Tag: Fiction

Thoughts on Immigration, Part 3 (posted 4/9/25)

I’ll start today by thanking everybody for your feedback on my Monday column. I normally respond to all comments, but I’ve had a lot going on the last several days, including watching the fightin’ Gators winning the NCAA basketball national championship! 

And that game went just the way we drew it up.  Have your best scorer play his worst game? Check.  Score the fewest points you’ve scored in a very long time? Check.  Trail by 12 points pretty late?  Check.  Lead the game for right around one minute out of 40?  Check.

But space that minute out wisely.  Take 17 seconds of lead time in the first half…and then the last 45 seconds of the game!

Also, it didn’t hurt that we played defense like Hulk Homan™ holding Gandalf’s staff at the southern border.  (“You shall not pass!  Or score very often…”) 

UF opened our basketball stadium and showed the game live on the big screen.  The place was packed, and it’s only half a mile from our house, so you could practically feel the ground shaking when the game ended! 

Anyway, I did read your comments, and I appreciate them.

This is the third and final part of my series of columns about immigration.  In the first part, I went through the evolution of our immigration laws, and pointed out groups who were specifically excluded from immigrating, including the stupid, insane, sick, welfare recipients and criminals.

In the second part, I discussed the reasons why many Americans were once either browbeaten or shamed into not deporting illegals, and how the lefties’ tactics to achieve that goal are no longer working.  Today I’m closing with a simple analogy, and a little analysis of how immigration rules should apply to visa holders and would-be naturalized citizens. 

The analogy is that a nation is like a house. 

Okay, I know that’s not especially deep or brilliant.  It’s no “faith is like a mustard seed.”  Or even, “Life is like a box of chocolates.”  But I think it can still be useful.

Your house has clear boundaries around it, i.e. its walls.  If we consider the slightly more expansive concept of “your property,” your house even has a series of exterior borders, such as your yard.  Often that is marked by a fence, or a hedge, or the edge of a lawn.  Sometimes there is another liminal space — a porch, a stoop or a patio – where you are not within the house yet, but you’re farther from the purely public space outside the yard.

If you’re a well-raised person, you feel a bit of natural reluctance to enter someone’s property without a prior arrangement to do so.  You might walk up to a door and onto the porch and knock on the door…if you’re delivering a package or you’ve told the resident that you’d be dropping by. 

But if it’s a stranger’s house and they’re not expecting you, it’s uncomfortable to let yourself in through a gated fence, and more so to walk up onto the porch.  Most of us, after knocking, will instinctively step back to the edge of the porch and try to put a pleasant look on our faces, so that the inhabitants can take a reassuring look at us from a safe distance before they open the door.  Most of us will be more polite than usual in such a situation.

Since you have the right to decide who comes into your house, and under what circumstances, you don’t even have to open the door. 

And only a sociopathic squatter, if nobody comes to the door, will just let himself in and make himself at home!

And if he does – and if the house in question is in a red state or smaller town where people have their heads on straight – he might be greeted with a warning gunshot to the chest or head.  Or at least the mind-focusing sound of a shell being racked into a shotgun.

If said squatter was lucky enough to find no one at home, and especially if it’s a big house, he would be wise to find a good hiding place, if he wanted to stay in the house.  Maybe an attic, or a basement, or the garage. 

You see where I’m going with this.  Illegal immigrants are the squatters here, and traditional, old-fashioned illegals at least had the good sense to hide, and make themselves as unobtrusive as possible.  Hence the saying from the good old days of 20 years ago which described illegals as “living in the shadows.”  They would hide from the authorities, work under-the-table jobs, and try super-hard to not be noticed.  When that didn’t work, they had the good sense to try to run.

But, like beleaguered citizens in a sanctuary city run by morons, we’ve created a new type of illegals: the entitled type.  In our lawn we’ve put up one of those idiotic signs saying, “In this house, we believe no one is illegal.”  And on our porch we’ve put up an even more idiotic welcome mat saying, “Welcome, MS-13!”

And beside our door we put a thrice-idiotic big plastic pumpkin filled with cell phones, hundred-dollar-bills, EBT cards and voter registration forms, and above that pumpkin a sign saying, “FREE!  But we’re on the honor system, so just take one of each.” (Spoiler alert: each day the first sociopath to arrive takes them all.) 

And for four years our demented grandpa who was in charge of the house – let’s call him Brandon – left the front door wide open.  And he’s the one who put the pumpkin there, because in his diminished state, he thinks every day is Halloween.

So now the squatters don’t even bother to hide in the attic or garage.  They raid our fridge, eat on our sectional couch, order pay-per-view imam sermons, and take over the master bedroom for themselves.

Sure, there are still some “nice” squatters, with the good sense to hide out in the garage with a hot plate and try to fly under the radar.  If they’re caught, they might offer to take care of the yard, clean and do our laundry if we just let them stay.

It’s no coincidence that in our blue cities and states we’ve had an unprecedented epidemic of literal squatters.  In a healthy country, no one would have the cojones to try to forcibly take over someone’s house, because they’d expect to be forcibly removed and jailed quick, fast and in a hurry.

But in recent years, squatters figured out that if we won’t enforce our borders and our laws, why would we draw that line at our houses?   And they weren’t wrong.

Obviously, we shouldn’t allow illegals to stay here, any more than we’d allow squatters to stay in our house.  Yes, we should prioritize removing the brazen sociopaths in the master bedroom first, but the “nicer” ones in the garage will need to go too, as soon as we can get to them.

People legally here on visas are more like house guests or roommates.  Some of them are here temporarily – on a student or working visa that is the equivalent of a one- or two-year lease.  Others are in a potential rent-to-own situation, with a green card that allows them to live here while they’re going through a process that they hope will eventually allow them to become citizens. 

But in those cases – and I cannot stress this enough – the roommates must be on their very best behavior.  Pay your rent on time.  Abide by all house rules.  Don’t make us sorry that we allowed you to move in!

That’s what’s been so infuriating about the entitled little Ivy League Marxists and junior jihadis, and the elite leftists who support and defend them.  We give them the amazing gift of allowing them to come to the greatest country in the world, to study at what used to be top-flight universities, and they immediately start acting like horrible roommates and entitled brats.

Khalid Mahmoud and many like him seem to double-major in anti-Semitism and campus disruption.  Helyeh (more like “Hell no!” am I right?) Doutaghi gets a professor gig, and then spends most of her time slandering America and the West as fascist colonizers, and promoting the jihadist ideology of our nation’s enemies. 

And when we cancel their visas and move to deport them, the usual suspects wail about it.  “They haven’t committed any crimes!  They haven’t gotten due process!  This is a free speech issue!”

No, it isn’t.  It’s a spoiled, horrible piece-of-crap squatting roommate issue!

They’ve done the equivalent of moving into my house, drinking all of my bourbon, then falling asleep on my best recliner and urinating on it in their sleep.  Then they wake me up in the morning by blasting some horrific Palestinian rap music (Lil Scimitar and the Infidel Beheaders’ “Throw the Jew Down the Well”).  When I go to the kitchen to make breakfast, I discover that they’ve eaten all the eggs and thrown out all the bacon, because it’s “haram.”  

