Tag: donald-trump

The Moral Confusions of the National Democrats (posted 6/5/24)

Today’s theme is moral inversion.

Not to be confused with cranial-rectal inversion, which is a common phenomenon on the left.  (See: “let’s defund the police so that crime will go down,” or “if a dude puts on a pair of ruby slippers and taps his heels together while saying, “I’m a girl,” he’s a girl.)

One example of moral inversion is the way national Democrats deal with the statute of limitations, which is the legal principle setting a time limit after a crime, during which charges must be brought.  It’s a reasonable rule, because as time goes by, evidence is lost, witnesses die and memories fade. 

Dems have provided several great examples of why a statute of limitations is necessary.  When the left wanted to stop Brett Kavanaugh from getting onto SCOTUS, activist/loon Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of raping her decades ago. 

Unfortunately for lovers of distorting the constitution, Ford was a little fuzzy on the details.  Details such as where it happened, and who else was there, and what town it was in, and what year it occurred. 

I’m not kidding.  She couldn’t remember the YEAR.  Which is all you needed to hear to know that she was full of (Adam) Schiff.  Because anyone who had any really bad experience in high school – never mind something as traumatic as being raped! – can tell you the year it happened. 

In fact, many people recall their teenage years mainly through the disasters: freshman year was when I broke my arm; sophomore year was when my folks got divorced and Beth broke up with me; junior year I totaled dad’s car and got chlamydia; senior year I voted for Bill Clinton.  Etc.

Of course, Kavanaugh wasn’t charged with a crime; the Dems were just trying to smear him to keep him off the court. 

But even though Ford turned out to be a lemon (ha!), the Dems were undeterred.  Last year the corrupt NY Dem party passed a law that temporarily got rid of the statue of limitations, specifically so that E. Jean Carrol ( I’m guessing that the “E” stands for either “eccentric” or “erratic”) – a fruitcake who makes Blasey Ford look almost high-functioning by comparison – could accuse Trump of sexually assaulting her almost 30 years ago.

Or maybe more than 30 years ago.  Because she too could not even pin down the year when the phony assault supposedly happened.  At one point she said that it was definitely a specific year in the 1990s because she remembers wearing a designer dress that came out that year.  Except that when someone looked it up, it turns out that the dress didn’t exist that year.  D’oh!

But never mind.  The Dems trashed the law, and got their false accusation turned into a civil conviction against Trump. 

And then last week, the Dems found a judge and DA so corrupt that they once again broke the law by charging Trump for mis-classifying business records – misdemeanors on which the statute ran out in 2019, if they had actually happened in the first place. 

But they zapped those dead charges back to life – much as they do with Joe Biden’s earthly remains before a public speech – and turned them into 34 transparently illegitimate felony convictions.

So the Dems are happy to trample the statute of limitations when it serves their purpose.  But how do they regard the statute when it can be useful to them?  As the most sacred of legal principles, of course.

Enter addict, dead-beat dad, and dead-brother’s-widow-jumper Hunter Biden.  Among his many apparent crimes are some serious actions of corruption and bribe-taking from foreign governments, most of which implicate his corrupt dad (and our current Cadaver-in-Chief).

Those crimes would be relatively easy to prove in court, partly because of the mountain of evidence against him, and partly because a jury would have to believe many patently unbelievable things to acquit him. 

Things such as that a shady Ukrainian energy company paid him $80K per month purely for his expertise in Ukrainian energy – even though he couldn’t find Ukraine on a map, and all he knows about energy is that snorting a bunch of cocaine off a hooker’s rump gives you A LOT of it.

“So Martin,” you are not asking, because you already know the answer, “when is Hunter’s devastating trial on those serious crimes going to start?  I thought he was only facing relatively paltry gun and tax evasion charges.”

You’re right, of course.  Because Merrick Garland – and say what you will about the Chinless Cartoon Turtle Mitch McConnell, but he kept that creep off SCOTUS! – Toobin-ed his way through the first three years of Biden’s term. 

And just when he got around to considering the slam-dunk case against Hunter, wouldn’t you know it?  That pesky statute of limitations had run out. 

To quote the mobster who whacked Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, reporting the news to DeNiro:  “That’s that.  And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” 

So when it’s one of their guys, they use the statute to evade the consequences of their crimes, and when it’s someone from the other side, they misuse the statute to convict on non-existent crimes.

THAT’s moral inversion.   

Media figures and “journalists” are especially skilled at moral inversion.  Stories about the rights of women and girls to be safe from disordered men using their showers and bathrooms are called stories about “trans rights.” Abortion is called “women’s health care.”  Jill Biden is called a “doctor.”

Another recent example – which also fits perfectly into my column category of “you don’t hate the media enough” – comes from Mannheim, where a cop was stabbed to death.  Two of the MSM headlines were as follows: “Officer dies after being repeatedly stabbed in attack at anti-Islam rally in Germany,” and “Officer Stabbed During Attack at Far-Right Rally Dies.”

Now if you had the miniscule IQ or the gullibility of an Ivy League grievance studies major – or of AOC, just to pick a random juicy booty (her words, not mine) out of a hat – you might jump to a conclusion.  You’d focus on the key words – Germany, Far-Right, anti-Islam rally, cop gets stabbed – and figure that the Germans were reverting to aggressive form, and menacing the adherents of the Religion of Peace™

But nope!  The stabber turned out to be a radical Muslim from Afghanistan.

UNEXPECTEDLY! 

Also, Yay, diversity!

Tragically, the deceased officer died largely because when some Germans jumped on the terrorist who had already stabbed people, the cop and others yanked the Germans off of the terrorist, to protect him. 

After which he turned on the cop – who was holding down an innocent German at the time – and fatally stabbed him in the back.     

Ugh. Rather than end on that dark note, I’ll give you one final example of moral inversion, along with an example of how to think clearly.

Before I left for Colorado, the Iranian president – a mass-murdering jihadi sadist named Ebrahim Raisi – died in a hilarious helicopter crash in the mountains, along with several of his weird-beard co-religionist co-conspirators. 

The guy was called “The Butcher of Tehran.”  And not because he cheerfully provided the kind of tomahawk pork chops and ribeye steaks which all good meat-eaters appreciate. 

So how did NBC describe him in the sub-head of their story on the crash?  As “a hard-line conservative cleric.”  Because of course they did.  Because they suck.

And how did the Biden administration respond?  By issuing a State Department statement offering its “official condolences” for the death. 

To see how a government official should actually respond to the much-deserved death of a smelly terrorist leader, I refer you to Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom our special forces – and military dogs! – raided and killed.

If you haven’t seen it before, you must watch Shane Gillis’ hilarious four-minute recounting of Trump’s epic, trash-talking speech that night.  The most famous line from it is that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog.”  But my favorite moment is one that Gillis highlights.

Trump acknowledged that Baghdadi likely had a suicide vest on, and talked about the way our special forces guys went in through a wall with a robot and military dogs.  “They used dogs… beautiful dogs.”

And then he mocked Baghdadi, praised our troops and our dogs, and then mocked Baghdadi some more.

THAT’s how you announce the death of a terrorist!   

On a related note, I can only hope that the IDF is deploying dogs in Rafah right now.

Beautiful, Jewish dogs.     

Hamas delenda est!

Our Colorado Trip, Trump’s Show Trial, and DeNiro’s Sad Decline (posted 6/3/24)

Let me start by saying that I’ll make this a three-column week, because I miss you all after having spent another week on the road, and not writing anything. 

We all had a great week in Colorado, and crammed a lot into it.  We set my daughter up in Boulder, and she was actually giddy about the natural beauty of the area, the much cooler temps and drier air, and the university, her roommates, and her mentoring professors. 

We left her there on Sunday, and then met up with my two cousins, and took a whirlwind tour of national parks and beautiful scenery.  We saw Pike’s Peak, the Great Sand Dunes, Royal Gorge, Canyon Lands, Mesa Verde and Arches.  We drove the Million Dollar Highway and saw the picturesque towns of Durango, Silverton, and Ouray. 

In Glenwood Springs we drank in the saloon beneath the room where Doc Holliday died, reportedly of TB, but possibly of Covid.  (He wasn’t vaccinated, and cute little guy Rachel Maddow tells me that that’s a death sentence.)

We didn’t have time to stop by Leadville.  Which was disappointing, because I was hoping to meet Kenny Koch’s brother Tim and his wife Vicki at their High Mountain Pies pizza place there.  Next time, I hope.

But I did get to see a cigar store Indian at one of the mountain towns we went through, which reminded me of Lizzie Warren, and that #wemustneverstopmockingher.

As I am on most vacations, I was pretty much cut off from the news, and in the day and a half I’ve been home, I’ve tried to get caught up. 

One odd thought occurred to me, as I skimmed through the coverage of the end of the Trump  show trial: in recent years I’ve often imagined going back in time and showing my younger self what has become of people I used to look up to and admire, especially those who have taken shockingly horrific turns in their lives.    

