While I Spend Time in TN, LA Goes Crazy and Israel Goes Roman on Iran (posted 6/14/25)

So I drove up to Tennessee on Tuesday to spend a week with my mom while the sis and her husband take a vacation, and it’s been a little rough.  Mom’s still putting up a game fight, but her Alzheimer’s is breaking our hearts as it continues on its cruel path. 

The ratio of lucid moments to foggy ones is diminishing, but she’s at her best in the daytime, and we’ve had some laughs and some good food.  I’m storing up more good memories, and trying to appreciate every moment with her before I head back to Florida on Monday.

The nature of this kind of visit has imparted a little fogginess to my own thoughts, and put me into the kind of weird, suspended animation that I always feel while traveling.  The world is still going on around me, but I’m disconnected from it in a way I’m not when I’m at home and in my own element.  I catch a few snippets of news during the day, and then a bit more before bed, with insufficient time to digest most of it.

Of course, I managed to be here during a slow news week, right?

Holy cats!  Before leaving home I barely had a chance to consider Greta’s Grifter Flotilla being stopped by the Israelis before they could deliver to the starving Gazans their desperately needed bounty of… four cheese sandwiches and a bag of chocolate chip cookies that someone had already half finished.

I sensed fodder for a solid column out of the Doom Pixie’s prevails, but that story was quickly pushed to the back-burner by the developing story of the LA riot, during which the leftists have beclowned themselves six ways to Sunday. 

And that was just by last Sunday.  Since then, they’ve beclowned themselves twenty-two ways to Thursday, with much more beclownation to come. 

Melting-face Maxine Waters – a fright wig atop a fright face – got a door slammed in her face by a no-nonsense employee when she tried to awe him with her congressional privilege.  Later she confronted some armed National Guardsmen and challenged them to gun her down, warning them that, “If you’re gonna shoot me, you’d better shoot straight.”  (“Whew!” said Mayor Pete.  “I’m safe.”)  

Tragically for the nation, no one took Waters up on her offer.  So she was still un-shot when she later gave a press conference in which she categorically denied that there had been any violence during the violent riots.

Unlike most of the lying leftists, who were smart enough to downplay or excuse the violence of their mobs (“It wasn’t a problem until Trump called out the guard, 99% of LA is totally peaceful,” etc.), Mad Maxine swung for the fences, denying what PWFE (People With Functioning Eyes) had actually seen. “Don’t think that somehow, because they called out the National Guard, there was violence.  There was no violence! I was on the street!  I know!” 

Some were tempted to believe her, because she did look like she had been on the street.  More specifically, like she’d been tossed onto the street and landed face-first.  And then bounced several times, still face-first.

But even those who tried to be cagier, and just downplay the violence, were humiliated by a combination of inept staffers and a loving God with a great sense of humor.  Two Dem congresswomen – the one whose name I remember is Judy Chu – appeared on a CNN interview, with their heads in a small box on the screen, while most of the screen was showing live coverage from LA.  

So as Judy prattled on about how the protestors were really remarkably restrained and peaceful, right beside her stupid head was a giant video of clouds of black smoke roiling up from burning cars, and clips of rioters throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at cop cars.  Many commenters observed the parallels to the infamous video from a blue city in 2020, in which a “journalist” insisted that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” as he was framed against the hellish conflagration of an entire city block behind him.  

Two of the most iconic images of the latest unveiling of the left’s true nature have been the moron on a motorcycle riding around a burning car while waving a Mexican flag, and the Waymo cars being devoured in roaring fires.

The fact that they were Waymo cars brings extra layers of irony to the rioters’ behavior.  If they had attacked vehicles that are logically associated with what they are ostensibly outraged by – an ICE van, cop cars – that would still be evil, but at least comprehensible as the kind of political gesture that narcissistic social justice warriors would make. 

But Waymo has never done anything to these troglodytes, other than offer an innovative way to get across town that is much cheaper than the car they can’t afford.  (Because living in mommy’s basement and whining on Bluesky has no monetary value whatsoever.) 

And the technological sophistication it took to develop and deploy driverless vehicles poignantly contrasts with the mindless urge to destroy that motivates the thugs who can barely make a Molotov cocktail work.  (And that involves fire, one of mankind’s first discoveries!)

That technology also highlights the petty cruelty of the rioters.  They call a vehicle made by a company that has done nothing wrong, and it faithfully shows up, and welcomes them with open doors.  And the mouth-breathing scavengers set it on fire, and dance around its flaming corpse.  

But then the horrific story of the first-ever Boeing Dreamliner crash in India…battled for news time with a handful of super-satisfying arrests of some of the worst of the bad bunch of leftist nihilists who are being quickly caught during riots. 

But that was bumped by Senator (guess which party?) Alex Padilla’s painful theater-kid turn when he interrupted Kristi Noem’s press conference by trying to bum-rush her while hollering dishonest non-sequiturs with all the persuasive power of a bag lady disrupting a city council meeting with a shrill screed about the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission. 

Then last night, the news starts coming in from Israel:  Netanyahu has gone full Michael Corleone at the Christening, and today he’s settling all family business.  Initial reports are that Israel killed a bunch of top iranian generals and nuclear scientists, and blasted the most prominent nuclear enrichment sites, along with some missile batteries that Iran might use to retaliate against Israel.  And new waves of strikes are on the way as we speak.

Reading about that made me wish that we’d consulted with the IDF months ago.  Because if they could pull off that pager masterpiece, I’m sure they could have equipped some Waymo vehicles with ball-bearing-laden plastic explosives, or exotic poisonous snakes in tiny catapults, or a noxious gas that causes explosive diarrhea and temporary blindness when the doors open.  Then our guys could just wait at a parking lot full of Waymos, until one-by-one, the vehicles get called by some anarchist creep, and pull out and hum away, carrying their surprise for the malevolent revolutionaries.

Am I saying that we should set up violent nihilists to become diced, blind, envenomed and beshitten because of their own evil schemes?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

Okay, I might not be able to write another column until after I get back home on Monday night.  But in the meantime, pray for our law enforcement, root for the Israeli badasses bringing the karma to Iran, and as always…

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on LA, SCOTUS, and Joe Biden’s Autopen (posted 6/9/25)

Well, LA’s on fire.  Again. 

And this time, as in the past, the Woke Avengers team assembled.  Led by Gavin the Haircut and Karen “Absentee Woman” Bass – plus an assortment of anonymous, mediocre DEI hires who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives – they leapt into action. 

Annnddd… did nothing for 36 hours, at least.

Well, that’s not fair to the Big Mouth Bass, because she released an outraged statement saying, “We will not stand for this!” 

Unfortunately, by “this” she didn’t mean hordes of violent thugs rioting and attacking ICE agents enforcing our laws.  No, the “this” for which she won’t stand is…wait for it…ICE agents enforcing our laws.      

I’m not making that up.  Even though Bass tried to walk that idiotic statement back within about 12 hours, the damage had already been done. The Bass had taken the bait, and been hooked on her own stupidity.  And like another fish-faced far-left mayor (I’m looking at you, Lori Lightfoot…and that’s not easy), this might finally cause her to be reeled in.  Because she appears to have just been flipped to her dorsal side, and prepared for a political grilling that she probably won’t survive. 

But hey, it’s LA.  So maybe she’ll get a “catch and release” parole.   Angelenos sure seem to like doing that with violent illegals.

(They said, “Hey Martin, I bet you can’t come up with 8 juvenile fish-related insults in a story on riots in a Democrat city.” And I said, “Hold my bourbon and watch this.”)

Two bits of good news can come out of this debacle.  First, the pro-illegal-immigrant Left is showing who they are (again!), and that belies nearly everything they’ve said about illegal immigration for the last several decades.  It’s hard to make the case that the vast majority of illegals love America and just want to assimilate and contribute when thousands of them are attacking American law enforcement, burning American flags, and flying the Mexican flag.    

Second, Trump has learned from his past mistakes.  In 2020 he allowed antifa and BLM leftist mobs – and a school of a-political scavenging looters swimming in their wake (bonus fish reference!) – to run roughshod in dozens of leftist cities around the country.  He didn’t call out the National Guard, maybe because he figured that if leftist mayors and governors were content to let their cities burn and would fight any help he tried to give, they could reap what they’ve sown. 

But Trump 2.0 means bidness.  He’s firing as many swamp creatures as he can, blasting away at Ivy League Jew-haters like a truckload of explosive de-groining pagers, and hammering the left with EOs like Sonny Corleone tuning up Carlo with that garbage-can lid.  (If you haven’t watched the Godfather frequently enough to get that reference, begone!)

