been arrested!

As a small government conservative, I think there is a place in a free society for whistle blowers who publish truths that the government wants to keep secret.  But as a non-moron, I also know that there is a huge difference between leaks that keep the bureaucrats honest, and leaks that threaten the lives of our soldiers and the people who risk their lives to help us.

I need to learn more about the details, but I’ve read that one of Assange’s leaks gave terrorists classified info that allowed them to thwart US efforts to defuse IEDs, and that others exposed brave civilians who helped us, resulting in their torture and deaths.

If that is true, I think Assange deserves the death penalty.

But since he will likely never get that in our feckless justice system, I like to fantasize that he’ll beat the rap.  Then, when he comes home to his nice apartment, he’ll walk in holding a bag of groceries like Matt Damon at the end of The Departed.  And there he’ll see an ex-soldier, the buddy of one of the guys who got killed because of Assange’s leaks, wearing gloves and booties and carrying a silenced pistol.

On the other hand, as long as I’m imagining happy endings, I’ll bet the South African lion who ate that poacher last week is probably hungry again by now.  Maybe we drop Assange off in that African state park, wearing some Sears Tuff-Skins jeans and with some barbecue sauce rubbed into his hair.

The next day, we give a reporter a tip, and he arrives at the park to find a lion with a red muzzle, picking his teeth with what looks like part of a human femur bone.  This lion, strangely enough, is also Italian, and he sounds just like the guy DeNiro called from the phone booth outside of the diner in Goodfellas.

When the reporter says, “Have you seen Julian Assange?” the lion will say, “Well, we had a problem.  And we tried to do everything we could.”

“What do you mean?” the reporter will ask.

“You know what I mean.  He’s gone.  And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”

“Are those his jeans and skull?”

“No comment.”

First up today, I write in mourning over my beloved home state of Illinois.  Though I left over 30 years ago, most of my family is still there–not to mention CO and COW, for a little while, at least — and I will always have an emotional tie to the Land of Lincoln.  (Who, right this minute, has to be whirling in his grave at a high velocity.)

But the voters of the mostly red state outside of Chicago have always been swamped by the Big Blue Corruption Machine of Chicago.  (Motto: “Al Capone? We’re ALL Capone!”) (Hat tip to Andrew Klavan.)

In 2016 they replaced a GOP billionaire governor who didn’t seem the sharpest knife in the drawer with a Democrat billionaire governor who isn’t even the sharpest knife in a drawer full of smooth, rounded stones.  He’s passed a raft of taxes on everything that moves, so you know that happy times will soon be here again.  (In TN, and TX and Florida, and every other red state that will be accepting the productive Illinoisans who are fleeing the greedy corrupt-a-crats in IL.)

To make matters worse, on April 2^nd Chicago held elections, and the results are not encouraging.

In the mayoral race, Toni Preckwinkle lost to Lori Lightfoot.  And I won’t lie – when it comes to hilarious leftist names, losing Preckwinkle is going to hurt.   (By the way, if you think that “Preckwinkle and Lightfoot” would make a hell of a 1970’s police show, you’re not wrong.) (Would Lightfoot happen to be a by-the-book cop who’s one year away from retirement, while Preckwinkle is a hot-tempered rookie who can’t follow the rules?  I think you know the answer to that.)

But not as much as Chicago is going to hurt, with what looks to be yet another 4 years under a mediocre leftist mayor.  (Although to be fair, both finalists were apparently far lefty knuckleheads, so the election result likely won’t make much difference.)

Lightfoot has never held office before.  But she is black, and female, and gay.  So… she’s got that going for her, I guess.

On the other hand, because she’s the walking embodiment of the Identify Politics trifecta, there is virtually no mistake that she can make for which she can be held accountable.  In fact, you are a terrible racist, sexist, homophobe for suggesting that it’s even possible that she CAN make a mistake.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

On the bright side, Preckwinkle and Lightfoot (cue the 70’s synth-heavy theme song, as they race out of a police building and slide across the hood of a 72 Gran Torino) (it’s Preckwinkle’s undercover ride.) defeated another Daley, the scion of the old corrupt Democrat machine.  I’m not sure how that was allowed to happen.

In any event, you’d think that a Daley losing would have to be a step in the right direction.  But you would be wrong.

Because the results were arguably even worse in the city council elections, in which – and I quote a headline: “Socialists Surge to Victories.”  That’s right, five or six fresh new faces are bringing their fresh new ideology to the City of the Slumped Shoulders.

Sorry, that should be “City of the Big Shoulders.”  Or maybe it shouldn’t.

How about, “Dog Butcher for the World?”  (Yes!  That’s a Carl Sandburg/Venezuela joke that four people in the world got, but it fills me with joy anyway.)

Anyway, buck up, Chicago.  Just because the last 114 attempts at socialism have produced nothing but gulags and grinding poverty and firing squads and terrible folk music and Bernie Sanders doesn’t mean that this time won’t be different.

 

On a less depressing note, I know that many of you have probably been sitting around asking yourselves, “What is the most vapid, millennial, first-world-problem complaint that has ever been made in the history of the world?”

I give you the Notorious AOC, in a deadly serious tweet that she posted last week:

“Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE 😱 Yet some people think getting a whole hour of personal, dedicated human labor for $15 is too expensive??”