Then, just when I’m watching the Gators celebrating the national championship, and our 7’9” redshirt freshman cutting down the net without the use of a ladder (that’s a real thing that happened on Monday night), they switch the channel to a Syrian soccer game.   

When I look at them with murder in my eyes, they inform me that Cassie the Wonder Dog is going to have to go, because Muhammad says that dogs are unclean. 

And then their first rent check bounces.

They’re in our house, and they’ve got no right to be here.  They’ve abused our hospitality, and they need to be thrown out, both because they richly deserve it, and “pour encourager les autres.”      So we’re calling our neighborhood cop to come over and give them a taser-and-billy-club-assisted eviction. 

And our neighborhood cop is Hulk Homan.™

Hamas delenda est!

Three Leftists Make Fools of Themselves (posted 3/31/25)

Before I get started today, I want to let everyone know that I’ve made another short video – this one on the topic of our crazies vs Democrat crazies — which I’ve posted on my website (Martinsimpsonwriting.com).  You can find it under “Videos” at the top of the screen.

It’s a little different than the ones I made before, and it contains several added features: a small portrait of Cassie the Wonder Dog; a chance to see my scraggly poison ivy beard before I shave it off, and a very brief cameo from the late great Sam Kinison.  So check it out if you’re so inclined, and let me know what you think.

On to the usual political malarky. 

I’ve still got a column on immigration on tap, but I couldn’t miss the chance to mock a few of our leftist antagonists before posting that one… starting with the Good-Year Governor of my old home state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.

He gave a speech last week at the lefty thinktank Center for American Progress, in DC.  (He kept calling them “CAP,” and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who keep instinctively adding an understood “dunce” before the CAP.) 

He wants to waddle for president in 2028 – which would be easier for him if he wasn’t running Illinois into the ground – and his 20-minute speech and subsequent Q&A was an early step down that road.  I’d like to tell you that I watched the whole presentation, but even my prodigious will power is not inexhaustible.

But I watched most of it, and that was enough to conclude that he’s no worse than most national Democrats right now.  (You can find that description beside “damning with faint praise” in a dictionary of common sayings.)  He can speak in complete sentences, but only if they are filled with a combination of banalities and fashionable progressive lies.

He attacked Elon as a wealthy oligarch, apparently forgetting that he inherited his own billions from mommy and daddy, and used a portion of that wealth to buy a governor’s seat.  He also attacked Trump because he heartlessly withheld masks and ventilators which would have saved the lives of many people in the early days of covid, purely because Trump “[sees] people’s lives [as] a game.”

Which would have been a great point, if we didn’t already know that Trump didn’t do that, and that masks and ventilators didn’t save people’s lives any more than draconian Democrat lockdowns did.  Beyond that, Pritzker offers only glittering generalities, and dishonest insults of conservatives.

The presentation was billed as, “Pritzker Drops the Hammer on Trump and Musk for ‘Cruel and Incompetent Recklessness.’” I couldn’t help thinking that “Cruel and Incompetent Recklessness” would be a great campaign slogan for what the Dems have done to Chicago and Illinois over these last several decades. 

And I think Pritzker would do a lot better for himself if he tried dropping a fork and spoon for a change, instead of a hammer.

Speaking of dropping a hammer, I came across a social media post by Tim Miller – a former RINO and current weasel who writes for the never-Trumper site The Bulwark – which quickly resulted in him being hammered from all sides.

Miller captioned a link to Musk’s DOGE interview with Bret Baier, this way: “Prepare to be lectured to by a guy who has never pleased a woman.”

Which is doubly rich, considering that Musk has about 114 children (which presumably means that he’s pleasured at least a woman or two in time), and that Tim Miller is not exactly the kind of fella whose entry into a room results in a wave of panties automatically dropping.  And that’s before you take into account that Miller is gay. 

A more skeptical guy might ask how Miller even has the chutzpah to opine on what it takes to please a woman in the first place.  But not me.  Because I can easily imagine Miller walking toward a group of women, who all look at him and think, “Oh boy.  What’s it going to take to get rid of this creep?”

But then one of them whispers to the others, “That’s Tim Miller.  And he’s super gay.”

And just like that, all of the women in the group are pleased that he won’t be hitting on them.  So good job, Tim.  Because just by being gay, I’m sure that you’ve pleased way more than your share of women.

My favorite story of the last week was NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher testifying in front of a House committee.  Maher is a standard-issue AWFL, and exactly who you’d expect to be the CEO of NPR. Or PBS.  Or some crooked leftist NGO.

She had to face the worst situation a public official can endure: being questioned by competent people who have the facts at their disposal, when you have left an obvious paper trail proving that you are clearly guilty of everything they’re about to expose you on. 

Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t seem to have been sharp enough to realize any of that.  After posting endless tweets about her super-white New England upbringing, and how she’s woke enough to condemn her northern neighbors for their complicity in the slave trade centuries ago, I couldn’t help but think of another New England tradition: putting bad actors in a pillory in the town square. 

But this was even better.  Because it was like they locked her head and hands in place, and then GOP officials started paddling her, while the angry crowd threw rotten fruit and vegetables at her head.

Her testimony had it all, including ridiculous assertions, unconvincing confessions, and bald-faced lies.

When asked why she’d called Trump a “deranged racist sociopath,” she said that she regretted her words today.  I’ll bet she does, after November 6th!

Brandon Gill went to work on her, and it was beautiful to watch.  He asked whether she believes that “America believes in black plunder and white democracy,” which she had tweeted in reference to a book she loved called The Case for Reparations. 

Maher not only denied that she believed what she tweeted, she said she’d never read that book. Then Gill read her tweet, which said, “I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations.”

D’oh!

She also denied knowing of a book called “In Defense of Looting.”  Until…wait for it… Gill read the tweet she posting saying that she’d read that book.

When Gill asked her, “Do you think that white people should pay reparations?”

Finally, she gave a definitive answer.  “I have never said that, sir.”

And Gill brought the paddle down hard.  “Yes you did.  You said it in January 2020.  You tweeted, “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America.  Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt.  Yes, reparations.  Yes, on this day.”

Yikes.  That’s Harry-met-Sally level stuff.  Except that none of us will have what she’s having!

She finally fell back to repeatedly saying that, “My views have evolved since then.”  And eye rolling could be heard throughout DC.  

Especially when she denied that NPR is politically biased.  Which was followed immediately by Jim Jordan pointing out that in the DC area, editorial positions at NPR have 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans.  Ms. Maher was shocked – Shocked! – to hear that.

As much fun as it was to watch Maher getting hoist on her own petard, the larger issue is that NPR and PBS should obviously be defunded, for many reasons. 

First, even if it wasn’t obviously politically biased, there is no reason to force Americans to support government tv and radio channels.  There are tv channels for every interest under the sun, from cooking to travel to Korean soccer to fishing to game shows.  And PBS’s worthwhile shows – my wife watches Antiques Roadshow, and we both like Rick Steve’s travel stuff – would be snapped up and shown on regular, free-market channels. 