And this time around, the TWA (Triumvirate of Whoop Ass) – Trump, Hegseth and Hulk Homan™ (plus their chick sidekick in too much makeup and a too-tight costume, Kristi Noem, God bless her) – are going to make the violent radicals WISH the worst thing they had to deal with was some Rooftop Koreans!

Let the mass arrests begin, and the mass deportations accelerate!

Hey, speaking of fish out of water (boom!), I’ve got to give the most unexpected shout-out ever to – prepare to deploy your smelling salts – the three leftist SCOTUS justices!  Each of them wrote a clear and logical (i.e. conservative) UNANIMOUS ruling last Thursday, and I couldn’t be more shocked if I’d been flipping through the channels and came across AOC cogently explaining the Theory of Relativity!

Kagan wrote Smith & Wesson vs. Mexico, finding that of course S&W can’t be held responsible for what violent scumbags do with their product, so mind your business – along with your cartels and fentanyl – Mexico! 

Sotomayor wrote Catholic Charities vs. Wisconsin, finding that of course you can’t discriminate against a religious charity just because you’re a Christophobic bigot.

And perhaps most surprising of all, Ketanji Jeanne-Pierre (HA!) wrote Ames v. Ohio Youth Services, finding that of course discrimination is unconstitutional, even if it’s “reverse” discrimination against whitey or straight people. 

I’m flabbergasted, and don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt.  But just in case this is a sign of the End of Days – and how could it not be? – please get yourself right with Jesus, pronto!

Finally, going from the most unexpected story ever, to perhaps the most expected story ever, I give you the latest in the Joe Biden auto-pen controversy. 

Last week Biden refuted the contention that others had signed many official documents for him without his knowledge, due to his well-documented descent from low IQ hack to confused, to dementia-ridden, to full-blown, stage 4, cuckoo-fried-chicken status.

When his forthcoming statement was announced, many observers watched with bated breath, wondering whether his voice would be steady, his posture upright, and his delivery graceful.

Annnnddddd… he released a written statement instead.

Because obviously the best possible way to refute an accusation that you are too far gone to make a clear statement, so someone else had to produce writing on your behalf, is to…produce a statement written by someone else on your behalf.

Brilliant! 

How do I know for certain that Joe Biden didn’t write “his” statement? 

Because I am a professional student of the written word, with a mind like a steel trap and keen insight into all matters linguistic.

If you don’t believe me – and to quote St. Greta the Self-Righteous, “How dare you?!  You have stolen my dreams with your empty words!” – here is Biden’s laughably phony statement:   

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency.  I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”

And now, here is how that statement would have appeared, IF Brandon had actually written it himself:

“Let me be Claire.  I made the incisions in my presh-dentsy.  I made declensions about pardons, execrable borders, luhsshlation and presti… prestidigi…  Come on man!  Any digestion that I didn’t is raddish and face.  I mean…rhombus and pulse.  You know, you know the thing.   Ummm… uhhh……………………………………………………… We finally beat Medicare.”

And, scene.

Hamas delenda est!

The Butterfield Fallacy Hits the WAPO’s Analysis of Why Fentanyl Trafficking has Plummeted (posted 6/6/25)

Regular readers will have noticed my repeated, sardonic usage of the word, “Unexpectedly!”  I started this a while ago, when I came across a clueless partisan reporter writing that in the wake of a push to defund the police, “crime unexpectedly rose.” 

That “unexpectedly” was so jarringly dumb that I couldn’t help but mock it, and the ideological prejudice that it betrayed.  How can anybody not realize that if you make it harder for cops to fight criminals and crime, more criminals are going to commit more crimes? 

I’ll tell you how: they are raised in an ideological bubble, and then they go to J-school and receive a pre-digested set of assumptions, prejudices and conclusions, and those congeal, and then harden into the cement of obliviousness.  Then, on graduation day, the newly minted “journalists” receive a diploma and a set of partisan blinders.  And they snap those on, and from that day forward they have a very hard time discerning basic cause and effect. 

A month or so ago, I was discussing this process with a buddy of mine – some bourbon was involved – and he told me I was talking about the Butterfield Fallacy.  I told him that I don’t even know any gay slang, and also that I thought that was actually a Robert Ludlum novel.  (Drink at least three double shots of bourbon, and that line will be funnier than it is right now.)

The next day I looked it up, and found out that my buddy was right.  Fox Butterfield was a  writer for the NYT about 20 years ago, and among other things, he wrote a series of stories about crime in which he discussed what he called, “the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population.”  In one story, he wrote about an increase in the prison population “despite a decline in serious crime.” 

In other words, his “paradox” and “despite” were my “unexpectedly.”  The bad news is that I thought I was coming up with something new, and wasn’t.  The good news is that the cognitive horsepower of Ivy Leaguers never fails to disappoint.

Did I mention that Fox Butterfield graduated from Harvard University?  Because of course he did. 

Also: Unexpectedly!

A few days ago we got another fantastic example of this enduring phenomenon, this time from the Washington Post, where “Democracy dies in imbecility.”

The WAPO discovered an odd anomaly: there seems to have been a big decrease in fentanyl seizures on our southern border recently. 

I know what you’re thinking – and it starts with “Duh!” – but hold that obvious thought. 

Because I’ve gone down into an underground chamber here at stately Simpson manor, taken my conical purple wizard hat out of its pressurized Lucite case, put it on my head, and magically traveled 1000 miles and 5 days back in time, to a WAPO conference room in DC, where an editor was discussing story ideas with a clot of young reporters.

Just to establish the visuals: the male reporters tended toward man buns and sad David Hogg beards, and half of them identified as non-binary, while the females were all scowls and unnatural hair colors and a lot of anger at their dads.

Let’s listen in…

Editor: So there’s this big drop in fentanyl seizures at the southern border, and we need to figure out whether it’s worth covering.  The first step is to brainstorm about the possible causes.

Male Reporter (MR) 1:  Racism!

Editor: What does fentanyl have to do—

Female Reporter (FR) 1: Sexism!

MR 1: Come on Karen, you always say sexism.

FR 1: Well you always say racism, Bruce!

FR 2 (under her breath):  It usually IS sexism.

FR 1: I know, right? (They fist bump, and glare at Bruce.)

Editor: I don’t think it’s racism or sexism.

FR 3: Says the white man.

Editor: I identify as a gender-nonconforming Native American!  You know that.

MR 2: You’re as white as Elizabeth Warren.

MR 1 (snickering): #wemustneverstopmockingher

FR 2: But you ARE a little on the gender-nonconforming side.

(FR 1 chuckles and fist bumps FR 2.)

Editor: Knock off the fist bumping!  Does anyone have any other ideas about what might have caused the drop in fentanyl trafficking?

MR 3: Global warming?

FR 3 (rolling her eyes): Not this again.

MR 3: It’s an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!

Editor: Of course it is.  And it’s probably going to kill us all.  But what does global warming have to do with less fentanyl at the southern border?

MR 1: Sun spots.  (Confused looks from around the table.)  Sun spots cause global warming, and the increased temperatures make Mexico even hotter, and the drug mules are probably passing out with heat exhaustion and dying half way across the desert.

MR 3: Sun spots don’t cause global warming, Bruce.  We’ve been over this a thousand times.

FR 3 (leaning conspiratorially toward the other female reporters):  Here goes the countdown. (She raises her index finger and looks at MR 3.)

MR 3 (counting on his fingers):  It’s big disgusting SUVs, cow farts, and capitalism.

Editor:  I’m not sure—

MR 2:  What about the Jews?

Editor: What?

MR 2: Maybe it’s… the Jews?

MR 1 (elbowing MR2 and whispering loudly):  Janice is Jewish.

FR 3: No I’m not!  My idiot dad is Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I am.  (quieter)  Stupid patriarchal jerk!

Editor: What do the Jews have to do with fentanyl in Mexico?

MR 2:  Isn’t the emperor of Mexico a Jewish lady?  Frieda Finebaum, or something like that?

FR 1: Mexico doesn’t have an emperor, Gary!  And their president is Claudia Sheinbaum.

MR 2:  That’s it!  And she’s Jewish, right?

FR 3: Yes, but what does that have to do with—

FR 1:  Well, they’re really sneaky.  Everybody knows that.  (FR 3 crosses her arms and stares at her.)  I mean, like your dad.  A lot of them are sneaky, patriarchal jerks like your dad.