What is wrong with that tweet?  I count at least 7 things:

1. It was written by a sitting US congressperson with a degree in economics who has never heard of supply and demand.
2. Using ALL CAPS does not make your argument more convincing.
3. If you do decide to use all caps, the capitalized letters better spell out something like, “WWIII BEGINS!” Because “PASTRIES ARE TOO EXPENSIVE!” doesn’t cut it.
4. She followed the all caps with an emoji of a shocked cartoon face. Serious people do not use emojis. There’s a reason that Patrick Henry wrote, “Give me liberty or give me death!” instead of “Poop emoji, Union Jack, Thumbs Down, Noose, Middle Finger, Frowny Face.”  And it’s not just because emojis weren’t invented yet.
5. Her choice to connect expensive airport bread to a complaint that the minimum wage is too low is what we sane people call a non sequitur. It makes no more sense than if I tweeted, “Lobster goes for MARKET PRICE, yet no one will paint a reasonably priced oil portrait of Cassie the Wonder Dog in an ermine cape holding an orb and scepter for the wall of my study!”
6. Everything at LaGuardia is expensive because it is run by a kleptocrat government monopoly. You know, like the way you want the entire country to be run, AOC. (Which reminds me: “When I win a Monopoly Beauty Contest I only win 50 DOLLARS!  Yet some people think I should have to pay 3 times that when I land on Park Place with a hotel on it!  Frowny Face emoji, #fightboardgameinequality!)
7. Hey Sweet Pea, what do you think will happen to the price of croissants if you force the Croissant Hut to pay their low-skill employees higher wages? Here’s a hint: “Croissants at LaGuardia are going for FIFTEEN DOLLARS A PIECE!  Yet some people think that paying someone $30 an hour is too expensive??

 

 

Ugh.  Leftists destroying Chicago, leftists destroying New York, San Francisco is hip-deep in human waste, crazy old white ladies who identify as Indians are running for president (#wemustneverstopmockingher) against trust-fund Irish beta males who identify as Hispanics (#let’smockhimtoo).

I know what you’re thinking: Are there no feel-good stories that Martacus can leave us with to start our Monday off on the right foot?

I’m glad you asked.  Because I was reading the South African papers with my morning coffee last week (as one does) when I came across this headline: “Suspected Rhino Poacher Killed by Elephant, Then Eaten by Lions.”

As a lover of animals – but not in a creepy, Joe Biden way, where I sneak up behind them and stroke their muzzles and sniff their manes – I always enjoy a good “Poacher gets his thorax gored as he zeroes in his rifle on a newborn gazelle” story.

And this one is pretty sweet.  Some low-life would-be rhino poacher sneaks into a national park with four miscreant buddies.  Annnnnndd… the buddies tell his family he was killed by an elephant.

So the family tells the cops, and they launch a search that finds, and I quote, “”Indications… suggest[ing] that a pride of lions had devoured the remains, leaving only a human skull and a pair of pants.”

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at that detail.  A skull and a pair of pants?!  I think the lions were taunting the authorities.  (“Take the cannoli,” one unexpectedly Italian lion said.  “Leave the skull and pants.”)

The only disappointing thing about the story is the name of the guy who runs the national park where the glorious story unfolded.  I was hoping for a sweet, African name like Umgabi Lopopo, but no: it’s Glenn Phillips.

But Mr. Phillips has a way with words.  He’s mastered the press release understatement: “Entering Kruger National Park illegally and on foot is not wise.”   You don’t say.

He went on to express condolences to the family, “It is very sad to see the daughters of the [deceased] mourning the loss of their father, and worse still, only being able to recover very little of his remains.”

“Worse still,” Glenn?!  You really think that the worst part was that they only recovered the skull and pants?  You think maybe they’d feel better if they’d retrieved more of his wardrobe and organs?!  “Oh thank God,” his wife would say, “at least we have his suspenders and two-thirds of his trachea.”

To which his daughters would reply, “Yes! And we’ll always treasure his prized pair of poaching spats, and his partially chewed uvula!”

(By the way, a young punk band looking for a new name could do a lot worse than “Partially Chewed Uvula.”)

The only thing I don’t understand is why the authorities are blaming an elephant for the killing.  I mean, it’s not like they recovered a torso with elephant-foot-shaped trample marks on it.  The guy is a skull and a pair of pants soaked in lion saliva!

Unless they have surveillance video of an elephant trunk-whipping the guy to death in a parking lot and then fist-bumping an approaching lion as he leaves the scene of the crime, I find the elephant-blaming very suspicious.

This sounds like a case for… Preckwinkle and Lightfoot!

 

 

I come before you all today with an idea that you may find surprising.  I had a chance to look at Beto O’Rourke’s policy menu on his website, and I was surprised to find several ideas that were not as lame as I’d expected.  I’m not going to say that I can picture a Dem ever being my first choice in an election, but I think that if he does get the nod, I wouldn’t necessarily rule out voting for him, especially if Trump drifts to the left on the budget.

HA! Of course I’ve started the column with an April Fool’s joke.

Actually, I had intended to extend the charade for several paragraphs to see if I could catfish anyone.  But even typing those few sentences made me throw up in my mouth, and April 1^st is no holiday for that kind of behavior. (That would be St. Patrick’s Day.)

So let me start the column again:

Those who know me, know that I don’t throw around the word “hero” lightly.  But Brad Aulf and Mary Rogers are real-life heroes, in the truest and noblest sense of the word.

Is that because they both generously hit my Tip Jar at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, you ask?

Yes.  Yes it is.

They may be heroes for other reasons too.  Because they are members of CO nation, we know that they are necessarily several standard deviations above the average person in terms of intelligence, discernment, and physical attractiveness, for example.  They probably have other fine qualities too, as I would know if I knew them personally.

But all I know about them is that they read the CO site, they have a keen eye for razor-sharp sarcasm, and they hit the tip jar hard.  So I salute you, Brad and Mary!  In fact, your generosity has motivated me to write a first-ever three-opening column.  So let’s get to opening #3:

April has begun, and you all know what that means: time to look back at March, and pummel a few lefties who almost escaped un-pummeled.

For example, how about that corrupt Chicago Smollett-enabler, Kim Foxx?

Regular readers of this site have already noticed the red flag about her: she demonstrates Simpson’s Law of Stupidly Spelled Names™ — i.e. those with irrationally spelled names usually have more than the usual character flaws (see also, “Jeh” Johnson and  Brett “Fav-ruh”).  Spelling the last name “Fox” with two “Xs” is only permissible if the so-named is either a stripper or has co-starred in a film with Stormy Daniels.  Possibly on a double bill with the Kamala Harris-Willie Brown story. (Tagline: “The electorate has never been polled like THIS before!”)

