Tag: family

My Class Reunion (posted 9/10/25, before the news of Charlie Kirk’s death broke)

I’m back home in Florida after my trip north.  As always, it was nice to get away for a while, and also nice to get back home.  The highlight of the trip was my first high school class reunion in 45 years, which took place on Friday evening, in Bloomington, Illinois. 

I got into town on Thursday evening, and had a late supper with a cousin who was working at a nearby power plant during September.  Afterwards, I watched the second half of the first NFL game of the season in my hotel room, before falling asleep.

The weather was a nice break from early September at home – cool and sunny – and I had a rare chance to spend an entire day on Friday, running around two familiar towns from my past – on my own, and with no particular agenda.   First I drove the 18 miles to El Paso, the town of around 2500 where I spent a decade from age 10 to 20.

Cruising into town, I found myself thinking about a moment in A Christmas Carol, though Dickens’ setting in a 19th century winter in England couldn’t be more different than a Midwestern farm town in late summer of 2025.  When the Ghost of Christmas Past transports Scrooge to his long-gone hometown, he looks around himself and says, “I was bred in this place.  I was a boy here!”

For the next couple of hours, I experienced the strange kind of disorientation that revisiting places from long past always produces.  Everything was familiar…but different, too.  Some buildings were smaller; some run-down, some remodeled.  The high school was the same, but the football field behind it was shrunken, somehow.  (I know.  It is still 100 yards, plus the end zones.  But it felt like a stadium when I played on that field.)

Our old house is the same, though painted a different color.  There are two new blocks of houses on the north side of town, in what had been cornfields in 1980.  I drove past several houses of old buddies, and they seemed closer than I remember, probably because the geography in my long-term memory was hard-wired for measuring distances on foot or by bicycle.

I recognized every detail of two houses of old girlfriends, both of which I could still walk or bike to with my eyes closed.  (“Remember it?” Scrooge says.  “I could walk it blindfold!”) Parked outside of both houses, I knew which windows had been each of theirs – both on second floors, a smart move for the dads of pretty, teenaged girls – and felt the jumbled, sensory echoes of old crushes, the indescribable longing no less strong for having been so ephemeral.

I remembered old cars I’d had – a rickety little Chevy Monza that I’d learned to drive a stick in, and a very cool ’72 Ford Gran Torino with a hood scoop and a blue racing stripe.  I remembered the clothes I’d worn – always Levis, usually flannel shirts, and later on, a letterman’s jacket – and the haircuts I’d had – all terrible! 

Driving toward the three-block downtown, I remembered music I’d listened to – with specific friends, or specific girls, or on specific trips:  Thin Lizzy and Foghat and the Beatles and Cheap Trick, and a dozen others. 

Most of the local class reunions are scheduled for early September, when the social event of the Midwestern year was going on: the Corn Festival.  New Orleans can have its Mardi Gras, Germany its Oktoberfest, and European capitals their Christkindlesmarkt, but for a teenage me in the late 1970s, the Corn Festival had everything!

Crooked ring-toss games, crooked shooting gallery games, a game where you could toss a ping pong ball into a tiny goldfish bowl and win a goldfish that would inevitably be dead in a week.  Rickety rides put together by alcoholic carnies with missing fingers and prison tats.  And all the best foods: sweet corn and fried chicken and cotton candy and ice cream cones (waffle or cake) and chocolate shakes.    

The guys who’d survived two-a-days and made the football team could wear their jerseys for the first time at the Corn Festival, and the cheerleaders wore their uniforms.  I reached a social status peak – driving the Torino, wearing my El Paso Comets jersey and walking through the Corn Festival with a cheerleader on my arm – that I never equaled until decades later, when I was tapped by the great and powerful CO as the Roving Correspondent.  (And before you can ask, yes: an orb, a scepter and a ceremonial sword were involved in that rite.)

Anyway, on Friday morning, the three blocks of Front Street were blocked off, and the Corn Festival rides were all in place.  The festival itself didn’t start until around suppertime, so I went to visit my favorite old haunt that didn’t involve either girls or sports: the Carnegie Library in Jefferson Park. 

Because I was raised in what was essentially the 19th century – before cell phones or the internet, when we had three tv channels, and they actually went off the air each night, after playing the national anthem – we could still have a park named after Jefferson and a library given to us by Carnegie without a mob of multiply-pierced freaks denouncing them as racists and robber barons, respectively.

The library was small but impressive, built of white stone, with round turrets flanking the front door.  To a 10-year-old me, it seemed like a classic European castle, and I spent many hours in there, preparing for my quixotic career as an English professor.  At some point in the intervening decades, a modern wing was built onto the old library, so I went straight through the new part to get to the old one, and found that I remembered the layout well.

I was surprised to find my old yearbook laid out on a heavy reading table!  Then I noticed that there were half a dozen other yearbooks, each from a year ending in “0” or “5,” because other classes were having their reunions in town this weekend, too.  So I looked through that yearbook, and felt another wave of renewed nostalgia. 

After lunch at a favorite pizza place in town, I drove back to Bloomington, home of Illinois State U, where I got my MA in the middle 80s, before God guided me to Florida, to meet my wife and produce my children, and become a Fightin’ Gator.  

I spent my afternoon visiting some familiar sites around town, and then walking through campus, which is greatly changed.   There are a lot of new dorms and academic buildings, and a lot of big hotels, but a several-block area of two-story brick buildings still remains, anchored around an old movie theatre that now appears to show mostly art movies and old movies. 

The reunion that evening was at a classmate’s house on one of the prettiest streets in an older part of town.  Around 20 people showed up, which wasn’t bad, considering that our graduating class had only had about 68 people in it.  Most had been to earlier reunions, so I’d missed out on seeing them then. 

Two of my best friends are in Texas now and couldn’t make it, but I got to see a bunch of other friends, and was pleasantly surprised that for the most part, the years seemed to drop away, and the conversations were easy.  I talked to a few classmates whom I hadn’t been particularly close to, but we found each other funny and easy to talk to.  I enjoyed the time I spent with them as much as I did the time I spent re-connecting to others I’d known better.

We spent almost four hours there, and the time went quickly. I found out a lot about everybody’s marriages, kids and grandkids, along with careers, successes and losses.  No one was obnoxious or overbearing, and a few who had been a little intense or manic in high school had mellowed, as one would hope.  The whole evening had a nice, Midwestern vibe, with no one putting on airs or getting into their cups and causing a scene.

A lot of pictures were taken, and when someone suggested that we take one of all of the bald guys, there was a lot of laughter, and no offense taken.  In fact, one of my female classmates happily joined in that picture; she’s a lovely person, who recently found out she had cancer, and the chemo’s effects earned her a place in the bald photo. 

In keeping with our stage of life, some discussion naturally turned to mortality and health issues.  One of my buddies had his arm in a sling after a recent shoulder surgery, and several had had cancer scares.  One of my best friends, now in Texas, had planned to come, but recently had part of a lung removed due to cancer, even though he’s never smoked. 

A few weeks ago, one of the reunion planners put together a list of classmates who have died, and I was surprised to see that it was 14 out of our original 68.  That seems like a lot, considering we are in our early 60s!  The individual stories run the gamut from the tragically predictable to the “there but for the grace of God go I” variety.

Two classmates went in car wrecks before we graduated high school, and a few from cancer between age 40 and 60.  Drug and alcohol problems have accounted for more, including a good female friend of mine who died of cirrhosis at 50.  One of the wilder guys in our class died in a shoot-out with police, and there was talk that it might have been “suicide by cop.”  Heart attacks have taken a few, and a handful have moved away; a few of those have shown up in obituaries, but with no mention of the cause of death. 

I talked to one classmate who wistfully described his marriage breaking up after his wife had lost a set of premature twins, and then “gone off the deep end” and eventually left him.  I talked to another who had been on the wild side in high school, but who now seems to radiate a kind of zen peacefulness.  It turns out he had a terrible heart attack two years ago, which has brought him to a deep faith that he was a little sheepish to tell me about.

