iran – Martin Simpson

Tucker Goes Off the Rails, & Jamaal Bowman Thinks the N-word Causes Obesity? (posted 7/10/25)

As enjoyable as it is to make fun of leftists when they beclown themselves, we also need to call balls and strikes on our side too. And I have to do that now with Tucker Carlson, who has sadly joined Jonah Goldberg as one of my formerly favorite voices on the right who has gone off the rails.

Within the last year I’ve written about Tucker doing some inexplicably bad interviews. He talked with a weirdo named Darryl Cooper – Carlson called him “the best and most honest popular historian” – who claimed that Churchill (not Hitler) was the chief villain of WWII, and that the Nazis killed millions of POWs out of pity, to save them from starving to death.

Because the Nazis were known for nothing more than their humanitarian compassion for the sub-human untermenschen.

Tucker also did a shockingly sycophantic interview with Putin, in which he praised the magnificence of a Soviet Potemkin subway station, and the cleanliness and great prices in a similarly phony Moscow grocery store.

His recent debate/interview with Ted Cruz was another low point. He used cheap gotcha questions, bad faith arguments and ad hominem attacks in the service of a utopian, anti-war stance that he contradicted a few minutes later. When he asked Cruz what Iran’s population is and Cruz admitted he didn’t know, Carlson adopted an exaggerated astonishment, asking how Cruz could justify going to war with Iran when he doesn’t even know the population.

The debate was about the wisdom and risks of Trump potentially striking Iran’s nuke facilities, and Cruz asked the obvious question of what difference it would make, in that context, whether Iran’s population is 80, 90 or 100 million? Carlson snapped, “If you don’t know anything about the country—” and when Cruz objected, Carlson asked what the ethnic breakdown of Iran was.

Cruz (correctly) answered that it is Persian and mostly Shia, but then refused to play Tucker’s game further. Carlson accused Cruz of not believing that Iran has tried to kill Trump – a pretty well-established fact, I think – or else he would have supported going to war with Iran beforehand. Eventually Cruz got Tucker to reveal how dishonest he was being, when Tucker said that if HE believed that Iran had tried to kill Trump, he’d support nuking Tehran!

This following months of Tucker virtue signaling about how he was against even one person ever dying in a war, and calling people “warmongers” and “ghouls” if they supported Israel’s strikes to take out Iran’s nukes and top military personnel.

Hey Tucker, around 9 million people live in Tehran. Even my weak, English professor math tells me that that’s roughly 9 million times the one single person you would never want to see die in a war.

Tucker’s rhetorical games avoided the real issues that the debate should have focused on: Has Iran been sponsoring terrorist attacks on Israel, America and her allies throughout the Middle East for years? (Yes!) Are the Iranian weird beards racing to get a nuclear weapon? (Yes again!) Are they likely to use such a bomb to dominate the region and threaten our allies and interests? (Hell yes!)

Tucker ignored the (glowing) elephant in the room, instead arguing that Cruz’s position is corrupt and evil because he doesn’t know that Iranians’ favorite food is chelo kebab, and that their top three turns-ons are moonlit walks in the desert, a well-defined unibrow (on a man or woman), and paying others to murder Jews.

Oddly enough, Carlson’s breathless predictions of the resulting apocalypse if Trump struck Iran’s nuclear sites – A forever war! An American ground invasion with mountains of casualties! Russian and China jumping in on Iran’s side! – were quickly proven to be ridiculous hysteria.

Unexpectedly!

But Carlson’s cage-match interview with Ted Cruz looks even worse when compared to the obsequious tongue-bath he just gave to Iran’s president, a man whose name is not even worth my time to look up, since he’s a powerless puppet of the radical ayatollahs who actually rule Iran.

Carlson went after Cruz hammer and tongs, like Thor after drinking a flagon of mead dosed with cocaine and meth. (Mmmm, meth-mead…) But when he talked with Mahmoud the Grouch (on-point puppet reference), Tucker sounded like Oprah interviewing Que Mala. No follow-ups, no challenges. Just a series of questions with no pushback whatsoever, no matter how outrageous the lies being spouted.

There are a dozen examples, but I’ll just cite two that made me shake my head so hard I was in danger of becoming self-concussed. (In the commentary business, we call this, “Pulling a Crockett.”)

When the prez claimed that Iran has never and is not now trying to build a nuclear bomb – only clean, green, oh-so-civilian nuclear power – Tucker was silent. He didn’t ask, “Why would the world’s most oil-rich nation need nuclear power?” Or “Why have you already enriched uranium to the 60% range when civilian use only requires 3-5%?” or even, “Who buries a civilian power plant hundreds of yards under a freaking mountain?!”

Later, Tucker did manage to ask him what’s up with the constant “death to America” chants.

And Jihadi Lambchop (puppet reference for the over-60 crowd, and Shari Lewis enthusiasts) says that it doesn’t mean “Death to America.” Don’t be silly. It really means death to “crimes, to killing and carnage, to insecurity and stability… [and to] “bullying.”