The all-time leader in that category is (of course) Bruce Jenner. 

If I could visit 14-year-old me in my small Illinois farm town in 1976 – as I sat in front of a Wheaties box with his picture on it, reading a Sports Illustrated account of his Olympic exploits – and try to explain “Caitlyn” Jenner today, I don’t know which one of us would be more discombobulated.

(Young Martin:  He cut off his WHAT?!  And he’s calling himself WHO?)

But last week, another former hero is giving Bruce a run for his money in the “how far have they fallen” derby: Robert DeNiro.

DeNiro has always been one of my favorite actors.  He was amazing in Godfather II, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.  He was in some great, iconic scenes: playing Russian roulette with Walken in The Deer Hunter; his slow burn as a small-time hood before shooting Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown; as Capone with the baseball bat in The Untouchables.  Even his under-rated comic turn with Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. 

I know that like so many other celebrities, he’s been an irrational lefty for a long time.  He’s engaged in obscenity-filled screeds about Trump at award ceremonies, and ranted ridiculous warnings about the hellscape that Trump would create if he ever becomes president. 

As if Trump was not the president in the recent past, during the least hell-scapey administration of the last 30 years.

But his disgraceful performance at the Trump trial is a further sad step on a downward spiral.  Jenner’s penectomy was less disgusting than DeNiro’s apparent lobotomy.  I can’t remember the last great movie he was in, or the last time he was great in a movie.  It’s all “Meet the Fockers” lately, and as the late Joe Biden used to say, “Not a joke.”

When I heard the news of Trump’s “conviction” on Thursday, it made me madder than I thought it would.  In view of all of the corruption and reversible errors during the trial, I thought that I’d been prepared for that verdict.

The case was ridiculous in the first place, and not moving it to a jurisdiction where you had some chance of finding a non-Trump-hating jury pool was a bad sign.  Then it came out that “Judge” Merchan’s daughter has raised millions for Dems, and he himself had donated three small amounts to Biden’s campaign and other leftist activist groups dedicated to stopping Trump. 

Then the trial starts, and the star witnesses are a porn star who admits she hates Trump, and will never pay the $500K a court has ordered her to pay him, and a convicted perjurer who admits to committing a much more serious robbery against Trump than Trump was charged with in this case.

The charges are misdemeanors on which the statute of limitations has run out, the predicate crime (necessary to allow revising the old misdemeanors) is not even named until the defense has closed (!), and Trump is not allowed to call a former head of the FEC who would testify that even the original misdemeanor charges are illegitimate because Trump didn’t violate campaign finance laws.

But I keep coming back to the judge.  I did a little research, and the guy earns over $200K per year and is worth an estimated $10 million, but when he decided to contribute to partisan leftist causes, he only ponied up a total of $35! 

The man sold out even the appearance of his professional objectivity for less than the price for one pair of the special shoes that Joe Biden has taken to wearing in an effort to keep him from face-planting every time he walks across the White House lawn! 

You can’t make this up.  Our opponents are cartoonishly corrupt, and I’m just praying that most voters are half as outraged by this travesty as I am.  Even though I was a DeSantis supporter, I have already been willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump in November.

Now you could put that glass into a moat full of napalm and rabid piranhas and set the whole mess on fire, and it wouldn’t keep me from the ballot box.  All I have to do is think about Biden, Bragg, Cohen, Stormy, “Judge Merchan” and the whole rotten lot of them, and my mind immediately goes to DeNiro’s Capone when he found out that Elliot Ness had captured one of his shipments of booze. 

I paraphrase his great rant, hand gestures and all:

“I want you to find these guys and I want them DEAD!  I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burnt to the GROUND!  I want to go there in the middle of the night and p*ss on their ashes!”

I know.  It’s a movie.  And I’m not actually advocating violence.

But I would like to see all of those little Fockers get what they’ve got coming to them.

Our New England Trip, plus Biden Agrees to Debate and Butker Kicks Butt at Graduation (posted 5/20/24)

I’m back from our trip to New England, and a good time was had by all.  We got to spend some time in Providence and Newport, RI, then in Cape Cod, and then in Amherst for my daughter’s graduation with a Master’s in Nursing.

The latter was a strange experience for an oldster like me, because she earned most of the degree online while working as a pediatric nurse in Denver, which doesn’t make sense to me.  (The last semester involved a practicum at another Denver hospital which has a relationship with U Mass.) So when we got to town on Thursday afternoon, we all saw the campus for the first time. 

We took some pics of my daughter and her husband in front of the College of Nursing building (which she’d never been in), and in front of other scenic spots on campus (which she’d never been to).

The next morning, as we arrived for the ceremony, I summoned up a fake tear and hugged my daughter, saying, “Where has the time gone?  It seems like just yesterday when we drove you to campus for the first time.”

Because I’m a dad, and we tell dad jokes.

I had hoped that while we were in Massachusetts we might run into Grandma Squanto Warren, so I could do the tomahawk chop and hop around in a circle in an extremely authentic rain dance that I’ve been working on, but no such luck.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)   

However, we did witness the next best thing, when the liberal white lady Dean of something or other started the graduation ceremony with a land acknowledgment.

If you’re lucky enough to not have experienced this leftist ritual, it’s when a very righteous liberal begins an event by paying lip service to the various indigenous people who once “owned” the land beneath the venue where the event is taking place.

It’s a quintessential lefty gesture, allowing them to stroke themselves and signal their virtue without actually doing anything substantive.  Because I’ve noticed that these “acknowledgements” never end with, “…and so, we’re hereby donating the campus, its multi-billion-dollar endowment, and my own personal mansion to the Hekawi tribe. 

“We hope this gesture makes up for the fact that our ancestors had smallpox and repeating rifles, while your ancestors were standing around with stone weapons and no immunity, like idiots.”      

This particular lady said, “We are gathered here today on land that has been taken from the Pequot, the Wampanoag, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.”  Or words to that effect.  I wasn’t paying very close attention after I realized what she was doing.

I must have had a certain look on my face though, because my wife put her hand on my knee and inflicted a five-fingernail death-grip that would have brought a lesser man to tears.  The look in her eyes said, “Don’t you dare boo, or make an arse of yourself.  Our in-laws are here.” 

So I leaned toward her, turned my head toward the big shot on stage, and so softly that only my wife could hear, said, “Boo!  Boo, you hypocritical white lady phony land-acknowledging beeyotch!  Boo!”

Because sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.  But I still need two functioning legs.

Anyway, it was a good trip, but it’s also good to be home.  And while I was gone, I missed most of the news.

Except that Joe Biden shocked me by offering to debate Trump twice.  I had been sure that he would never agree to a debate, on account of him presiding over an indefensibly terrible presidency, and also being deceased.

Pundits said that his taking the risky step – especially since Trump had given him an easy out by refusing to debate in the primaries – is a sign that the Biden team recognizes that he is losing.  Which sounds plausible.

But his embalmers were smart to insist on a set of conditions that will help him: debating on one of the corrupt, in-the-bag MSM outlets that will do everything they can to protect him; allowing no live audience who would cheer or laugh at Trump’s jokes, and gasp and flee when Biden trips over a sandbag or loses control of his bowels; keeping RFK Jr. out so that there will be no non-senile Democrat alternative on stage.

I think Trump had boxed himself into a corner by saying that he’d debate Biden anytime and anywhere, so he couldn’t then negotiate any conditions without looking hesitant.  But I hate to see us once again granting the ridiculously biased MSM control over yet another round of debates.  

But the thing I’m most annoyed by is letting Biden pick an unprecedentedly early debate in June, two months before the Dem convention. I’ve said it before: having Biden on the ticket is our best chance to win, and we need to do whatever we can to keep him there.  But if he does terribly in June, I expect the Dems to try to push him aside and sub in another candidate at their convention. 

My favorite political event of the week is the left’s outrage at Harrison Butker’s speech at Benedictine College’s graduation, because of what it tells us about them.

Over the last decade or more, the NFL’s top brass and woke media commentators have shown us that it takes a lot to make them mad.  NFL players can beat their girlfriends and be deadbeat fathers to children by baby-mamas all over the country, and the NFL can’t be bothered.  Mediocre, racist QBs like Kapernick can slander America, white folks and football fans, and he’s beloved on the left.

A sapphic soccer “star” can denigrate the country, straight folks and God – then play terribly and tear an ACL in a light breeze – and she’s still a media darling.  Obnoxious male narcissists can beat the tar out of female athletes and break female records, and the normally male-hating leftist establishment gushes over what brave “women” they are.

But Butker said a bunch of commonsense things – abortion is abortion, Pride Month is ridiculous, covid lockdowns were a mistake, DEI stinks – and a bunch of Catholic talk, at a Catholic school, to Catholics. 

And THAT is what finally made the left furious.

As a wise man once said, on his daughter’s first (and last) day at her alma mater, “Boo!  Boo, you hypocritical, phony beeyotches!  Boo!”

Hamas delenda est!