Second, they are obviously biased, and that’s doubly insulting in a country that is politically divided.

Third, it’s typical of the totalitarian streak on the left that they would expect us to pay for their propaganda.  Conservatives are glad that our right to own guns is in the constitution, but we’d never expect that American lefties should be forced to buy our guns for us.  And we appreciate conservative outlets like Fox and the Daily Wire, but we’d never expect American lefties to have to pay for those.

But it’s not enough for lefties to pretend that their right to abort their children is in the constitution – they’ve got to force us to pay for those procedures, which we find morally repugnant.  

Similarly, it’s not enough for lefties to demand their own tv and radio networks.  We must be forced to pay for the whispering androgynous soy people to spread their soporific propaganda on our dime.

Finally, the one refrain you hear constantly from advocates for NPR and PBS is that government money makes up such a small part of their funding that it’s barely worth talking about. 

I think it’s time to treat them like Katherine Maher, and call their bluff.  Because if the taxpayer “contribution” is so small, I’m sure they’ll never miss it.

Hamas delenda est!

Poison Ivy and Good Political News (posted 3/14/25)

Before I get into today’s helping of good news, I have to share a brief story, and only because it comes with a moral.

For the last 10 days, I have been enduring a bout of poison ivy that would kill a lesser man, and drive many men to madness.  I received this affliction because I tried to do a good thing for my community. 

Our little neighborhood has a small and charming pond in it, and a few weeks ago, our neighbors called for a community “clean the pond” day.  We would have happily joined in, except that they scheduled it on a Sunday morning, and I was in church on Sunday morning, repenting of my vicious mockery of Democrats that you have all witnessed many times here in CO-ville.  Along with many other sins which are not important now, so tend to the log in your own eye and mind your business.

Anyway, when the clean-up was over the neighbors had piled limbs and pond fronds and other debris around the pond, and I took several truckloads of that stuff to our local dump.

But because I like to go above and beyond, and because my wife bought me a chain saw for Christmas – after 35 years of marriage, that woman really gets me – I offered to cut down two dead crape myrtles that were leaning precariously over the pond.  And apparently, concealing some of the most virulent poison ivy known to man.

Before I realized what was happening, I had scratched both of my forearms, one side of my neck, one cheek, and a spot a few inches below one eye.  And then the blisters and the maddening itch came, and after 5 days of what turned out to be totally inadequate doses of steroids, I am now on a much stronger regimen.

The facial outbreak has kept me from shaving for a week, so I’m rocking a scraggly hobo beard that only partly distracts your eyes from the angry red blistering.  And my forearms are tough to look at.  They would easily win a “Worst Forearms in a Leper Colony” contest.  And that description still doesn’t do them justice.

The closest I can come is, if Maxine Waters’ melting face was a pair of forearms…

Yes.  Exactly.

I told you there was a moral to this story, and there is: Never do good deeds for your community.

HA!  I kid.  The real moral is one of the offshoot benefits of an optimistic outlook: Having something taken away for a time makes you appreciate it much more than you otherwise would.

Growing up without money can make you appreciate hard work and thus getting a little money.  Being lonely for a time can make you appreciate finding a good friend or good spouse.  Being bullied can make you stronger and more empathetic, and inclined to intervene when others are bullied. 

And being sick for a little while makes you appreciate good health in ways that you never would otherwise.

For example, I normally have a regularly passable face and two normal forearms, none of which I’ve given much thought to.  But in a few weeks, when this hideous cup of disfiguring hives and scrofula has passed from me, I’m going to look in the mirror and wink at my suddenly handsome self, and then go out in public and look for an excuse to point to things in front of other people, just to show off my pristine forearms.    

Okay, now on to good political news: the Democrats are continuing to shoot themselves in the feet in various and sundry ways. 

For example, for a day or two, a succession of MSM talking heads tried to argue that Trump was hiding from or avoiding the press because he didn’t want to take questions about the stock market downturn.

Exhibit A was CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, who I find intriguing, mostly because of an odd, chameleon-like quality she has.  From some angles, she looks like an attractive woman, but then the camera moves slightly, and she’s got a mannish transgender thing going on. 

On Tuesday, she did a snarky little segment about Trump “keeping the press away.”  Which was ridiculous, as many commenters immediately pointed out, by way of giving the numbers of press questions answered in their first month in office by Obama and Biden (a little over 100 questions each), as compared to Trump’s… wait for it… 1006!

Then, within 30 minutes of her criticizing Trump for avoiding media, he took questions from the media for 30 minutes!  D’oh!

Speaking of biased media figures, there are a lot less of them still employed lately.  A partial list of the resigned or fired includes Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Norah O’Donnell, Chuck Todd, Jonathan Capehart, Lester Holt, Chris Wallace and Andrea Mitchell.  In addition, the inaccurately biased polling outfit 538 has been shut down, and the entire NYT editorial board is out. 

Which reminds me of the old joke, “What do you call 1000 Hezbollah terrorists getting blown up by pagers?”  Answer: “A start!”

In a story I missed the other day, Rosie O’Donnell has deported herself to Ireland.  Which is great news for us, but a tough break for the Irish.  First the potato famine, then the Troubles, and now this!

Other Europeans are also coming to some well-deserved grief.  Recent stories came out that would shame many virtue-signaling Ukraine supporters, if they were capable of feeling shame.  Polls of 7 nations show that they all strongly think that Ukraine should receive more support – in numbers ranging from 52% up to 66%.  But the same polls also show that they think that THEIR COUNTRY should pony up support for Ukraine by much lower numbers, ranging from only 11% to 29%.  Hypocrites!

Reports also show that the Europeans who trumpet their support for Ukraine most loudly have also been giving more money to Putin – buying Russian natural gas and oil – than they’ve given in support to Ukraine.  Which is something that Trump warned them about 6 or 7 years ago, and they laughed in his face. 

My favorite example of those with delusionally high opinions of themselves is an Austrian economist named Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn.  Partly because of his ridiculous name.  “Gunther” is a perfect start, followed by what sounds like a hyphenated term for a German sex crime.  (“Und vat vere you doing when Gretchen accused you of fehling her jahn?”)

But mostly because he said this in an actual tweet that I swear I am not making up: “I call to confiscate all American military assets in Europe and hand it over to our emerging European Army in case of America leaving NATO.”

Oh, is that what you’re calling for, Gunther?  I’d love to see you try it. 

I picture a battalion of whiny Greta Thunbergs being whacked in the head with rifle butts by a battalion of Pete Hegseths. 

Meanwhile, in blue cities in America, Democrats continue to make bad choices.  While they actually have an opening to hit Trump over his ad-hoc-seeming tariffs and the falling stock market, they decide instead to focus their attention on… wait for it… defending Hamas supporting antisemites like Mahmoud Khalil, garden variety criminals, and illegal aliens.

Within the last two weeks, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (as in “woo doggy, is she stupid!) has championed the latter two groups, in what looks like an ambitious campaign to single-handedly debunk the stereotype that Asians are all really smart.