Got that? “Death to bullying.” Because who amongst us, when we see bullying going on – or insecurity, too! – doesn’t race up behind the bullying, pull its head back, and cut its head off with our scimitar, while screaming, “Death to bullying!?”

If that doesn’t make you say, “WTF?” or “You’ve got to be Schiff-ing me!” that’s because you’re not Tucker Carlson. Who just nodded and moved on.

Watching this made me miss the old Tucker I thought I knew. But on the bright side, it also taught me something about the Iranian president: If Jeff Dunham ever fires him from his gig as Achmed the Dead Terrorist’s sidekick (and there’s the puppet reference hat-trick, my narwhals!), his skill at torturing the language qualifies him to land a tenured position at Harvard as the new occupant of the Bill Clinton Chair for Post-Modern Deconstructionist Prevaricating.

That job comes with a six-figure salary, all the interns you can grope, and some sweet stationery with an embossed illustration from the Kama Sutra under the position’s Latin motto: “Pendeat ex quid significat ‘est’ ‘est’.”

(In English: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ ‘is’.”)

Rather than leaving you on that down note, I’ll close with my favorite comedy story from the last week in June. (I know that was last month. I’m mocking as fast as I can!)

You might remember Jamaal Bowman from that time when he was the congressman who pulled a fire alarm to prevent a House vote that the Democrats were going to lose. When it turned out that his devious act was caught on camera, his defense was – did I mention that he was a former school principal? – “I don’t know how fire alarms work.”

So he lost his next election – unexpectedly! – and has now been reduced to selling his blood, collecting cans, and appearing on CNN panels.

In his most recent CNN appearance, he announced that he’s made a breakthrough medical discovery that might hurt my chances of getting the Nobel Prize for Medicine (for my Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ – see yesterday’s column). If he edges me out, I’m going to be at the end of my rope. Especially after I’ve been runner-up for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year for the last 20 years running!

(George Clooney? I get it. Chris Hemsworth? Understood. But John Krasinski? Now you’re just rubbing salt in my wounds, People Magazine!)

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Jamaal Bowman has discovered the cause of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity in the African-American community. And he rushed straight from the laboratory to CNN to explain, in this quote which I swear to you I am not making up:

“You can’t be calm about this! I’m a black man in America! The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the N-word directly or indirectly every day.”

And before you can ask: No, he is not talking about the word “narwhal.” But the fine people at COOSP (the Cautious Optimism Office of Standards and Practices) have asked me to proceed as if he is.

Sure, at first glance this quote would appear to suggest that Jamaal Bowman is a race-hustling, imbecilic grifter. At second glance, too. But if you hang in there long enough, at around glance number 147 or so, Bowman’s theory starts to make sense.

So I’ve spent the last 3 weeks researching his claims. I decided that heart disease is tougher to quantify quickly, so I focused on cancer, diabetes and obesity. I found 1000 black volunteers and exposed them to various sources of n-word exposure, and calculated how much each exposure would increase tumors, blood sugar levels, and weight gain.

Here are my preliminary results, adjusted per capita:

Reading Huckleberry Finn (one of the main characters is named “Narwhal Jim,” so…) – 1 tumor, a 10 mg/dl increase in blood sugar, and 4 pounds of added weight.

Watching Pulp Fiction’s “dead narwhal storage” scene – 2 tumors, 15 mg of blood sugar, 10 extra pounds

Watching Richard Pryor “Live on the Sunset Strip” – 5 tumors, 30 mg blood sugar, 30 pounds

Watching any Dave Chappell Netflix Special – 6 tumors, 70 mg, 50 pounds

My research found a little good news, because as with many medical conditions, some people are more susceptible than others. Sure, for bitter racial hypochondriacs like Joy Reid or Whoopi Goldberg, just hearing a conversation about the west African nation of Niger is close enough to cause a skin rash and 5 pounds of weight gain.

Meanwhile, role model and great man Clarence Thomas – who has been called a “house narwhal” by half the malevolent leftists in academia and the MSM thousands of times – is still strong like bull.

Anyway, I’ve got bad news and worse news for Jamaal Bowman.

The bad news is that even though Hippocratic-oath-related concerns forced me to cut my final test short, that one produced the highest rate of TVNE (Toxic Verbal Narwhal Exposure), which resulted from listening to a complete album by any rapper other than Kid Rock.

To wit: head-to-toe metastatic cancer, more sugar than a super-sized Mountain Dew/ice cream float, and weight class: Pritzker.

The worse news is the Recommended Course of Treatment: spend more time around white people.

I can hear Jamaal now: The cure is worse than the disease!

Hamas delenda est!