MR 3: I’ve GOT it!  (Everybody turns toward him.)  Sheinbaum is a greedy Jewish capitalist who hatched this evil plot to get rich on fentanyl money, and she brought the sexist and racist cartels in on it, so they’ve been loading up poor women of color with fentanyl and sending them across the desert to sneak into America, except that global warming is killing them before they can make it to the border.  

Editor (after a long pause, during which everyone looks at everyone else): So you’re saying that it’s racism, sexism, Judaism, capitalism AND global warming?

MR 3: Exactly!

Everyone starts nodding excitedly.  The editor slowly does too.

Editor (grinning): It all makes sense.  (looking around the room) I smell a Pulitzer!  (He stands up quickly.) Everybody get packed.  This story is going to require all hands on deck, so you’re all heading for the border!  Hail Satan!

And, scene.          

Okay, I can’t completely vouch for the accuracy of that probably very accurate scenario.  But I can point you to the actual WAPO story that resulted, which I am not making up. It was written by Mary Beth Sheridan, and she’s the Post’s “Mexico and Central America Correspondent,” so you know she’s really good. 

The headline of the story: “The Mysterious Drop in Fentanyl Seizures on the US-Mexico Border.”   The sub-head: “The reasons behind the decrease of fentanyl seizures…are complex.”

“Mysterious”!  “Complex”!  Seriously, you can’t make this up.  The writer later goes for the trifecta, calling the drop “puzzling.”

By the end of the article, the author even performs the Butterfield Rectal-Cranial Inversion move (which HAS to be gay slang doesn’t it?  And that’s not just the bourbon talking).  To wit:

“The decline is occurring even as the Trump administration has deployed thousands of troops to the border and expanded drone flights.  With more boots on the ground, you’d think seizures would go up, not down.”

Again, as God is my witness, I did not make that up.  This “journalist” is a purported expert on the region, and she knows that Trump has pulled out all the stops and gone Roman on the border.  But she still cannot see the forest for the trees. 

In fact, she can’t see the forest OR the trees.  Or the gigantic meadow in front of the forest and the trees.  Or the creek that flows through the meadow and into the forest, and between the trees.

It doesn’t occur to her that now that we’ve got a president who is serious about closing the border, the border has been closed.  Or that cartels might send less fentanyl to a closed border being manned by thousands of Hulk Homan™ types with military weaponry than they did to a wide-open border with a big banner saying, “Bienvenidos, Shriners and Cartel Members!”

The tariffs might be confusing, and Musk might be slapping Trump like Mrs. Macron slapping Mr. Macron, and every partisan district judge with a Napolean complex might be dreaming up new reasons why the constitution forbids the Chief Executive from carrying out the duties of the Chief Executive. 

But this is the quality of our opposition, people. 

They’re defending wife-beating gang-bangers and Jew-hating, illegal Egyptian pyromaniacs, and using Tampon Tim and Lil’ Davy Hogg to appeal to young male voters, and they can’t figure out why closing our borders would result in less cross-border crime.

I think we’re going to be fine.

Hamas delenda est! 

A Little Political Taxonomy(posted 6/4/25)

Perceptive and regular readers of my columns may have noticed that I am periodically annoyed by our elite leftist leaders in DC, the MSM, and the Ivy League. 

If by “periodically” I mean “7 days a week, when I’m not asleep.”  And if by “annoyed” I mean “infuriated.”  And I do, in both cases, mean that. 

But there is another type of nationally prominent lefty who just frustrates me, because they demonstrate the ability to think clearly and call out problems on both sides…but then can’t sustain that and come to the right conclusion.

There are so many people of the first type from whom to choose, and their failings are so obvious as to need little explication.  So for today I’ll discuss just one, and his actions just this week, on just one issue. 

The Dem in question is Jamie Raskin, and the issue is the terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday. 

By now you all know the basic details: Muslim illegal immigrant named Muhamad (unexpectedly!) who hates Jews (unexpectedly!) uses a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to badly burn 8 Jews who were peacefully marching to plead for the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.  (The terrorist reportedly used fire in his attack because he had been unable to get a gun, due to his illegal status.)   At least two of his victims had to be airlifted to a hospital, and if they survive, will face a long and extremely painful recovery.

A few more details make the story even more infuriating.  At least one of the victims was an octogenarian Holocaust survivor.  A local police official – hours after video had widely circulated showing the terrorist screaming, “Free Palestine!” and, “I did it for Gaza!” – insisted that the scumbag’s motives were not known.

Then a genius named Juliette Kayyem got on CNN late that evening and blasted Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for having declared that the obviously targeted terror attack was a “targeted terror attack.”  Juliette was not buying that small step to a well-supported conclusion.

But soft! What ditz through yonder camera speaks?  Tis Juliette, and she’s a total moron: “It makes law enforcement look disorganized, and it makes the FBI look so juvenile, like why are you getting ahead of the police chief who says, ‘I don’t know what this is?’”

Did I mention that Juliette is a former DHS official in the Obama administration, and a former Harvard professor?  Because of course she is.

Anyway, Muhamad came to the US on a tourist visa in 2022.  When he broke our laws by overstaying that visa, the Biden administration demonstrated their “tough on crime” bona fides by… rewarding him with a work visa for two more years!  And then he illegally stayed again, when that visa expired.  (Please insert an all-caps “Unexpectedly” after each of the three previous sentences.)

So to recap: an anti-Semitic Muslim illegal immigrant carried out a horrific attack using fire.  From that set of circumstances, one might logically draw the conclusion that we have serious problems involving vicious anti-Semitism, mass illegal immigration, and even a statistically over-represented tendency to violence among some (not all) adherents to a certain Religion of Peace.  And possibly a “fire-control” problem.

But not if one is Jamie Raskin D-(‘oh!)- Maryland, who turned his awesome Sherlockian powers of deduction toward Boulder, and quickly arrived at the culprit: Guns! 

The poor dunce went on MSNBC, and said, “We are still in the midst of a gun violence epidemic…. This is why we are for a ban on military-style assault weapons in the country.  Our lax gun laws are a danger to everybody in America.”

I’m not making that up. He looked at a multi-faceted crime with zero guns involved, and decided that guns were the problem.

I thought about guns when I saw that news story, too.  But my thoughts were more along the lines of, “I wish that had happened in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, or some other free state where citizens exercise their 2nd amendment rights more vigorously.  Because if it had, that hateful creep would have been lucky to light up his first octogenarian before he was stitched with bullets from his tiny groin to his evil cranium.”

And THEN we would have all been spared that smoking bullet-magnet’s idiotic political slogans, and Juliette would have been justified in scratching her empty head and wondering what his motive had been.

So Juliette and Jamie are the type of leftists who drive me crazy, because they are propagandist hacks who wouldn’t tell an inconvenient truth or make a good-faith argument if their lives depended on it.

But the second type – and there aren’t a lot of them – are frustrating, because they often show that they are capable of clear thought and smart criticism, and yet continue to make common cause with those like Raskin, Schumer, et al.  

John Fetterman is one.  Since he recovered from his stroke, he’s frequently been a beacon of sanity in the Dem congress.  He’s called out the anti-Semitism on the left, praised Trump’s closing of the border, and criticized his party’s shameful coverup of Biden’s physical and mental infirmity.  But he still votes with them the vast majority of the time, even though he’s proven that he knows better.

The best example of this type is Bill Maher, who I think I’ve written about before.  He’s a condescending egotist who I wouldn’t want to hang out with, but he’s intelligent and often very funny, and he regularly takes a scalpel (and a machete) to woke errors and idiocies like nobody else on the left.  And yet, at the end of the day and after demonstrating that he’s got 20/20 political vision…he puts his leftist blinders back on and returns to rote conservative bashing.

Or, as one of my favorite Bible verses puts it, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”

I don’t watch Maher’s program, but I often watch clips of it that show up on my various political feeds, and his discussion of Harvard’s self-destructive arrogance this past weekend was a good example. 

He spends nearly 6 solid minutes tearing Ivy League education a new one, with insight and sarcasm.  He points out that students aren’t being educated but indoctrinated, and indicts woke intolerance, feckless administrators, and the hypocritical arrogance of gullible, entitled youth.  He points out that Harvard is “an assh*le factory.”

But then – so frustrating! – he puts on his pinko-colored glasses, and goes every kind of wrong.

The pivot comes when he grudgingly says that Harvard does turn out some decent people.  But his first example tells you all you need to know: “But for every Barack Obama, there are two Josh Hawleys.”  And he doesn’t mean the comparison as an insult to Obama – which it should be – or a compliment to Hawley.  Which it should be. 