On March second, one Lemark Jaramillo – 32, with a criminal record dating back to his high school days – chased two terrified people into a Boston restaurant with a knife.  Luckily, an off-duty Boston cop was there, and after Jaramillo wouldn’t follow orders to drop the knife, shot him.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible for anyone to say anything more idiotic than what his girlfriend, Jennifer Geddes, said after Jaramillo assumed room temperature. She said, “Lemark was a good guy.  He didn’t deserve this.”

A local story reported, “The two had been dating for a decade, and Geddes said he was loving and close to her children.”  

Then… wait for it…

One.  Sentence.  Layter…

“Geddes had however taken a restraining order out against Jaramillo in 2018 after he was charged with assaulting her…and pulling out a knife.” 

Because of course he did.

So how did Mayor Wu top that clueless statement?  By giving a press conference in which she said, “My condolences and all of our thoughts are with the family of the individual whose life has been lost.” 

Perfect.

Ten days later, in a Boston Public Radio interview, Wu blew off criticism that she has also been releasing criminals wanted by ICE, because ICE hasn’t presented her with completed warrants before she can release the miscreants back onto the streets. “ICE is choosing not to go and get these criminal warrants, [and then claiming] so and so was extremely dangerous and a threat to the community.”  

You had arrested them and were holding them in your jail, which we know you are generally loath to do, and ICE then identified them as wanted illegals.  But that wasn’t good enough for your tender sensibilities, so you released them, forcing ICE into the more dangerous situation of having to chase them down and arrest them in public.

But as grim as this story is, I’m an optimist, and can look on the bright side.  

Someday soon, my face and forearms will be returned to attractive good health.  But these Democrats will be self-beclowning, rake-stomping boneheads until the day they die. 

Hamas delenda est!

Various Schemes Backfire on Dems, Including Mourning the Key-Holder of Yosemite (posted 2/24/25)

For many, many years, ever since I was just a hilarious zygote with a dream, I have loved watching the best laid plans of bad actors blowing up in their faces.

I remember watching Wile E. Coyote painting a black tunnel entrance on a rock wall, then – after watching the Road Runner somehow race through the tunnel – smashing himself against it. 

I enjoyed hundreds of cartoons featuring bad guys setting traps involving dropping anvils on heads, disguising quicksand pits, or giving their nemeses exploding cigars, only to be crushed by those anvils, sunk into that quicksand, or having their beaks blown around to the side of their heads by those exploding cigars.

Which brings me to the Democrats’ entertaining travails over the last 9 years. 

When Trump considered running in 2015, many Democrats loved it.  They mocked him and dared to run, and they gave him hours of free publicity on their tv programs.  Many of them crossed over to vote for him in primaries, and some contributed money to his campaign.  And then they got what they asked for, good and hard. 

It still warms my heart to remember them in the Javits Center on election night, after Cankles McPantsuit had thundered out of the gate, only to snap a fetlock on the first turn.  They stood around with shell-shocked expressions, soot all over their faces and the stub of a detonated cigar clamped between their teeth. 

But soon they had wiped off their faces and got back to their wicked ways, using every under-handed tool at their disposal to try to hamstring Trump’s first term, and ensure that he lost in 2020.  They launched the Russia hoax and the resulting Muller investigation to tie him up for most of his first term.

By the time the 2020 election rolled around, they weaponized covid as an excuse to hide Biden from the public during his campaign, and conspired with 51 dishonest deep state hacks who pretended that they didn’t know that Hunter’s laptop was Hunter’s laptop.

Ironically, their success against Trump in 2020 laid the foundation for what looks to be a much more successful Trump second term now.  Between Biden’s awful performance for four years, and Trump’s time in the wilderness – which provided him the space to learn from the tactics the left used to undermine him during his first term – Trump approached his second term a much wiser politician than he had been in 2017.

But first he had to win again.  And the left once again used tactics that backfired on them in the most hilarious and schadenfreude-tastic ways possible.   They launched a four-pronged lawfare attack – five-pronged, if you count looney E. Jean Carroll’s patently absurd accusation that cost him time and money (until it is inevitably overturned on appeal). 

But just like most of their other efforts against Trump, this one backfired again.  The more bogus charges they pressed against Trump, the more popular he got.  His own base rallied around him, and open-minded independents did the same, and before the Dems knew what hit them, Trump had dispatched the Cadaver and steamrolled the Cackler. 

Now that Trump has been in office for a month, the hits just keep coming.  One of his most potent weapons is DOGE.  It would have been logistically tricky for Trump to try to create that agency, but luckily for him, Barry O had created the US Digital Service ten years earlier, providing Trump with a ready-made cudgel to re-name, and then begin bashing the deep state with.

Also luckily for him, many deep state creeps had also outed themselves, secure in the belief that Trump would never be president again.  They left a treasure trove of social media posts and MSM appearances that basically screamed, “I’m a hateful, anti-American jerk, please fire me immediately!”  

In fact, most of the Democratic elite seem to be following a knee-jerk strategy of doubling-down on everything that hasn’t been working for them.  They are grabbing the “20” position on every 80/20 issue, and then hanging on to it like a ballplayer hugging a base after trying to stretch for a double and being called out. 

My favorite recent example involves the National Parks.  Trump wants to cut 1000 park service workers nationwide.  While that amounts to just two positions from each national park, it represents an opportunity for the left to score a few points, because the park service is one of a handful of government agencies that the public enthusiastically supports. 

Unlike cutting the leftist slush funds flowing from USAID, and firing rapacious IRS agents and corrupt educrats like Randi Weingarten, cutting park rangers could give many citizens pause.

But the Dems seem to be addicted to stupid. Instead of making a disciplined, reasonable defense of park service priorities and workers, the most visible push back took the form of in-your-face protests and angry leftist cliches. 

One group hung an upside-down American flag on El Capitan, and released a hyperbolic statement that “national lands are under attack,” and urging citizens to consider “your public lands on strike.”

Some lefties also protested the cuts carrying signs saying, “Silence is violence!” – a tired cliché that is transparently false – and, “All cops are bastards.”  Sure, the police have nothing to do with the funding of national parks, but hey, most Americans hate cop-bashing, so why not turn them against you, too?

The most ridiculous rake-stomping leftist self-own on this issue came from the Washington Post.

Unexpectedly!

Some earnest young WAPO staffer thought he could really stick it to Trump by touting an example of a model employee doing essential work at a national park whom Trump has unfairly fired.  So he came up with… wait for it… a locksmith at Yosemite!

I know what you’re thinking: Are there a ton of intricate, Get-Smart-style series of high-tech doors scattered about our national parks?  Is there some kind of retinal-scan/finger-print-accessed barrier that encloses Old Faithful, or a bank vault that must be defeated before you can gaze upon El Capitan?

Nope.  

The WAPO describes the locksmith in question, in a quote that I swear I am not making up, as, “The sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.” 

Institutional knowledge?!  We’re not talking about what would happen if Oppenheimer or Edward Teller quit the Manhattan Project, are we?  I mean, this is Gus the janitor, holding a fistful of keys in front of a locked bathroom door!  Even the kind of brainiac SCOTUS judge who can’t define “woman” can intuit that you put the male key into the female lock and then turn it, can’t she?