They Won’t Accept Success: Tucker and the Left’s Reaction to Taking Out Iran’s Nukes (posted 6/27/25)

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions to Trump’s bombing of Iran, especially since there are very few things that we agree on as a nation. Our recent election results have all been within a handful of points of 50/50, and the job approval ceiling for the last several presidents appears to be right around 50%.

In that context, you’d think the 12 Day War in Iran – assuming that the fighting is now over –would seem to be an extreme outlier, since there has rarely been such a one-sided modern battle.

Israel’s all-time record victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 will likely never be topped. (One of my all-time favorite t-shirts is a white one with the blue Star of David on it, and the words, “Six Days, B*tch.”) And even the first Gulf War took a little over a month.

So the speed of this victory, along with the moral lopsidedness of the combatants – no one but Iran’s ruling theocratic dictatorship and their terrorist clients could side with them – is also unusual in most conflicts among states. You would have to be a totally deranged lunatic to side with the mullahs over Israel and us. (Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Keith Olbermann.)

I wrote in a previous column about Israel’s stunning successes against Iran before this war, and then during the lightning-strikes and coordinated strategic destruction of military targets, along with decapitating the cream of the Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists. It’s amazing to think about how much they’ve accomplished in a year!

They decimated Hezbollah with the brilliant pager plot, along with targeted strikes on all of their top leaders, and did the same to Hamas with their relentless attacks on the terror forces of October 7^th. They contributed to the weakening of the Assad regime in Syria by eliminating much of their navy and air force, and when Assad fled, Israel wisely flew strikes that took out most of their remaining ships, planes, missiles and chemical weapons, so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of Assad’s successors.

They also took out much of Iran’s air force over the last year, and in the early hours of their attacks this month, they took out the rest, along with the leaders who would have organized a military response and possible counter strikes. Their successes meant that our bombing run against Iran’s nuke sites posed fewer risks than it otherwise would have.

All of this put the Democrats in a very tough position, partly because too many elite Dems and their activist base really dislike America, and partly because successes of one party always make for bad politics for their competitors. I mean, if Biden’s program – allowing millions of illegals into the country, spending like a meth addict with a trust fund, forcing dudes into girls’ sports and lockerrooms, imposing draconian covid mandates and lockdowns on healthy people – had succeeded, our election prospects last year would have been dismal.

Having said all that, it was so entertaining to watch all of the hysterical reactions from Never Trumpers and the left during the lead up to our bombing. Particular favorites in a crowded field were the articles and speeches of David Frum and Chuck-you Schumer, which aged like milk left out in the summer sun.

Frum published an article in the Atlantic (motto: Wrong About Everything Since 1857) entitled, “What Iran Knows About Trump: The Mullahs of Iran Join the Bet that Trump Always Chickens Out.” I’m going to see if I can get the Atlantic to publish my companion piece to Frum’s. I’m calling it, “What David Frum Knows About Trump… Could Fit in a Thimble.” Frum also tweeted that, “’Two Weeks’ is what Trump says when he’s backing away from a commitment he did not mean.”

What makes those even funnier? They both appeared on June 21^st, the very day that Trump was rocking the Iranian Casbah (sing it with me, “Khameni don’t like it…”) instead of chickening out, as Frum-py knew he would.

Schumer got in earlier, but just as stupidly. He put out a video a few weeks ago warning that Trump was going to fold to the mullahs, and make a secret deal. “If Taco Trump is already folding, the American public should know about it,” he croaked.

He sneered that Trump was “gonna sound tough in public and then negotiate a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything.” And give him credit, because he was half right: Trump did sound tough in public.

But then he dropped the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP.

And before you can ask, I looked it up, and that is NOT gay slang, no matter how much it sounds like it. (Still, the next time my wife asks me to get the mop, I’m going to chuckle and give her my Grouch Marx eyebrow wiggle, even though she won’t get it.) (I mean the comedic reference, not the… Ahem. Perhaps I’ve said too much.)

By the way, I assume that everyone has noticed Schumer’s obvious physical decline. He was briefly taken to the hospital a day ago for a breathing scare, but he was losing it long before that. He’s getting more and more hunched-over every time I see him; right now he’s got the posture of a jumbo shrimp, or possibly the letter “c,” and that gives him a creepy Nosferatu-ian vibe when he crouches over a podium and hollers at us while glaring from over the top of his glasses.

Do any politicians ever just retire anymore?

Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson has continued his precipitous slide from being a smart and insightful guy into either a dumb hack, or a dishonest one. Shortly before Trump gave the mullahs the MOP (stop snickering), Tucker was on Steve Bannon’s podcast raving about the apocalyptic consequences if Trump did anything to Iran.

He said it would signal “the end of the American Empire” and of Trump’s presidency, and predicted that we’d lose thousands of soldiers in another Iraq situation. And he mocked the idea that the argument isn’t between those who want to use quick strikes to prevent Iran from getting nukes, and those who want to rely on drawn-out negotiations (which, spoiler alert have been tried and failed miserably for the last several decades).