Sadly, the second X in her name arises only because she is “eXecrable” at her job.  First she announced in a press conference that prosecutors in Chicago regularly offered accused criminals the kind of deal that Jussie (have I mentioned Simpson’s Law of Stupidly Spelled Names™?) Smollett got.

Then she immediately texted her entire staff (in a message that someone immediately leaked), asking them to research any previous cases where someone as obviously guilty as Jussie was given a “get-out-of-MAGA-country-free” card.

Two of her staff members suffered PTSD from the request.  It turns out that both of them had previously worked for Liz Warren’s campaign, and they had received an infamous, nearly identical text from Grandma Squanto: “Hey guys, I’ve made a career out of claiming to be American Indian, and now people are starting to ask questions.  Can somebody hit Ancestry.com and see if you can dig up any Cherokee connections for me?  If it helps, my great-grandfather Howard Worthington Warren used to have a wooden cigar store Indian in his entry hall.  Also, I could use some crab-based recipes for a cookbook I’m working on.  I’m going to call it “Pow Wow Chow!”  What do you think?  There’s no way that will make me look like a total idiot, will it?” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

While not fruitlessly researching non-existent legal precedents, Kim Foxx’s staff also had to do damage control after another of her press conferences.  They finally came out with a statement printed in crayon on a piece of notebook paper made into a paper airplane and thrown out a third-floor window: “When Ms. Foxx said that she had recused herself from the Smollett case, she meant that colloquially.  ‘Colloquially’ is Latin for ‘opposite day’.”

“Also, when she said that she only sealed the records of the case accidentally?  Funny story.  She had the records all stacked and ready and slipped neatly into a big manila folder, so that she could hand them over to the press.  But then she accidentally knocked over a bottle of super glue that was precariously perched on the end of her desk, and it fell on the envelope, and before anyone knew what had happened, the records were sealed.”

“Also, Jussie thought the two Nigerian muggers were white redneck Trump supporters because they were in white face, and a thick Nigerian accent sounds surprisingly like a conversation between extras on Dukes of Hazzard.”

Chicago mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle (whom I am not making up) had no comment on the Kim Foxx situation.

Then why did I bring her up?  Because I could not resist her last name, which is one vowel change away from hilarity!  Please, somebody introduce her to Anthony Weiner, because any children they have who could survive middle school would embody a huge Darwinian step forward in toughness!

 

Speaking of sexual impropriety, the story of Robert Kraft’s getting caught up in the post-Super Bowl massage parlor scandal has left me with mixed emotions.

As a Christian, and one prone to all the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to (thank you, dead white male Shakespeare!), I sympathize with him.  As a football fan who is more than a little sick of Patriot Super Bowl victories, I’m a little less sympathetic.

My favorite moment in the scandal was reading the oddly formal legal account of his arrest, which included the description that at one point the masseuse (and if her last name has less than two Xs in it I am going to be sorely disappointed!) – and I quote – “manipulated his genitals.”

I love the English language!  Reading that, I can’t help picture the masseuse – recognizing that Kraft’s genitals don’t feel very good about themselves – cleverly taking advantage.  Before they knew what had happened, Kraft’s genitals had bought a time share, changed their long-distance carrier to Sprint, and joined the Church of Scientology.

Oh, the manipulation!

Ouch.  I hope that after that little digression, Brad Aulf and Mary Rogers are not reconsidering their generous donations!

 

Moving on.

How about that Babs Streisand?   In a March interview she opined on Michael Jackson’s child molestation victims: “You can say ‘molested,’ but those children, as you heard… they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.”  She also shared some of her keen insights about MJ’s pedophilia: “His sexual needs were his sexual needs.”

When all morally sane people condemned her general horribleness, she showed herself to be the master of leftist PR pseudo-contrition.  She rushed to “clarify” her comments – which, inconveniently for her, were already crystal clear – saying that “the words as printed do not reflect my true feelings.”

“As printed?!”  Your words “as printed?”

Do you mean your words, exactly as they came out of your big, stupid mouth, and then were accurately transcribed?  Don’t blame Gutenberg, you terrible crone!

After reading that interview, I found myself fantasizing that one of those grown victims will some day cross paths with Barbra. (By the way, do you notice the missing “a” in her name?  More vindication for Simpson’s Law of Stupidly Spelled Names™!)  And that he will land a crisp right jab right on that gigantic proboscis of hers.

And do you know what I’d say if asked my opinion of his actions?  “His pugilistic needs were his pugilistic needs.  It didn’t kill her, did it?”

Always remember that leftist celebrities are our moral betters, and we should be grateful when they lecture us on right and wrong.

 

Finally, I’d like to end this column on a lighter note.  Like, for instance, how much I love Spain.

That statement may surprise those who know me.  Until last week, my only encounter with anything Spanish was a painful stint in high school Spanish class, during which I learned a grand total of two sentences in Spanish: “Silencio, por favor, Martino.” And “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”

I tried out the second of those sentences on a cute female classmate of mine, when my alleged best friend told me that that was how to ask, “Would you help me study Spanish?”

Her response was not what I hoped for:  “Not if you were the last guy on earth!  And you’re not as funny as you think you are.  And that was French, not Spanish, you moron.”

So I’ve never been a huge Spain fan.  But that changed last month, after Mexican socialist president Obrador called on the Spanish king to apologize for Spain’s 500-year-old conquest of Mexico.

By the way, how can you tell that the Mexican president is a socialist?  First, have you seen the vibrant Mexican economy, humming with socialist productivity and efficiency?  Second, instead of minding his own business, El Presidente spends his time pouting and demanding apologies for things that happened when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in high school.