As a landlord with 29 years of experience, allow me to share some institutional knowledge with the National Park Service:  You can take the one key that unlocks all the bathrooms in Yosemite to Lowes or Home Depot, and you can make a dozen copies of it for a little over $2 each.  Then you can hang one of those keys on a hook in 12 different Ranger Stations, and voila!  National crisis averted!

Hey, wait a minute. I just noticed something else in that WAPO jeremiad.  It described the Nobel-worthy locksmith to the stars as someone who could “rescue visitors from locked restrooms.” 

Does that mean that some dimwit visitors have locked themselves INSIDE a bathroom, and need to be rescued?    

Good lord!  Would any of us, if we were walking by a park bathroom and heard someone frantically shouting that they were locked inside, not stop and say, “Hey buddy, you should see either a latch or a raised ridge on a button on the lock.  Turn that a quarter turn to the right, and then open the door, you moron.” 

But here is the scenario that the hysterical WAPO leftist wants you to believe:

Gus the Yosemite janitor is passing by when a panicked bystander grabs his sleeves and yanks him toward a park bathroom.

Gus: What’s going on here?

Bystander: There’s a woman in there, and without your help, she’s going to die!

Voice from the Bathroom (VFB): Help!  Is there anyone out there?!

Gus: I’m a park employee.  What’s the problem?

VFB: I’m trapped, and I’m running out of oxygen!

Gus: You can’t run out of oxygen in a public bathroom.  There’s an air gap under the door, and several windows at the top of the wall.

VFB: Don’t contradict my lived experience!  I’m telling you my truth!

Gus (skeptically):  Are you a Democrat congressman?

VFB: Congress-person!

Gus (nodding): Okay, AOC.  Just open the door and come out.

VFB: How am I supposed to do that?

Gus (sighing):  Do you see a metal latch right above the doorknob?

VFB: Yes!  What should I do with it?  Should I lick it?! 

Gus:  What? No!  Why would you lick it?!  It’s a deadbolt lock, and you use it to open a door!

VFB: Don’t man-splain to me!

Gus (rubbing the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb): Stupid juicy booty–

VFB: What did you say?

Gus: Never mind. (under his breath: Your words, not mine.)  Just grab that metal latch, and turn it–  (He gasps, grabs his chest, and his face turns red.  He staggers, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground.)

Bystander: Oh no!  Now we’ve lost this man’s institutional knowledge!

VFB:  What’s happening out there?  What should I do?

Bystander: Make your peace with God, because you’re going to starve to death in there!

VFB (raising her fist and howling to the ceiling):  F-ing Trump! This is all your fault!!

And, scene.

Hamas delenda est!

Stupid Criminals, Foolish Victims, & Leftist Govs Produce Predictable Failures (posted 12/11/24)

Earlier this year I wrote about some new categories that would become regular features in my columns, including headings like “Unexpectedly!,” “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough,” “Schadenfreude Corner,” and “Stupid Criminals.”  Since I haven’t returned to them in a while, I’ll do so now:

Stupid Criminals

Nowhere do political theories show up more clearly than in crime stories.  Most everyone makes room in their thoughts for both punishment and rehabilitation, but conservatives believe that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish.  So their laws tend more toward punishment.

For example, in red states like Texas and Florida, our stance on the death penalty can be summarized by the saying, “If you kill someone around here, we’ll kill you back.” 

Meanwhile in blue states, there’s a lot more focus on rehabilitation, and assigning responsibility to anyone or anything rather than the criminal.  E.g. criminals aren’t moral agents with free will, but the helpless pawns of the system, institutional racism, or capitalism. 

Therefore, in NYC, the judicial system doesn’t look at Jordan Neely and see a habitual drug abuser and violent recidivist terrorizing the citizenry, but a charming Michael Jackson impersonator unjustly attacked by a so-called “Good Samaritan.”  Because: racism. 

But those two examples are extremes, and many stories fall in between them, at least in part because denizens of some blue cities are starting to realize that their earlier views might have been AOC-level stupid.

Take the case of two armed robbers in New Orleans named Cecil Batiz and Teony Juarez, two teenaged Mensa members who decided to terrorize a clerk and rob a convenience store on December 3rd.  After pointing pistols at the clerk and grabbing a bunch of cash, they both demonstrated that they’d forgotten one of the prime rules of robbing people: keep your head on a swivel.

Because while the morons were paying attention to their take, the clerk pulled his own pistol and demonstrated that he knew the prime rule of both suppertime and shooting criminals: everybody gets a first serving before anybody gets seconds.  So he shot Cecil in the abdomen, and then Teony in the arm, as he was returning fire before bravely running out the door. 

Then the clerk gave Cecil seconds, as he lay on the floor trying to get his gun up.  Cecil took the room-temperature challenge, while Teony was only wounded, and later arrested.  And the good citizens of New Orleans, upon watching the video of the clerk getting the drop on the criminals, cheered like the Saints had just hit a game-winning field goal.

New Orleans’ DA is a George Soros-funded jerk named Jason Williams, so you’d think that the store clerk is in trouble.  But it turns out that in October of last year, Williams and his mom were carjacked, after which Williams said that he had changed his thinking about crime and punishment. 

When asked about the robbery gone wrong, Williams noted that “it’s painfully obvious to anyone who saw that video what those two people were doing in the store” and that “once somebody puts a gun in your face, the rules change.”  

Yes!  Even a once-blind lefty can sometimes see the light!

But not so fast, cautious optimists!  Consider the opposite case of Darcie Bell, over in…

Schadenfreude Corner:

Darcie is a leftist right out of central casting:  lives in San Francisco; wears Rachel Maddow glasses and a face mask (because of course she does) in her social media pic; has posted many times calling for the police to be defunded.

But now she’s decided to move out of San Fran, as she shares in a X post: “I’m like moving out of my house because I can’t afford to live here anymore.”  Even though she’s got graying hair, note that she still includes the superfluous “like” as if she were an annoying teenager. 

But with even less excuse, since teens do that as an unconscious verbal tic when they speak, and Darcie actually wrote the word out in a tweet!

Anyway, the poor dear has been priced out of her feces-caked liberal paradise.  But that’s not her only complaint: “My kid just broke his femur at one of your many, underfunded SFUSD schools, and there was no nurse present to help him.”  Not one our OUR schools, Darcie, one of YOUR schools.

And did you ever wonder why, when you are paying such high prices and taxes, your schools are still underfunded and sub-par?  Which party has been running those schools for the last century or more, sweetheart?

She concludes thusly: “Lmao.  WTF is this city?”   

Answer: This is exactly TF what you voted for this city to be!

But the funniest part of Darcie’s story is yet to come.  Because when she loaded all of her belongings into a U-Haul truck to make her move… wait for it… and put down your drink …some low-life scumbags stole the U-Haul! 

Cue Nelson Muntz, pointing at Darcie Bell: “HA! HA!”       

She turned to social media and asked for people to look for the stolen truck.  But apparently there are a few wise guy conservatives still left in San Francisco – Christopher Silber, I’m looking at you! – because many people pointed out that she could call the police.  Except, oops, she hates the police, and wants them defunded.