He had just arrived at a work function when he went down, and everything lined up perfectly for him.  Two of the people there had CPR experience, and paramedics and a good hospital were nearby; his heart stopped three times, but they were able to resuscitate him each time, and his surgery went very well.  He’s savoring every day and feels like he’s playing with house money, and I loved hearing him tell that story.   (I’m trying to look at life the same way, and am happy to do so without an intervening heart attack to forcibly focus my mind!)

Most of the group have kids, and a lot have grandkids.  Most of them seem to have enjoyed their careers, and a little more than half have retired.  A few love their work, and have no plans to retire.  Experiences with family have been all over the map.  Almost half of the ones I talked with have divorced, but most of them seem content with their second spouses, or no spouse.  Kids have been a great source of joy for some, and the cause of a lot of pain for others.     

Overall, I really enjoyed reconnecting after so many years.  Everyone there talked about looking forward to getting together again in 5 years for our 50th, even though I think a lot of us probably shared one thought about that: how many of us might not be around for the next one?  Someone joked that we’re now in the sweet spot: retired (so we have more flexibility to come to a reunion) but not yet dead!

On one final personal note, we just found out that our youngest daughter is going to be heading off to England for at least the next year.  She had applied to several PhD programs this year, but with all of the university budget cut-backs recently, neither she nor any of her friends from Boulder’s competitive summer research program had gotten a slot.

But a former professor of hers pointed her to Exeter’s Master’s program, and she applied to study Physics with a focus on Astronomy.  She was accepted yesterday, so she’ll be leaving in a week.  My wife will fly over with her to get her squared away, and then we’ll both be looking for an excuse to go to England once or twice this year to visit her. 

Since I got back home I’ve caught up on some national news, and noticed that the Dems have continued to firmly grab onto the “10” side of several 90-10 issues.  So I’ll be back with another column on Friday to celebrate the salutary and mock the mock-worthy.         

Hamas delenda est!

More Uncle Bob Stories (posted 8/11/25)

After the positive reaction to my column on Friday about our family reunion and Uncle Bob’s exploits, I decided that I’d tell a few more Uncle Bob stories today, and be back on Wednesday to celebrate some of the happy conservative wins and schadenfreude-drenched tales of Dem losses from the last 10 days.  

So after the tractor fire two Thursdays ago and before our family reunion that Saturday, my cousin Darryll and I went out to Uncle Bob’s on Friday afternoon.  When we got there we first saw the burned tractor and the burned Miata.  The tractor was totaled, and the Miata’s passenger-side taillight assembly looked to be fine…but the rest of it was burnt right down to the frame. 

Other than the two roasted front tires, the tractor Bob saved had no other damage.

We found Uncle Bob sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a huge, old oak tree, with his daughter Lisa’s good dog Lola sitting in the grass beside him.  (Yes, I have a cousin named Lisa Simpson.  And I swear I’m not making this up: she married a guy named Bart.  Fortunately, we live in a patriarchal society where wives take their husbands’ last names, so they were spared the burden of going through life as Bart and Lisa Simpson.) 

After Darryll and I put some treats for the reunion in the fridge in Bob’s shelter, we sat down and talked with him for a while.

Bob had a .22 pistol on his lap.  Because of course a guy who just drove a burning tractor out of a burning barn would have a pistol close at hand.  Maybe the tractor fire had been arson.  You can’t be too careful.  (And better to have a gun and not need it…)

After he told us the story about Illinois Bob and the Burning Tractor of Doom – he made it sound more like a Three Stooges short, because he’s modest that way – we then went on to other subjects.

He’s a good storyteller in his old age, which is strange, because he was famously taciturn as a young man.  I mentioned before that he and my dad were “Irish twins” – dad having been born in January of 1938, and Bob that December – so they were in the same year in school.  I remember dad telling me that when one of their teachers read the class roster the first day of high school, her face went pale at the prospect of two more Simpson boys in her class at the same time.

Their two older brothers, Ray and Bill, had done some hell raising in town, so teachers were apparently braced for the worst.  (Ray ended up joining the Army and going to the Korean War, apparently as a result of some alcohol-involved incidents that resulted in a “go to jail or join the army” choice.  Afterwards he moved out to California, so I didn’t get to know him very well.  When I asked my grandma what Ray was like – I was around 9 or 10 at the time – she said that he was a pretty good boy, but “Ray like to tussle.”  Which I think is the most grandmotherly way to say that.) 

(Fortunately, when Ray did some tussling with some North Koreans and Chicoms, he lived to tell the tale…although he never did much talking about it, as I understand.)

But the teachers had nothing to fear from my dad and Bob, who were thick as thieves, but caused no real trouble.  They had polar opposite personalities.  Dad was an extreme extrovert, and Bob an introvert, and there was no better proof of that than their senior year school yearbook. 

Their pictures were right next to each other, of course.  Beside dad’s picture was so much writing it could barely fit: 4-year letterman in track, basketball and football; captain of the football and basketball teams; senior class president; homecoming king; voted “most popular.”    

Beside Uncle Bob’s picture?  “Bob Simpson.” 

Somehow the subject of high school came up when we were talking to Uncle Bob and petting Lola under his oak tree.  And he told the story of his final English class, during the spring of his senior year.  What follows is as close as I can remember to his exact words.

“I already had enough credits after December to graduate, so I didn’t want to be in school, let alone in that English class.  And our teacher told me that everybody in class was going to have to give an oral report on some story we’d read.  I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I had to.  I said I’ve barely talked in four years of school, and I wasn’t going to get up in front of class and talk about some story.”

Here he added, “Why would I want to talk about a weird story about some old sailor with a bird tied around his neck?”

Darryll looked at me, because I’m the English professor, and I said, “You mean, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?’”  (It’s a once-widely-anthologized Coleridge poem, an archetypal Romantic piece filled with the kind of symbolism perfectly designed to be unappealing to a 17-year-old Uncle Bob.)

“That’s it,” he said, and shook his head.  “After I said I wouldn’t do it, she sent me to the principal’s office.  I asked him why I couldn’t just take shop again, and he said, ‘You can’t take four years of shop!’” 

(By then Bob was already a decent carpenter, and he ended up becoming a union carpenter, after stints as a barber – he built his own barber shop – and the proprietor of a small take-out restaurant.   When everybody “started growing long hair like a bunch of freaks in the ‘70s,” he quit cutting hair and converted his barber shop to “Fish ‘n’ Chicks,” and ran that for about 8 years.  All while he was also doing some carpentry on the side, too.)

A compromise was finally reached.  Bob would have to write a book report on any story he wanted, and he wouldn’t have to read it in class.  “So I saw a movie about a story where a young couple buy each other gifts that they can’t use, and I wrote about that, so I could graduate.” 

I said, “The O’Henry story, ‘The Gift of the Magi?’”  (The husband owns a pocket watch but no chain, and the wife has beautiful hair but no comb.  So he sells the watch to buy her some combs, and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain.  When I got back to Florida, I looked it up, and found the movie Bob watched: “O’Henry’s Full House,” a 1952 anthology of five stories, which serendipitously offered him a path to graduation in the form of a way to write a book report without reading the book!)  

And Uncle Bob looked at me and said, “How many stupid stories do you know?”

And I said, “All of them.” 

Afterwards, when Darryll I were heading to a local golf course, I asked him why Bob had a pistol with him.  He said that there were some moles in his yard, and on days when the weather is good, he likes to sit in the yard and look for movement, and then fire controlled bursts of two or three shots into the ground.

It won’t surprise you to hear that Bob has worked on other handyman projects over the years.  When he was in his mid-60s, he built a duplex that he kept as a rental for about 10 years before selling it.  My dad and two other uncles on my grandma’s side pitched in during part of the framing; I was in Florida by then, but I remember hearing how 4 men in their 60s struggled to lift lam beams into place.   

Probably to the consternation of the same women who took a dim view of Uncle Bob driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn in his mid-80s! 

(By the way, if Bob had talked about building that duplex last week, I would have made a reference to J.D. Salinger’s novella “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.”  And Uncle Bob would have just shaken his head at me.) 

His latest projects have involved working on a series of mobile homes in Bradenton, Florida.  He started coming down for the winters about 15 years ago.  He bought a trailer that was okay, but needed some work done.  He worked on it for two winters, got it perfect, and then got itchy and sold it, buying another fixer-upper.