Nope. For Tucker, “The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence and those who seek to prevent it – between warmongers and peacemakers.” That sounds like something that could have been written by Bernie Sanders, AOC, or the ghost of Howard Zinn.

Speaking of AOC (she of the juicy booty, according to her), she and half the Democrats in Congress ran to microphones or X and immediately started calling for the impeachment of Trump (again!) and decrying his horrific, unconstitutional act of bombing without getting congress’ permission first.

Apparently no one has told them that every president since HW Bush has done that, or that Obama dropped thousands of bombs without congress’ permission in just the last several months of his reign of terro—I mean, administration.

But I didn’t need to study for years about geopolitics to support the bombing of Iran’s nuke sites. Because I informed myself by reading an article on Twitchy about 20 actual laws in Iran, and that was enough.

A small sampling of illegal activities in Iran: apostasy (leaving Islam), blasphemy, homosexuality and adultery can all get you the death penalty. You can’t criticize the chief Weird Beard, or drink alcohol, or dissent online. Women can’t sing or dance in public or go to stadiums, and they have to wear pup tents or beekeeper outfits.

You can get up to 74 lashes for holding hands or kissing in public, and any same-sex relationships – even if, and I am quoting, they are “non-penetrative” – will get you “lashes, prison or worse.” (I’m no relationship-ologist, but if your sexual relationships are non-penetrative, I’m pretty sure you’re doing something wrong.) (But hey, you do you.)

However, I didn’t even need to read about any of those laws, because they had me at # 19: Dog ownership is banned, because dogs are “unclean.” (Cassie the Wonder Dog is beside my desk as I write this, so I’m typing very quietly.) Which is truly offensive, not to mention ridiculous.

I’ve seen those mullahs’ lice-y looking beards, and I’ve read about their goat brides – not to mention the goat chlamydia outbreaks that routinely sweep through the Iranian leadership – so I don’t think they should be throwing any stones about cleanliness from inside their glass mosques.

Am I saying that the Iranians deserved a devastating bombing campaign because of the way they treat dogs?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

And I’m also saying yes.

Hamas delenda est

Feeling the Christmas Spirit (posted 12/23/24)

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for this Christmas season, not the least of which is the good news that has been coming out of Israel lately. And sure, starting with Jewish stories might not seem to be the most Christmasy way to begin a column. But God started that way too, and we Christians got one of the top two Testaments ever, plus our Savior out of that deal. So I’m just sticking with what works.

Israel had a great year, if measured by their righteous smiting of their enemies, and compared to their horrific 2023. Their highlights included the exploding pagers, then the exploding radios and walkie talkies, and also the killings of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahoo Sinwar, along with most of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.

In fact, the only disappointment from the Israelis came in October, when they carried out air raids and targeted strikes against Iran in the wake of the massive missile barrage Iran had thrown at them. I had hoped they’d take out all Iranian nuclear sites, since the one existential threat to Israel — and the largest threat to the Middle East and beyond – would be the mullahs of Iran with nuclear weapons.

But in the two months since those strikes, I’ve realized how well that strategy worked. Israel took out literally all of Iran’s air defenses and most of their ballistic missile program. While I was hoping for more widespread destruction of Iran’s military and leadership, smarter analysts than me have pointed out that taking Iran’s missiles and air force off the map was a master stroke.

Iran is now deterred more than ever, because they know that the next time they start trouble, Israeli jets can strike Iranian targets with impunity. And with greatly diminished missile inventories – and Israel’s demonstration in October that they can intercept the vast majority of missiles fired at them – Iran can hope for only a token show of force before they suffer devastating retaliation.

That still leaves the Iranian nuclear development threat. But even on that front, the Israeli strikes achieved more than they had appeared to at first glance. Because a month after the strikes, Netanyahu officially confirmed that Israel had destroyed a key nuke research facility at Parchin.

The extra-sweet twist to that story: because Iran had been lying to the low-T anti-Semites running the UN that Parchin was a non-threatening, basically dormant facility, they are now unable to run to them whining that the Israelis took out the nukes that they had been insisting did not exist!

Oh, the savory delectability of a heaping bowl of Christmas hummus, glazed with a generous dollop of schadenfreude and served with a side of Nelson Muntz-ian HA-HA!

A summarizing story from late November featured some perfect observations: “The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), earlier this year warned that Iran’s nuclear program has largely run unchecked for the last six years, and it is believed to have increased its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium metals…. But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has warned that Iran’s nuclear facilities should not become a target as Israel ramps up direct operations against Tehran.”

And now, if you’ll allow me a moment to crack my knuckles, stretch my arms, and rotate my head back and forth to get the kinks out of my neck like a bouncer preparing to pummel an opponent, I’ll attempt the rare, four-“unexpectedly” paragraph:

After Iran has been lying about their nuclear program for years (UNEXPECTEDLY!), and the lefty squishes at the UN and the Biden administration had adopted a subservient posture to appease them (UNEXPECTEDLY!), Israel went Old Testament on the mullahs, which worked out well (UNEXPECTEDLY!). (“Down goes Goliath! Down goes Goliath!”) And then, with the prospect of Orange Hitler returning to power, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas “tail between his legs” Araghchi “said he was ready to engage in international talks.” UNEXPECTEDLY!