Ms. Bell didn’t appreciate that viewpoint, because her next post sounded a little more like angry Joy Reid or sulky Sunny Hostin: “I haven’t found my sh*t!  The cops didn’t do sh*t!  U-Haul made me file a f-ing police report!  There’s cameras all over this city.  They haven’t done sh*t!  I just want my stuff back!”

Cue the sad trombone, followed by Nelson Muntz saying, “HA HA!”, followed by Sean Connery saying, “Suck it, Trebek!”

And lest you think that Darcie may finally have learned something…

Cue Doctor Evil: “How about NO!”

Because her last post before “muting” her X thread said, “I don’t care about the people who stole it, people steal sh*t, I just hope they take the stuff they need and I can recover the personal stuff.” 

Darcie, Darcie, Darcie.  Thieves don’t steal a U-Haul because they need it!   They steal it because they are thieves, and because they have the work ethic of Hunter Biden, and because boneheads like you allow and excuse theft. 

But here’s a thought that should comfort you.  In your leftist theology, private property is theft.  So you really didn’t have any right to your “personal stuff,” and those thieves were really just redistributionists, following Obama’s commandment to “spread the wealth around.” 

I mean, you don’t want to be an evil capitalist, greedily clutching your precious “private” property, do you?

Finally, we have a couple of blue states clocking in with entries in the “Unexpectedly!” column:

First up is California, where Ken-Doll Newsom signed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage in September of last year.  Ten months later, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that CA had lost 6,166 fast-food jobs. 

But those losses were worse than meets the eye, because they followed the same period a year earlier, when CA had added 17,528 such jobs, for a net comparative loss of nearly 25,000 jobs. 

So a leftist politician substituted his arrogant judgment for that of the millions of free citizens participating in a voluntary free market…and thousands of people lost their jobs. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!  

Meanwhile, my late, great, home state of Illinois has been suffering under the governance of a succession of far-left goofballs for many decades.  The latest party boss is Governor “Goodyear” Pritzker (D-irigible) – #putdownthatcomicallyoversizedturkeyleg – who has managed to add to a pension shortfall that has now reached $172 billion!

That’s right.  Illinois Democrats have managed to over-tax their citizens and over-promise pension windfalls to their government workers to produce “the worst public pension debt bomb in the country.”

Illinois’ debt is almost twice as much as that of the six surrounding states combined, and it’s more than the shortfalls of the 33 best-performing states, COMBINED.

So a state presided over by a far-left governor, dominated by a giant city presided over by a string of far-left mayors, has produced an economic disaster. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Hamas delenda est!

My Daughter is in the Hospital, & Little Else Matters (posted 10/17/24)

I am writing this from my daughter Katie’s hospital room in Denver, to update and touch base with those who have emailed or are wondering why I haven’t posted a column this week. 

Katie had a set-back this past weekend, but she’s doing better now, and I appreciate all your prayers and well wishes posted after my last column.

Katie continued to improve after her surgery, and last Saturday afternoon she was released after two weeks in the hospital; her husband and my wife were ecstatic to finally have her home again.  They got her settled in, and my wife prepared to fly to Vermont on Sunday, to join me and some friends of ours on a previously planned fall getaway.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the night Katie once again started experiencing a lot of pain, and she was rushed back to an ER, and eventually re-admitted to the hospital she’d left only 14 hours before.  Since then she’s been on antibiotics and pain meds, and the doctors have been watching her closely.  

She’s got an infection that has been responding to treatment, and the docs are doing various tests to diagnose the cause of the problem.  They’re fairly optimistic that they’ll be able to get her through this without another surgery, and she has been feeling a little better each of the last several days.

I flew to Denver, and we celebrated her 27th birthday in the hospital on Tuesday.  Which stinks.

On the other hand, she’s an optimistic young woman, and she knows that she’ll now have a birthday story that will make her extra grateful during all future birthdays.  Just like many people who had that one horrible trip – with the canceled flights and the food poisoning – that makes every subsequent vacation sweeter, or the WWII vets who never had a tough winter after that freezing Christmas of ’44 in Bastogne.  

It’s a cliché to say that tough times reveal people’s character, but I’m happy that this truism has been confirmed in our lives over the last several weeks.  My wife has been a doting mom at her daughter’s bedside, trading off night shifts with Katie’s husband, who has proven himself a stand-up guy. 

He’s been with her every day, making sure she has everything she needs, and reading one of their favorite Tolkien books to her every evening.  He has been bringing her things from home, including some kind of scent-diffuser – her hospital room smells like sage, instead of like a hospital room – which has to be the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever heard a straight guy do.

And something that I have to admit I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years!

I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.  In addition to the increasingly positive prospects suggesting that our nation might be nearing a return to political sanity in a few weeks – I’ll be posting about that stuff again shortly – our homes and hometown have survived three hurricanes in the last two months. 

And we’re living in a time of unbelievable advances in medicine, in a great nation that has helped to produce – and benefit from – those advances. 

It’s the middle of a quiet night, and I’m watching my beautiful daughter sleeping peacefully in a sage-scented room, surrounded by amazing technology in an impressive building filled with skilled professionals dedicated to returning her to health. 

My heart is full, and I can’t believe that 27 years have passed since my wife and I were watching her sleep in another hospital bed, her face as innocent and her expression as untroubled as it is right now.     

A Tale of Two Males (posted 4/12/24)

This first story happens in Indiana, a Midwestern state that is basically the Illinois I grew up in, before the Dems in Chicago and Springfield lost their minds and began committing a decades-long, first-degree wokicide on my much-loved home state. 

The scene was a Subway sandwich shop on March 22nd. 

The players: 

Daniel Saunders, 31, a bully and a crappy human (I’m judging by video of the incident). 

Un-named short, Hispanic-looking lady behind the counter. 

Gabriel Pitzulo, a twenty-something former wrestler with dreamy blue eyes.

(I’m just sayin’, ladies.  CO and I are taken, but if you’re single and looking for a good man, you might want to head to Indy and look up Gabriel P.)

As Gabriel came in to the shop, Saunders was screaming at the little Hispanic lady and throwing stuff at her from over the counter.  Then he turned and started to stalk out, with a cocky bounce to his step.  Because as everyone knows, the best proof that a guy is a real bad-arse is his ability to menace and intimidate a small Latina. 

Gabriel tackled Saunders, spinning his body to slam him onto the floor, and then pinning him and holding him until the cops arrived.  Saunders tried to fight back and free himself, but because Gabriel isn’t a diminutive lady and Saunders is a cowardly douche, that mostly meant whining and kicking his little feet. 

So if you’re scoring at home, Saunders was 1-0 against a tiny lady, and 0-1 against someone his own size and gender.    

Because this happened in Indiana – and not in NYC, CA, Chicago or any other Dem-run big city – Saunders was charged with some pretty nifty crimes, including battery, battery resulting in bodily injury, and a new favorite to me: “disorderly conduct-fighting/tumultuous conduct.”

I for one have not been able to work “tumultuous” into everyday conversations often enough, but from now on I’m going to try. 