Tossing a Speaker (?) and Biden Warns Israel not to Hit… Israel? (posted 4/22/24)

Okay, I’m going to risk some of the goodwill I’ve hopefully got banked here at the CO site by discussing an issue that is toxic on our side right now, and that will likely make many of you mad.  But if you’ll hang with me through the first part of the column, I’ve got a few stories to celebrate, too.

(You’ve heard the old cliché “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”  Today’s column is going to be medicine first, and a little bit of sugar afterwards.)   

To the medicine: I think it would be politically suicidal to try to oust Mike Johnson from the Speakership right now.

No, he’s not conservative enough for me.  Neither is Kevin McCarthy, or roughly 97% of Republican office holders. Or Donald Trump, for that matter.

So I not only empathize with those amongst us who were dissatisfied with McCarthy, and now with Johnson – I am one of those!  But at the same time, many on our side don’t seem to recognize the most basic political reality: we have 51% of one house of congress, and the Dems have the White House and the Senate.

It’s especially aggravating to read conservatives on other sites blasting Johnson for not closing our border, or saying, “We need to secure our border before we do anything else!”

If we were living on a planet where Mike Johnson had the ability to close our border, and he sided with the Dems and refused to do it, I’d be with those conservatives: “He’s a traitor, and should be run out of town!”

But we do not live on that planet.  And Mike Johnson – or Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, or even the great and powerful CO – can do absolutely nothing to close our border right now.  If Johnson pushed a “close the border” bill through the House it would win by one vote.  Then the Senate would toss it aside the way they did with the Mayorkas impeachment. 

But hey, we’re optimists, right?  What if it turned out that Fetterman’s recent brain damage was caused by a virus, and half the Senate caught it, and their recovery was super-fast, so that half of them became marginally sane, and they passed the Johnson border bill?

Then the earthly remains of Joe Biden would veto it, and we would accomplish nothing.

Having said that, I’d still like Johnson to push and pass such a bill, purely to gain some justified political advantage.  In general, I think we should force the Dems to take every unpopular vote we can, and then bludgeon them with those votes in November. 

(Pass an “at least prohibit abortion in the last trimester” bill, and a “don’t allow warped Munchausen parents to sexually mutilate their sexually confused kids” bill, and a “don’t release serial murderers so they can immediately murder again” bill.  And force the Dems to vote for aborting babies half-way down the birth canal, castrating kids, and facilitating the murder of more Americans.)  

But let’s not pretend that Johnson is fumbling away a non-existent potential victory.   

The latest exaggerated Breitbart headline I saw said that by garnering Dem votes for the Ukraine bill (along with 185 GOP votes, which aren’t mentioned), Johnson “has allowed the Dems to seize congress.” (I’m not discussing the wisdom of the Ukraine bill here, which I think has only gray options, and is all Biden’s fault.)

Really?  If that’s true, then by that standard, Matt Gaetz and his small band collaborated with the Dems to oust McCarthy, despite nearly all Republican votes.  And if MTG and another tiny group decide to toss Johnson out, they’ll be siding with the Dems again. 

But forget all that emotional sturm und drang.  Just out of Machiavellian self-interest, it is incredibly stupid and self-destructive to overthrow your own speaker when you have no one better to take his place!

Not only will it cause a ballistic circle jerk of Republicans shooting at each other, it will also turn off the independents who are desperately looking for an alternative to the late Joe Biden, and will make a loss in November more likely.  (Then everybody who hated McCarthy and Johnson can happily settle in to the final six months before the election under Speaker Jeffries, and total Dem control of congress and the WH!)

So what should we do?  1. If any Republican is speaker when the dust clears, we must immediately get rid of the new rule that a tiny number of GOP pols can overthrow a speaker.  If you can’t get a majority of your party to agree that a speaker has to go, suck it up. 

The Dems would never cripple themselves with such a rule, which is part of the reason that – despite having the most idiotic and dysfunctional agenda since the Trojans tugged that big horse within their city walls – they’ve managed to push through their terrible legislation with very thin margins in the house, while the GOP’s much more rational legislation has languished.

Seriously.  At any given moment, at least several dozen House Dems are not just opposed to their party leadership’s agenda, they are certifiably bat guano crazy.  Hank Johnson thinks Guam is in danger of capsizing, Sheila Jackson Lee thinks that the moon is made of gas and the sun is “a very strong heat” on which human life would be difficult.  (Just think of how much sun screen you’d have to use every single day you were living on the sun, people!)  The squad is a bunch of mouth-breathing anti-Semites, and etc. and etc. 

And yet Imhotep Pelosi was able to either whip her stupidest colleagues into line, or else ignore and marginalize them.  Even though her brains were pulled out of her skull through her nose when she was first mummified several millenia ago, she would never have been stupid enough to give a group of 3-5 of her most volatile members the chance to scuttle her agenda any time they got their burkas in a bunch.

2. Win the WH and Senate in November!   

3. Win a large enough majority in the House so that you can let your camera-hogging marginal characters (I think MTG, Boebert and Gaetz – and sadly for me, Massie – are amongst those, but your mileage may vary) say and do what they want, without the power of the whip hand to paralyze all action in the House.

Okay, if any of you are still with me, and aren’t already typing your comments (“Dear Jackass, You are neither hilarious nor a genius!  Good day sir!”), let’s move on to other news.  (By the way, the last video I made – it’s called “Buckley and CS Lewis on this election” – touches on similar issues, i.e. a call for us to have grace with each other and our imperfect leaders as we head into this election season.  You can see it at my website – Martinsimpsonwriting.com – under “Videos.”)

One bit of very good news came on Friday, when the Trump campaign and the RNC unveiled a “massive election integrity program, involving more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys working in each battleground state, and overseeing voting and ballot handling and counting. 

Yes!  Many people have been begging for this sort of effort (I mentioned it in my March 8th column), and if it is as robust as it sounds, it might go a long way toward making up for the inexplicable decision to support Ronna Romney for at least two election cycles and 4 years too many!  My gut tells me that the single biggest threat to a Trump victory is the left possibly rigging the election and 2020-style ballot shenanigans, so this new effort is just what Dr. Simpson ordered.   

(Now if we can just get Trump to stop telling his base to NOT vote early or by mail!)

There’s even a bit of good news involving Joey Gaffes this week. He was feeling a little down because five times he had said, “Don’t!” as a stern warning for Iran not to attack Israel. 

Annnndddd… they attacked Israel with 320 drones and missiles. 

But he said, “Don’t!” one more time, this time directed at Israel, along with this admonishment: “Don’t move on Haifa.”  And to their great credit – and Biden’s relief – Israel took his advice and did not attack Haifa.

Which is… a city in Israel.  

(I think he might have meant “Rafah,” which is a terrorist-infested city in Gaza.  And which, come to think of it, sounds like the kind of burg that Biden would like to protect, since his ululating base voters in Dearborn MI are quite fond of those gang-raping jihadists in Rafah… and much less fond of the peace-loving Israelis in Haifa.)  

But hey, Biden called on the IDF not to hit their own cities, and they didn’t, and that’s the closest thing to a win Biden has had for a while.

Ooh, except that while his favorite uncle was definitely shot out of the sky and then eaten by cannibals, Joe has been unmolested by cannibals for all 124 years he’s been on this planet.

Rumors that the cannibals took one look at him and said, “Too stringy.  Plus that brain thing he’s got might be catching, like Mad Cow Disease,” have not been confirmed.  

Hamas delenda est!

I See Dumb People Everywhere, Including Judges and WH Officials (posted 4/8/24)

Once again I’ve got an embarrassment of riches in terms of stories about people who are too shameless or stupid – or both (a condition which I call “the Schumer gambit”) – to be embarrassed when they should be.  

Let’s start where we almost always could: in New York.  Where District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis (yes, his name can form two anagrams that somehow feel appropriate: “causal hiring oafs” and “fracas liaison ugh.”) is a notorious leftist in robes. 

Among his more prominent rulings were throwing out a non-racist firefighter exam because too many blacks and Hispanics failed it, and finding that DACA – a policy unilaterally created by hulking tough guy Janet Napolitano and later declared illegal by federal courts – is fine and dandy.

When I saw a headline about Garaufis saying, “Judge says FDNY firefighters booing Letitia James reveals systemic problem,” I was momentarily taken aback.  Could it be?  Could even a jerk like the oaf hirer admit that Letitia James’ biased and unprofessional performance as DA – which is more than deserving of lusty booing, if not thrown vegetables and a vigorous application of both tar and feathers – is evidence of a systemic problem?

Alas, no.  The systemic problem that Garaufis sees is that the firefighters booed a horrible boss that deserved to be booed… because…wait for it… racism! Of course.

We are facing a really serious dilemma in this country: what are we to do when a pathetically incompetent, biased, mean-spirited jackass gets into a powerful position and behaves terribly… and happens to be black?