Meanwhile at home, MSM dissemblers are either getting fired or taking pay cuts to keep their jobs. MSNBC’s already-low ratings have plummeted since the election, dropping by over 60%. To put that in terms AOC could understand, they’ve lost more than half of their viewers. That’s literally dozens and dozens of people!

Get ready for the most deserved scare quotes ever: Their on-air “talent” has either been getting fired, or required to take less pay. Stephanie Ruhle was offered a pay cut from her current $2 million, and rabid, racist, blonde-hair appropriator Joy Reid – “My culture is not your costume!” says my Norwegian-American smokeshow wife to the Joy-less one – will drop from $3 million.

Which raises the obvious question: How on earth were those two imbeciles earning over a million dollars in their lifetimes, let alone in a single year?!

But it gets worse: Boyish expert in getting everything wrong Rachel Maddow graciously agreed to a pay cut – remember: she does a single one-hour show per week! – from $30 million allllll the way down to $25 million.

While I might be a hilarious genius, I’m no math genius. But even I can figure out a ratio of viewers to salary, when looking at Rachel Maddow. (Who, by the way, recently received the most laughably back-handed compliment in history, from a NY Post story. They called her “MSNBC’s most bankable star.”)

(Not since Jeffrey Toobin’s colleagues told him, “We’ve seen smaller,” has a compliment been so backhanded.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, Maddow’s viewers-to-salary ratio. I would love to be on the network side of all of these salary negotiations, because they certainly have the whip-hand. The toughest negotiations are the ones in which the employee has rare and marketable skills, and many suitors wishing to hire them. Think of a top-notch pitcher who can throw in the 90+ mph range with a lot of control. If his team doesn’t want to pay him, other teams certainly will.

Now look at Stephanie Ruhle. Is anyone else on earth elbowing aside competitors to pay her $2 mil? Or Joy Reid, at $3 million? I remember my dad saying, when we came across a super-annoying person, “She looks like a long day.” Well, who needs a low-IQ, racist, long day of a person that badly?

I mean sure, the warped and dessicated Ivy League system will line up for an anti-patriotic whitey-hater to hire and give tenure to. But not at $3 million a year!

On an unrelated note, after the new year starts, I’ll be negotiating with CO for an equally reasonable salary of $30 million. But I’m willing to negotiate down to Maddow-level numbers, even though that pittance would be a devastating insult to me.

0-0-0

For the next week I’ll be enjoying my favorite rituals of the season. I’ll be listening to some Christmas carols in brass, along with A Christmas Carol read by Frank Muller. (No matter how many times I read him, Dickens endures, and gets better somehow.) I’ll watch at least one or two versions of A Christmas Carol on tv, along with at least parts of It’s A Wonderful Life. (If you like Dickens and haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend a recent movie called “The Man Who Invented Christmas” which tells the story of his writing the Carol.)

We’ll go to a Christmas eve service, followed by supper with Karen’s two brothers and their wives. After a peaceful Christmas day at home, we’ll go up to Tennessee to see my mom, sister and her husband.

Because I’ve been traveling so much, I haven’t had the chance to respond to the comments on my last several columns, but I was touched to hear how many of you have lost loved ones around past holidays. I knew that my experience of losing my dad at Christmastime wasn’t unique, but I still got choked up hearing that for a handful of COers, this will be your first Christmas without a spouse or loved one. You’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of many of us here, as you go through the first holiday (always the toughest one) with an empty chair at your table.

I hope you all have a great Christmas, one in which you savor all you have, and take nothing for granted.

I couldn’t do better than to end with a pitch-perfect Dickensian toast that Dickens gives at the end of the movie I mentioned earlier. “I wish you all many, many happy Christmases, and friendships, and great accumulation of cheerful recollections, and heaven at last for all of us. In the season of hope, we will shut out nothing from our firesides. And everyone will be welcome.”

Israel Continues to Win, and a Hurricane Approaches (posted 9/27/24)

Before I get on to personal stuff, I saw that Israel took out yet another Hezbollah big shot yesterday, this time the head of their drone unit, a guy named Mohammed. (Unexpectedly!) He had an apartment on the third floor of a 10-story building, and the IDF managed to put three missiles into his apartment.

The tone of the media coverage is interesting. The AP mentioned that Mohammed’s apartment – it used to be turn-key, but now it’s a fixer upper – is in a building very near the one where the Dirty Dozen Hezbo commanders were flattened last Friday. The story noted that Thursday’s strike was the fourth to hit a specific area in Beirut, calling that neighborhood “a Hezbollah stronghold.”