He’s now on his fourth trailer, and he had just finished working on it when Hurricane Debby came through last August, taking off the carport and damaging the roof.  My cousin Darryll has a trailer about two blocks away, and he and Bob’s son Bobby came down after the storm and tarped the roof and cleaned up the lot.   

(Darryll and Bobby are the two cousins I’ve taken the May trips with in recent years, starting with driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in Darryll’s 1976 Caddy El Dorado in 2021.  New CO members can read my journal of that trip at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Just scroll down the right side until you see “Route 66 Road Trip.”)

When Darryll came down in November, Bob and Aunt Lilly were already in Florida.  Darryll called him the night he got in, and said that he’d be over to help Bob with the roof the next day.  Does anybody want to guess where Darryll found him when he got to Bob’s trailer?

That’s right.  On the roof. 

Fun fact: Uncle Bob is 4 years older than Joe Biden.  And Bob’s still climbing ladders, while Biden hasn’t climbed a staircase without falling since late last century. 

I miss my dad every day, but I’m glad that Uncle Bob is still here, and that he’s already dodged the two leading causes of death for octogenarians: falling off a roof you’re working on, and driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn.

Am I saying that America needs a lot more men like my dad and Uncle Bob, and a lot fewer Gavin Newsoms and Beta O’Rourkes?

That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.

Hamas delenda est!

Family Reunion: Mom Did Well, and Uncle Bob Saved a Flaming Tractor (posted 8/8/25)

I’m happy to be back home in the free state of Florida, after my trip up to Illinois for the family reunion.  I just saw CO’s post celebrating over 33,500 followers on this site, and after everybody’s generous responses to my column about the struggles of my friend’s wife, my mom, and Cassie the Wonder Dog, this growing group feels like a huge family right now. 

As it happens, this is my 700th Cautious Optimism column, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to write every one of them.  Especially since number 700 will be less somber than number 699 was. 

Starting with the best news from the trip, mom had a really good time, and everybody was glad to see her.  My sister arrived with her around 2:00 on Saturday, which gave us a chance to drive her around town for a couple of hours before the reunion dinner started. 

The weather was great, sunny and in the 70s, and we first drove past the house mom grew up in on Post Street.  The current owners have let some over-grown bushes and trees obscure part of the building, but mom recognized it right away, pointing out the porch before we drove around to an angle that let us see it. 

At this point her Alzheimer’s is like a fog that descends on her and then lifts for a while, following no particular pattern.  We never know when the mists will dissipate or for how long, but seeing her face light up when she recognized the house made the trip worthwhile all by itself. 

From there we drove down Ottawa’s main street, through a quintessential Midwestern downtown, past the leafy town square featuring a fountain and a statue of Lincoln and Douglas, commemorating their debate there.  Mom recognized the square and the courthouse, but enough of the old buildings have received face lifts over the years that she didn’t recognize a lot more.

We drove to the cemetery beside the Illinois River where her parents are buried, and while she didn’t recognize the cemetery, she recognized their headstone.  We wondered how she might react, because for the last several months she has gone back and forth between remembering that they are dead, and thinking that she just talked to Grandma on the phone, and is supposed to meet her at the Post Street house. 

But the fog seemed to have lifted for most of the weekend, and she seemed undisturbed, and contented to visit their graves.  From there we drove by grandpa and grandma’s last house, a tiny place on the other side of the river that she didn’t recognize.  We drove her over to Marseilles, the town where she and dad had started their married lives, and where I spent the first 10 years of my life.

As we crossed the river and drove up Main Street, she recognized the downtown, and a few familiar sights.  One of the two houses we lived in has been extensively remodeled, and all of us had a hard time figuring out which one it was.  But she recognized their first marital home, on Fillebrowne Street. 

I don’t think mom remembers the story of how they bought that house anymore, but she and dad told us so many times that Rhonda and I will never forget it.  Mom was going to a baby shower for a friend of hers, and dad wanted to go to a garage sale on Fillebrowne.  But because they were broke and he was impulsive, she made him promise not to buy a mower, or tools, or anything.

And he didn’t.  He bought the house!  For $4500.  Then they had to go to see her dad, to ask him to borrow the $450 down payment.

Over the years, every time that house has come up in conversation, or whenever we’ve been back in town and seen it, mom and dad would tell us that story.  On Saturday, for the first time, mom didn’t repeat it.  But she recognized the house, and that was good enough for us.

We all met for dinner at a local restaurant.  Dad had been one of nine kids – five boys and four girls – and eight of them survived past childhood, which was not something to take for granted in their generation.  (Dad’s brother Donnie got sick and died before he turned two, and nobody is even sure what he died from.)  Three of the nine siblings in dad’s generation are still alive, and two of them were able to make it, along with their spouses.  We had 27 people there, including 8 of my cousins and their assorted kids, and the food and the conversations were great. 

Afterwards we went to my Uncle Bob’s homestead north of town, for more visiting and stories.  Bob’s got about 60 acres, some of it cornfield, but a lot of timber and a huge, shady yard with old oak trees.  He’s got a big, old barn and several smaller and newer ones, and he built a nice shelter between his house and the treeline years ago.  It has a fireplace, and enough tables to hold 35 to 40 people, and several of the attendees brought possessions that had belonged to their parents or our grandparents.

Everybody did a show-and-tell, and there was a lot of laughter, and some tears.  A lot of people brought pictures that most of us haven’t seen in years, if ever.  My cousin had an old trunk full of grandpa and grandma’s stuff.  There was a wooden high-chair that all 9 kids had used at one time or another, and an old, red onesie and a metal toy car of Donnie’s, which choked everybody up.  There was also a pair of his baby shoes, though there was some joking that, as poor as the Simpsons were, every boy and a few of the girls probably wore those shoes before they were handed down to Donnie.

Mom recognized everybody from her generation and most of the cousins, and she had a great time.  There were a lot of stories about dad and Uncle Bob, who were “Irish cousins,” and very close.  (Dad was born in January of 1938, and Bob in December of that same year.)  Mom soaked it all in, and was happy but tired by the time Rhonda and Jimmy took her back to their hotel. 

The fog descended on her again the next day.  A little while after they got back on the road for Tennessee, she became worried that they’d left dad behind in Ottawa.  Rhonda reminded her that he passed away ten years ago, but mom was certain that she’d seen him the night before, apparently thinking that dad had been there with the rest of the family at Uncle Bob’s.  To be fair to her, a lot of us felt that way.  

When they got home that evening, mom went to bed early, and by the next day she didn’t remember the trip at all.  But for that one night, she was in her old hometown and surrounded by family.  And when she wakes up from this life and the fog has lifted for good, she’ll remember it all.

One more story from the weekend.  I got up to Illinois on Thursday night, planning to pitch in with some preparations, including cleaning up and stocking the shelter for the reunion.  But as I was driving up on Thursday, Uncle Bob couldn’t wait for the kids to get there and help. So that morning he took one of his two tractors out and mowed the ginormous yard, before returning the tractor to the newer barn, and going back in the house.  

A little while later he smelled smoke, and ran out to the barn to find that the tractor that he’d put away hot was on fire.  He ran back to the house and told his wife to call the fire department, and then ran back to the barn.  The burning tractor was parked between his bigger tractor and their Miata; the Miata had a full tank of gas, and it was on fire, and the other tractor’s front tires were on fire.  And Bob is going to turn 87 in a few months.

So naturally, he ran into the barn and jumped onto the big tractor to try to drive it out of the barn and save it.  The metal he grabbed to get up into the seat was hot, and the seat was hot, and the gear shift was hot.  But it started up, and he drove it out of the barn – both front tires fully engulfed – and drove it into the closest grass that was still damp from dew, and drove in a serpentine pattern to put the tires out. 

His daughter and her husband had gotten there that morning from Minnesota, and she came out of the house to see her octogenarian dad come barreling out of a burning barn on a smoking tractor, twisting the steering wheel from side to side as he tried to extinguish the flaming front tires. 

THAT is an Ameri-CAN, people!