Are we not allowed to point out that Kim Foxx has been a disaster in Chicago, or that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are the most self-destructive couple since Thelma and Louise went off that cliff in the convertible?   Or that former Harvard president Claudine Gay is a plagiarizing, anti-Semitic mediocrity.  Or that Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Reid are racist nut jobs?

I mean, we can openly say that all red-heads are mortified that Jen “circle back” Psaki is one of them, and that all women with allegedly juicy booties are embarrassed to be associated in any way with AOC, and that Indian tribes from coast to coast are proud that Liz Warren is NOT one of them (#wemustneverstopmockingher)? 

But we can’t point out that Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what either a woman or the first amendment is? 

C’mon, man!  That’s a bunch of malarkey.  Not a joke.  Anyway…

But what can we expect of corrupt and dimwitted DAs and judges, when the best and brightest around the White House come up with the ideas reported last week in a Breitbart story titled, “Dem Strategists Gripe WH Not Pushing Back on Biden Frailty Concerns.” 

The story – which I cannot stress enough that I am not making up – featured various Dem apparatchiks expressing ire that Biden’s handlers aren’t doing enough to “counter the narrative” that Biden is too frail to be president for four more years.

Um, guys?  He’s too frail to be president for the LAST four years!

Brad Bannon says that Biden’s minions should do “everything they can” to dispute what everyone with functioning eyes sees every day.  An unnamed weasel agrees.  “If you have a president who is being portrayed as old and frail, why wouldn’t you punch back and show him active?”

Is that a serious rhetorical question?  He’s not “being portrayed” as old and frail – he IS super old and frighteningly frail!  And there aren’t enough CGI effects in all of Hollywood to “show him active.” 

The anonymous dope went on, and again, I swear I am not making this quote up: “Don’t just show a hyped-up Biden during the SOTU.  Show how active he is every f—ing day of the week.”

He wasn’t “hyped up” during the SOTU; he was doped up, you moron.  And do you remember how he laid face-down on the stage after he fell over a sandbag, and before a secret service guy picked him up?  THAT IS how active he is every f—king day of the week!

But the article got even worse.  Bannon suggested that the campaign should show Biden “lifting weights” and “on the treadmill.”  (Did I mention that I am not making this up?)

The guy couldn’t lift a paper clip at this point, let alone a weight.   And seriously.  You think his people should film him walking on a treadmill, a device which is slightly inclined, and moving!

Have you seen him try to walk across a perfectly level lawn, which is lying there perfectly still?  They’ve got him wearing those ridiculous waffle-soled shoes that are as big as a tennis-racket-style snowshoe, and he still manages to look like a Wallenda trying to make it across a thin tightrope stretched over the yawning mouth of an active volcano! 

My favorite quote is from a fitness expert “who has studied fitness through a social justice context.”  (Good lord! I’m not even going to ask what that means.)  This genius finds it “curious” that Biden has not shared more about his “exercise regimen” and his “workout routine.”

Words fail me.  Anybody who has watched Biden for five minutes knows that the only cardio he gets is when they put those paddles on him and shock his heart into re-starting, three to five times each week. 

One professor they quote manages to almost, just barely, tangentially get a glimpse of reality.  “It does occur to me that… [the Biden team] must take care not to produce a Dukakis-like image that people will poke fun at.”

Really?  That thought occurred to you, did it? 

You mean an image like Biden taking one step onto a moving treadmill and immediately being fired backwards into a wall, whereupon he’d explode in a crackling of dry bones and dust, with a fluttering cloud of hairplugs settling slowly onto the dessicated remains of his beef-jerky-looking carcass?   

After that story, this next one – the latest in my well-received “Stupid Criminals” series, doesn’t really seem that stupid.  Which tells you a lot about the quality of both our presidential advisers and our criminals.  (And that’s a Venn diagram that has more than a little overlap.)

Anyway, Jonathan Gagen (31) – proud owner of two pending aggravated battery charges – went to a stranger’s home in southern Illinois and tried to break in.  The homeowner met Gagen at the door, showing the criminal his gun and making “numerous requests for Gagen to leave.”

But Gagen – rumors that he “has studied B&E through a social justice context” have not yet been confirmed – ignored commands not to enter.  Instead, he told the homeowner that he would “have to shoot me,” and then opened the storm door.

Whereupon the homeowner shot him.

Unexpectedly!

Medical help arrived in time to confirm that Gagen had shuffled off this mortal coil. 

Rumors that his last words were, “Ouch! In retrospect, telling that guy with the gun that he was gonna have to shoot me wasn’t a good decision.  But at least it wasn’t as stupid as saying that Biden’s staff should try to set up a photo op with him on a treadmill,” have not been confirmed.

Okay, I’ll have another mid-week column on Wednesday, because a whiny kid got expelled from Vandy in the most hilarious way possible, and that’s too good to not celebrate.

In the meantime…

Hamas delenda est!

Reasons to be Optimistic, + DeSantis Dunks on MSM Smear Attempts. Again. (posted 4/5/24)

Hey kids, let’s start today with a quiz.  Here’s a description of the social decay in a prominent big city: 

“This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit.  No one works; the streets are filthy; there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards. It hurts me to see how bad it has become. There is growing idleness and cowardice in the people and all of those base and criminal instincts…it seems are destroying [the country].”

Was that written about:

A. San Francisco

B. Chicago

C. New York City or

D. Washington D.C.

Many of you picked up on the reference to a capital, and might have chosen D.C.  Others may have noticed the slightly archaic language, and suspected a trick.

And despite the fact that I am usually the most reliable of narrators, the suspicious among you were right.  Even though the above quote could be aptly applied to any of our current sanctuary cesspits – er, cities – the passage was written by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1917.

He was describing St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), not too long before Lenin’s Bolsheviks launched their murderous revolution.  In the previous months, attacks on the social order had been encouraged and carried out by the party’s foot soldiers, and the deterioration of everyday life was accelerating. 

It’s a sobering red flag (no pun intended) when you read a withering account of a doomed country’s downhill slide right before a historic tragedy and think, “Hey, I recognize that place!  Which one of our major cities is it?”

Fortunately for us, we’ve got a chance this November to avoid the damage that befell Russia.  The vocal, far-left fringe – then as now – represents a small minority, without as much widespread support as our egregious MSM would have us think. 

And as a cautious optimist, I see plenty of encouraging signs for the country, despite the Petrograd-esque decay in the Dem-run cities.   

For example, it was only a couple of years ago that a wave of “defund the police” measures were enacted all over the country.  Democrat pols at every level staked their reputations on removing cops, and trumpeted the dawning of a new day, in which economic justice would reign and cities would thrive. 

Annnnnddddd… Petrograd, 2024!  Crime skyrocketed, businesses closed, no one was working, and there were piles of stinking rubbish in every courtyard.

Unexpectedly!

Now those Democrats’ faces are as red as Liz Warren imagines hers to be (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and nearly all jurisdictions who cut cops are scrambling to reverse course. 

Similarly, the drive to decriminalize hard drugs has created growing pushback.  When a decriminalization law was passed in deep-blue Oregon and went into effect in 2021, supporters smugly pointed to parallels to getting rid of prohibition, and confidently predicted the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, man!

Annnnddddd… Meth Mania, 2021!

How disastrous was that plan?  It took America 13 years to reverse prohibition, but the results of this law were so horrific that even the imbecilic socialist dullards of Oregon managed to wise up and reverse it in only 3 years! 

I am not making that up.  A Democrat governor in Oregon – yes, she is female and gay (lucky guess on your part!) – signed a law criminalizing drugs last month. With the support of spineless Democrat Portland beta-mayor Ted Wheeler. And a headline the next day admitted, “Oregon Forced to Recriminalize Drugs After Disastrous Decriminalization Experiment.”

If I live to be as old as Joe Biden (RIP), I would never expect to read the sequence of words in my previous paragraph.  It’s a Transgender Day of Visibility miracle!

Even in areas where Dems are stubbornly persisting in their terrible policies, public resistance is building, increasing the chances of a Trump victory in November. 

The attempts to force Americans to buy EVs is looking more unrealistic and unpopular every day.  The open border is now a nationwide disaster that can’t be hidden, and national Dems are sweating like a meretrix in church.  The term “Bidenomics” became such a punchline that it has disappeared from the media. 

The ghoulish and outrageous mania to push transgender policies, including mutilating surgeries on kids and allowing dudes to beat the crap out of women in various sports, has gotten as ugly as “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine joining the gals of the View for a group photo.  Many states and some sporting organizations have passed rules recognizing biological reality, and the first of what should be a flood of lawsuits have been filed against doctors on behalf of kids whom they sexually mutilated or injured.       

And then there’s John Fetterman. 

Before his stroke, he was the worst mayor of the worst-run small town in PA.  During his campaign, he was less mentally agile than AOC, and less articulate than Joe Biden.  But as he’s recovered, he’s started saying sane, true things almost half the time.  Which gets him over the very low bar of “best Democrat senator in the country.”  