The AP needs to look up the definition of the word “stronghold,” because I think they’ve confused it with “missile magnet.”

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the no-win situation the terrorists have gotten themselves into. They can’t use cell phones, pagers, radios, walkie-talkies or smoke signals – unless the smoke involved is rising from their braised hands or genitals. They can’t meet out in the open, and they can’t meet in an office building.

And now they can’t spend time relaxing in their own apartments, flipping through potential matches on Goat Tinder™.

And you know that none of them saw this coming when they decided to fire off a few hundred missiles at Israel, thinking that they were preoccupied with the terrorists in Gaza, and wouldn’t be able to respond effectively.

How does that old cliché go? “Everybody has a plan until their pager blows various appendages off?”

On a personal note, I am writing this from Tennessee, where I have once again come up to visit my mom, while my sister and her husband took a previously scheduled trip for a few days. Regular readers will remember that mom is dealing with Alzheimer’s, which makes every trip to see her both precious and a little heartbreaking.

This trip is a little more fraught because I’ve inadvertently left my wife at home in Gainesville, to ride out a hurricane! When I got up here on Tuesday, Helene was tracking out in the Gulf, around 300 miles from our home in the middle of north central Florida, so we expected some heavy rain and only some moderately gusting winds.

But the storm grew stronger in the last two days, so even though the track has not come closer to our area, the expected winds are stronger. As I’m writing this overnight, my wife has texted to say that she’s lost power, and she’s going to be updating me regularly. She’s got the company of our Wonder Dog and three moderately-useful-at-best cats, and her brother lives nearby, but it feels lousy to not be there with her.

Of course we are praying for the residents of the Big Bend area where the storm has made landfall. The expected devastating effects there will dwarf any that we expect to see in our area, so we won’t be complaining about any clean-up that we’ll need to do in the coming days.

At a time like this I’m grateful for our excellent governor, and the efforts that our state has made to prepare for and respond to this storm. And I hope to be able to report good news and then get back to the usual commentary and snarkery next week.

Hamas delenda est!

Feel-Good Stories: Bibi kills it, DEI Struggles, Israel Takes Out Some Bad Guys (posted 7/31/24)

Our politics lately is so full of knaves, grifters, pathological liars and fake Indians (#wemustneverstopmockingher) that following it can dent the optimism of even the best of us. Mocking the bad guys takes some of the edge off of that for me, but it also helps to focus on the many positive stories that are happening all the time, too.

Here are a few of those stories from the last couple of weeks:

Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to our congress last week was moving and inspiring, and perfectly emblematic of the courage of a people who gave us the story of David and Goliath. After the atrocities of October 7^th, the Israelis have made great sacrifices to minimize their enemies’ civilian deaths as they wage a war every bit as righteous as our fight against the Nazis and Japanese in WWII.

And for that they’ve been slandered and lectured by leftists — in the press, in the UN, and in much of the West generally. They’ve endured condemnation for responding “disproportionately,” and have been told that they must unilaterally cease fire, leaving their hostages in slavery and Hamas terrorists in control in Gaza.

And then when Netanyahu comes to address the congress of his great ally, the president and VP and around 50 Democrats shun him and boycott his speech. And the one anti-Semite who does show up is Rashida Tlaib, sufferer of the worst case of “resting jihadi face” in the world! And the slogans on the stupid little ping pong paddle sign she was holding up were as tough to look at as she is.

And still Bibi was able to give that speech. If you didn’t watch it yet, you should. He pointed out and honored some of the battle-scarred Israeli heroes, and the young woman hostage who was rescued by the IDF and reunited with her dying mother, who feared that she would never see her again.

The kind of moral clarity he displayed is bracing, and its virtue even more impressive when contrasted with the shameful reactions of many of our pitiful elected Democrats. I love knowing that when a nation is threatened by evil enemies, there are still brave citizens around who will rally to their country’s defense.

In other good news, we appear to be winning many battles in the culture war.

Just a few short years ago, the defund the police movement was sweeping across our nation, and DEI propaganda was a dominant force in academia and in most of the corporate world. But now the “defund the police” mobs have been routed nearly everywhere, including even in deep-blue states and cities, and you can’t find a nationally important Democrat who supports that disproven and delusional cause.

DEI is just as clearly in retreat, too. Universities in several states – Florida, of course, and most recently Alabama, among many others – have gotten rid of their DEI emphasis and are dismantling their DEI departments and terminating or reassigning their DEI employees. In the leftist enclaves of the universities, this is a nearly miraculous development!

Within just the last month, giant corporations including Tractor Supply, John Deere and Microsoft have also all explicitly renounced DEI. The latter used some sweet corporate-speak to announce the falling axe, with euphemistic phrases such as “[DEI programs] are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020.”

In a perfect world, they would admit that such policies were NEVER smart, and they sure as hell were never “business critical!” But a win is still a win.