But the king of Spain is apparently not Barack Obama, Joe Biden or Beta O’Rourke.  Because instead of apologizing and groveling, his government responded forcefully.  First, they “firmly reject[ed] the request,” explaining that, “The arrival of Spaniards 500 years ago to present-day Mexican territory cannot be judged in light of contemporary considerations.”

Then they dropped the other pinata, saying that Spain is “obviously” not going to offer such an “extemporaneous apology…. Just like we are not going to ask the French Republic to apologize for what Napoleon’s soldiers did when they invaded Spain.  Or like the French are not going to ask the Italians to beg forgiveness for Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.”

The only way to improve that answer would be to point out that before the Spaniards arrived, Obrador’s ancestors were a bunch of bloodthirsty Aztecs, sitting around pyramids of human skulls and ripping the hearts out of their local passersby in an effort to ensure a good corn crop this year.  So how about Spain apologizes to the Mexican government right after the Mexican government apologizes to the descendants of the neighboring tribes that they colonized?

Oops, that’s right – you killed all of them!

Silencio, por favor, Obrador!

So I’m sitting in my book-lined study, listening to Bach’s Cello Suite 1 in G, with T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” open in front of me.

Because I’m classy like that.

Eliot’s familiar last lines go, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

In this most schadenfreude-tastic of weeks, I want to borrow Eliot’s theme, and focus this column on Things That Have Ended with both a Bang and a Whimper:

First, let’s get the easy joke out of the way — Kamala’s “job interviews” with corrupt and crusty old Willie Brown.   Bang. Whimper.  Here’s your no-show job, Kamala.

Second… of course… it’s Mueller time!

I know that CO and COers have already done an admirable job with this the story, but I can’t resist a few comments of my own.   And to properly set the mood for that, I must ask you to go to Youtube and call up the video of Ray Charles and the Voices of Jubilation singers doing, “Oh Happy Day.”  Please use that as your soundtrack as you read the rest of this column.

(Also, as a bonus: if I were somehow turned into an African-American woman in a red dashiki, my expressions while I was channel surfing the MSM Monday would look exactly like the lady at 2:13 in that video.) (And if that sounds too far-fetched to get your mind around, consider that I am a lot closer to being that woman than Liz Warren is to being an American Indian.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

First, does it make me a bad person if I’m enjoying watching the disappointed lefty true believers cycling between shocked despair and full-blown denial in the wake of Mueller-geddon?

If so, I’m a very, very bad person.  I surfed from one channel to another, savoring the stammering, yammering boneheads.  John Brennan is backpedaling like a scared cornerback lined up across from Willie Gault in 1985.  (Yes, that’s a 34-year old Bears reference.  What’s your point?)

Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo – from the “Help! I’m trapped in an airport with no other viewing options!” network – wobbled around like they’d been pole-axed.  Lemon started a rambling sentence about Russian collusion that somehow ended with “…the easy fix, is to just release his tax returns.”

Um, what now?  Does Lemon “think” (scare quotes intended) that Trump had a write-off labeled “collusion expenses?”

I saw the headline that Maxine Waters was having a meltdown over it, and of course my first thought was, “Don’t over-react — her face always looks like that.”  But when I watched a little video, and saw that the melting has indeed spread from her face to her brain.  In a rambling response, she said, “This isn’t the end of anything.” (pause) “Well, it is the end of the Mueller report…”

Yep!

One of my favorite moments was seeing CNN president Jeff Zucker defending his network’s getting everything wrong for two years.  (If you’re not sure which one Zucker is, he looks like a dishonest, giant human thumb, with glasses on it.)  In an email to the NYT, he pronounced himself “very comfortable” with CNN’s coverage of the non-existent collusion conspiracy.  (Which tells you that he is a very much opposable thumb.) (HA!)

His best line: “We are not investigators.  We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.”

Hey Thumbkin, if you don’t do any investigating, how do you learn the facts that it is your job to report?  Do you just stand on a street corner in Atlanta until some bum who’s out of methadone stumbles up to you and whispers out of the side of his mouth that he saw Trump groping Natasha Badanov while her husband Boris conveyed marching orders from Putin?

(And before you can object, I know that “bum” is politically incorrect language.  But I can’t keep up with the terminology.  Is “vagrant” acceptable?  How about “hobo?”  “Member of the Poop Map Contributor Community?” “The Democrat Base?”  Someone please help me with this.)

Anyway, Tom Thumb says that it’s not his reporters’ job to investigate anything.  They just report whatever facts come through from the fillings in their teeth, I guess.

One last hilarious detail: since the Mueller report came out, CNN’s ratings have cratered, and I’m sure that Zuck-ster and his team are sitting around a big table, trying to understand.  I mean, they’re not investigating, or anything.  But they’re looking at each other with vacant, Cuomo-esque stares, wondering what this all means.

I’ll tell you what it means: One, two, three, four, we deplorables declare a thumb war!

Third in our “bang and whimper” list is the latest in the Jussie “don’t call me Jessie” Smollett case.  The inexplicable decision to depart from all usual procedure and dismiss the rock-solid hate crime hoax charges against the Trump-hating obscure actor appears to be a whimpering end to the case.   But the black police chief and the law enforcement rank and file are furious, and even Rahm “dead-shark-eyes”  Emanuel has felt compelled to blast the dismissal.  With any luck, another shoe will be dropping with a bang shortly.

Fourth, the execrable Southern Poverty Law Center has been imploding over the last several weeks, and it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of political arsonists.   Creepy founder Morris Dees was fired on March 14^th with a vague statement to the effect that he had “failed to meet standards.”   Ten days later, president Richard Cohen resigned, and rumors about endemic racism and sexism in the SPLC headquarters for decades are running rampant.

In other words, so far two big bangs, and a chorus of whimpers at SPLC.  By the way, that misnamed group has always reminded me of the old saying about the Holy Roman Empire – it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  The Southern Poverty Law Center mostly aimed to raise funds from guilty Northern liberals, accumulated great wealth, and was totally lawless.  Good riddance!

