First up this week, one of my favorite elected conservatives of the last several years is Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Sears, and I like her for many reasons, some more trivial than others.
On the trivial side, I love the name “Winsome.” It’s an old-fashioned word – it means “attractive or appealing in appearance or character” – and it fits her very well. It reminds me of the old Puritan practice of giving their kids “grace names” that indicated virtues they hoped the child would display. Old fashioned examples include Prudence, Charity or Temperance, but a few survive today, including Faith and Hope.
(My wife and I chose “Emily Grace” for our second daughter’s name, and I’m glad to say that today, on her 22nd birthday, she has not made that middle name sound ironic!)
Sidebar: I just looked up some examples of eccentric Puritan names, and came across this example that I feel compelled to share with you: “Praise-God Barebone, a lay preacher who became a member of Oliver Cromwell’s last Parliament in 1653, named his son “If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned.”
Try writing that on a check! The writer of the article followed that strange name by observing, “He went by ‘Nicholas.’”
I’ll bet he did.
On the more serious side, Sears also joined the Marines, and I’m very thankful that she is providing a much-needed example of a high-profile black woman who is smart and dignified, and is worthy of the influential job she has.
Unlike Fraudulent Fani Willis, dim-bulb anti-Semite Claudine Gay, Jussie Smollett-protector Kim Foxx, or disgraceful hack Letitia James, to name just a few.
Well, there’s now one more reason to admire Sears. Because she made an honest mistake in a legislative session last week, and then gave the most aggressive “apology” ever for it.
It happened when Sears was presiding over the legislature, and a sexually confused male senator who calls himself “Danica” asked a routine point-of-order kind of question. In the process of answering it, while looking through some papers and after calling him “senator” twice, Sears said, “Yes sir,” and then confirmed the answer.
Now to be fair to Sears, “Danica” is about as feminine as an enlarged prostate, and asked his question in a voice you might hear coming from a barrel-chested high school football coach with a buzz cut urging his d-line to give 110% in the game on Friday night.
But no matter. Because upon hearing that, “Danica” flounced out of the room in a huff, and pouted out in the hallway, causing several recess breaks in the proceedings.
Hey, credit where credit is due: that was the most authentically female reaction from a trans dude that I’ve ever seen.
A sexist would say! I kid because I love!
Anyway, Sears gave an aggressive quasi-apology, which boiled down to, “You know that I didn’t mean to hurt your little feelings, so why don’t we all grow up and get back to business.”
Still, I don’t like the idea of apologizing at all when you’ve done nothing wrong, a judgement that was immediately confirmed when a bunch of whiny Dems stomped their feet and insisted that such a horrible act can never be forgiven.
If I were advising Sears, I’d tell her to take the podium again and say this: “Since I’ve learned that using traditional English pronouns might cause some fragile House members to have a panic attack, I’ve decided that from now on, I’m just going to point at anyone with a question and describe him or her so that there’s no confusion.”
Then I’d tell her to point to “Danica” and say, “You there, with the linebacker shoulders and the five o’clock shadow in the blue Donna Karan dress, what’s your question?”
Speaking of sexually confused obnoxious people, Scotland – the land of some of my ancestors – has really dropped the ball (so to speak) on treating sexually confused criminals appropriately. Which I learned by reading about the case of Andrew Burns, a “notorious prisoner” with “a reputation as one of the UK’s most violent inmates.”
Well Andy is going by the name “Tiffany Scott” these days, and he was going to be transferred to a women’s prison last year, before that was put on hold in the wake of the Isla Bryson scandal. Which you and I have never heard of.
So I did a little research, and discovered that “Isla” is another dude, and a serial rapist, and he was temporarily housed in a women’s prison, until sane Scots got wind of it and objected.
Still, the Scottish justice system and media seemed determined to cater to Andy/Tiffany’s ridiculous delusions. They called him “she” and “they” in reporting, and referred to him as “Tiffany Scott” rather than his real name. After being imprisoned for a long series of violent crimes, prison officials agreed to his demand to be called “Mr. Mighty Almighty.”
Then when he claimed to be transgender so that he could be moved to the victim-rich environment of a women’s prison, the prison bosses took his claim seriously, and started calling him “Tiffany.”
Good lord, man! You guys used to be a bunch of haggis-eating bad-asses! You were so tough that the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall and then stayed on their side of it! You’ve gone from William Wallace (Freedom!!) to Dylan Mulvaney.
Fortunately, there’s a happy ending to this depressing story, because “Tiffany” died last Thursday, before ever getting into a gals’ prison. No cause has been released yet, but since he was only 32, I’m going to guess suicide.
But if his cause of death is determined to be ovarian cancer, I will never stop laughing! And I will take back everything I’ve ever said about transgender dudes.
Speaking of happy endings, new media reports on Saturday claim that CNN is “on the verge of an epic collapse,” with the “struggling network desperately trying to get out of its death spiral,” beginning with huge pay cuts to its “big name” anchors as their current contracts end this year.
If the report is right, Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace are both getting $8 million per year, Wolf Blitzer is getting $15 million, and Anderson Cooper is hauling down $20 mil!
With the network getting its lowest-ever ratings, the good news is that those contracts don’t end until after the November election. So we’re going to have those hacks to kick around for that long at least, with the extra satisfaction of knowing that their audience is so small that their propaganda is going virtually unseen!
In one last refreshing bit of news, even far-left NYT writer Nicholas Kristoff has admitted on MSNBC that if we air-drop food aid into Gaza, Hamas is just going to steal it. As part of his commentary, he also said that Israel has stopped the corrupt EU-weenies in UNRWA from controlling food aid delivery because it turns out that at least 12 members of that motley anti-Semitic crew actually participated in the genocidal attacks on October 7th!
One of the most frustrating things about watching the blatantly biased, anti-Semitic MSM coverage of the Hamas war is the obscene moral equivalence they try to apply to Hamas and Israel. There are tons of examples that give the lie to that idea:
There is no Jewish equivalent to Hamas’ barbarity. No IDF troops have intentionally targeted civilians; no Jewish troops have gang-raped and tortured Palestinian women; no Jewish troops have taken a single Palestinian hostage; no huge street mobs of Jews have celebrated the deaths of civilians by defiling the corpses of raped Muslim women paraded through Jewish cities.
And while malicious lefties have screamed the genocidal “from the river to the sea” chant ad nauseum and all throughout our colleges and all over the world, you’ve never heard a single crowd of Jewish supporters chanting, “All throughout Judea and Samaria, all Muslims should die of malaria!”
But I don’t want to close this column complaining about our egregiously biased media. Instead, since my research on Puritan hortatory naming practices has inspired me, let me close with a challenge to Cautious Optimism readers:
In your comments to this column, post your own attempts to preserve that naming tradition by giving Puritan names to our current political leaders.
To start you off, here are a few examples:
Senator “Her-Skin-is-White-as-Snow” Warren (#verilymustweneverstopmockingher)
Vice President “Oh-God-Why-Hast-Thou-Forsaken-Us” Harris
President “He-Knows-Not-What-He-Does” Biden
or
President “Yea-Thou-He-Walketh-In-The-Valley-of-the-Shadow-of—Watch-Out-For-That-Sandbag!” Biden.
Let’s see what you’ve got, CO Nation!
Also…
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 