Tractor Supply and John Deere were even more blunt, admitting that they’d screwed up their priorities and insulted their customers, then apologized, and then laid out the specific steps they were taking to completely eliminate DEI from their operations.

The fact that companies like that – whose products are bought disproportionately by straight males with a Liz Warren-esque complexion – had been putting their employees through idiotic diversity training and racial struggle sessions in the first place shows how far the DEI rot had spread!

I was raised in Midwestern farm country, and I never heard a farmer, grain elevator worker, or farm equipment salesman involved in a heated discussion of pronouns. No fights in a detassling crew ever included the words, “You’re gonna acknowledge your privilege right now, or I’m gonna whip your arse!”

In fact, no detassler on his first day of work ever challenged a farmer by saying, “You’re telling me to pull the tassles out of the plant because that’s the male part. But what if that corn stalk doesn’t identify as male? Won’t misgendering the crops make the harvest inedible?”

Even prominent Democrat pols now implicitly acknowledge the danger that DEI poses to their plans, by trying to defend the concept while simultaneously denying that it has influenced any of their candidates.

When MSM talking heads howl that it is horribly racist to say that DEI is responsible for Ketanji Jackson being on SCOTUS or Que Mala being their candidate – even though Biden openly said he was making a DEI pick in both cases, by choosing only from among black females for those positions – they give the game away.

Being called a DEI hire is now clearly recognized as an insult, and that’s a good sign for our culture.

Finally, to prove the main point of this column, as I was finishing it I was interrupted by the news that Israel has just given a big ol’ “ballistic Shalom” to top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr.

(Have you noticed how the names of these terrorists often sound like insults? “You’re nothing but a damn Shukr! Why don’t you go fuad yourself?”)

On Saturday, Shukr masterminded the Hezbollah missile strike on a soccer field in Israel, killing 12 Druze children. And I’m sure that made him feel like a bad-arse jihadi warrior, bravely taking on those soccer-playing kids from the safety of his home in Beirut.

Annnnnndddddd cue the transition card and the French-accented voice-over from Sponge Bob: “Three days lay-ter…”

…an Israeli drone flew over Shukr’s shack and fired three missiles that collapsed the building on his evil head, before shooting some video of the chaos and then flying away, pumping out a couple of jaunty verses of “Hava Nagila” as it departed.

(Yes, I love the scene in Apocalypse Now where Duvall leads the helicopter attack while they’re playing “Ride of the Valkyries” to frighten the Viet Cong. And I love the idea of Israeli fighter jets or drones screaming in low over terrorist bases while blasting a shofar.)

And THEN, as I was putting a few final touches on this column – “ballistic shalom” doesn’t just pop into your head on a first draft, people – I was preparing to post this at around 3:30 a.m. Because I never stop working for CO nation.

Does that mean you should hit my tip jar at Martinsimpsonwriting.com?

Probably.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Just before I posted, I took a quick look through the headlines and saw “Israel Takes Out Top Terrorist in Air Strike in Iran.”

I started to move on, until I remembered that Fuad achieved room temperature in Beirut. What’s this about Iran?

So I read the article, and lo and behold, the Israelis got a two-fer within 12 hours, taking out an even bigger terrorist piece of merde, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh not long after he arrived in Tehran. There is no info yet on how they killed him, but I bet the details are hilarious.

It’s been a tough stretch for terrorist scumbags lately. Most of Hamas’ fighters are either dead or cowering in tunnels and pooping in buckets. Then Iran’s leader decides to take a ride in the mountains on a rickety helicopter and turns into hummus on a hillside. Then the Iranians pick a new top weird beard, and Ismail comes to town for the big celebration, and…

Like I said, there are a lot of great things going on, if you just look for them.

Defund the police is dead, DEI is dying, Fuad is flattened and Ismail got Is-nailed.

Say it with me, CO nation…

Hamas delenda est!

Men Attacking Women in NYC, Sanctions That Actually Work, & Billy Strings on Mushrooms (posted 4/3/24)

The latest crime story in NYC involves a spate of males (I can’t call them “men”) sucker punching women in “unprovoked, broad-daylight attacks.” At least 8 different women posted videos describing these attacks in just the week before Easter.

Sorry, I meant “in just the week before the Holy Feast of Autogynephilic Weirdos.”

Many New Yorkers are rightly outraged by this. The city council’s mostly leftist Women’s Caucus said they are “deeply disturbed and concerned,” and demanded that the NYPD do something about this.

The council’s majority leader Amanda Farias asked, “Where are the men calling this out?”

Marine Daniel Penny – sitting at home with an ankle monitor on, awaiting trial in October for intervening to stop career violent criminal Jordan Neely from attacking innocent New Yorkers – saw Farias’ statement, and said, “Interesting. Good luck with that.”