In fact, while I’m in a happy, post-Easter mood, let me send you into the weekend with a story that combines two of my column’s regular categories: “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough” and “Celebration of Excellence.”

The latest chapter of this story is happening in the polar opposite of 1917 Petrograd: Florida.

My state has its problems, as every place does.  Our summers are brutally hot and humid, recent hurricanes are playing havoc with insurance prices, and we’re facing the kinds of challenges caused by success (rising prices, more crowding).  

But we’ve got a great governor who has been under sustained attack by the MSM since the day he took office.  They smeared him over covid, they lost their Schiff when he sent illegals to Martha’s Vineyard, and they mocked him when it looked like Disney had put one over on him.

But then it turned out that he was right about covid, and right about illegals.  And then he beat Disney like Caitlin Clark beat LSU.  (That’s right, folks: my first and last ever reference to women’s basketball.  But that game last week was actually great.)

So last week NBC took another shot, in an article that explained why everybody who thinks Florida is succeeding is wrong.  In a state with 23 million people, they found a handful of gripers who fit their narrative, and let them gripe.  And after mentioning that “hundreds of thousands” of people have moved here, they ominously noted that 500,000 left in 2022.

Which doesn’t sound good, until you notice that in another paragraph they mention in passing that more than 700,000 people moved in in 2022.  And while I’m no mathmetologist, it seems like 700K is larger than 500K.

NBC was roundly mocked for that story – commenters noted that “NBC News apparently has no idea how net migration works,” and even lefty election analyst Nate Silver said, “Sorry, but Florida is popular. 

But then the Palm Beach Post told NBC to hold their beer, and ran a column with the headline, “DeSantis blames undocumented immigrants for health care costs.  His report costs taxpayers more.”

The story told about the “online dashboard” that DeSantis created to collect and publicize the data about how much illegals cost Florida taxpayers, then reported that while the state spent $566 million on uncompensated health care for illegals, DeSantis spent $577 million on the dashboard!

Ooh, they had him now!  It’s an outrage!  How the hell does anybody spend half a billion dollars on an online dashboard??

Except that when the story ran, it took about 30 seconds for hundreds of readers to fact check it.  And it turned out that the online dashboard had cost $5K to set up, and that the entire budget request for the data collection (which included another state agency as well) was $567,882. 

Not $577 million.  $567 thousand. 

Which is considerably less than the $566 MILLION that Florida has been stuck with because of Biden’s flood of illegals.

Of course, when the paper and the reporter discovered their error, they apologized profusely and ran a Page-1 correction of their laughable mistake.

HA! I kid. 

They actually “stealth edited” the column to remove the accusation, without acknowledging their mistake, or the change.  Which gave DeSantis the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes justifiably pummeling them for their unprofessional and dishonest behavior.

Man, I hope we someday have the chance to have that guy as our president!

Seriously though, I hope somebody from the Trump campaign has seen the story about Florida’s online dashboard, and is working on a national version.  Several columns ago, I called for something like that, only to find out now that it already exists.

I could see a national “dashboard” displaying updated and transparent totals of all of the costs of Biden’s illegally opened border.  One category could be “crime,” with breakdowns of the numbers of car accidents, thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, etc. 

Another could break down the enormous costs by type: medical costs, food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, processing costs, costs to arrest, try and imprison, etc.

And then every time any Democrat complains about not having enough to spend on anything – infrastructure, social programs, increased pay for inert government workers, fresh burial wrappings for Imhotep Pelosi – we could call up the dashboard and say, “Well, if we hadn’t spent $65 billion on Biden’s illegals, maybe we could do some of that.  Oh wait, now it’s $66 billion.” 

If anybody knows any big shots in the GOP, please pass this along!

Hamas delenda est!

Dems Create a Bloodbath, a Racist Movie Bombs, Planet Fitness Implodes, & Tim Tebow Rules (posted 3/22/24)

We’ve got a full line-up of stories, so let’s start with a new category, with a hat tip to Red State for the title:

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough

One of the most despicable traits of our mainstream media is the bad faith way that they take a quote wildly out of context, and then pull their dresses over their heads and launch into a performance art piece of faux outrage. 

One example would be when Sarah Palin referred to “targeting” vulnerable Democrat candidates for House and Senate seats, and the MSM pretended to believe that she was soliciting hitmen to kill Dem candidates, or something.  

Maybe the most famous example was when Trump joked in a 2016 speech that maybe the Russians could find and turn over Hillary’s lost emails.  It is still hard to believe that the Democrats were mendacious enough to pretend that he was collaborating with the Russians, and to use that obviously humorous quip as the basis for a presidential impeachment!

They were at it again this week, this time pretending that when Trump used the word “bloodbath,” he wasn’t discussing dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.  Even though the quote came from the middle of a speech about… wait for it… the dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.

No, the Dems cried havoc, and let slip the whores of war. 

Wait, that’s not right.  I meant the dogs of war.  Or was it the dog-faced pony soldiers of the presstitues of the MSM?

Anyway, everyone from Imhotep Pelosi (Aiiii! The mummy walks among us!) to every Dem pol and media talking head in sight started ranting about how Trump was calling for a genocide, or something.

Of course multiple conservative web sites immediately cited Merriam Webster’s definition of “bloodbath,” one meaning of which is “a major economic disaster.”

(Like, for example, the dire ramifications of allowing Chicoms to attack our car market.)

And they also quickly produced a series of news clips featuring dozens of Democrats and MSM “journalists” (but I repeat myself) using the word in exactly the same way Trump did.

Ugh!  As this category suggests, whenever we think we might really hate the lying media, we must remember that we STILL don’t hate them enough.

But I’m not a hater.

A mocker and a sarcastic critic, sure.  Guilty as charged.  But I’m no hater.

Therefore, I’m going to give our leftist opposition a fantastic tip to make their “journalism” less pathetic:  If you’re going to insist that the word “bloodbath” be taken literally – which is incredibly stupid, but hey, you do you – then it must be used only when there is literally blood involved. 

Here are a couple of examples:

“Democrats defund police; bloodbaths ensue in major blue cities.”

“Democrats open our borders to hordes of foreign criminals; bloodbaths ensue.”

“Taxpayer money is used to fund Planned Parenthood abortuaries all over the country; it’s a bloodbath every day!”

You’re welcome, Democrats.  Now please re-think your life choices.

Today in Schadenfreude Corner, I’ve got a quick bit of movie news.

If you’re not a low-down whitey-hating racist – and I know that you aren’t – you probably missed the promotional push leading up to the opening last Friday of the movie, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”

And your mental health is better for it.  Unfortunately for me, part of my heroic role here at Cautious Optimism is to subject myself to various political assaults on the American project so that you don’t have to. 

I won’t lie though: I did not watch this movie.  But I did read two reviews, and then I watched the trailer. (On an unrelated note, if there are any opthalmologists in CO Nation, can you tell me how long the burning and blurred vision that comes after splashing bleach in one’s eyes usually lasts?  Asking for a friend.)

The premise is that white people are so maliciously racist that they are a constant threat to innocent black people, requiring blacks to condescend to their white fragility.  The mentor to the protagonist sets the table in the first minute of the trailer, when he asks his protégé, “What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”

Just as the kid starts to answer, “Sharks,” the mentor interrupts him with, “White people…when they feel uncomfortable.”

Get it?  It’s not a racist screed played ironically as a horror film, or an acerbic social critique. 

It’s a comedy!

(I’m reminded of an old Gilbert Gottfried routine in which he imagined the pitch meeting to persuade tv executives to greenlight “Hogan’s Heroes”: “It’s about a bunch of allied prisoners in a concentration camp during the holocaust.  And it’s a comedy!”)

So this insulting mess of a film opened in 1,146 theaters nationwide on March 15th… annnddd… it bombed!  It brought in a pathetic $1.3 million on its opening weekend, and that total included a huge drop from its first day to its second.    

Even more shockingly, it only got 31% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, even though the critics famously give virtue-signaling extra points for woke themes in movies.  Any film focusing on a transgender handi-capable person of color fighting the patriarchal forces of white, straight America is usually spotted 60% right off the bat (10 points for each of those checked boxes). 

So for even lefty critics to only give this mess 31% speaks to what a horrible abomination it is.  (For comparison, the critics gave Rob “Meathead” Reiner’s Christophobic “documentary” “God and Country” 88%!)    

To put it another way, if you added the earnings from the Meathead movie and this racist trash together, you wouldn’t even have enough cash to hire renowned Ukrainian energy expert Hunter Biden to lobby his dear departed daddy for one single month!  

Speaking of financially disastrous decision-making, I’ve got a new entry in the “Unexpectedly” category:

The Planet Fitness chain of gyms recently started coercing their employees and customers to cater to the desires of sexually confused “transgender” people. 

The business produced an operational manual that required employees to use “names, titles and pronouns” of strange sexual narcissists, and threatened to fire them if they wouldn’t do so. 

The manual also acknowledged that some customers might “feel uncomfortable” with people of the opposite sex sharing showers and bathrooms with them, but insisted that, “This discomfort is not a reason to deny access to a transgender member.” 