For the next 3 minutes, he lobs evidence-less ad hominem attacks at Hawley, and then lists those on the right who have Ivy League degrees with an acid tone of disdain: Vivek, DeSantis, Cruz, SCOTUS members, etc. 

That’s it.  He just lists them.  He doesn’t cite any stupid or evil things they’ve done, or any of their flaws.  He just sneers their names, and his audience of trained seals applauds accordingly. 

I keep finding myself thinking of the Parable of the Talents, and how those who squander greater gifts are judged more harshly than the less gifted who don’t make much of themselves.  I look at dullards like Hank Johnson, AOC, or Eric Swalwell, and I’m not sure they even know how dumb or wrong they usually are. 

But then I look at someone like Maher, deftly dissecting the destructive foolishness of the Left, before immediately backsliding into juvenile, simple-minded smears of the Right.  I watch him proving that he knows better, and then acting like he doesn’t, and I shake my head.       

I don’t know which is worse. 

But I do know that I’d rather be on our side – even with all of our squishes and weasels! – than on theirs.         

Hamas delenda est!

It’s a New Month, but Harvard Has Little to be Proud About, & Hamas is Running Out of Sinwars (posted 6/2/25)

Well, it’s the beginning of another Haughty Spirit month, so if you’re super stoked about your sexuality, you do you.  But also, remember that everything doesn’t have to happen in public.  Because there’s a time and place—

Sorry.  My crack staff has just given me a correction, and here at the Simpsonian Institution we strive for accuracy.  It turns out that I’d mixed up my King James texts.  To wit, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

So it’s Pride month, not Haughty Spirit month.  My bad.  Though in past years when I wasn’t able to look away from some parade floats on tv soon enough, I noticed that there was quite a bit of haughty spirit exposed too.  Along with a disturbing amount of big bellies and bare arses.  So thanks for those visuals, you exhibitionist loons.

I’m not going to ask why there’s no heterosexual pride month, because I think it’s weird to feel proud about sexuality.  After all, as Cole Porter pointed out, “Birds do it.  Bees do it.  Even educated fleas do it.”  And I’m not big on recorded sexuality parades of any type, anyway.  (Though if you insist on having one, spotting a “reverse-cowgirl” float as I’m going through the channels wouldn’t be as unsettling as a “dudes in arse-less chaps” float would.)

By the way, note to aspiring rappers out there: Re-read those lyrics.  They’re almost 100 years old and they’re about sex, but they’re still remembered, and they’re still goofy and fun.  And there isn’t a single “b*tch” or n-word in there.  (If you think anyone will be remembering “WAP” a century from now, you’re as dumb as your “songs” sound.)

Anyway, there’s no pride month for eccentric males like me, who prefer women, and I’m not asking for one.  Although again, if we must have some sort of sexuality-related public celebration, I suggest that a Great Beauties Hall of Fame would be a good alternative.  I am even willing to suggest some nominees for the first class of inductees, all of whom had an impact on an impressionable young Martacus: Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Nena (of “99 LuftBallons” fame). 

Loren and Welch were at the height of their powers before I reached puberty, but when I saw both of them on tv reruns – Loren as a sponge diver in a movie I have no other memory of, and Welch fighting off dinosaurs in a fur bikini (that one was based on a true story, I think)…  Well, let’s just say that I knew even then that I wouldn’t be going down the “Mayor Pete Path,” if you know what I mean.

Farrah is self-explanatory, and you wouldn’t think that a doe-eyed, one-named cutie singing in German would stick in one’s mind, but the heart wants what it wants.  And of course my smokeshow wife would be inducted as the first winner in the Lifetime Achievement category. 

Where was I? 

Oh yeah.  I’m hoping that since the cultural tide seems to have turned against some of the excesses of woke sexual foolishness (mandatory pronouns, kowtowing to those with autogynephilia or gender dysmorphia, 57 genders fantasies, etc.), Pride cheerleading might be less ubiquitous and annoying this year.  

Speaking of “even educated fleas do it,” I am loving Trump’s beat-down of Harvard!  As a former academic, I’ve always wondered exactly how much the Ivy League in general hates Jews, free speech, and academic freedom.  And now it looks like we might be getting an answer: way more than $3 billion dollars’ worth!

When Trump first fired a shot across Harvard’s bow – telling them to start abiding by civil rights laws and crack down on Jew-hating freaks who have been disrupting their educational mission, or forfeit some grant money – I figured that the bureaucrats would make a token show of resistance and then sheepishly comply.  I thought that the horrific optics of standing with obnoxious jihadi brats and their tent-ifada would be enough to make Harvard submit, even without financial pressure.

But no!  The arrogant snoots dug their jack-booted heels in for Jew hatred uber alles, even after Trump threatened to take away more federal funds.  So then he said he’d be challenging their tax exempt status, and trying to block them from enrolling foreign students, many of whom are a coveted source of both bundles of cash and hatred of America and the West – two coveted resources for the extremist partisans running Harvard. 

Harvard got their noses even higher in the air – who would have thought that was even possible? – and filed suit against the president, rather than submit.  Of course, partisan left judges are coming out of the woodwork to block Trump (unexpectedly!), but it’s hard to see how they can win this one. 

American taxpayers can’t be forced to fund any university who defies federal laws in ways various and sundry, and no university is entitled to billions in funding automatically.  As a schadenfreude-tastic beneficial side effect, this case is fortuitously exposing the dark underbelly of academe, not just in its anti-Semitism, but in the way it has been decreasing admissions for  American students in favor of unvetted and often anti-American foreign students, and also systematically discriminating against conservative/traditional/pro-Western beliefs in faculty hiring and student admissions. 

Over the weekend CO reposted a tweet from Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) (whoever that is), pointing out that within 20 minutes of Harvard President Alan Garber sanctimoniously proclaiming that, “Harvard is not Harvard without its international students,” Garber awarded an honorary Harvard degree (I’m guessing in “Anti-Semitism Studies?”) to Elaine Kim, who supports efforts to “ban Israeli students from all universities.”

Ugh.  Kestenbaum summarizes the situation perfectly: “Israel is an American ally.  Harvard is not.” 

Yep.

I think Trump’s next move was a stroke of genius: he threatened to send $3 billion in grant money away from Harvard and to trade schools instead.  It’s probably an empty threat, but I like the idea, and it reinforces Trump’s appeal to working class voters: The Dems are for the rich elites getting grievance studies degrees at Harvard, and he’s for blue collar folks learning a trade.   

I’m hoping that if all else fails, and courts stop Trump from letting Harvard admit thousands of foreign students, he can at least give the leftists a taste of their own medicine, and deploy the “due process” gambit.  The State Department can say, “Okay, we’re prepared to admit foreign students.  But we have to give them very thorough, due-process vetting before giving them a student visa. And if that takes 4 or 5 semesters to get done, so be it.”

I feel bad for some innocent foreign students who get caught up in that process, but that’s the price that Harvard is imposing on them by defying the laws (and the taxpaying citizens) of the United States.  Because Ivy League administrators and faculty need to learn the real meaning of something they’ve been chanting for years: no one is above the law!

Finally, speaking of jihad enthusiasts, Hamas might be running out of Sinwars. 

You might remember that Yahya Sinwar was the leader of Hamas, until the IDF caught up with him last October.  He ran into an apartment building in Gaza, where an IDF drone filmed him throwing a stick at it (rumors that he threw like a girl are confirmed, and hilarious) before they assisted him in assuming rubble temperature. 

Well Yahya had a younger brother, and his name was Muhammad.  (Unexpectedly!)  He had helped plan the October 7th massacre, and he had taken his brother’s place as a Hamas leader.  And on Saturday, Israel announced that earlier in May, they had struck an underground compound near a hospital in southern Gaza, thus sending Muhammad to his eternal reward.

Which, if I understand justice in the afterlife correctly, involves an eternity of rectal pitch-forking. 

The Israeli defense minister with the most Israeli name ever (Israel Katz!) named the two most likely senior Hamas successors to the unlamented Sinwar brothers as Izz al-Din al-Haddad and Khalil al-Hayya, and warned them, “You are next in line.”

So if you’re keeping score at home, two Sinwars have been retired, the Katz is out of the bag, and the hyphenated Izz and Khalil are on deck.  If you want to see their near future, open Duckduckgo.com and search “MLB Pitcher Randy Johnson hits a bird.” 

And then picture a flying keffiyeh, instead of a cloud of feathers.

Hamas delenda est!

Three Biden Cover-Up Stories (posted 5/30/25)

Today I need to start by thanking you for all the very nice birthday wishes and funny, warm comments.  I love this online family that CO created, and for nine birthdays now, you all have made it much more fun to fight my creeping senescence.  I haven’t been this happy since I saw Ras Baraka open for Bob Marley at Reggae-Fest ’79!