Actually, I don’t know if he said that or not. But I know what Sam Kinison would say, if Farias asked him why the stand-up men aren’t doing something to stop this: “Gee, I don’t know, Mandy. Maybe because when they do step up and protect you from some thug, you try to PUT THEM IN PRISON FOR 15 YEARS!! OH! OHHHHHHH!!!”

If you remember, in May of last year a bunch of NY Dems were outraged when Penny put Neely in a chokehold on the subway to stop him from menacing a car full of riders, only to get lambasted when Neely died.

Mensa member AOC was “disgusted” when Penny wasn’t initially charged, saying, “Jordan Neely was murdered. But b/c Jordan was houseless and crying for food… the murderer gets protected….”

For the record, Your Juicy Bootiness (your words, not mine), someone crying for food would say something like, “Please sir, may I have a few morsels of food?” whereas Neely was screaming – according to many witnesses on the subway – “I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will! I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet!”

Do you see the subtle difference, Sandy from the block? “Could I possibly trouble you for a sandwich?” vs. “I’ll murder all y’all mother frienders!!!”

But AOC wasn’t alone. Another influential female pol in NYC seconded Cortez’ indignation last May, posting, “I continue to be heartbroken and outraged by the death of Neely,” and went on to decry “the senseless violence” that cost him his life.

That outraged gal was none other than…wait for it…Amanda Farias!

Yep. As a candidate she urged the city to “significantly divest from police precincts” and called for “the reduction of NYPD’s operating budget.”

And now, women all over NYC are getting assaulted by violent recidivists who remain on the street.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Changing topics to foreign policy, I’m going to answer the following question that I’m pretending that one of you have asked: “Hey Martin, how effective are international sanctions, anyway?”

I’m glad you asked that, imaginary person who respects my sagacity on all matters international. The answer is that it depends on the nature of the sanction.

Take one timely example. Mohammad Reza Zahedi has been a top commander in Iran’s Qud’s Force, and the man in charge of getting Iranian weapons and intelligence to Syria, and to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, so that they can kill more Jews. As is their wont.

In 2010, Obama hit Zahedi with financial sanctions. (This was two years before Obama warned Assad that if he used chemical weapons, he would be crossing a “red line” that would have “enormous consequences.” And three years before Assad used chemical weapons… and learned that Obama’s idea of “enormous consequences” was “a strongly worded email of disapproval.”)

The result of Obama’s soul-crushing sanctions? No change in Zahedi’s behavior. He managed to struggle through the last 14 years, living a pampered life of power and prestige, with an endless procession of the most alluring goats in the entire Middle East brought to his chambers each night. (I’m guessing about that last part, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.)

Until this Monday, when he was sanctioned by Israel in an Iranian consulate building in Damascus. But the Israelis had apparently ran out of strongly worded emails, because they opted for a SDS (supersonically delivered sanction) in the form of a missile strike.

The result of that sanction? Quite noticeable changes in Zahedi’s behavior, including but not limited to cessation of pulmonary, cardiac and brain function; sudden cellular disassembly; and creating a mess for the “Allahu Akbar Syrian Janitorial Services, LLC.” (Not to mention a sudden and complete loss of interest in even the most fetching of Iranian goats.)

Experts calculate that the chances that he will facilitate any more terrorist acts and Jew murders in the future to be well less than 4%.

Happily, Zahedi’s deputy and 5 other top-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guards terror chiefs were with him when Israel’s sanction whistled through the window, and they were all collaterally sanctioned as well.

Sources are calling this the largest loss to Iranian terrorists since Donald Trump ballistically sanctioned General Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

(I’m assuming everyone remembers that one, but if not, you remember how in my last column I told you about how the violent thug who murdered NYPD cop Jonathan Diller had previously stuck a shiv up his own rectum? Will this was kind of like that, only the “shiv” had a warhead on it. And Soleimani didn’t insert it himself.)

I’ll close with another of my “celebrations of excellence.”

Regular readers may remember that a year or two ago I wrote about the freakishly talented bluegrass/country guitar player and singer Billy Strings. I had stumbled across a video of him when he looked to be about 15, playing a song he’d just written called, “Dust in a Baggie.”

If you haven’t seen it, go find it now. It’s the one recorded on a cell phone in a down-scale, paneled rec room like the ones in the houses I grew up in. He mumbles around with his group of blue-collar (and stoner) friends for a minute… and then launches into a tornadic, three-minute virtuoso sprint through scorching, flat-picking guitar accompanied by pitch-perfect lyrics.

I find myself returning to that video every so often, and when I did again last night, I was reading some background info and found out something that made me appreciate his accomplishment even more: he was tripping on mushrooms during that performance!

Don’t get me wrong: don’t do drugs, kids.

But to learn that he did THAT when he was on mushrooms? It’s like finding out that Beethoven wrote Moonlight Sonata and six of his symphonies after he went deaf.

It’s an amazing achievement either way, but holy moly!

If you haven’t seen it before, you’re in for a treat, and you’re welcome.

Hamas delenda est!