And just to demonstrate the company’s Orwellian bona fides, the manual said that this deranged coercion was meant “to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the Judgement Free character of Planet Fitness.”

Got that?  “Judgment Free.” 

But if a normal woman and her teenage daughter undress and head for the showers after a workout, and they notice some naked dude with heavy mascara and a beehive hairdo sitting in the locker room staring at them while he’s trying to make balloon animals with his phallus? 

If they object, you know that the “understanding” commissars at Planet Fitness are going to judge the hell out of them for being transphobic bigots!

Anyway, late last week the Planet Fitness manual hit social media.

Annnndddd… their stock price plummeted 8% immediately, shaving $400 million off the company’s value.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  (Also: more please.)

In Stupid Criminal news, I’ll take you to the big open space where our southern border used to be for the story of a guy who might be the dumbest criminal I’ve ever written about.  (And I’ve written about the Biden crime family!)

This charmer is a 22-year old Lebanese named Basel Bassel Ebbadi.  (He’s the terrorist so nice, they named him twice!) He was caught by the US Border Patrol in Texas on March 9th. 

And even though I’m wary of disclosing sensitive tactics involving our national security, I’m going to disclose one clever forensic technique our border agents used to trip up ol’ double-Basel:  They asked him – and this is a quote – “What are you doing in the US?”

And he said, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.”

(Rumors that he then slapped his forehead, said “D’oh!  I mean, I’m here to seek political asylum,” have not been confirmed.)

Further fiendishly ingenious questioning tricked Basel-squared into admitting that he had “trained with Hezbollah for seven years… and guarded weapons locations for another four years.”  And also that he planned to set off his bomb in New York City. 

So a Hezbollah terrorist came through our porous border with plans to blow up part of New York, and the only reason he was caught was that he was dumb enough to confess when he was asked one question.  (This guy is so dumb that he’s been called “the AOC of Jihadis.”) (By me, just now.)

And ABC and CBS did not even mention this story on their flagship morning and evening news shows on Sunday and Monday, while NBC did give it 45 seconds on Monday night.  (Remember: we don’t hate them enough!)

Let’s end with a new and inspiring example of the Celebration of Excellence.

Thirty-seven years ago, a married missionary couple serving in the Philippines were pregnant with their fifth child when the mother suffered a life-threatening infection that required strong drugs which threatened her pregnancy. Doctors advised her to abort the baby because he likely had birth defects because of her severe illness, but she chose to have the child.

That baby was Tim Tebow, who would grow up to become the greatest college football quarterback ever, in my unbiased opinion (Go Gators!), winning two national championships and a Heisman trophy. 

But as good of a player as he was (did I mention he went 4-0 against FSU?), he’s a better man.  He’s been a fine example of Christian faith, raising money for various charities, including the pediatric cancer center at our home-town hospital where my daughter got her first nursing job.

(“Hey Martin,” you might be asking, “was she nominated last week for a state-wide nursing award in Colorado?”  Yes she was, in fact.  Thanks for asking.)  

Ten years ago Tebow started a foundation that puts on an annual “Night to Shine,” a coordinated

series of world-wide “proms” for kids with Down Syndrome and a variety of other disabilities.  (Watch a few of their videos online if you don’t mind getting choked up.)

In the cynical and debased world we live in, it’s hard for me to watch even Tebow without wondering in the back of my mind whether he’s too good to be true and authentic.  But I was glad to see him speak in front of our congress earlier this month (I know: talk about “pearls before swine!”) in support of a bill to fund rescue teams to identify and rescue child sexual abuse victims.

I know that the government can screw up everything it touches, but this is a truly good cause, and I’m going to look into this bill, and I hope that it does what its sponsors want it to.

And I’m glad that his parents brought Tim Tebow into this world.             

Hamas delenda est!

Hur Wrecks Biden, Fani & a Subway Criminal Wreck Themselves, & I Celebrate My Anniversary (posted 3/18/24)

I’m tempted to open today with some comments on Hur’s testimony last week about Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.  And if I were to do so, I’d mention how many of the Democrats made complete fools out of themselves during the hearings, blatantly lying about what Hur said in his report… while he was sitting right there to refute them!

I might hypothetically call special attention to Pramila Jayapal (and not just because an anagram of her name is “liar pajama play,” because that is obvious to everyone) who read from a prepared stack of lies.  When she said that Hur’s “investigation resulted in a complete exoneration” of the late Joe Biden, Hur interrupted to contradict her. 

She immediately started talking over him, repeating that, “I’m going to continue with my questions.” (Of course, she wasn’t asking any questions.)  Irritated when Hur insisted on making his point, Jayapal repeated, “You exonerated him.”

And Hur corrected her, mid-lie, again: “I did not exonerate him.”

That’s when Jayapal gave the most obnoxious smirking glare and insisted, “Mr. Hur, it’s my time. Thank you.

If I were commenting on the hearing, I would have to momentarily return to a fixture of my past columns – the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI) – to note that normally Jayapal has a SFPI of 78 (in the middle of the “resting Hillary-face” zone), but during her pathetic “it’s my time” comment, her SFPI spiked to 94. 

Which equates, as regular readers may remember, to a situation in which even Mother Theresa would be unable to stop herself from instinctively slapping the dishonest smirk off her face.  

And I would probably – if I were to comment on the hearing – point out that my favorite part of Hur’s interviews was when Biden went off on a long, rambling tangent about his Corvette (I swear I am not making this up) and – in the words of an actual, official document of the United States – “made car noises.” 

But I’ve decided not to comment on those hearings.  Because we need to do everything we can to be sure that Biden remains on the ticket until election day.  So I think he’s doing a great job!

And by the way, I missed the Hur testimony, which I’m sure was not worth watching.  Instead, because it’s pollen season in north Florida, I washed our cars that afternoon. 

And you should have seen the strange look my wife gave me when she came out and caught me in the driver’s seat of her car, yanking the steering wheel back and forth and going, “Vroom!  Vroom!  Look at me, I’m the leader of the free world!”  

I will instead start my column with a few observations about the judge’s bizarre ruling in the Fani Willis case on Friday. 

The judge read his findings, pointing out the long list of damning facts proving that Willis and Nathan Wade broke every legal rule except coveting thy neighbor’s oxen… before explaining that if Wade left the case, Fani could remain!

Lots of people are already pointing out the logical inconsistency of finding that Willis and Wade both behaved unethically, but then ousting Wade and allowing Willis to stay.  (And by the way, where is the old-school, oppressive patriarchy when you need it?  Shouldn’t the system have condemned the adulteress and let the dimwitted man-wh*re stay on the case?  It’s almost like we don’t live under the yoke of misogynistic oppression after all.)

This decision fits a troubling pattern of bias, in which judges admit to finding clear evidence of guilt and misconduct – as when Comer basically said that Hillary was guilty in the illegal server and secret documents case, or when Hur found that Biden clearly stole and mishandled secret docs for decades – but still allows the leftist in question to escape consequences. 

But this might be one of those “God works in mysterious ways” situations.  Obviously, if the outcome had been that Willis got tossed out on her Fani and no other corrupt leftist prosecutors could have been found to take up the case, that would have been better.

But if the case is to go forward, the best-case scenario is that Fani stays in the seat (HA!), since she is so thoroughly discredited.  And judging from her terrible performance so far, I’m sure that she’ll be be-clowning herself even more.  She has already shown the emotional stability and maturity of a conceited junior-high girl, and that was BEFORE she got publicly and rightly humiliated for a solid month. 

There’s no one more angry and incapable of rational behavior than a mean girl who got pantsed in front of the whole school.  So her future mis-steps should provide plenty of entertainment.

In today’s Stupid Criminal Story, I give you the tragic tale of Dajuan Robinson, 36, who got onto the NYC subway last week with a bad attitude and a gun in his backpack.  (I don’t watch MSNBC, but I’m assuming that they’ve already reported that “Dajuan” is a very common name among White Christian nationalists.) 

Anyway, Dajuan goaded a 32-year-old man to fight, and then lunged at him, pushing him down and punching him several times.  When a woman on the train pulled out a knife and stabbed Dujuan twice in the back, he interrupted his attack to pull a gun from his backpack.  Then the other guy fought with him, got the gun away from him, and shot him with it.   

This is obviously a happy-ending story, but not just because a violent creep got shot with his own gun.  How about the average New Yorker who jumped in and stabbed the guy first?  Most observers in such situations usually either cower, or pull out their cell phones and narrate the action like low-IQ ghouls. 

Even better, a Brooklyn DA has said that the shooter won’t face charges!  I know: pick up your jaw and read that again.  A DA in Brooklyn said that somebody who defended himself against a violent perp won’t be prosecuted!  Now if someone can just tell that DA about the Daniel Penny case! 