Unless it was when I saw Creeping Senescence open for Metallica at the Rosemont Horizon in ’86.  I’ve still got a little tinnitus from that one.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of a road trip is being cut off from most of the news of the day, and I feel like I should enjoy that more often. But by the same token, one of the satisfactions of being back home is that you can catch up on what you missed when you were gone.  (And realizing how much you are happy to have missed!)  

I’ve been able to zip through 10 days’ worth of podcasts on high speed this week, and it sounds like some of the biggest stories were a trifecta of revelations about Joe Biden: the audio tapes of Hur’s Biden interview were released, Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis was revealed, and Jake Tapper’s book came out, outlining the shocking discovery that Biden was out of his gourd for his entire presidency.

Unexpectedly!    

I’ve read a bunch of excerpts of the book and listened to Megyn Kelly’s solid interview of Tapper and his co-author, and it’s both fascinating and ridiculous.

The behind-the-scene details were the fascinating parts: Biden’s staff planned to put him in a wheelchair after he won re-election, but had to keep him tottering around in those waffle-stomper shoes until then.  During debate prep, ol’ Joe would just get up and wander out and sit by the pool.  He once waved around an ice cream cone to show Joe Scarborough the sword fighting moves he used to defeat Corn Pop in a duel.

Okay, I made that last one up.  But it was still believable, right?

Everything else about the book is ridiculous.  A bunch of professional politicians, media figures and “journalists” sat for interviews in which they beclowned themselves by either pretending that they had no idea that Biden was cuckoo fried chicken, or admitting that they gaslighted everyone about his dementia. 

Sam Harris, a famous atheist with an undeserved reputation for being super smart, managed to combine the worst of both gambits on a recent podcast. 

He started by playing dumb: “[Biden] clearly understands the issue as well as he ever did.  He’s just not a fluid speaker, and less and less fluid by the hour.  Right.  That is what I assumed was true.  Because of how effective this cover up was, I no longer believe that to have been true.  I think it’s quite possible that he was just checked out to a degree that I did not suspect at the time.” 

Got that?  Sherlock Harris is just now beginning to suspect what all of the millions of us PWFE (People With Functioning Eyes) knew in 2019, if not before. 

We assembled such data points as: shook hands with a ghost; mixed up his wife and sister; tripped over a sandbag; mangled the “all men are created equal” quote; tripped over a sandwich; went straight from hollering Grandpa Simpson to Creepy Whispering Guy; tripped over a grain of sand; pooped on the Pope. 

And we connected those dots. And they formed a flat line on an EEG.   Which Sam Harris could not decode.

But a few minutes later he gave the game away by admitting that he would prefer a diminished Biden if the alternative was Trump.  Or as the Breitbart headlined summed up his argument, “Harris: Would Rather Have Biden ‘In a Coma’ than ‘Evil’ Trump.”

Well, we got four years of Biden in a coma, and that was more than enough, Sammy.

The story of Biden’s metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis only adds more incriminating evidence to the Biden cover-up scandal.  At first the MSM tried to act like this was a surprising new development, but many cancer doctors almost immediately came forward to say that it takes at least 5 years – and more likely 7 to 10 – for slow-growing prostate cancer to spread to the bones.

Then some poor hack suggested that many men are no longer screened for prostate cancer after they turn 75, since they’re more likely to die of other causes before their prostate kills them.  So Biden probably wasn’t even aware he had it. 

Annnnddddd… then PWFBs (People With Functioning Brains) all pointed out that sure, maybe Gus, the retiree on the local HOA board, might not get PSA tests after 75.  But you know who Gus isn’t?

<engage Kinison filter> THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD!! OH!! OHHHH!!!!  <end Kinison filter>       

Nobody is going to believe that Biden has had cancer since at least age 74, and that he “served” as “president” from age 78 to 82, and nobody on the White House medical staff knew it.  Especially after it came out that the most prominent side effects of the drug commonly used to treat prostate cancer are problems with balance/heightened risk of falling, and mental fogginess.  

(If you look up “heightened risk of falling” and “mental fogginess” in a dictionary, you’ll find Joe Biden’s picture beside both entries.)

Finally, where does Robert Hur go to get his reputation back?   After he interviewed Biden as part of the investigation of Biden’s illegally keeping classified documents, he got flak from all sides, because his conclusion – Biden was guilty, but a jury wouldn’t convict him because he was an elderly man with a bad memory – satisfied no one.

The GOP rightly said that if Biden was too mentally incompetent to stand trial, he was too mentally incompetent to be president.  But that logical point was drowned out in an epic Schiff-storm of Democrats and MSM empty heads screaming that Hur was dishonest, incompetent and corrupt.  

They said that it was gratuitous and unprofessional to even bring up Biden’s memory, ignoring what everybody knew: Biden had kept records that he never had any right to take, and he kept them in at least three different locations, one of which is a super-safe and secure location.  I.e. in a limp cardboard box partially closed with duct tape, beside a Corvette in an unlocked garage through which Hunter’s parades of hookers would regularly wobble, on precariously high heels.

So if Hur couldn’t give a reason why he wasn’t going to prosecute Brandon, he would have had to prosecute Brandon. 

But last week, after over a year of the Democrats smearing Hur, the recordings of the Biden interview were released, and they were even worse than Biden’s debate performance.  Among other revelations, it turns out that Biden DID forget when his son Beau died – a fact he repeatedly denied.

Biden had also ranted to the press about Hur bringing up Beau, barking, “Who the hell does he think he is?!”  But the tapes show that it was not Hur but Biden who brought up Beau, in a vain attempt to figure out when he had taken some of the documents.

In other words, it was a “they said/Hur said” situation, and they were lying.  (Unexpectedly!)

If the Republicans are smart, they will investigate and archive all the details of the outrageous, gaslighting coverup the Dems orchestrated.  Because when any Dems who were anywhere around Biden try to run in 2028, the ads will write themselves:

Cut from the Dem in question praising Biden (“Behind the scenes he’s sharp as a tack.  He’s the best Biden ever!”) to any random video of Biden slurring, falling up stairs, or losing his train of thought.  Then cut from a clip of that Dem attacking Hur’s report for lying that Biden is too old or has a bad memory, to a painful excerpt of his halting fumbling for an answer.

Then fade to black, and the Voice-Over tag line:

“They lied to you then.  They’re lying to you now.”         

Hamas delenda est!

My Birthday, and More Dems Behaving Badly (posted 5/28/25)

Before I left on the cousins’ trip, I’d made some notes on a few “lefties behaving badly” stories.  Even though those examples are now two weeks old, and there have been hundreds more similar stories since then, I like to think that these stories are evergreen.  So I will share them with you now.

But first, I have to acknowledge a painful reality.  Today is my birthday, and I am 63 years old.  Some of you who have seen my most recent video – in which I was rocking my gray, poison-ivy beard – are probably saying to yourselves, “No way, Martacus!  You don’t look a day over 61 and a half.”

But sadly, that’s not the case.  I can verify for you youngsters that all of those cliches about life going by too fast are true.  I remember the 1980s like they were yesterday.  Even when I’m feeling my age, I like to think of myself as middle-aged. 

Which I am… assuming I live to be 126.  (And on that day – mark it on your calendars: May 28th, 2085 – I’ll STILL be more fit to be president than Joe Biden was.)

I didn’t tell you this just to get a bunch of gratifying “happy birthday” wishes.  (Although, considering how little time I have left on earth, a rousing round of “happy birthday to you” wouldn’t hoit.  Just be sure to sing into my good ear.)  I’m also telling you because of an embarrassing error I made many years ago.

When I created a personal Facebook page – which I neglect for months at a time, so if I haven’t responded to your post there, please don’t take it personally – my tech incompetence and short attention span quickly raised its ugly head.  I lost interest shortly after starting to complete the various “profile” information fields, and thus left the default setting for date of birth, which was January 1st.

So over the years, I’ve received some very sweet “happy birthday” messages from people… on New Year’s Day.  Please forgive me for my sloth.  My only social media activity takes place on this wonderful CO site and my own WordPress page, so I apologize for my inattention elsewhere.

But enough about me behaving badly.  Let’s move on to lefties doing so…

You may remember when a handful of Democrat elected officials led a mob of low-IQ protestors and tried to force their way into a NJ ICE facility back on May 9th.  That story continues to unfold hilariously, with congresswoman LaMonica McIver having since been arrested and charged with assault.