The best part of this story is to read or listen to Gabriel’s account of the incident, and imagine a couple of leftists hearing it.  I picture soy lattes being dropped in horror, and man-buns spontaneously unraveling themselves in outrage.

In fact, allow me to present a dramatization of that scene, using Gabriel’s actual words:

Gabriel: “[When I came in, Saunders was] assaulting [the employee]… and throwing stuff.  I believe I saw him spit at her.  And how I was raised, man, you don’t do that stuff.  It was kind of ‘go time’ from there.”

Man-bun #1: “I know, right?  ‘Go time’ meaning ‘time to go to my safe space and call my therapist!’”

Gabriel: “She didn’t seem like she could defend herself.”

Man-bun #2: “What? Is he saying that a woman is different than a man?!”

Man-bun#1: “And how did he even know that she’s a woman?  What if she doesn’t identify as a woman?”   

Man-bun #2: “Yeah!  He could be guilty of mis-gendering they!”

Gabriel: “I did combat sports for a while, so I was completely controlling [him].”

Man-bun #1: “Eek! Toxic masculinity!” 

Man-bun #2 (with one hand over his eyes, peeking between his fingers in terror): “Hey, the other guy is a person of color!  This is a hate crime!”

Gabriel: “He was trying to bite me, and I didn’t want to punch him or anything.  I didn’t want to hurt him too bad.”

Man-bun #1: “’Too bad?!’  Why were you hurting him at all?”

Man-bun #2:  “He’s literally trying to keep a black man down!  Racist colonizer!”

Gabriel (after being called a hero by the store’s owner): “All glory to God, man.  He’s always protected me and put me in situations…that I can handle.”

Man-bun #1 (shocked silence):

Man-bun #2 (wide-eyed horror): “Did he…?”

Man-bun #1 (more shocked silence): 

Man-bun #2 (in a high-pitched squeal): “He’s a white Christian nationalist Christo-fascist!”

Man-bun #1 (vomiting on his Birkenstocks): “Blluuuu-ugh!”

And, scene.

From that story – and I must warn you that this transition may give you the bends – I take you to the tale of Jack Petocz, a gay narcissist who grew up in Florida and spent his high school years during Ron DeSantis’ first term as governor, and yet learned nothing from that enlightened time.

Jack was a young activist, starting when – at 15 – he was “irritated by a local school board member who was, in his opinion, ‘recklessly tweeting COVID misinformation.”  Because of course he was. 

(By the way, I’m betting that the offensive “misinformation” included wacky ideas like COVID starting in a Chicom lab, partially funded by Tony Fauxci, and that wearing masks and getting multiple pokes of a magic elixir would render you both immune and immortal.)

He started organizing protests for every bad cause he could find.  He held rallies protesting some schools’ attempts to keep child porn out of school libraries, and organized a state-wide school walk-out to protest RDS’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill (which, ironically, never mentioned the word “gay”).  

On the day of that protest, despite having been told by the school principal to not distribute 200 gay pride flags, little Jacky… distributed 200 gay pride flags.  And then was suspended from school.

Unexpectedly!

This bit of ass-hattery got him an interview on NBC news, where he said, “Waaahh!  Bigotry! Sniffle.  Homophobia!  My feelings are hurt! How dare you?  Waaahh!” (I’m paraphrasing slightly.)

He was also given some sort of virtue-signaling narcissism award from Teen Vogue, and parlayed that into a visit to DC, where he took selfies with Chuck Schumer and Imhotep Pelosi, and also one sandwiched in between Joe Biden and Que Mala Harris.

By the way, if you go to the Breitbart story on this, you’ll see those pictures.  And as you look at his self-satisfied smirk – he looks like a less masculine Greta Thunberg – you will be seeing a SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) score of 98.  So you’ve been warned.  

Fast forward to late March, and Petocz is now a student at Vanderbilt.  (Because of course he is.) And he helped lead the pro-Hamas protest that involving a bunch of brats pushing their way into the chancellor’s office and conducting an obnoxious “sit-in.”  (Because of course he did.)

If you watched the entire video of that preening cosplay production, you’ve got a stronger gag reflex than I do.  But even watching a few minutes of it provided a perfect synopsis of everything that’s wrong with entitled adolescent social justice warriors.

A bunch of liberal white kids whose mommies and daddies are paying almost six figures per year for their “education” barge into a campus building, record themselves reading statements about how they are bravely standing up for the innocent Hamas freedom fighters.  They lecture a black security guard about how he doesn’t understand racism and oppression. They demand that Vanderbilt makes them all queens for a day, and that Hamas be given more ammunition and permanent access to all future Israeli music festivals.  (I’m paraphrasing slightly.) 

They also demand food and water, because they apparently had not considered how peckish you can get when you are saving the entire world through your courageous activism.  One female even demanded that one of her fellow protestors be allowed to leave and return after changing a tampon, which could otherwise cause toxic shock syndrome.

I am not making that up.  (Full disclosure though: Rumors that the fresh-tampon-deprived fellow protestor was Jack Petocz have not been confirmed.) 

Shockingly enough, Vanderbilt authorities actually terminated the protest by arresting 4 students (including Petocz!), and forcibly removing more than 20 others.  Two weeks later, Vandy announced the disciplinary consequences: they expelled 3 students (including Petocz!), suspended 1, and put 22 others on probation. 

And Jack’s wailing posts about this existential injustice were chef’s-kiss perfect!

“I’m Jack Petocz, a 19 y/o activist that’s been fighting for marginalized people for years.  Yesterday, I was expelled from Vanderbilt for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.” 

He called himself a “passionate organizer.”  He bemoaned Vandy’s horrible oppression of “students rallying together in compassion and love for those outside Vanderbilt’s ivory towers.” 

He said, “I came to Vanderbilt with the dream of escaping the rampant bigotry and institutional repression I experienced in the Deep South.  That dream has soured.”

What can you say to that? 

Other than, “Come down off that cross, Jack, we can use the wood.”

Ugh.

There is only one greater gulf in our culture than the one between alpha-male Gabriel Pitzulo going all tumultuous on Daniel Saunders’ sorry arse and Jack Petocz pouting and whining like Ilhan Omar at a bar-mitzvah. 

And that’s the gulf between actual Native Americans and Liz Warren.  (Boom! Unexpected #wemustneverstopmockingher reference!)

Hamas delenda est!

Lawfare Is Looking Shaky, & Some Military Bad-Arsery (posted 2/23/24)

I know that the worst of the elite left is cheering that the corrupt NY judge and evil Letitia DeVille have run their banana republic lawsuit scam on Trump, and he’s now on the hook for almost half a billion dollars to get it eventually overturned. 

I’m so outraged and disgusted by that sham trial – and the other three! – that I can’t think straight, and I can’t add anything to the story that others here have not already said.

Except that I hope that the huge middle of the electorate – the independents, the casual and semi-apathetic voters, the RINOs and the mushy centrists – is paying enough attention and is sane enough to recognize the blatant corruption of the Dems, and punish them for it in November.