Afterwards, he felt a little shaky about what he had done, and his wife and daughter were mad at him for doing it.  But he got a lot of furtive fist-bumps from the Simpson men and cousins at the reunion.  And Saturday night, when all but six of us had gone home, and we were sitting around a fire under a clear night sky, my cousin Darryll told Uncle Bob that he was his hero, and that he hoped he’d be able to pull stupid stunts like that when he’s 86. 

Because: toxic (or at least reckless) masculinity.

I just wish that my uncle had a ring camera on the door of his house, because that video – possibly with a little Indiana Jones theme music as the soundtrack – would be great for a show-and-tell 20 years from now, with our kids and grandkids. 

Next week I’ll be back on the politics beat – there is so much great stuff going on! 

But tonight I’m just appreciating the afterglow from the trip.  Cassie is asleep beside my desk, where she’s been while I’ve written all 700 columns, except for the small number I’ve written when I was traveling.  And we’ve made some new memories with mom, and the rest of the family.

Thank you all for being part of CO Nation, and have a great weekend!

This Week I am Feeling the Bittersweet Brevity of Life (posted 7/30/25)

This is going to be an unusual column for me, because I’m in a more contemplative frame of mind.

As you’re reading this, I’m on the road heading up to Tennessee and then Illinois. I’ll stop over in TN and see my mom and sister – today is mom’s 87th birthday – and then continue on to Illinois, where we’re having a family reunion on Saturday. My sister and her husband are bringing mom up on Friday, and this will be her last trip back home.

Regular readers know that my mom has been struggling with Alzheimer’s, as her mother did before her. She lives with my sister and her husband, and they have risen to the occasion beautifully. Mom is still as sweet as can be, so her care is less challenging than it often is for people whose loved ones’ cognitive decline can be marked by belligerence and inappropriate behavior.

But it still takes its toll, and while I’ve been lucky to be able to go up there frequently and give my sis and her hubby the chance for week-long vacations on a fairly regular basis, Rhonda has still been doing the lion’s share of the work with mom. We’ve recently come to the point where we’re looking at some memory care nursing home options for her.

Rhonda took her for a visit to a very nice one close to her home, and was impressed with it. Mom talked with the people there and took a tour, and at the end, she said that she really liked it, and asked if she could stay there now! Which lifted some of the burden.

Of course, the next day she’d forgotten that she’d been there. On the bright side, when Rhonda showed her brochure from the place, mom thought it looked great, and agreed that she’d like to go see it.

Our fear is that when the moving day comes, if mom gets upset or cries when we take our leave, that’s going to be brutal.

We’ve read a lot about the importance of routine and familiar surroundings to ease an elderly person’s disorientation and anxiety, which has motivated us to keep her at home for as long as possible. A while ago we arranged for someone to come in and stay with her several days a week, and that has helped Rhonda.

But over the last six months or so, mom doesn’t recognize the house or her room as hers, and every evening has involved reassuring her that she’s at home. She’s had a harder time going down for the night because she doesn’t like being alone, even if Rhonda is only 70 feet away, in her own bedroom.

The memory care center has two nurses on duty 24/7, and we hope that mom will likely recognize her room there as well or better than she does her own room now.

The whole situation is fraught, of course, and this weekend will be a bittersweet one. We know it will be her last visit to her old home state and hometown, and the area where she and dad raised us. We hope that she’ll recognize all the family who will be gathered there, and her old church, and her parents’ graves in a pretty cemetery overlooking the Illinois River.

We’re pretty sure that she’ll recognize the two-story brick house she lived in on Post Street, and from where she moved away to begin her adult life when she married dad in 1958. Because she’s been obsessing about that house, convinced that her folks just sold it, and she needs to get back there and help them clean it out before the new owners arrive to move in.

In addition to mom’s decline, a few months ago I got some tragic news from a good friend of mine. He and I met in grad school 40 years ago, and we’ve been close friends ever since. My wife and I have vacationed with him and his wife over the years, and I’ve gone up to Maine to see him at least a couple of times per year for the last 15 years or so. He and I both know that we outkicked our coverage when we managed to land our amazing wives, and have been greatly blessed in our marriages.

In April, doctors discovered that his 50-something wife had a glioblastoma brain tumor, and although they performed a successful surgery and she’s been getting the best care, that kind of tumor is heartbreakingly aggressive, and she probably has around a year to live. We’ve been praying for both of them, and I’d ask that if you’re so inclined, you would do the same.

We husbands know that we usually die younger than our wives, and we are generally prepared for that, in no small part because we know that most of us would be fairly helpless without our wives. So it seems especially cruel when a younger wife gets news that upends her life and family so shockingly.

She has two kids and a husband who love her, and a church family who is surrounding and supporting her. But still, there are no words.

On a much less weighty note – but one that still involves grieving – my much-loved Cassie the Wonder Dog seems to have entered the last stretch of her life. Since the late winter she has been gradually losing steam. She’s got the heart of a lion, but it’s in the body of a 13-year-old Aussie shepherd.

I’ve always taken nightly walks with her for around a mile and a half, which involved going to the edge of the UF campus and through the law school; I tried to teach her to bark and lunge at lawyers, but she’s more well-mannered that I am, and has charity for everyone.

In the late fall I noticed that she was missing a step – just a momentary stumble – maybe half a dozen times during the walk.

Around four months ago, she started to sit in the street when we got a couple of blocks from our house, until I turned around and we headed for home. For a while she would only do the whole law school route 4 times a week, and now we’re down to maybe once.

We have a steep set of stairs in our house, and she started to struggle getting up them, stopping several times on the way up. A couple of days ago I carried her up them for the first time.

There’s nothing dramatic going wrong, and no sickness or injury. Just aging. She’s getting regular check-ups, and we’ve got her on food for older dogs, and we’re giving her a little helping getting into and out of the car. Her eyes are getting slightly milky; it’s easier to see in the brown one than in the blue one.

I know. A dog, even a world-class one like Cassie, is not the moral equivalent of a mother, or a wife. But we’ve had her since she was a year old or so. She delighted my kids when they were young teenagers, and she’s co-existed with my wife’s cats like a champ.

She made the weekly trip up and back to Tennessee with me throughout a tough autumn 10 years ago, when my dad was dying, and I think he was almost as glad to see her as he was to see me every time we got there.

She’s going to leave a little hole in our world when she’s gone.

In the meantime, I’m spoiling her more than usual, and spending as much time with mom as I can, and praying for and talking to my buddy and his wife as often as I can.

All of these gut punches from mortality lately have got me thinking about Shakespeare, even more than usual. Because: English prof.

Sonnet 73 has always been one of my favorites, and as with most of Shakespeare, it gets richer and deeper, the more life experience I get. The speaker is an old man, and uses metaphors of the parts of a day and the seasons of a year to describe his mortality.

The two opening couplets:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

That last line always kills me.

I’m in my 60s, but I was a young man just a few months ago. I was king of the world, broke and living in a tiny apartment, my sights set on landing my smoke-show wife. Dad was still alive, and mom was fully herself. My buddy and his wife were newlyweds with kids and life and love ahead of them. Cassie was still a glint in her great-great-grand-dog’s eye.

And now, life is still amazing, and beautiful. But I don’t have to look too far or too hard to see “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

The final couplet sums things up the way only a God-touched poet could:

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Yes!

And ouch.

I won’t have a column on Friday, and likely not on Monday either, while I’m the road, trying to savor the choirs before they become bare and ruin’d. I’ll be back with my usual goofiness and mockery next week, because so many good things are happening for our country, and our political opponents are making such entertaining fools of themselves.

And as jarringly dislocating as this is to say – considering what an elegiac column this has been – I look forward to getting back to it, and celebrating our victories in our national life, even as I’m simultaneously struggling with the impending losses of loved ones in my own.

But isn’t that our natural state? “In the midst of life, we are in death,” as the Book of Common Prayer says. (There is a great Gregorian chant on that theme, if you like that sort of thing, in Latin: “Media Vita in Morte Sumus.”) Despite the current storm clouds, I’ve got a Savior, and the hope of a life beyond this one.

Shakespeare knew it, and we’re all learning it: the sweetness of this life is heightened by the knowledge that it is fleeting.