In fact, the great Babylon Bee had a hilarious Penny story on 3/6, with the headline “With Daniel Penny Arrested, NYC Forced to Deploy National Guard to Protect Subway.”  The best lines in the story are faux-attributed to Governor Hochul: “We desperately need the Guard to come do exactly what we arrested Daniel Penny for doing.  Civilians have become too afraid to confront violence on the subway, for reasons we cannot determine.”

Unfortunately for Dajuan Robinson, that might be changing.

In other news, I’ve considered adding a few new categories to some of my future columns, one on stories about our horrific mainstream media (I’m thinking of a title phrase I saw on another conservative website: “No matter how much you think you hate the MSM, it’s not enough.”)

The other new category will be offering nominees for “Jackass of the Month.” And because I love you all, I’m going to write a short column on Wednesday with my first nominee for that award.

I know: I spoil you.  And you’re welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a self-indulgent choice for my latest “celebration of excellence” category.  And the subject for this one is… drumroll please…

Me!

Because 38 years ago I sold my motorcycle and my shirt, and moved to Florida to get a PhD in English.  A week later, I met a blonde smoke-show of a Norwegian goddess who was so out of my league it was ridiculous.  She was charming and witty and kind… and did I mention her incandescent hotness?  

I mean, I couldn’t even look directly at her.  I had to poke a hole in a shoebox and look at her through that, like an eclipse!

That night I went home and took a self-inventory. 

I look like I look (i.e. nothing to write home about), and my net worth was a used black Mazda GLC with no AC (in Florida!), a “Most Improved Player” high school football trophy, and a couple of particle-board bookcases full of cheap paperbacks.  Not only that, I was starting a degree that within 5 years’ time offered the possibility of earning well in excess of $18,000 a year!   

Sure, I had a razor-sharp wit and the strength of ten men (because my heart was pure), but most people were not overly impressed by that. 

I cannot describe the unlikeliness of me landing her!  “Drawing to an inside straight” doesn’t begin to touch it.  “Outkicking my coverage,” is inadequate.  Winning the lottery is closer.

As it happened, 30 years later Randy Newman wrote a lovely song that describes my situation perfectly.  It’s called “She Chose Me,” and you should go listen to it right now. 

It’s got strings and a piano and a French horn, and it starts with these lines: “I’m not much to talk to, and I know how I look/ What I know about life, comes out of a book/ But of all of the people, there are in the world/ She chose me.” 

And 35 years ago today, in the First Lutheran Church in Gainesville, FL, in perhaps the greatest feat of marrying-up in human history, I got Karen Ludwigsen to be my wife. 

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!

Also, as always, Hamas delenda est

The SOTU Speech, & What We Should Do Between Now & November (posted 3/8/24)

Well, there’s an hour and twenty minutes that I’ll never get back.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I popped in and out of the SOTU for maybe a total of 10 minutes, my rule being that as soon as my gag reflex threatened to kick in and offload some of the bourbon (mmmm, brownest of the brown liquors) that I had been consuming – as fragments I have shored against my ruin – I tuned out until the urge to purge receded.   

(That’s right, trenchant references to Lionel Hutz and T.S. Eliot in the same sentence!  Suck it, other columnists who dare not attempt such a rhetorical stretch!) 

While I’m tooting my own horn, I posted a column on Wednesday featuring my imagining of Joe Biden preparing for a speaking engagement.  If you haven’t seen it, scroll back to Wednesday afternoon’s posts, and give it a quick read.  I’ll wait….

I know: it wasn’t super-hard to predict, but did I nail it or what?  The confusion, the slurring, the physical stiffness.  The ridiculous shrinkflation issue.  And I knew he’d be screwing up names – I had him calling Rocky Balboa “Rocky Road” and the Cookie Monster the “Cake Moose” – but I didn’t get the square on the Biden Bingo card for “Lincoln Riley.”

(Which is pretty funny.  One Republican whips the Dems and frees their slaves 160 years ago, and he’s still living in their heads rent-free!)

If I missed anything, it was by under-estimating the amount of sustained anger Biden was capable of; I expected a few bursts of “get off my lawn,” quickly trailing off into Cocaine Mitch-esque short-duration catatonia. 

But whatever drug cocktail they’re giving Brandon to keep him upright for 81 consecutive minutes must be some strong stuff.  So good for him.

I mentioned several years ago that I’d prefer that we get rid of the SOTU entirely.  It’s always an insufferable cavalcade of imbecility and phoniness: a laundry list of your stuff (which is all great!) and the other party’s stuff (they’re wrong about everything!), followed by ridiculous promises that no one thinks that you’ll keep. 

And ooh, there’s a couple of guys/gals/children/oldsters in the crowd whom I’d like to use as political props!  I’ll point to them and ask them to stand up, unless they’re in a wheelchair or paralyzed as a result of one of the other party’s stupid and destructive policies.  Then I’ll scold the other side for paralyzing their sorry arses.

Bah! 

As in most things, we should handle the SOTU the way the Founders did: write your message in a short document – we’ve bought a new batch of muskets, we’re accepting bids to build a few federal buildings, there’s a boll weevil problem in Mississippi, but the sorghum crop is coming along nicely – hand it to a guy on a horse, and slap the horse’s rear end to send him off to carry it to be read in the House.

Beyond that, I didn’t find a lot worth commenting on.  Of course Biden lied and dissembled and argued in bad faith, as I think most people expected him to.  I don’t think that anything he said will be remembered for long, as much as his affect, which was 100% angry old man. 

In that sense, it reminded me a lot of his Reichstag speech in September of 2022, minus the ominous red lighting and the two Marines flanking him, wishing they didn’t have to be there.

I don’t know how that behavior is not a huge political mistake for Biden.  His poll numbers are bad, and his best asset is Trump’s high negatives among independents and moderates.  So he should be trying to go all kinder and friendlier, to draw the moderates to him.   To the extent that he attacks Trump, his tone should be more in sorrow than in anger.

Instead, he’s scolding the nation, calling everybody who has ever considered voting for Trump unpatriotic fascist deplorables.  And he’s shaking his bony fist and hollering like Grandpa Simpson.  “In my day, we got 20 hectares to the hogshead, and that was good enough for us!  Also, we really fixed the Kaiser’s wagon!  No joke!”

If I had the Trump team’s ear, I would say that in the wake of this speech, I think we should do 4 things:

1. Set up a website with a daily updated count of crimes committed and costs imposed by illegals.  (Make it like the debt clock that some pols used to put up, when they pretended that either they or we were troubled by our rising national debt.)  

Keep a tally of the total number of crimes, along with highlighting the worst of the worst.   Also give numbers on how much we’ve been spending on their schooling, healthcare, prison, welfare benefits, etc.

We’d have to handle it carefully, with many statements about “not all illegals” (aggravating as those are), because we alienate winnable voters if we attack all immigrants, or defuse the blame and take it off the open border policies that are causing all this chaos. 

2. Try to get Trump to take as low a profile as possible, and keep the spotlight on Biden and his policies.

3. Focus on get-out-the-vote efforts, and stop telling people to NOT vote by mail and/or early!  (Dammit!) The Dems are great at that, and they will be again, and if we don’t fight fire with fire, we are going to under-perform in November.

4. Start preparing for Biden’s replacement nominee, because I’m increasingly certain that he will not be the nominee in November.  His poll numbers are too low already, and they’ve got nowhere to go but stagnant or down.  And his physical and mental deterioration are too obvious to be hidden, even by the dedicated gaslighting asshats – or yes, asslighting gas hats – in the MSM and Democrat party. 

The national Dem coven – er, brain trust – can see this just as well as we can.  If you and I are getting more confident that if Trump can manage to even minimally control himself, he’ll win against Biden in November, the Dems know that too.

So they’re going to switch him out, most likely in the summer or at the convention in August. And when that happens, Trump instantly goes from being the younger guy with the lower negatives in the race to the old guy with the highest negatives. 

Therefore, our best course is to keep hitting not only Biden, but the entire far-left Democrat establishment and their terrible policies.  (“It’s not just Biden’s open border, it’s the Dems’ open border; it’s not just Bidenflation and Bidenomics, it’s the economic results of Dem policies.”)

That way, when the Dems swap Biden out, we won’t be totally wrong-footed.  We can just slam the desperate, unprecedented, flop-sweat-infused decision to switch candidates at the 11th hour – and also slam the racist and sexist Dem party for pushing Que Mala aside too! – and quickly pivot to targeting the entire Dem party:

“Changing the frontman for your horrific policies won’t make any difference in the outcome.  Ken Doll Newsom is just Biden with a pulse.”  Or “Big Mike Obama is just Biden with linebacker shoulders.” Or “Hillary Clinton is just Biden with cankles and a terminal case of Resting Beeyotch Face.”

Etc.    

There you have it.  Please print this column out, hand it to a mounted GOP party official, and tell him to get it to Mar-A-Lago, stat.  Then slap the rear end of his horse to get him started.

But first, look carefully to be sure that no Dem congresswomen are around.  Because if the horse’s flanks look too juicy (not my words)… that might not be a horse.     