She made a classic blunder: when you’re going to participate in an unruly mob and assault a government official while cameras are recording, try not to be an obnoxiously loud, plus-sized person wearing a bright red coat. 

I think Sun Tzu said that.

But the Red Menace was not the only one arrested that day.  She was joined by Ras Baraka. 

Despite having the name of a Klingon warlord, or possibly a Jamaican reggae band, Baraka is actually the mayor of Newark New Jersey.  He’s done such a bang-up job with Newark – as everyone knows, when you think of stellar governance, you think of Newark – that he’s now planning to run for NJ governor.

And what could be a better way to launch a gubernatorial bid than to get some national attention by being arrested in a high-profile incident?  Unfortunately for Ras, he is apparently taking his PR cues from Cory “Spartacus” Booker, because in a press conference after his arrest, he compared himself to David.

I don’t mean David Hasselhoff (although the mayor’s clarity of thought suggests that he too may have a problem with the bottle), or David Schwimmer (though the mayor would be well advised to PIVOT from his recent strategy). 

I mean the Biblical David. 

Because we all remember the story of how King David overcame Goliath by yelling incoherently until the Philistines freed a bunch of foreign criminal gangbangers, don’t we?  Good grief!

Speaking of famous Davids, do you know what’s funnier than the Dems picking Lil’ Davy Hogg for their DNC co-chair?  Giving him the boot less than three months later! 

I can’t wait to see who they replace him with, since their fig-leaf reason for dumping him – as opposed to the real one: he’s a narcissistic zygote with no life experience whose first decision was to spend $20 mil trying to primary a bunch of old Dems – was that the committee who elected him wasn’t “diverse” enough!

Man, I’m hoping that they roll out a previously unknown niece of Que Mala!  Or maybe Joy Reid?  I hear she’s looking for a gig.

Anyway, have you noticed how quickly the Dems dropped the main talking point that they’d been beating into the ground for the last year?  No, I’m not talking about “Trans women are women!”  That was second place.

First place by a mile was, “We have to defend democracy!  Our precious, sacred, inviolate democracy.  Oh, won’t someone please think of the democracy!”

And then Trump won the electoral college, and all seven battleground states, and the popular vote.  And all of a sudden, they’re not so excited about democracy anymore.  So how can we be surprised when they elected Davy Hogg – fair and square, and oh so democratically! – and as soon as he turns out to be the petulant child he obviously was when they elected him… they un-elect him!   

That’s the Democrats, people.  Gaslighters gotta gaslight, and they are the gold standard of gaslighting.  If they’re not trying to convince us that Tampon Tim Walz is a man, they’re trying to convince us that Michelle Obama is a woman, or that Joe Biden was in tip-top shape all through his presidency.

It’s been great fun lately to watch all of the top Dems scrambling for cover when asked about their scandalous cover-up of Biden’s obvious dementia.  Someone obviously came up with a lame talking point, which was shortly spouted by Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and a dozen others: “We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”

That’s comically inept.  Can you imagine it working with any kind of scandal?  Could Letitia James get away with saying, “All of my fraudulent mortgages are in the past. Let’s look forward!”

Or could Bill Clinton have had a much more tranquil 1998 by saying, “Oh, come on!  Who can even remember who was taking Chicom cash from Charlie Trie, or banging cocktail waitresses two at a time so that customers couldn’t even get a drink at the White House bar?  That’s all past stuff.  I’m looking forward now.” 

Still, I guess we can be grateful that no Democrat will tell any more tired lies about January 6th, or refer to Trump’s 34 bogus convictions, since those are both in the past, right? 

But my favorite example of Democrat self-beclowning from the first half of May came from smelly Eric Swalwell.  During congressional questioning of Kristi Noem about whether proven MS-13 member Kilmar Garcia is an MS13 member, Swalwell took the obviously wrong position, and bragged that he was correct because of his very accurate “bullsh*t detector.”

Hey Eric, it’s probably not a good idea to brag about how you are incapable of being fooled.  Because we all remember that time when a Chinese spy sidled up to you, batted her eyes, and whispered, “Me love you long time.” And you didn’t think, “Wait a minute, that’s a line from the Vietnamese hooker in Full Metal Jacket, and I’m a 4 at best, and that’s before taking my low IQ and flatulence into account.  And she’s a lot younger, and a 7 or 8.”

But no.  Your bullsh*t detector must have been on the fritz.  And it stayed that way for several years, until the FBI came to you and said, “You know that Chicom cutie who pretended to fall for you, even though she would never fall for someone who looks and smells like you in a million years?  Yeah, she’s a spy.”

Well done, Eric!  You keep doing you, and we’ll keep laughing at you.

Hamas delenda est!

The Cousins’ Trip, Part 2 – Flight 93 Memorial, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (posted 5/27/25)

From Gettysburg we drove north in a steady rain for the rest of Wednesday. I had hoped to visit Pittsburgh on this trip, and we would have done so on our original itinerary, which had us passing through Pittsburgh earlier, when the weather was still good.  But between the rain and our lack of time, we had to leave a visit to Pittsburgh for a future trip.

We did make a serendipitous stop though.  As we were on the PA turnpike, we saw a sign for the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville.  According to Waze we were 21 minutes from the site, which would close in 25 minutes.  Both of my cousins had seen it before and were moved by it, and said that it was well worth seeing if we’d had more time.  

But because I’m an Ameri-can and not an Ameri-can’t, I said, “Let’s drive dangerously fast in the rain and try to make it there before closing.”  Which we did.

In what felt like an omen, the rain got heavier as we got closer.  When we entered the road to the memorial site, a layer of thick fog descended over the road, and just as we’d driven what felt like a long way on that curving road and arrived at the parking lot beside the site, the rain went from “steady” to “downpour.” 

One cousin and I ran across the parking lot and into the Visitor Center, fighting against the flow of a busload of school kids who were exiting as the center prepared to close.  My cousin said that the best thing to do in just a few minutes was to pick up an earpiece on a display wall close to the entrance, and listen to three phone messages left on loved ones’ answering machines by three different women who were on the flight, and knew they were about to die. 

It’s a good thing I’m a stoic Midwesterner who is as tough as a two-dollar steak, or I would have been reduced to a crying mess.

As it was, I made it through two-and-a-half of the phone calls before a Center employee appeared and announced that the Center was closed.  We walked back outside into fog, a chilly wind and a slightly easing rain. 

The park site features several tall concrete walls, through which a black granite walkway goes from the parking lot to your right down to a gate made of hemlock beams to your left.  That black stone traces the final flight path of the doomed plane.  From the hemlock gate, the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the field beyond it, into which the plane crashed. 

The names of the 40 innocents killed in the crash are carved on 40 individual white granite wall panels.  Two of the panels are poignantly different from the others.  On one, Toshiya Kuge’s name appears in the same black letters in which the names of the other dead are carved.  But his name also appears in four Japanese characters, in a barely visible white carving, in his mother’s handwriting.

The other unusual panel features the name of Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas in black, followed by three heartbreaking words in ephemeral, barely visible, unpainted letters: “and unborn child.”

(We don’t hate those terrorists enough.  If I were to make one change to the site, it would be to place a few flat stones on the edge of the field, away from the rest of the site.  On those stones would be carved the names of the terrorist hijackers, identifying them as hateful cowards, and inviting visitors to spit or urinate upon them, as the spirit moves them.) 

One other inspired feature at the site is a 93-foot Tower of Voices, which consists of a concrete frame holding 40 aluminum, tubular wind chimes, one for each of the passengers and crew.  When winds at the site exceed 12 miles per hour, the chimes make music. 

Unfortunately, the fog was so thick that I could just barely make out the structure as we passed it, and the wind wasn’t quite strong enough to coax music from the chimes.

Just as with our earlier time at Gettysburg, the grim weather seemed commensurate with the somber event being commemorated.  And in a strange way, our rushed visit seemed to hammer home the tragic brevity of life.  I wasn’t even able to make it through the short, brave, tortured phone calls before the experience came to a premature end.   

After that, we continued driving north, arriving after dark on the outskirts of Cleveland.  The next morning we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  The cold rain was once again so strong that we could barely make out Lake Erie.

I’d never been to Cleveland, but I’ve always had a grudging admiration for it, and for the tough and unpretentious Midwesterners who live there.  It was famously nicknamed “The Mistake on the Lake,” and I like Randy Newman’s droll, elegiac song “Burn On,” about the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969.  (“The Lord can make you tumble, the Lord can make you turn, the Lord can make you overflow… (but) the Lord can’t make you burn.”)