So I’m going to make the most of this week, and I hope you will too.

Three Tales, About Three Stooges (posted 7/18/25)

I missed a WAPO op-ed last week. 

Actually, I think I’ve missed every WA-PO op-ed since late May of 1972.  Because that’s when I turned 10, and officially became too wise and world-weary to trust anything I read in the WAPO. 

But I saw this opinion piece, one week late, because it made its way into my news feed as a great example of MSM imbecility.  You may have seen it too.  It’s the one titled, “I’m a clown.  Donald Trump is not one of us.”

It appeared over the picture of a guy in a bowler hat and a red nose, and my first thoughts were: “I thought Ted Kennedy was dead,” and, “Where’d he get that bowler hat?”

But no, the piece wasn’t written by the late drunken weather balloon from Massachusetts.  Its author is an actual clown named Tim Cunningham, and the op-ed is one long, unfunny joke to the effect that we shouldn’t call Trump a clown, because being a clown is a noble profession, and should be taken way more seriously than a fascist like Trump. 

I’ll bet that Jeff Bezos is just thrilled with his management team’s efforts to restore the Washington Post’s credibility. 

But I’ve got news for Mr. Cunningham.  Trump is not a fascist, and clowns are mostly not funny. 

How un-funny are clowns?

Three of the most famous clowns in the world were John Wayne Gacy, Jerry Lewis in that Holocaust movie (look it up), and that super-creepy guy who lived in a sewer and had a disturbing affinity for frightening children.

No, not Joe Biden (RIP).  Although if you’ve seen any of those photos of him sniffing the hair of traumatized kids, that’s an image that will stay with you.  Also, he did that one trick where he pulled a bowel movement out of his hat.

The Pope was expecting a rabbit, and was not pleased.

Also, rumors that Biden once tried to make a very simple balloon animal, and the secret service had to intervene because he nearly strangled himself have not been confirmed.  

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the WAPO editorial meeting when they came up with the idea of asking a leftist clown – of all people! – what he thinks about politics.  Because who needs a Marxist Abbott and Costello when we already have the comic stylings of Crockett and the Booty in congress? 

(Yes, I know: that would be a great name for a wacky FM “Morning Zoo” DJ team.  And in a sane world, that would be the most prestigious job that Jasmine and AOC could aspire to.)  

Speaking of beclowning oneself, did you catch Grandma Squanto’s attempt to dunk on Trump on Wednesday?  She tried to play the corruption card against Trump.  (By the way, have you ever seen a Democrat pack of cards?  All four queens are scowling gender feminists, so naturally, all four kings are suicide kings.  And the Jacks can all turn into Jills, somehow.  And there are still four suits, but diamonds are “corruption,” hearts are “weird sex stuff,” clubs are “sexism,” and “racism” is….  I’m not saying.)    

You could say that Lizzie’s attempt at a card trick blew up in her own face, as if someone had rigged her peace pipe with an exploding charge, like a Dakota (Sioux) Daffy Duck.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

In an X post, she presented a chart listing six entities and how much they donated to the Trump library.  Above the chart she wrote, “Government should work for the people, not whichever giant company or foreign government can dump the most money into the president’s future library.”

Never mind that most of the billionaires who donated in 2020 gave to the Democrats, or that Cackling Que Mala was given $2 billion to blow (phrasing) in a few months. 

Just look at Lizzie’s six categories.

She doesn’t even bother to try in the last one; the “Who” is “other special interests” and the amount listed is “unknown millions.”  Which is brilliant!  “I accuse you of taking…some money, from…somebody.” 

But the other five are hilarious.  See if you can spot the pattern:

Paramount/CBS News gave $16 million.  Meta gave $22 million. Disney/ABC News gave $15 million. X gave $10 million.  And Qatar gave $400 million (Jet)

The Qatari jet was not given to Trump, but to the United States, and if the gift ever does happen, the jet will act as Air Force One, and then go to his library.  He will never have any private use of it at all. 

(I still don’t think that he should accept the jet, but it is not personally enriching corruption like – oh, I don’t know – [begin Kinison filter] HAVING YOUR HOOKER-BANGING ADDICT SON COLLECT BAGS OF CASH FROM THE CHI-COMS!  OHH!  OHHHHH!  [end Kinison filter])

The remaining four examples were not bribes, happily given by fat cats wanting to buy Trump’s favor.  They were ALL lawsuit settlements, grudgingly handed over to their hated nemesis by corrupt MSM power players who had slandered him so blatantly that they stood to lose many millions more if they had gone to court, where Trump would have beaten them like Cuddly Kilmar beat his wife. 

If I thought Elizabeth Warren was capable of feeling shame, I might say, “Boy, is her face red!”  (#wemustneverstop)  But I’ll just leave it at, “Nice forked tongue, Lizzie.  (#mockingher)

Finally, Scott Jennings continues to be the only reason to ever watch CNN, and as of Tuesday, he has run his record to 147-0 in his battles against hapless leftist panelists.  The latest contender was Democrat Strategerist Julie Roginsky, with an attempted assist from host Abby Phillip. 

The on-screen chyron defined the topic this way: “The Debate: US Inflation Rises as Trump’s Tariffs Push Up Prices.”  That subject should offer Ragin’ Roginsky a chance to score at least a few minor points.  I mean sure, when Biden took Trump’s 1.5% inflation rate up to 9% in 14 months, CNN probably called that “a barely noticeable bump,” whereas an increase of .2% from May to June under Trump gets WWIII-level headlines.

So how does Roginsky kick aside a chance for a tiny victory and grab hold of defeat with both bony hands?  When Jennings suggests that the current small increase is no reason for panic, she says, “When we were promised on August 15th last year that the price of eggs, the price of bacon, of apples—”

Obviously at this point she was going to say, “would be down.”  But once he heard “eggs,” Jennings jumped in, as one does when an opponent makes a mistake.  Because of all the things she could cite, she chose the one grocery item that was hyped in the news before the election and inauguration, and that everyone knows has dropped in price. 

So Jennings says, “The price of eggs are down.”

If that segment had been a fencing competition, a little buzzer would have sounded, and a ref would have announced a strike.  Or a stab.  Or whatever they call it when one fencer skewers the other’s thorax.  (Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the fencing analogy, since I obviously don’t know much about it.) 

But apparently Roginsky’s thorax is as numb as her skull, because she offered a meaningless rebuttal.  “Year over year, eggs are up 27%.” 

Jennings shook his head as if he didn’t think she’d really said that, and replied, “Since he took office, they’re down.”

And Roginsky insisted, “Year over year!” 

Think about that.  Roginsky thought that she could score a point by saying that since last July 15th, egg prices have gone up.  But since Joe Biden was still the president for six more months – during which egg prices nearly doubled – she surely couldn’t be dumb enough to claim that Trump was responsible for the increase in egg prices when he had no ability to influence egg prices, could she?

Don’t call her Shirley.  But you can certainly call her dumb.  Because that IS what she was claiming.  And Jennings’ response was the only sane one: since Trump took office and had the chance to influence egg prices, they’ve gone down.  

This is the kind of dispute that could be solved in 5 seconds by looking up egg prices, which reporter Joe Concha did (but CNN didn’t).  And it turns out that the national average price of eggs (according to TradingEconomics) when Trump took office was around $6.60 a dozen.  Because Biden needlessly killed 4 million chickens in his last days in office – and because dead chickens lay surprisingly few eggs, for you city slickers out there – the price climbed to a little over $8 in the first week of March.  Since then, it has plunged to $2.89 this week. 

So Jennings was right.  But Abby Phillip – noticing that Roginsky had suffered a serious thorax poke – put that weird fencing strainer thing on her face and rushed in to help her slow-witted friend.

To wit, “Let’s not fight over statistics here.”  Oh good, maybe Abby knows a chicken’s hind-end from a hole in the ground—  “She’s right, year over year, they’re up significantly.”

Good lord! 

Since a good thorax-piercing apparently cuts off blood flow to the brain, Roginsky stepped on the same rake again, in this quote which I could not make up, no matter how much bourbon I drank:

“Let’s be clear.  He promised three things: the price of eggs, bacon and apples were going to go down.  I can quote him, it was on August 15th of last year…. All of them are up.  They’re up year over year, and that’s a fact.” 