Fifth, no bang-and-whimper list would be complete without the immolation of the Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.  (Insert your own Stormy Daniels joke here.) (Um, maybe “insert” was not the right word.)  A year ago this guy was flying high, appearing on CNN hourly (and thus being seen by literally dozens of people every day), and being taken seriously by some Dems as a potential presidential contender.

And now, he’s been fired by Stormy, kicked out of his law offices, and charged with multiple counts of extortion.  Which means that he would now be no better than the fourth-most-impressive Dem presidential candidate.  Oh, how the degraded have fallen… one or two steps lower than he already was.

Sixth, March 26^th was the best day in the US Senate in decades.  Cocaine Mitch McConnell finally forced a vote on the Green New Deal (also known informally as the “Titanic-Hindenberg-Edsel-New Coke-Dumpster-Fire-Act of 2019”).

The result?  0 yeas, 57 nays and 43 voted “present.”

So close!

“But Martin,” I can hear you saying, “Hasn’t every Democrat senator running for president praised the Green New Deal, ranting that if we don’t pass it, we’re all going to, like, die in only, like, 12 years or something?”

Yes.  Yes they have.  And yet every last one of them — Hillary 1 and 2 (Klobuchar and Gillibrand), Squanto Warren, Bernie, Kamala, Spartacus – voted “present.”

Along with, of course, every other spineless leftist in the Senate, including Schumer, Dick “nobody ever calls him Richard” Durbin, Richard “everybody secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal and the other assorted Merkleys and Markeys.

Not since a herd of squishy RINOs got elected promising to end Obamacare and build a wall has a political party so betrayed their voters.  Let the lefty whimpering begin!

 

Finally, I’m happy to end with a story that is all bang and no whimper: the Israeli response to Hamas terrorists firing rockets into Israel.  When the fine folks from the Religion of Peace™ managed to reach Tel Aviv with a super-peaceful rocket (result: shrapnel wounds to 7 civilians, including a woman in her sixties, a 12-year-old girl, and two infants.), Israel responded with some vigorous diplomacy.

HA! I kid.  They conducted 80 air strikes against dozens of terror installations in Gaza, leveling most of them.  My favorite line from the reporting involved the administrative headquarters of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which before the strikes was a three-story building. (Now it is less than one story.)  The line referred to the building as Hamas’ “secret headquarters.”

Secret’s out, Ismail!

What’s the over/under on how long it takes Ilhan Omar to criticize Israel for attacking an innocent terrorist headquarters building?

What a week!   Mueller nukes the conspiracy fever dreams of the left, Avenatti heads for the Big House instead of the White House, and Morris Dees gets the poop-map-contributor’s rush.  (Get it?) And then the Dem senators get a chance to vote for the vital, “stop the end of the world now” act that they sponsored, and the whole rotten lot of them vote Present!

Look at the end of the “Oh Happy Day” video again, because I’ve stopped identifying with the lady in the red dashiki.  (Don’t mis-gender me!) Watch when the big bald guy escorts Ray Charles away from the organ toward the end of the song, while Ray rocks that mile-wide smile, pats both side of his face, hugs himself, and does that weird little squatting, knee-slapping dance.

Call me Ray “Martacus” Charles, because that was me this week, dancing around my living room watching the MSM imploding, while Cassie the Wonder Dog pranced around me, barking with joy.

I have been spending some free time pondering the possible Democratic presidential tickets.

I know what you’re thinking: is he still on those narcotics?  (If you missed the story, I recently had a pain-med adventure that involved a dentist who literally went at me with hammer and tongs.) (But at least it wasn’t a hammer and sickle, which is what we’ll get if Bernie gets control over our health care system.) (HA!)

I am thinking about the various combinations of Dem Prez/VP combos because I find them all fascinating.   And by “fascinating,” I mean simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

I trust that the sophisticated CO nation understands the horrifying part.  If any of this crop of ne’er-do-wells wins next year, tuning in to that inauguration is going to be like watching a baby carriage rolling in slow motion directly into the path of a speeding 18-wheeler on the interstate.

(For those of you who may not have majored in Interpretive Dream Symbolism, in this analogy the baby carriage would be my beloved United States, the baby would be an actual, adorable human baby – although she’d be clutching all of my hopes and dreams in one of her pudgy little fists, and my 401K in the other – and the speeding semi would be the doomsday administration of whichever leftist loon the Dems and MSM — but I repeat myself — managed to drag across the finish line.)

But as horrible as the general election would be if the Dems were to win, their primary debates are going to put the “high” in “high-larious.”  I can’t wait!

The black ones will be sneering at the white ones, and the women will be scowling at the men, and Beta will come rolling in on a skateboard like a doofus.  Bernie will lose a hearing aid, and Biden will grope a moderator. Either Amy Klobuchar or Kirsten Gillibrand will call Liz Warren “Sitting Bull” under her breath, and because Lizzie can’t tell the two of them apart, she’ll start calling them “Hillary 1” and “Hillary 2.”

Which will be fighting words, so with any luck, a three-way white-lady wrestling match will break out.  Cory Booker will command them to stop, but as he stands astride them with his hands on his hips, yelling, “I am Spart-“ he’ll be interrupted by one cankle shooting out of the scrum and catching him in the crotch, after which he’ll hobble off stage like Spartacus’ cowardly manservant, a character so nondescript that his name is unknown to history.

Harris will sidle up to Bernie and offer to sleep with him if he’ll put her on his ticket as VP – a political stratagem that is known in California political circles as “pulling a Kamala” – but he’ll be shaking his hearing aid in frustration, and won’t hear a word she says.

Biden will trip over Beto’s skateboard and fall into Bernie, and both of them will immediately break a hip.  Beto will take advantage by stepping through the mass of writhing idiots to the microphone, where he’ll begin gesticulating wildly as he recites a word salad made up of equal parts of randomly selected paragraphs from Jack Kerouac, a madlib of socialist talking points, and AOC’s dream journal (but I repeat myself).