Cleveland has an NFL team…but it’s the Browns, a team that has often played tough, but never made it to the Super Bowl.  I’m not sure what the team owner was thinking by naming the team after their first coach, Paul Brown – who was a solid coach, with an uninspiring name.  To add insult to injury, brown isn’t even an inspiring color, and offers no logical mascot.

The NFL is full of admirable animal mascots (Bears, Jaguars, Lions), birds of prey (Falcons, Ravens, Eagles) and professions or groups of admirable people (Steelers, Patriots, Saints).  NFL helmets and uniforms are adorned with pirate flags, Viking horns, and lightning bolts.

But the Browns are… the browns.  Their helmets are a featureless brown.  As are their jerseys.  They used to play in a badly designed stadium called… Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and now they play in… Huntington Bank Field.  (Woohoo!)  We drove around the stadium in the rain, and saw the two statues of their greatest players:  Jim Brown (of course!), and Otto Graham (who, as you may have guessed from the name “Otto,” played 75 years ago). 

(Not to brag, but I live in a smaller town than Cleveland, with a college football team rather than a pro one.  But that team has the cool name of “Gators,” with an iconic Gator mascot.  We play in a stadium known as The Swamp.  And we have inspiring statues of three great Heisman winners, all of whom are still alive, and none of whom is named “Otto.”)

Despite all that, Cleveland is a gritty, underdog kind of city, and I like it.  Especially since we had a good time at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

We saw a lot of artifacts from the usual musical suspects: Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Johnny Cash.  But there was also a lot of respect paid to the R&B, country and Gospel roots of rock, as well as to some of my favorites, including the great John Prine.  Of course you can always quibble about who got too much attention (Cher, Bon Jovi and various rappers) and who got too little (nothing from Tom Waites, only one small picture of Cheap Trick, and very little on David Bowie, a particular favorite of my youngest daughter).

I liked that the museum had a “garage” section, composed of smaller rooms with instruments that visitors could play around with, and where some good musicians played several live sets throughout the day.                     

The last thing we did there was watch a short movie – in a theatre equipped with lights and shaking seats – of musical highlights from past HOF induction performances.  The song that got the most time came at the end, and was the great version of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” performed by an all-star band. 

Harrison’s son played – looking like a clone of his dad – and the highlights for me were Tom Petty’s singing and freaky little weirdo Prince’s amazing shredding on guitar. 

Midway through our seven-hour drive back to Illinois, the sun finally came out, making for a mellow ending to our trip.  After the grim sites of the last two days – bloody battlefields scarred by the fight to end slavery, and the lonely field in Pennsylvania scarred by a plane brought down by evil, microphallused jihadis – a celebration of raucous American music was a nice, palate-cleansing dessert.

Tomorrow, I’ll return to my usual political mockery.    

Until then, as always…

Hamas delenda est!

The Cousins’ Trip, Part 1 – Shenandoah, Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, Gettysburg (posted 5/26/25)

After 10 days of traveling, I’m glad to be back home.  I had intended to write a few columns during this cousins’ trip as I had in the past, but I was only able to take some notes along the way.  So this column is about the first part of our trip, which fits the occasion of Memorial Day, and I’ll post a column tomorrow about the rest of the trip. 

I was glad to be able to visit with my mom, sister and brother-in-law in Tennessee at the beginning and end of the cousins’ trip.  Mom is hanging in there, and my sister is doing a great job of watching over her.  Mom’s spirits are still good, and the whole family has gotten some much appreciated help from a woman who has been coming in to help two days a week. 

I was also able to spend a day in Illinois having meals and visits with an aunt and uncle, as well as a few cousins who weren’t going to be traveling with the three of us. 

Our trip this time was for five days, and the weather forecast changed our plans a bit.  We had three sunny, cool days to start, and two rainy days at the end, so we opted to take my cousin’s relatively new Ford Explorer, rather than the ’76 Caddy convertible that we’d taken on our previous trips. 

Regular readers may remember that that beautiful old car is less than completely water-proof, and its wipers less than efficient.  Shakespeare was right when he said that “Conscience makes cowards of us all.”  But if he were taking a long road trip in the rain in May of 2025, he might have had a few things to say about comfort and convenience, as well as conscience.

Anyway, we looked at the forecast, and then at the Caddy, and then at the forecast again.  And then “our native hue of resolution was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  So the Explorer it was.

The rain also changed the order of our trip.  We’d originally planned to head east first, and then south to the Shenandoah National Park and Harper’s Ferry area.  But the promise of some sunny days for our outdoor activities meant that we headed southeast and drove longer than planned on our first day.

Fittingly for this trip shortly before Memorial Day, we went to four battlefields.  Tippecanoe (in Indiana) was first, the site of a much smaller battle in a war with Indians associated with Tecumseh.  Though that battle was much more important to Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), the three Civil War sites to follow dwarfed it, in scale and casualties.

We made it down to Clarksburg, WV late that night, and the next morning we visited the Shenandoah National Park, which was as beautiful as advertised.  From there we made our way to Staunton, VA, a small town surrounded by wooded hills that punches above its weight, with a charming downtown and blocks of well-preserved old buildings.  After lunch we went to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum.  That’s a modest place with pretty grounds, and a garage exhibit featuring a sweet Pierce-Arrow limousine billed as “The Chariot of the President.”

We didn’t tour the museum and house, partly because of time, but mostly because Wilson was a racist leftist president whose bossy wife was the defacto president when he was debilitated during his last year in office. 

And I’ve already had my fill of that, and don’t want to support it any more!

That evening we made it to Harper’s Ferry, which made a strong, if strange impression on me.  The site is lovely, with the old town occupying three or floor blocks along a hillside where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet.  There is a train station on the low ground closest to the Potomac, and a few inns and restaurants, but most of the old town is a national historic park, and basically shuts down at night. 

Of course the town is best known for John Brown’s famous raid in 1859.  Meant to start a slave rebellion, the raid failed, and most of the raiders were killed during the skirmish or executed afterwards.  Because of its proximity to DC and strategic location on two rivers and a major railroad line, the town was fought over throughout the Civil War.    

We stayed in an 1840 inn, and took the opportunity to wander around the town and watch the last commuter train of the day arrive from DC, before we ate a late supper.  The next morning we were up early, before many people were out, and walked the mostly empty streets. The morning air was cool and refreshing, and smelled like honeysuckle.  We made our way up to Jefferson Rock, an outcropping on which the great man sat in October of 1783, and pronounced the view one of the most beautiful he’d ever seen.

After coffee and breakfast, we crossed a pedestrian walkway attached to a railroad bridge over the Potomac, and climbed on a forested path, up a steep hillside to where a battery of guns had been stationed during the war.  As we climbed, we were treated to intermittent views out over the valley and the town below, which confirmed Jefferson’s opinion of the scenery.  The timber was full of birds, and the honeysuckle scent was even stronger there.  On our way back downhill we began to see more people, but that morning felt like a tranquil break from normal life.

On the other hand, I kept thinking about something that was never far from my mind as we visited two more battlefields over the next 24 hours: What must it have been like to fight the battles that happened in those places?  After a half hour of walking on a cleared, wide pathway up to where the gun emplacement had been, I couldn’t imagine hauling cannon up that hill, when there was no path and tons of obstacles, and only manpower and horsepower to accomplish the feat.

From Harper’s Ferry we drove the 18 miles or so to Antietam, site of the bloodiest one-day battle of the war.  The visitor’s center had some interesting exhibits, and we watched a film recounting the course of the battle, before walking the nearest portion of the battlefield, and then taking a guided driving tour around a series of spots that followed the various stages of the battle. 

I’d read a lot about the Civil War years ago, and watched Ken Burns’ excellent 10-part documentary on the war, so most of the key positions were familiar to me: Burnside’s bridge over Antietam creek, the Dunker Church, the Cornfield, etc.  But it’s a different thing to see the actual site, with the monuments identifying which units were at which spots, and the gently rolling land on which so many men died.

I remembered reading about the Sunken Road (soon to be known as Bloody Lane) from which confederates were first able to ambush federal troops who marched right up to it without knowing it was there.  But even as we drove into the small parking lot that the audio tour identified as the Sunken Road, we still didn’t see it until we’d left the car and were right on top of it.  And then we could instantly understand how it turned into a death trap, once the union troops knew it was there, and could fire down into it. 

The beauty and peacefulness of the day when we visited Antietam contrasted with the horrific battle that had taken place there. 

But that was not the case when we arrived at Gettysburg, in a cold rain, the next morning.