Yes it is.  An utterly irrelevant fact. 

As she pushed on and doubled down on the year-over-year thing, Jennings was finally exasperated enough to say, “You are literally lying—”

And then the tide of imbecility rose up all around the table, with several people saying, “Whoa!” and Abby jumped in again, unknowingly taking another skinny fencing sword in the soup-strainer mask: 

Abby:  Before you accuse her of lying, I literally just went over this.  She is correct that year over year—

Scott (speaking slowly and emphatically): Since Donald Trump took office, what’s happened to the eggs?

Abby: Oh my god, do you not understand—   

After more insane crosstalk that lasted for the longest minute of your life, Abby accused Jennings of derailing the conversation, and ended it this way: “I think people have the ability to understand the difference between the price of eggs today and the price of eggs a year ago today. Versus what you would prefer to talk about, which is the price of eggs when Donald Trump was inaugurated.  You’re just talking about two different time horizons.”

YES!  He “would prefer to talk about” the relevant time horizon, rather than one that holds Trump responsible for what Biden did as president.

Whatever else you can say about that segment, it’s clear that Jennings foiled them again.  (Boom!  Late, game-saving proper fencing reference.  Because I looked it up, and a fencing stick is called a “foil.”) 

Whatever CNN is paying Scott Jennings, it’s not enough.

And whatever they’re paying Julie Roginsky and Abby Phillip, it’s way too much.

So… 

Roginsky/Phillip, 2028!

Also,

Hamas delenda est!

Tennessee Trip, Israel Takes Iran Apart, + Book & Video Recommendations (posted 6/18/25)

I’m back from Tennessee, and still processing the trip. 

Heartbreakingly, mom didn’t recognize me three different times over the week, but only for about 10 minutes at a time, and the good moments outnumbered the bad.  I had to remind her literally a few hundred times that she lives there, and that I was visiting from Florida while my sis and her husband were in Memphis for a week.  “So you’re my babysitter,” she said, but without rancor.

She wears glasses on a cord around her neck, and has hearing aids.  When I took her to church on Sunday morning we were cutting it close on time, so I didn’t notice that she had neither her glasses nor hearing aids until she couldn’t hear the sermon very well, and also couldn’t follow along in her Bible.

“You’re not much of a babysitter, are you?” she said in the middle of the service.  And because her hearing aids were at home in the charger, she said it loudly.  We got a few looks.     

I’ve always been able to make mom laugh, and she’s never so much herself as when she’s laughing.  She’s always loved running jokes (I come by it naturally), and I got her with a stupid one dozens of times.  I’d ask, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” and she remembers that cliched old set-up well enough to roll her eyes and start to make some dumb reply, which I’d interrupt with, “Be-CAWS!” in my eerily accurate chicken voice.

Each time she’d get startled, then remember that I’d got her with that one many times before, and she’d laugh at the stupidity of the joke and my shamelessness in repeating it.  If being startled and then belly laughing could cure Alzheimer’s, I’d be up for a Nobel prize in medicine. 

We took day trips to small towns in the area each day. On Saturday we went to the small town of Pulaski, but arrived to find the downtown cordoned off and the place jammed with people celebrating Flag Day.  (Because: Tennessee!) 

But because it’s 2025, there was also a small group of protestors doing their “No Kings” thing.  There were maybe 30 of them, and you could tell that we weren’t in Seattle or LA: they skewed older and well-behaved, and their signs weren’t obscene, and they had American flags.  That could be because they know their audience in Tennessee – folks don’t take kindly to violent rioting by Mexican-flag-waving d-bags there – but I prefer to think it’s because they are well-meaning people who are exercising their free speech rights and protesting for a cause they believe in. 

Of course, I think it’s silly to believe that Trump is a fascist or would-be king on the verge of establishing his monarchy.  One subtle clue that that’s not the case: over a thousand groups protested in 50 states, and nobody was beheaded or pierced by crossbow bolts, and there was no drawing or quartering.  No one was even arrested or hassled, unless they were violent.   (In which case I would have rooted for a healthy bout of crossbowing.)   

Of course my sweet mom didn’t know what was going on, but when she saw all of those people holding flags and signs and waving, she waved back happily.  Which is one more poignant memory for me.  Mom was happy to encourage people waving American flags, and the protestors now feel like they’ve reached at least one supportive old lady – not knowing that she’s got Alzheimer’s and has no idea what ideas they are supporting. 

So God bless us, everyone, I guess.

Meanwhile in the larger world, Israel was making me very happy by dropping a whole series of kosher kabooms all over the Iranian nuke program and the top people involved in it! 

People didn’t think Israel could top the exploding pagers, then the exploding walkie-talkies, then the killing of various Sinwars and Nasrallahs (plus assorted Achmeds waiting for their chance to move up from triple A – and yes, the “A”s all stand for “a-hole”) with drones and missiles.

And Israel said, “Hold my Manischewitz and watch this.” 

I love every detail.  The Israelis built a drone base inside Iran, from which they launched drones to destroy a bunch of Iranian missiles and launchers.  They devised a ruse to keep a bunch of top Iranian generals in one place so that they could wipe them out with one missile.  (Sure, those guys buy their missiles wholesale and not retail, but there’s no sense in wasting them!) 

It’s a sign of the mullahs’ dysfunction that they steer young Iranian science nerds away from fields that would improve the world and the lives of the Iranian people, and toward developing Jew-killing nukes instead.  And since Friday night, Iran has become a much less nerdy place, inshallah. (That’s Islam talk for, “I regret all of my decisions.”)

I enjoyed the hilarious clip that CO (peace be upon him) posted of the Iranian Rachel Maddow, aka the gal reading the news when a “Hebrew Hello” hit very near the newsroom.  (She’s got more burka and sex appeal than Rachel, but less America-hatred.)  And though my Farsi is a little rusty, I think I’ve come up with a pretty accurate translation of what was said in that short video.

She starts out with the usual, “Death to America!  Death to Israel!  Trump is a fascist!  We like the cut of Gavin Newsom’s jib.  We will wipe out the evil pig-dogs with our swords of justice and—”  BAM!  WHAMMO! KAPOW!  (Yes, I did watch a little Batman when I was a kid, thanks for asking.)

The lights went out and came back on, and everything on camera shook for a few seconds.    

“Aaaiiiiieeeee!” she continued. “I’ve soiled my beekeeper outfit. Forget that pig-dog comment.  MAGA!  And also MIGA! (Make Israel [and Iran] Great Again)  I for one welcome our new Hebraic overlords!”

And, scene.

One other highlight was the pic of where an Israeli missile hit one specific apartment’s bedroom, killing a top Iranian general and the leaving the rest of the building remarkably undamaged.  Reports that his three mistresses staying in the apartment at the time – two of them goats – were also unharmed have not been confirmed.

Finally, I’ve got a quick book and a song recommendation.  The book is “The Promise,” by Robert Crais.  Crais has written over 20 detective novels featuring main characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and I thought I’d read them all.  But I had somehow missed The Promise (2015).  I especially liked a great sub-plot involving a military K-9 with a second career as a police dog in this one.  (As always, they had me at “K-9.”)

The video is for Oliver Anthony’s new country/blues song, “Scornful Woman.”  He released it two weeks ago, and I heard about it on Joe Rogan’s show right before I headed up to TN.  Anthony went from unknown to a famous singer/songwriter with his anti-politician song “Rich Men North of Richmond” less than two years ago.  His songs are always raw and personal, and now that his wife has filed for divorce, this one is 3 minutes of pain from a talented musician.

The video and song were recorded in a small house in West Virginia during a snowstorm in January, and the visuals are great: an old barn and three big dogs in the snow and in the house, and Anthony and two other musicians recording in make-shift conditions inside.  Interspersed video clips of firefighters battling a burning house echo the lyrics perfectly.