It’s going to be like 4 months of Christmas, mixed with Wrestlemania 25 (“This Time It’s Personal – and the Personal is Political!”) and April Fool’s Day!

Once the primaries are over, and the Democrats have chosen a “winner” (and never have scare quotes been any scarier), the VP derby will begin.

Traditional political analysts, when mulling presidential tickets, consider ideology (a hard-liner and a centrist might be the most electable combination), age (a combination of older/experienced works well with younger/energetic), or geography (a VP from a key battleground state might tip the balance if he could bring along his home state).

But not me.   Because at times I’ve been called @hilariousgenius, and at other times Martacus, and at still other times, Martino.  (Okay, that was only in high school Spanish class, where I may have been called a lot of other names too.  But I wouldn’t have known that.) (Because I don’t speak a word of Spanish.)

But I have NEVER been called a traditional political analyst.

Which is why I have my own, idiosyncratic ways of choosing a dream ticket.

For example, I am tempted to pull for the Whitest Ticket In History combo: Warren/Gillibrand.

Or the best alliteration ticket:  Biden/Beto.

Or the least ethnic putatively African-American ticket: Kamala/Spartacus.

Or the double-barreled ethnic fraud ticket: Beto/Warren. (an Irish Hispanic and a translucent Iroquois) (#wemustneverstopmockingbothofthem)

Or the “never-worked-an-honest-day-in-their-lives” ticket: Sanders/Beto.  (But also, really, most of them.)

 

But perhaps my favorite dark horse ticket would come down to the coolest-sounding pairing: Hickenlooper/Buttigieg.

“Hickenlooper” is so goofy-sounding that I admire the guy just for having any career at all.  Because a name has traditionally made a huge difference in how someone is perceived.

You expect a woman named “Sophia Loren” or “Brigitte Bardot” to be smoking hot.  You expect a guy named “Michael Stonebreaker” to play linebacker at Notre Dame.  You expect someone named “Albert Einstein” to be the intellectual opposite of AOC.   (Also, in a coincidence that I’m almost too modest to point out, you expect a guy named “Martin Simpson” to be a smoking hot, linebacker/genius.) (Take that, tropical-disease-name-sounding Idris Alba!)

It usually works in the opposite direction, too.

Nobody was going to watch a tough-guy western starring Marion Morrison, so he became John Wayne.  Women weren’t likely to swoon over Archibald Leach, so he became Cary Grant.   No one was going to vote for Willard Romney, so he became Mitt.   (As it turns out, not enough people voted for him anyway, but that’s probably because “Mitt” is not such a great name.  Also, he’d had his spine surgically replaced with a slinky, which did NOT help.)

And before you can raise the Arnold Schwarzenegger objection: he’s the exception that proves the rule.

(Fun Historical Naming Fact Digression: Hitler’s dad was the illegitimate son of a woman named “Shicklgruber,” and he and Adolph came very close to being stuck with that name.  Which would have changed history, because no gang of rowdy Germans in a beer hall could ever have plausibly been induced to shout out the salute, “Heil Schiklgruber!”)

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Hickenlooper’s little buddy, Buttigieg.

Wow.  I don’t know anything about the guy, except three things: He grew up gay.  In the Midwest.  And his last name started with “butt.”

Therefore, he’s got to be tough as nails, and I want to like the guy. Not since the great Johnny Cash told the story of the Boy Named Sue has there been a name as guaranteed to get a youngster toughened up.

So as I was writing the above, I thought that I’d research Buttigieg a little, because maybe he’d be a Dem who might not be awful as president…

Aaaannnnnndddd nope!

First of all, I was devastated to learn that his last name is disappointingly pronounced something like, “Boot-edge-edge.” (Though I’d probably say that too, if my name had an obvious “butt” in it.)  At least his first name isn’t “Jeh.”   (Because if you spell someone’s name to look like “Jeh Butt-a-gig” but insist that it’s pronounced “Jay Boot-edge-edge,” I don’t care if he’s the newly discovered son of Ronald Reagan – I’m out!)

Secondly, he’s another cookie-cutter leftist, supporting the usual disaster-producing policies: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, forced increases to the minimum wage, etc.

So we’re back to square one: all of the Dem candidates are as crazy as outhouse rodentia, as we used to say in my small Midwestern town, when parents were in earshot.

But the primaries are going to be all the more entertaining because of it.

Hickenlooper/Buttigieg 2020!

 

So March is off to an iffy start.  I just had a little visit with an oral surgeon who removed a cracked tooth.  If I weren’t a stoic, Spartan type of guy – as some of you may know, my close friends often call me Martacus – I would guess that he used a mining drill, and possibly a few shaped charges.  There was definitely smoke involved.

I’m going to end up getting an implant several months from now, and to that end, the dentist put in a cadaver bone graft.  And yes, before you can ask, I checked with him beforehand to confirm that the cadaver involved was not from Egypt.  Because I don’t want to suddenly find myself slurring my words, and wildly gesticulating with dessicated mummy hands, going all Nancy Pelosi.

At one point, the assistant warned me that the doc was going to be “manually raising the sinus floor” (which has to be one of the greatest euphemisms ever), and to that end, I would hear some – and I quote – “tapping.”

This was followed by some concussive hammering on my upper jaw with what I can only assume was a 24-ounce waffle-faced framing hammer.  (I’ve done a lot of home renovations over the last 20 years, and I stand by that guess.)

I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank a benevolent God for inventing anesthetic.  Because although I was bouncing around in the chair like Ted Kennedy’s date on the ride home, I didn’t feel a thing.  Not until 3 hours later.