Finally, in my Wednesday column I suggested a Secret Service code name for Biden (“Flat Line”), because I often amuse myself by thinking up code names for various administration figures. For example:

Que Mala: “Word Salad”

Jill Biden: “Juco”

Liz Warren: “Edgar Winter”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Janet Yellen: “Keebler”

Merrick Garland: “Bullet Dodged”

So as we move into the weekend, let me invite all of you in CO Nation to share your secret service code names for prominent Dems, or Republicans, for that matter.

Hamas delenda est!

We Must Keep Joe Biden in This Race! (posted 2/12/24)

Even though I am wildly popular here in CO Nation, I don’t write columns to be popular.  I’ve got to call balls and strikes as I see them.  And that’s why I must deliver this sure-to-be unpopular message:

I think the MSM is treating Biden way too harshly and unfairly.  As patriotic Americans, we’ve got to do everything we can to defend him from these spurious attacks, and support keeping him in office and running for re-election!

I know.  But hear me out. 

Yes, the guy was never more than a glad-handing mediocrity, a fumbling, bumbling low-IQ gaffe machine. And that was back when he was young and at the height of his powers, finishing at the low end of his law school class and plagiarizing his way right out of two presidential runs!

Sidebar: Can you imagine what would happen if you had the misfortune to hire one of the attorneys who finished BELOW Joe Biden in law school?!  Good lord!

You’d pick him out of the phone book, then make an appointment with him to represent you in your divorce.  Then you’d meet him at his office, which would be the smallest space in an aging mini-mall in an iffy neighborhood, sandwiched in between a pawn shop and a Tai Kwan Do studio with no Asian instructors.

And you’d explain to him that you’ve got a solid pre-nup and you caught your wife cheating on you, plus she’s got two DUI’s and an open warrant for a Failure to Appear in a meth distribution case out of Abilene, Texas. 

And the guy would smooth out his comb-over and say, “No problem, this is a slam dunk case.  I went to law school with Joe Biden, you know.”

And three months later you’d stomp back into his office wearing only a pair of mis-matched flip-flops and your oldest, threadbare boxers, holding a cardboard box of VHS tapes and a third-place bowling trophy from junior high.  And you’d drop the box on his desk and say, “You did finish higher in your law school class than Joe Biden, right?”  

And he’d say, “Why do you ask?”

And you’d say, “Because my cheating, alcoholic meth-dealer of an ex-wife got the house and the cars and my 401K and the clothes off my back.  And now I’ve got to pay her alimony and child support.  And we don’t even have any kids!!”

And, scene.

Where was I? 

Oh yeah.

Now Biden’s just a shell of his former shell of a self, and is manifestly unworthy of being president. 

So yes, it would technically be better if he stepped down today. 

Except that then, Que Mala would be the president.  And yes, we all just threw up in the back of our mouths a little.  Or possibly a lot.  And some of you are dry heaving over a waste basket right now, just because I brought up that possibility.

Sorry about that.  But it’s too late for a trigger warning, so let’s just move on.

Here’s the situation: the three people on earth most likely to be our next president are Willie Brown’s former side piece (underwater by something like 19 points on approve/disapprove), the late Joe Biden (underwater by around 17 points, and falling like Jeffrey Toobin’s pants on a Zoom call), and Donald Trump (underwater by around 12, which is roughly 3 points better than he was a couple of months ago). 

I desperately want Trump to win, and it’s looking way better for him against both Biden and Que Mala than it did in recent months.  (Please God, I don’t ask for much, but this one time… Our country needs this!)

But if anybody else is up for the Dems in November – DeSantis took Ken Doll Newsom apart at the joint, so the most likely stand-in now appears to be Big Mike Obama – Trump is going to be at a comparative disadvantage. 

As ridiculous as that is!  I’m not saying it makes sense at all, or that it’s right.  But that’s my honest take on the situation.  Trump is more underwater with the independents and the mushy middle of persuadables outside of the right-wing base – which are frustratingly ALWAYS the ones who decide presidential elections – than any pol other than Brandon and the Cackle Queen.

Have you ever seen two exhausted boxers in a late round, when the guy who’s losing starts wrapping his arms around the other boxer and holding on for dear life whenever they get close?  It’s a good strategy to run out the clock, especially when you can’t afford to go toe-to-toe with your opponent, because even a single, glancing punch is going to turn out your lights.

That’s what Trump should do with Biden, but for the opposite reason.  He should close up with him and then go into a clinch, so that he can hold Biden up and keep him upright until the final bell.

Don’t go after him 24/7 for the next nine months.  Don’t get in his face and challenge him to a debate.  (You already gave him an out for that by skipping the GOP debates anyway, but now that can actually work for you.) 

If you get on the same stage with him and start throwing rhetorical haymakers, he’s going to go down like Mike Tyson when Buster Douglas caught him with that flurry of jabs in the 10th round.  And then the Dems would discover (unexpectedly!) that’s Biden’s actually been dead for several years now, and sub in somebody with at least a 50/50 chance to beat you.

Fortunately for us, if Biden can retreat to his basement, the MSM will do everything they can to protect him.  The Dems believe that he can beat Trump (or at least they did), and their strategy to use sleazy lawfare to simultaneously help Trump get the GOP nomination and weaken him with the independents was probably their smartest course of action. 

I mean, if you accept that they have rejected their responsibility to behave as ethical and sane adults.  Which they have definitely done, for lo these many decades now.      

But now that they’re there, they just need to keep Biden away from microphones.  And cameras.  And any competent journalist who might somehow slip inside the White House cordon to yell a question at him when he’s concentrating on wobbling his way across the lawn without falling and shattering one of his bird-like hip or leg bones.  Or arm bones.  Or ribs.

The establishment and MSM have already been doing their level best to run cover for him.  And there’s no better sign of that than the DOJ’s kid-gloves decision to not go after him for his obviously illegitimate taking of classified documents and sprinkling them all over the eastern seaboard, from his beach house to his garage to his phony “Biden Center” at U Penn.

The investigation admitted that there’s plenty of evidence that Biden took docs he had no right to take… but basically says that they aren’t going to prosecute him because he’s mentally incompetent.

What?!

That’s what the lawyer for the guy who gets caught with the bodies of 5 murdered nurses half-buried in the dirt basement under his house argues!  “Sure, my guy went on a multi-state murder spree, but look at him.  The poor sap doesn’t know if he’s afoot or horseback.  You can’t convict him!”

But at the end of that story, his best-case scenario is for the authorities to put the mentally ill guy into a psych ward instead of a supermax prison. 

You know what the authorities DON’T do?  [begin Sam Kinison filter] THEY DON’T SEND HIM BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO LEAD THE FREE WORLD! OH! OHHHHHHH!  [end Kinison filter]

It’s even worse than that, because you know that Ben Hur was just feeling sorry for Biden, because he actually said, in his actual report, that Biden is “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

You don’t have to understand the Latin phrase “non compos mentis” to understand what Hur just said about Joe Biden.  Even my daughter and her friends, when she was in second grade, could understand what that meant: as they would say, he’s “cuckoo fried chicken!”

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations!  You never want to be in the position of explaining away the manifest flaws of a chief executive that way. “That’s just Joe.  He means well.”

If Ben Hur was a genteel Southerner, his report would be titled, “An Inquiry Into Joe Biden’s Handling of Classified Documents: Bless his heart.”

So kill him with kindness, Mr. Trump.

No, strike that!  Don’t kill him!  For the love of God, don’t kill him!

Treat him like he is a fragile porcelain mouse.  Compliment him. You probably can’t say, “The president is a formidable opponent,” with a straight face.  So go for something more believable, like, “I know that he’s doing the best he can to implement his policies.” 

Or, “I don’t think he’s lost a step since he took office.  He looks as healthy as ever to me, and even if something happened to him (unexpectedly!), Kamala is ready to step in and take over for him.  But that won’t be necessary, because Joe Biden is every bit as effective and on top of things as he was when he was Obama’s VP.  Even though he can’t remember when that was.  Or who Obama was.”

Whoo.  This is going to be tough, I know.  But cut those last two phrases.  Just discipline yourself, and stick to the compliments.

Please Mr. Trump, we need this!  You don’t need to go into attack mode, and you don’t need to get distracted.  Don’t say that E. Jean Carroll is a loony beeyatch.  (Even though she obiously is.) Or that the judges in all of your bogus trials are evil leftists, persecuting you for political reasons. (Ditto.)

Just hold some rallies, bask in the base’s love, and stay on friendly ground.  Talk for 5 minutes, saying things like, “How about that border crisis?” Or “Remember when gas was $2.15 a gallon?” Or, “Did you ever notice that Putin took Crimea under Obama and attacked Ukraine just a few years ago, but when I was president, Putin stayed on his chain?”

Then say, “Goodnight folks!  See you in November!”

So as painful as this may be for me to write…

Biden/Harris 2024!

Oh, and also…

Hamas delenda est!