Anthony sings and plays a Dobro resonating guitar and drums, and he’s joined by two virtuosos, one on the violin – although in this context, it’s really a fiddle – and one on the electric guitar.  (“Hey Martin,” you might be asking, if you don’t have my vast musical expertise, “What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle?”  A violin has “strings,” whereas a fiddle has “strangs.”  You’re welcome.)

The song slides back and forth between grieving and furious, and Anthony’s delivery elevates his plain but evocative lyrics.  (When he rhymes “nightmare” with “right there,” both simple lines cut deep.)  And the two instrumental solos tear through the small house like the fire imagery does. 

The fiddle player goes first, somehow ripping a guitar solo out of a violin.  And when the guitarist closes things out, he wails on his instrument like it owes him money, and possibly slept with his best friend, too.  The final effect suggests three talented musicians who just went through horrific divorces and are dealing with it the way men do: by howling and breaking things.

The pivotal lines are a cri de coeur: “And the court said fifty-fifty, but the math don’t seem right, with a scornful woman.”

Whoo.  The song is great, and painful, and it makes me very grateful that I miraculously closed on my smoke show wife 36 years ago, and have never had to feel her scorn.

Hamas delenda est!

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!

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!

A Good Mother’s Day, and Other Assorted Good News (posted 5/12/25)

I hope you all had a great Mother’s Day!  We certainly did.  Because my wife’s birthday is the 10th, we had a combination birthday-Mother’s Day celebration for her on Saturday.  Her two brothers and their wives came over, and we all went to a large animal sanctuary a few miles north of town.

It’s called the Carson Springs Wildlife Conservation Foundation, and they really do things right.  They’ve got all the proper certifications and designations, and during our two-hour walking tour, we could see that they love those animals, and give them the kind of care they deserve.  Their living areas are spacious, with appropriately sturdy fencing in a natural setting.  (There are no concrete floors and jail-cell ambience here.)  They’ve got lots of big cats, plus hyenas, lemurs, and a lot more.

I know that many people can go and see lions, tigers and cheetahs and still go through life as atheists or agnostics.  But I don’t get it.  I can’t look at an adult male lion without thinking of C.S. Lewis’ Aslan, or Biblical lion imagery (the Lion of Judah, roaring like a lion, the boldness of a lion, even the adversary, “prowling around like a lion, seeking someone to devour”).

And the story of “Daniel in the Weasels’ Den” would work for no one.

On the other hand, I can see how a materialist could still appreciate these animals, just for their ingenious fitness for their environment.  The jaguar is so perfectly camouflaged.  The cheetah can go from 0-60 in 3 seconds, and he looks like it, even when he’s standing still. 

The hyenas aren’t as handsome, but are fascinating to watch.  Our tour guide pointed out that their back legs are shorter than their front legs, which allows them to sprint backwards while keeping their eyes and teeth facing a pursuer. 

In the SEC, we call that “a shutdown corner.”

Because: God and football, two essential parts of life. 

That night I caught the SNL monologue – only because one of my favorite actors Walton Goggins was the host – and saw his very touching tribute to his mom.  She was in the audience, and when he called her up on stage to dance with him, it was enough to make even a flinty stoic like myself get a little misty eyed.

(Goggins is in The White Lotus, which is too weird for me to watch.  But he was in Justified, which is arguably the best series this century: amazing actors; characters and writing from the great Elmore Leonard; and fantastic Kentucky-ness everywhere you look.)  

On Sunday I called my world-class mom.  Regular readers know that she is beset with Alzheimers, but is still soldiering on.  For the sake of new readers, I’ll re-tell the story that best sums up my mom.

She lives with my sister and her husband in Tennesee, and after she had a mild stroke two years ago, she was unsteady on her feet for a few days after she came home.  My sister told her that she was going to sleep in her bed with her the first night or two, so that she could help steady her if she had to get up in the night. 

When they had been in bed for about 15 minutes, mom rolled over and saw Rhonda there.  Seeing that mom was confused – in fact, she’d forgotten the mild stroke already – Rhonda said, “Remember?  I’m going to sleep with you tonight.”

Mom said, “Oh, okay.”  Then after a moment, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”  THAT’s a mom: 86 years old, and still taking care of the kids!

When I called her yesterday, she said she’s doing great, because that’s her standard response.  I thanked her for being a great mom most of the time – there is some controversy in the family as to whether she spoiled my sister too much 😊 – and she thanked me for being a great son all of the time.

Thus proving that her mind and memory are still strong!

Later this week, I’ll be going up to see her and my sister, on my way to Illinois and another traditional May trip with two of my cousins.   (New readers can go to “Road Trips” on my website and read about our trip on Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in a ’76 Caddy Eldorado several years back, followed by our “Lap the Lake” trip around Lake Michigan.)

(You can also see a 6-year-old picture of my mom and I there, in stylish headgear.  She’s the one in the birthday hat; I’m the one in the turkey chapeau.)  

This year we’re going to Harper’s Ferry, with stops along the way in Cleveland (for the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame), Pittsburgh, Gettysburg, Antietam and the Shenandoah National Park, along with anywhere else that we stumble across along the way.          

All of that being said, I don’t have time to comment on all the good things that have happened in the world over the last couple of days.  But ticking off even a short list should make us grateful. 

India and Pakistan seem to have pulled back from a nuclear war.  The Catholics have a new pope.  There are positive signs on the tariff front.  Letitia James is so panicked about the karmic arse-whipping she’s about to get that she has painted herself bronze and is trying to hide in plain sight on top of a pedestal in Times Square. 

Trump has intimidated Hamas into releasing their last American hostage. (Though if they don’t immediately release the rest of their hostages, I hope Israel descends on them like the Lion of Judah, if the Lion of Judah had exploding pagers and groin-seeking missiles and whatever other weapons it takes to wipe every Hamas terrorist off the map).  

By the way, you may remember that American hostage’s name from all the time the Dems spent wailing about his illegal captivit—

Oh no, wait.  They haven’t mentioned his name, because they’ve been too busy rending their garments over wife-beating, human-trafficking, gang-banging illegal thugs like Kil-Mar.

Speaking of which, Democrat politicians never fail to keep failing, as four of them did when they tried to illegally force their way into an ICE facility in New Jersey last Friday.  A Dem mayor got arrested, and more arrests are likely coming, as DHS reviews video of the incident.  Which was exactly like The Great Escape (1963), except that instead of brave POWs trying to break out of a Nazi camp, it was a clot of bumbling, deranged commies trying to release a bunch of violent thugs into America.   

Because: self-detonators gotta self-detonate!

Finally, I have to mention Maine high school teacher JoAnna St. Germain, who appears to be a miraculous agglomeration of the DNA of Jasmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Lil’ Davy Hogg, all rolled up in one.  

This “educator” took to Facebook to call on the Secret Service to “take out” the president and “every sycophant he has surrounded himself with.”  She later clarified that she’s “not talking about assassinating a president.”

But wait.  Didn’t she just— Oh, read the next sentence: “A president is a person duly elected by the American people.” 

Get it?  That thing in November wasn’t a legitimate election, because any election in which the Left doesn’t get what it wants is by definition illegitimate.  Thus, Trump is a fascist dictator, and should be murdered.

She seems nice.   

She’s got social media pics and posts that check ALL the boxes:

Crazy eyes?  (You betcha.)

Odd hair?  (Several variations, the most recent of which appears to be a shaved/very short ‘do.  If she is undergoing cancer treatment, I sincerely apologize for the mockery.  But… NOPE.)

Pics from protests featuring badly-made, hand-written signs?  (Oh yeah.)

Do those signs have way too many words, heading off in multiple, incoherent directions?  (Need you even ask?)

How about vulgarity?  (If a big “F” bomb counts, then yes.)

Any pics of the rainbow flag?  (Obviously.)

Does it have the big, ugly, triangular thing on it, indicating that just 5 or 6 made-up genders aren’t nearly wacky enough?  (That’s a bingo.)

The Secret Service confirmed that they are aware St. Germain’s creepy posts, but no charges have been filed against her yet.  On the bright side, she is probably now one of the leading Democrat candidates for 2028. 

And “Crockett/St. Germain” has a nice “JD-Vance-walking-in-accompanied-by-‘Hail to the Chief’” vibe to it, don’t you think?