Anyway, long story short, I’m taking an assortment of antibiotics and some sweet pain meds.  And I’ve always found that the best time to write about the actions of various leftist boneheads on the national scene is when I’m hopped up on goofballs.  So here goes…

I’m sure you all really enjoyed the Oscars, and neither did I.  Instead of watching the cavalcade of America-hating prima donnas, I checked out the Daily Wire podcast about it, on which Ben Shapiro summed it up best: gay black guy story beat out several regular black guy movies and several other regular gay person movies.   And evil Cheney movie was nominated, but couldn’t win due to a shortage of disabled transgendered people of color in the cast.

My favorite part was that after the leftist witch-hunters drove off anyone willing to host, the anemic ratings actually went up about 9%.  I just like the message that that sends to Jimmy “waah” Kimmel: after two years of you doing the hosting job, you were replaced by nobody.  And nobody did a better job.

Terrible bartender and juvenile thinker AOC continues to amuse.  She’s lost her patience with people always picking at tiny little details that she gets wrong – such as $93 trillion deficits, and the fact that you can’t build a railroad to Hawaii, and the fact that you can’t replace cars with a national system of thousands of miles of slip-and-slides, and that there’s not supposed to be any Murphy’s Oil Soap in a scotch and soda.

She finally snapped in an interview.  Responding to skepticism about her Green New Deal, she threw down the gauntlet, demanding to know why no one else has come up with a plan to fix the world’s climate.  Because I wasn’t there, no one said, “Because real scientists are debating nearly every aspect of the myriad factors that influence global temperatures, and what steps humans might be able to take to affect even a few of those factors.  Also, a planet’s ecosystem is a little more complicated than a Long Island Iced Tea.  Which, by the way, is not supposed to have lye and pepper in it, so please take this back.”

She worked herself up into a perfect, pre-teen snit, sneering that “no one else has even tried” to deal with the climate, and ending in a finger waving, “like”-infested rant:  “So people are like, oh, it’s unrealistic.  Oh, it’s vague. Oh, it doesn’t address this little minute thing.  And I’m like, YOU try!  You do it!  Cause you’re not.  You’re not.  So until you do it, I’m the boss!  How bout dat?”

You’ve got to see it and hear it to get the full inanity of it all.  She’s like that “Cass me ousside, how bout dat?” girl from some daytime talk show.  Only she has the ability to propose legislation, and deter multi-billion dollar companies from opening a branch in a blue state.  (HA!  Take that, Cuomo and Schumer!  The illiterate and innumerate chickens are coming home to ROOST! (How bout dat?)

And the other fresh faces in the new Democratic congress aren’t faring much better.  In particular, two new Muslim congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have stumbled from one anti-Semitic and anti-American gaffe after another, including mocking Mike Pence’s Christian faith, and altering a map to show the state of Israel replaced by Palestine.

If you throw in scandal-prone abuser Keith Ellison, the Democrats have gone 0-for-Islam so far.

 

But even considering all of this leftist smorgasbord of stupid, my two favorite lefty stories from last month came from lesser known Democrats.

First, Lamar, South Carolina mayor Darnell Byrd-McPherson, an African-American female (despite being named “Darnell”) has been on the lookout for MAGA-hat wearing deplorables committing hate crimes.  On February 7^th, this knucklehead announced in a press release that the racists had struck:

“The incident happened last night. Even though I drove my car today, I thought it was pollen. My husband and our neighbor noticed the cars looked like someone had spray painted on both our vehicles, which were parked in our front yard.

As an aside, during the 70s, crosses were burned in the yard of our home when my mother was involved with the civil rights movement. On this very same corner in this very same front yard!

Again, we are grateful the person or persons did not try to take our lives but the culprits will be identified and prosecuted.

Love conquers hate and my husband and I refuse to be intimidated by those who perpetrated this act of vandalism which I classify as an act of hatred. ”

Byrd-McPherson referenced how bills are being introduced to address hate crimes in the South Carolina General Assembly. She added hate crimes are on the rise in the state.

The incident remains under investigation.”

The give-away is in the first line: something that appeared to be pollen was found on her car.  Naturally, she immediately thought about Klansmen (whom I must point out were Democrats) burning crosses on her yard.  As one does. From there it’s only a hop, skip and a smear to people trying to kill her, and her not being intimidated, and by the way she’s introducing more hate crime legislation.

As it turned out – you guessed it – there was pollen on her car.  In South Carolina.  During pollination season.

But don’t give up, Darnell.  How do you know that your property is NOT surrounded by racist trees and shrubs?  Trying to kill you, or hold you down, or mess up your cars?  Not to mention making you sneeze and wheeze?

In fact, only a few minutes of research revealed to me that in your region, you are surrounded by such suspicious trees as WHITE pines, WHITE firs, and WHITEbark pines.  Not to mention the Torch Pine!  I don’t think I need to remind you who was fond of carrying torches: Democrat klansmen!

And don’t get me started on lynchberry bushes or Jim Crow kudzu!

So look alive, mayor.  I’m already hearing rumors that many white supremacist trees are colluding in a conspiracy – reports indicate that this will happen in October — to drop millions of leaves on the heads of unsuspecting minorities, possibly injuring them, and definitely clogging their gutters.

 

Not to be outdone by idiot leftist politicians, idiot leftist vandals also had their moment to shine in February.   This story happened in North Carolina, where some unknown miscreants continued the recent trend of vandalizing statues of Civil War figures by trying to light a statue of Robert E. Lee on fire.

They encountered two problems.  First, the statue is made of marble, which is not famous for being flammable.  Fun fact: of all of the buildings that burned to the ground in the great Chicago Fire, roughly zero of them were made of marble.  Which is why you may not have been taught in school about how Mrs. Leary’s cow was slipping and sliding around in her marble barn when the fire started.

Second, it turns out that the carved marble figure was not in fact Civil War general Robert E. Lee, but World War II Major General William C. Lee, who was known as the “Father of the US Airborne.”

To be fair to the vandals, both Lees are white males who identified as males, and to many idiots, we all look alike.