In the meantime, I wish that I had Trump’s ear, so that I could encourage him to stay focused on the important stuff.  He’s already got us in the conservative base with him, and he’s got a slight lead in the polls.  He just needs to remember the old political cliché: “When your opponent is decomposing before our eyes, stay out of the way.”

(I’ve paraphrased that slightly.)

For example, when the Hur report came out last week and Biden decided to stumble out and prove that he is tickety boo, mental-function-wise, he made things infinitely worse.  He yelled at the clouds, insisted that of course he knows what year his son what’s-his-name died, and bragged about how he got the president of Mexico to open the Panama Canal so the Gazanians could go see the pyramids. 

For the next 24 hours, the lefty establishment went to Defcon 4, insisting that the Hur report didn’t say what it said, and you didn’t see what you just saw.  

A flop-sweating lineup of MSM empty heads and Democrat hacks mumbled that sure, when he’s on camera Biden’s got the gait and demeanor of Bela Lugosi on horse tranquilizers, and he speaks like Ozzy Osbourne after a Fetterman-esque stroke.   

But behind closed doors, the guy cavorts around the Oval like Fred Astaire at the height of his powers!  When he talks foreign policy, it’s like Benjamin Disraeli and Metternich had a baby.  And his enunciation!  You remember when Professor Henry Higgins was trying to teach diction to Eliza Doolittle?

It’s like that!  Biden is at the top of his game, we tells ya!  He stands astride the world like a modern colossus!   

Trump should have pulled a giant, gilded throne up next to that media dumpster fire and roasted marshmallows over it, wearing a big Cheshire cat grin and saying nothing.

Instead, he got in front of a camera and said that he told our NATO allies that if they didn’t pay for their own defense, he’d tell Putin to do whatever he wanted to them.  Then he insinuated that Nikki Haley’s husband may have left her, saying, “Where’s her husband?  Where is he?”

Why?!

It doesn’t matter that he’s right about NATO’s recent under-funding of their own defense.  Many dumb and uninformed people think Trump is too friendly with Putin.  Of course, they’re wrong!  But is it helpful to say that?

And spoiler alert: Haley’s husband is in the Army National Guard, and is deployed overseas.  Which is irrelevant anyway, because you’re beating her by 30 points in her home state, and she’ll soon be out of the race.  There is no reason you should even say her name again.

Especially since Biden is out there throwing up on his shoes three times a week, and the media is dying to cover ANY story other than that!   

Please, Mr. President.  Don’t give them any other stories.  We all know that they hate your guts. Don’t make their job easier!      

Now onto happier news.  And there really is some.

We seem to be turning the corner on the recent trans madness, with more and more pushback against the groomers and narcissistic activists.  The first of what will surely be a tidal wave of lawsuits have been filed against docs and hospitals that have done mutilating and sterilizing surgeries on kids who later realize what was done to them.

And if common sense and the Hippocratic oath hasn’t stopped the butchers yet, gigantic financial judgments against them will likely do the trick.

Even though our borders are still disastrously open, the decisions by Abbott and DeSantis to send the illegals to big blue cities and states is causing just the opening battles of blue-on-blue warfare that is going to be schadenfreude-tastic to watch.  And if we can get Trump back in the White House, he’ll have a lot of support to reverse course immediately.

In fact, when it comes to fighting illegal immigration, City Journal (which I recommend to everyone) had a recent article proving how laughably wrong the leftist Cassandras were when they attacked DeSantis’ tougher immigration law SB 1718, which took effect last July. 

The law invalidated driver’s licenses given to illegals by blue states, required hospitals to quantify uncompensated care given to illegals, and forced employers to use E-verify to check new hires’ legal status. 

Of course the lefties tore their garments and gnashed their teeth, predicting that Florida’s workforce would plummet by at least 10%, and the economy would crater.  The state Dem party chair warned that, “Ron’s ‘woke’ war will cause prices to increase on all goods and services,” and other hysterics wailed about the inflation that was sure to follow. 

Annnnddddd… the opposite happened.  Unexpectedly!

Florida’s economy grew by 6 % in the third quarter, the population growth since then was 2nd in the nation, and food shortages and inflation never materialized.

I mean, other than the commonplace nationwide inflation caused by…Bidenomics!

You might think that birthday boy CO and I, as two of the state’s most influential citizens, spend a lot of time conferring on such economic issues, perhaps over expensive cigars and Kentucky’s finest bourbon. 

But you’d be wrong.  Because CO sent me a text last week, and it was about something far, far cooler: the recent hellfire missile strike that our military used to take out a smelly terrorist chieftain in Iraq earlier this month. 

Did I mention that the missile in question was one that used six gigantic flying blades rather than the usual explosives, and that it is called “the flying ginsu”?!  (I know: how can a country capable of that kind of awesomeness be losing a shipping war to a ragtag bunch of Houthi pirates?)

(You know the reason: Bidenomics!)

So the Iran-backed leader of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Baqr as-Saadi, was riding in a car when a missile dropped onto his car, with the aforementioned flying blades being released right before impact.  Thus turning his car into a convertible, right before turning as-Saadi into “a-Salad”.

Yes!  The Flying Ginsu!  It slices, it dices, it circumsizes and it beheads!

More please.

Finally, you probably haven’t heard about this, but a great American died at the age of 74 on February 12th.

His name was Chuck Mawhinney, and he was the deadliest Marine sniper in Corps history, with 103 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills during his 16 months in Vietnam.  

His biggest single day was, ironically enough, Valentine’s Day of 1969.  He took up a position along a river that a platoon of Viet Cong wanted to cross, and he picked off 16 of them, persuading the rest to retreat.

Nine days later, he turned 20!    

According to news stories, after the war he lived quietly, working for the forest service and fathering three sons, and not even telling his wife about his sniper service. It wasn’t until a fellow Marine sniper wrote a book mentioning him in 1991 that he got his first public attention.

His obituary contains many indications of what a great man he was, starting with the fact that, “His friends, neighbors and co-workers had no idea that the soft-spoken man had killed at least 103 enemy combatants.” 

(Just like the mild-mannered Kiwi I met in Europe who had urinated in Hitler’s bathtub in the Eagle’s Nest, Mawhinney was no braggart.  As opposed to, say, I would be, if I had done anything anywhere near that cool.  “Hey, I know you’re just doing an oil change for me.  But have I mentioned that I killed several hundred commies in Vietnam?  And that I pissed in Ho Chi Minh’s bathtub?”)

In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Mawhinney was approached by a writer named Jim Lindsay, who got him to agree to let Lindsay write a book about him.  That book came out recently, and it’s called, “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time.”  

And it is the next book that I will be reading.   

“He listened to other people tell their stories,” said Lindsay. “He never told his story. Nobody knew he’d been in the war or what he’d done.  He was a good man.  He was a good father, a good husband and an asset to the community. He was a pretty cool cat.”

Indeed.  We should all be so lucky to have an obituary like that.  Plus, he killed between 103 and 319 Communist soldiers!

RIP,  Charles “Chuck” Mawhinney.  Semper Fi.

Also, a very happy birthday to the Founder of the Feast, our very own CO!

Also, as ever…

Hamas delenda est!