Have a good week!  If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch Justified, and if you’ve got a little donation money lying around and want to support some of God’s creatures, Carson Springs is a 501-C-3 non-profit, and can be found at http://www.carsonspringswildlife.org.

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

Three More Candidates for Moron of the Month (posted 4/14/25)

By now you’ve all seen that CO has temporarily stepped back from the page for a few days, which I feel like puts a little more pressure on me to make you laugh on a Monday morning.  But much like Walter Clayton Jr. (from the national champion Florida Gators – have I mentioned that?), I’m a clutch player. 

So it’s Martacus’ time to shine! 

In my Friday column I introduced three candidates for “Moron of the Month,” and by popular acclaim, Jasmine “Fake Lashes” Crockett beat out the too aptly named Chase Strangio and drama queen Spartacus Booker to move on to represent the Eastern division in the next round.

Today we’ve got three more worthy competitors, this time from the Western division.  (Just like in the NCAA tournament, geographical names for the divisions are meaningless.)

First up we’ve got Elie Mystal, a public “intellectual” (and yes, those scare quotes are mandatory) with degrees from Harvard (because of course he has) who would be best known for his rabid America- and whitey-hatred, except for the fact that every African-American appearing on MSNBC is an unpatriotic, rabid whitey hater.

So he’s best known for his truly ridiculous, giant gray puff-ball of an Afro.  Which makes him look like he’s closing in on 70, when he’s actually only 46.  I have two theories about that:

1. He got so sick of all of the Fat Albert jokes that he dyed his hair gray to stop them.  (Though I’m not sure that, “Hey, hey, hey… it’s Old dumb Albert!” is a whole lot better.)

2. Just like soldiers who live through horrifying combat sometimes go prematurely gray, I think maybe morons who think too many horrifyingly stupid thoughts go through the same thing.   

Though he’s little known to the general public (because he writes for The Nation, and often appears on MSNBC), Mystal has been making a name for himself in moron circles for quite a while. 

He wrote an execrable book in 2022 called, “Allow me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.”  I planned to write a review of it called, “Allow me to Vomit: A White Guy’s Review of F.A. Mystal’s “A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.”  But I couldn’t make it through the first several pages. 

Earlier this month, he came out with his second book, “Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That are Ruining America.”  And it has single-handedly made a liar out of me, because I spent many years telling my students that there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Then I read the table of contents of Bad Law.  Consider the following chapter titles, along with the obvious answers to each:

Chapter 2: How Did Immigrants Become “Illegal?”  [By breaking our laws, you moron.]

Chapter 4: Why Do We Incarcerate So Many People? [Because they break our laws, you moron.]

Chapter 7: “Why Do We Give White Guys a License to Kill Black People?” [We don’t, you moron.]     

Chapter 9: “Why Can’t We Say Gay?” [We can, you moron.]

As you can already tell, Mystal has an IQ low enough to scare those nightmarish albino fish in the lightless depths of the Mariana Trench. (Latin name: “pescatorus LizWarrenus”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  

But he’s also got the second element of the one-two punch that so many elite leftists have: a narcissism as large as the great outdoors.

In an interview to promote Bad Law, he talked about how he is such a significant critic of the Trump administration that he’s had to hire security during his book tour, because he’s worried that Trump is going to have someone “snatch him up off the street.” 

(Make your own, “Watch out for a forklift with a presidential seal on it, Elie!” joke here.)

My favorite idiotic statement of his came on his appearance on The View.  I know.  And he might have been the dumbest one on the set that day.  Which…yikes!

When explaining why we shouldn’t abide by our immigration laws, he referred to how racist and awful America is (duh!), and said, “Every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional.”

Let that sink in for a minute.  The only way to declare any law unconstitutional is to examine it in the light of our founding legal document: the constitution.  Which Elie apparently thinks was written after 1965? 

To which I can only say: “Hey, hey, hey… it’s innumerate Albert!”    

Our second contestant is named Greisa Martinez Rosas, a leftist activist and executive director of United We Dream.  Her group participated in one of the high-profile “Hands Off” rallies on April 5th, protesting against Trump and Elon.  In fact, her rally was in Washington, DC.

She spoke on stage at the protest, and was brazen enough to give her full name and shout, “I am an immigrant.  I am undocumented, unafraid, queer and unashamed.”

I don’t know what “queer” has to do with it.  Or, for that matter, what “queer” means.  Is it just a synonym for “gay?”  But if so, why list the “Q” and the “G” in your alphabet list of identities?  And if not—

Never mind.  I don’t care.  I like women, and I don’t understand the rest of you, but good luck with all of that.  Or congratulations, or my condolences, or good for you, or get well soon, or whatever.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  For some reason, Griesa really needs for all of us to know that she’s illegal and unafraid. 

If she had admitted that when the late Joe Biden was still the president, or when Obama was, she would have had good reason for being unafraid.  Because those guys were busy circumventing the law (and making up new laws) to go after conservatives, and had no appetite for following our immigration laws.  

But there’s a new sheriff in town, and his sidekick is Hulk Homan™, and Griesa has made a big target of herself.  (That’s not a joke about her appearance.  Though if you put her in a line-up with the drug dealer/bowling ball illegal from a few weeks ago…)

So Griesa could have tried to fly under the radar, or maybe even gone underground.  But she decided the best thing to do was to go to the nation’s capital, clomp up onto a stage, and lean into a microphone to confess to being a criminal, in front of an audience of wildly cheering morons. 

Making her eligible for Moron of the Month.  And hopefully, a visit from ICE.

Rounding out the Western division nominees is Tania Fernandes Anderson.  Her campaign might be hurt by the fact that she’s unknown outside of the Boston area – she’s on the City Council there.  But don’t count her out, because she’s a five-tool player.  Or, to be more accurate, a five-tool tool.

Because she’s a BLM activist, a Democrat, a Muslim-American, a sanctuary city supporter, and a “former undocumented immigrant.” 

Okay, maybe the Muslim thing isn’t necessarily a problem.  And there are some decent Democrats.  But that still leaves the other three strikes, which are enough to call her out.  She’s the kind of sweetheart who recently slammed her fist on the podium and said, “What the f**k do I have to do in this council in order to get respect as a black woman?”

Not beating up city property and dropping F bombs would be a good start, Sweetie.

Anyway, Tania has just pled guilty in a federal corruption case, and won’t be bringing her special brand of wisdom to the Boston City Council anymore. 

It turns out that Tania couldn’t be expected to get by on her measly, taxpayer-provided salary of only $115K a year.  So she hired her sister and a son to staff positions before she’d even been sworn in – which is illegal – and then gave the sister a good salary and a $13K “bonus” from the taxpayers, and then took $7,000 of that back as a kickback.  When she was initially questioned about that, she denied that her sister was her sister.  She was also cited for failing to report almost $33K in campaign contributions, and exceeding legal state donation limits. 

By the way, two years ago she was demanding stronger protections for illegal immigrants and telling Boston to defy ICE.  Who could have guessed that a woman like that would turn out to be a criminal herself? 

Thus proving the old adage: It’s always the ones you most suspect.

When I read her story – in between fits of bitter laughter – I learned that she came here illegally, but that in 2019 “she became an American citizen.”  I’m not sure how that worked, but the good news is that her conviction may “threaten her immigration status.” 

Well let’s hope so!

In tough times like these, she would normally be able to turn to her husband, Tanzerious Anderson, for comfort.

I’m serious.  I’m not delirious.  Or trying to be mysterious.  His name’s “Tanzerious.”  (Don’t tell me that I couldn’t write poetry, if I put my mind to it.)

But Tanzerious won’t be able to help his criminal wife, because he’s currently in prison for murder.

Unexpectedly! 

So there are your choices, CO nation, and they are all worthy of your consideration.  Griesa and Tania both get points for brazenness, while Elie wisely kept a much lower profile, by only appearing on the little-watched MSNBC and the View.  And he has to get some points for that preposterous Afro.

But Griesa went to the shadow of the White House to confess her criminality. 

Then again, Tania gave me the chance to write “Tanzerious.”   

Happy Monday, and I await your verdict.

Hamas delenda est!