On the other hand, Robert E. Lee had a cool beard, and wore a Civil War era uniform, and is virtually always depicted on a horse.  Whereas William C. Lee is clean shaven, wearing a WWII uniform (with a 20^th century military hat, uniform and boots) and is not sitting on a horse.

Note for those who may have learned their history from blue-state, unionized public school teachers: the Civil War did NOT happen in the 20^th century.  Also, one of the main reasons for the Confederate defeat was NOT how ineffective their air force was.  Finally, surprisingly few WW II airborne assaults were conducted by soldiers parachuting out of the back of airplanes on horseback.

Although it does make me smile to picture a squad of German soldiers in Normandy on June 6^th, looking up in terror at a sky filled with airborne troops carrying six shooters, on the backs of descending horses with murder in their equine eyes.

“Mein Gott!” I pictured those Germans screaming, “a million American bad asses are descending on the back of a million Hillary Clintons.  Beware the hooves and cankles!  We surrender!”

Okay, I think that last paragraph can only mean one thing: it’s time for me to take more narcotics.

Martacus out!

Several events have started me thinking more about fathers lately.  For one, my mom was down for a visit last week. She’s 80 now, and dad has been gone for 4 years, which makes the time we get to spend with her even more precious.  We never get together without thinking about him a lot, and the great legacy he left for us.

On the other end of the spectrum, my youngest daughter turns 17 next week, and that shocking indication of the passing of time has a way of sobering one up.  It’s a cliché for a reason: it seems like just a year ago she was a defenseless infant, and just a week ago she was a prickly pre-teen.  And now when I have a tech question about my website or cell phone or wifi, I go to her, and she condescends to help me.  Plus, I get to try out some jokes for my column on her, which means I get to see some world-class eye rolling. (On the downside, she has been as reluctant as my wife to address me as either “@hilariousgenius” or “Martacus.” Which is disappointing.)

Regular CO readers have heard of some of my great parenting techniques, but for new arrivals, here are a few tips.

First, to be an adequate father, you don’t have to do that much: marry the woman you are going to have kids with, then stick around, earn a little, love them, don’t vote for leftists.  (That last one is not just for dads – it’s a requirement for all functional adults.)  If you’ve got daughters, keep them off the pole.  If you’ve got sons, don’t let them play soccer.  It’s not that hard.

To be a world-class dad, I would suggest devising a few additional monkey tricks for the kids that you teach them when they are very tiny, and then have them perform those for visitors.  That gives them self-esteem.

For example, in addition to my call-and-response routine with my first daughter when she was still in diapers (I’d say, apropos of any terrible story on the news when we were together, “Who do we blame that on?” and she’d respond with an adorable, “The Democrats!”), I also came up with a couple of other crowd-pleasers.

When I asked her, “Which is your favorite of Aristotle’s logical fallacies?” I taught her to say, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.”  (This usually came out “procto hoc,” which is close enough.)  I’d follow up with, “What does that mean in English?” To which she would reply, “After this, therefore because of this.”

My closer would be to ask her, “When you are on the court, what kind of Supreme Court Justice will you be?”  She would answer with, “A strict constructionist!”

Her pronunciation wasn’t always perfect when she was two, but the answer still always killed.  The only exception was when she spoiled the moment after her answer by pointing to her diaper and saying, “I made poop.”

But I saved the day by pointing out that that was in fact her eerily accurate Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression.   Then I said, “Now do your Hillary Clinton!”  And she’d screw her adorable little face up into a frown and screech, “CAW, CAW, CAW!” at the top of her lungs.

Good times.

But enough about my terrific parenting skills.  I’d like to point to another dad who is doing it right: Donald Harris, father of Kamala Harris.

Hear me out.

I know that your first instinct is that he probably failed as a father.  He split up with her mom years ago, and although Kamala did manage to stay off the pole, she did something arguably much worse, sleeping with creepy old (married) Willie Brown to launch her career.

And anyone whose child ends up in this dementia of Democratic candidates (hat tip to, I think, John Gabris?  And all the other COers who chimed in with collective nouns for the Dem hopefuls) has been a less than super successful parent.

On the other hand, in response to one of her recent idiotic interviews (you need a scorecard to keep track with this bunch), he displayed the nuclear option of fatherhood: public shaming.

Some idiotic radio interviewer asked Kamala if she has smoked pot, she responded, “Half my family’s from Jamaica.  Are you kidding me?”

This answer was part of a painfully awkward pattern of leftists trying to appeal to millennials by pretending to be young and hip.   Hillary pretended that she carries hot sauce everywhere she goes, and she once said, “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids,” with a straight face. Squanto Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) pretended that she likes to crack open a cold one in her kitchen like a real-life Peter Griffin. RBG pretends that she’s a feminist spokesperson, and that she has a pulse.

In the same vein, Kamala came out with an execrable “mood mix” selection of music, and claimed that back in college, she used to get high listening to Snoop and Tupac songs.  (Fact check: those two haven’t ever actually produced anything that could technically be called “songs.” Also, neither of them produced an album until 6 years after Kamala graduated from college.) (So liar, liar, big floppy rasta hat on fire.”)

Anyway, Kamala’s dad was not happy with his daughter’s crass reference to the heavy-toking Jamaican stereotype.   He wrote a public letter saying, “My dear departed grandmothers…, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected…with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in pursuit of identity politics.”

Ouch!  Daddy no like!

I love this for two reasons: he called her out on the kind of pernicious racial stereotyping the leftists deploy against conservatives but never pay a price for themselves.  And he also slammed her for playing identity politics, which I think is one of the most destructive trends in our public life right now.

So I salute you, Mr. Harris.  But I have to confess that I’m not as upset as you are that Kamala is a pot-smoking joy seeker.

I just wish she wasn’t a pot-smoking office seeker!

Martacus out.

(See.  I can be as faux hip as any Dem candidate.) (If I had a mike, I’d drop it.)