The museum there was excellent, with many exhibits of weapons and uniforms, and a moving film that proved an old adage: you can’t go wrong with Morgan Freeman narrating.  After watching the film, we went upstairs into the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a large round room, with a raised, rounded platform in the middle, surrounded by a gigantic, 360-degree oil painting of the battle.  Between the platform and the walls, there is a hillside – complete with artifacts (cannon, wagons, rifles) and vegetation – that slopes away from the platform, and blends into the painting beyond. 

After that we went out into a chilly, foggy rain, and took another driving and audio tour of the large battlefield.  The low skies and grim weather seemed to perfectly match the somber events of the three-day battle, and once again I was surrounded by famous places I’d read about since childhood: Little Round Top, the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Cemetery Hill. 

Overall, Harper’s Ferry was too quaint and the landscape too charming to feel like a battlefield to me, and Antietam was too bucolic and the day too pretty.  But experiencing Gettysburg under slate-gray skies and a cold rain was appropriately somber, and felt fitting, considering the bloody struggle that unfolded over three terrible days there.

On this Memorial Day, I’m in a Gettysburg state of mind, and I feel the kind of gratitude that it took the pen of Lincoln to express, when he wrote about our military men who “gave the last full measure of devotion” in the service of our country. 

God bless them, and their memory.

Hamas delenda est!

Response to Last Week’s Posts About Debating Lefties, + My Dark Secret (posted 5/15/25)

By the time you read this, I’ll be on the road up to Tennessee, and then on to Illinois.  I think I’ll be posting a column tomorrow on the Dems’ entertaining, continuing implosion, and I’ll do my best to post at least one or two columns next week from the road.

Last week I posted a slightly edited version of an email exchange I recently had with an old friend of mine who is a committed lefty, on the subject of the rule of law, and the potential for a “constitutional crisis” that may arise if SCOTUS doesn’t shut down the dozens of district court judges who are filing frivolous lawfare TROs against every move he makes.   

Many of you asked how he responded to the points I made, and many said that they have stopped even trying to discuss politics with the lefties in their lives. 

I haven’t heard back from my friend about my last two responses yet.  He received the first one the night before he was leaving on a two-week trip, and said that he’d need time to go through it and think about it, and I sent him the second one while he was on the road, and said we could talk about it when he gets back.

But over many years of such exchanges, I think that each of us has changed the other’s mind on individual points, but not on any of our larger beliefs.  (E.g. I think I’ve been able to prove to him that individual lefties have been corrupt and that some conservatives have governed better than some lefties, but not that leftism itself is based on false premises and doesn’t work in the real world.)  He’s one of four leftist friends of mine, and I think that statement applies to all four of them.    

Since none of them are the deranged, extremist, “you’re cancelled if you don’t agree with me” types, I’ve still been able to discuss politics with them, to varying degrees.   And I appreciate that, for a couple of reasons.  As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy clarifying and testing my arguments in good-faith debates.  (Teaching argumentative and persuasive writing was a good fit for me!)

I also think that my friends and I have served a very useful moral purpose for each other: reminding all of us that the other side is not made up entirely of malevolent idiots and worse.  It’s very easy to watch bad-faith hypocrites and liars like Biden, Schumer, Grandma Squanto et al and start thinking of all Democrats as irredeemable creeps.  (And there are plenty of GOP morons who can make regular conservatives look like idiots!)  But knowing my friends reminds me – and I hope that knowing me reminds them – that that’s not the case.

In a way, this point dovetails nicely with my Christian faith.  We’re supposed to be as aware of our own flaws as we are of others’ flaws, and it’s good to be reminded of other people’s foibles in a way that doesn’t lead us to demonize them.  People make ridiculous choices in many areas of their lives, not just in politics.

Some people willingly drink ouzo.  Some are vegans.  Some root for FSU.  Some like soccer.  Some don’t like dogs. And some vote down-the-line Democrat.  What are we going to do?  Uncle Jesus tells me I’m supposed to love them anyway, and reminds me that I might have made a few stupid choices along the way myself.

I mean, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me, with my smoke show wife, my great kids, and my Wonder Dog, living my best life in the Free State of Florida.  But even I have had some dark chapters in my life. 

What I’m about to share with you needs to stay between us, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it.  Like Joy Reid when her homophobic posts came out, I’ll just claim that my email was hacked.  (Joy Reid is this angry racist lady who used to be on tv.  Or on MSNBC.  Which is kind of like tv, except without the viewers.)

So if others are in the room or reading this over your shoulder who can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut, please go somewhere else, or ask them to leave. 

Okay.  Here it goes. 

I was basically a Democrat until I was in my late 20s.

I know. I just threw up in my mouth a little, too.  And Cassie just looked at me with her head turned sideways, because I forgot that she can read.  Annnndddd… now she’s trotting out of the room, giving me a withering look back over her shoulder. 

Please, let me explain! 

I was pretty a-political as a teen and young adult.  I was one of those weird young men who was preoccupied with sports and girls, with an added layer of voracious-reader book nerd. 

Then I went to grad school for seven years (the PhD took me an extra year because I wrote a novel instead of my dissertation in my fourth year), where I was surrounded by lefty professors and students.

The pressure to conform was pretty strong.  If taking a lefty position in class was more likely to get me the 4.0 that I was looking for, okay.   If pretending to have read Das Kapital and Noam Chomsky’s latest drivel increased the chances that a female classmate would overlook my pedestrian appearance and thrust herself upon me, I’m in.  (If not like Flynn, at least like a young, proto-Martacus.) (100-year-old movie references for $100, Alex.) 

Whew, this is tough to write.  In the years since, my shame has driven me to confession about this multiple times.   And I’m not even Catholic!  I’d just randomly stop in a Catholic church and step into the shame booth.  (Have I mentioned that I’m not Catholic?)  But even then, I’d be tempted to falsely confess to murder or robbing a nun, just to avoid saying the words, “I once voted for Jimmy Carter.”

In my defense, I’d never paid enough attention to politics to be a down-the-line lefty.  I’d always had enough common sense to know that affirmative action was just reverse racism, and that abortion was wrong, for example.  And as I was forced to read leftist literary criticism – anti-Americanism and CRT were already making themselves felt, even in the Midwest, in the 1980s – I started to feel more and more repulsed.

By the time I finished my PhD, I had resolved never to read Lacan, Derrida, Marcuse or any of those weirdos again.  In fact, I started to read a lot of history, and then military history.  And then I came across Thomas Sowell, and Milton Friedman, and eventually VDH. 

Within two years of getting out, I was a confirmed conservative.

My transformation was completed a few years later, when I realized that the vow of poverty that I’d taken when I became an English professor was not a joke.  I started researching ways to buy fixer-upper real estate so that I might be able to retire before age 90. 

Some real-world experience with entrepreneurial risk-taking quickly cured me of the last vestiges of my youthful dalliance with liberalism, and I started down the road to becoming the conservative stalwart you know and admire today.      

Thus I became the old political cliché: a soft-hearted, naïve liberal at 20, but a reality-appreciating conservative by 30. 

My example does give me hope, though: sometimes it seems as if everybody is in their own bubbles, and people cling so stubbornly to their own priors.  But I made the change, both through reading ideas from the other side, and from life experience.  My guess is that the latter changes a lot more minds – the old “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” idea. 

But as a bookish type with a taste for logic and argument, my conversion began and moved pretty far along purely because of reading and thinking, before I staked my meager life savings on several real estate investments, and thus sealed the deal.

So while it often seems that our politics are so polarized in recent years, I still retain some cautious optimism that at least some liberals are persuadable.  In fact, their own party’s insane race to the far left is pushing some of them toward our side by default.  

I think many of these types now feel – or soon will – like Reagan did when he said that he didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him.  Elon certainly does.  A year or two ago he posted a cartoon showing him standing in the same place, but the leftists running so far to the extreme left that his unchanged position – which was once a little left of center – is now firmly on the right. 

A similar process happened for RFK Jr., Tulsi, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, and many more.

So I enjoy debating my lefty friends, even though I don’t expect that any of them will necessarily undergo the conversion that I did. 

But even if they only become more aware of and turned off by the extremists on the far left, they will be doing themselves and the nation some good.

Our country would be better off with a sane, center-left liberal party, and a much more marginalized and impotent far-left fringe (rather than the radicals who are steering the Democrats today). 

Such a centrist party could mitigate the damage done when the Dems next have power, and could even be cooperative partners with some conservatives on a small range of issues where we have some common ground. 

If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I see that happening anytime very soon.  But we’re cautious optimists around here, and I’m trying to keep that hope alive!

Hamas delenda est!

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