Tag: israel

Stephanopoulos Shames Himself, A Criminal Brings a Hammer to a Gunfight, and Bibi Tells Biden to Stick It (posted 3/25/24)

The ridiculous stories are coming at us so fast that I might have to make this another three-column week.  No promises, but I’ll do my best.

We Don’t Hate the Media Enough

This story is already two weeks old, but I have to mention it: George Stephanopoulos put on a truly shameless display when he interviewed Nancy Mace on his sleazy Sunday morning show. 

He opened with a clip of Mace talking about her rape when she was a teenager, and then attacked her for supporting Trump, whom GS dishonestly said – 10 times! – had been found “liable of rape” against the crackpot E. Jean Carroll.

Mace fought back and repeatedly played the victim card – rare as it may be, she was actually justified in this case for doing so!  But I wish she had really attacked GS directly, because he certainly deserves it.  I wanted to hear her say something like this:

“George, are you telling me that I shouldn’t support a candidate just because he’s been accused of rape?” (Wait for him to give a smug, self-righteous reply.)  “Well didn’t you coordinate the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton’s numerous sex assault victims, including Juanita Broaddrick, who credibly accused him of raping her?  And didn’t you call those victims “nuts and sluts?”  And didn’t you refer to their true accusations as “bimbo eruptions?” 

“And by the way George, you know very well that Tara Reade has credibly accused Joe Biden of doing to her exactly what Jean Carroll said Trump did to her, except that Reade knows the year it happened, as well as the day and the place and the details.  Since her charge is so much more credible than Carroll’s, will you agree to denounce Joe Biden right now, and urge your dozens of viewers to refuse to vote for him, since you strongly disapprove of rapists?”

Ugh.  If our MSM weren’t thoroughly corrupt, they’d never hire someone like GS, and if he had a conscience and even a scintilla of self-awareness, he’d never be able to attack a rape victim on air, after he’s spent decades pimping for Clinton and Biden.

To follow that story up with a little schadenfreude chaser: Trump has filed suit against ABC News and GS for defamation.  Those suits don’t usually succeed, but Trump’s might have a chance, since GS repeatedly said that a jury found Trump “liable for rape.”

Unfortunately for him and ABC News, and even though the Carroll jury were biased hacks who bent over backwards to pretend to believe her, even THEY couldn’t go as far as GS claimed.

They answered 10 charging questions in their verdict.  The first one read, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.”

Their answer, and I quote, was “No.”

So here’s hoping that Trump beats George like he’s going to beat Fani’s fanny.

Stupid Criminals

Today’s Stupid Criminals story has a little mystery to it, because I found two media stories about it, but one says that it happened in Trenton NJ, and the other in Muskegon County, MI.  So let’s just look at what the stories agree on:

At 2:00 a.m., Citizen-of-the-Year candidate Andray Ingram, 34, used a hammer to break into an apartment and assaulted the resident there. Then he tried to enter the main home that apartment was attached to.  He broke the ring camera with the hammer and made it inside, before the owner greeted him with a pistol.

Shortly after that, cops arrived to find Andray with a brand new hole in his chest.  He was taken to a local hospital, where he joined the choir invisible. 

The moral may at first seem obvious: Moron Brings Hammer to Gunfight, Goes Down Swinging.

But I think the lesson is more complicated:

Hammer vs. Unarmed resident; Hammer Wins.

Hammer vs. Ring Camera: Hammer Wins.  But…

Hammer vs. Pistol; Armed Homeowner Wins.  

In other good news, the Israelis ignored Tony Blinken, Que Mala and the Biden administration’s strongly worded letters telling them to leave Hamas alone now that they are trapped and one the edge of defeat in Northern Gaza.  (You know, like the allies left Hitler alone once we had him trapped in Berlin, or the way we left the Japanese alone once they had pulled back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Instead, the IDF raided the al-Shifa hospital over the weekend, killing 170 terrorists and capturing 480 more.  They also “located weapons and terrorist infrastructure in the hospital.”  (You know, the way your local hospital will also be a staging place for jihadi lunatics, RPGs and AK-47s.)

Israel also said that it killed Fa’aq Mabhouh – a guy whose name sounds like a verb followed by a direct object – whom it identified as Hamas’ “head of internal security.” 

According to NPR, though, “The Government Media Office in Gaza said Mabhouh was in charge of the coordination between tribes and UNRWA to bring humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.” 

They say “tomato,” I say “tomahto.”  And by now, I think we all know what Hamas calls “humanitarian aid,” don’t we? 

Anyway, I’ll always remember Fa’aq as the guy whose name I will NOT spell out phonetically, because I’m a gentleman.  If I weren’t so gentlemanly, I’d be tempted to speak for all of us when I say to the “Government Media Office in Gaza” (which, oddly enough, is Arabic for “NPR”), “Fa’aq Mabhouh, and the horse you rode in on!”

But I am a gentleman, and I know that hearing about the deaths of so many terrorists can hurt the tender feelings of many of our leftist brethren and cistern, let me rephrase what happened in a way that will ease their minds:

“Women’s health care in Gaza was defended by IDF medical personnel who surgically removed 170 tissue masses at the al-Shifa hospital.  These “parts of a woman’s body” ranged in age from 57 to 165 trimesters.  You are now free to shout these abortions.”    

Sorry.  My crack staff tells me that “cistern” was the wrong word to use in the last sentence, and that I should have used “sistren.”  I apologize for the mistake, and will happily amend my last paragraph to replace “cistern” with “septic tank.”   Mea culpa.

Celebration of Excellence

Finally, I highly recommend to you the Daily Wire’s new 8-part video series by Bill Whittle on the history of the Soviet Union, called “An Empire of Terror.”  I’ve only watched the first episode and the first five minutes of the second, and it is stellar.  The production values are high, and it provides a great re-cap for people who already know the outlines of the story.

It really brings alive the heartbreaking cruelty and malice at the heart of all top-down central control schemes (99% of them leftist), and the shocking extent to which those evil forces worked in Russia.  And for those who have only learned about the story in public school – i.e. those who have barely heard of it – it will be a gut-wrenching revelation.

Whittle knows how to tell a story by starting with some intriguing details, and then providing a Paul Harvey-esque “the rest of the story” payoff. 

For example, the second episode begins with the story of a train carrying a devastating biological secret weapon that left Switzerland for Germany and then on to Russia in November of 1917.  Whittle reveals that Lenin was on that train, then cites a haunting 1929 quote from Churchill: “The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons.  They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus…”    

Whittle hammers home the point: “Lenin was not carrying the weapon. Lenin WAS the weapon.”  

The comparison of communist ideology to a plague bacillus is chilling, but it might even be understating its destructiveness!  In the 14th century, the Black Plague killed no more than 30 million people at the most, while communism killed 100 million people in just the last 87 years of the 20th century.  (And the actual plague never imprisoned, tortured and immiserated tens of millions more, the way the commies did!)

You need to subscribe to the Daily Wire to see the entire series now, but I think most conservatives would benefit from supporting the Daily Wire.  They have some great writers/speakers (Andrew Klavan, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro among them), and they make docs (What is a Woman?) and comedies (Lady Ballers) that Hollywood wouldn’t touch.

They are even making wholesome cartoons for kids to counter the agenda-driven, grooming weirdos at Disney and elsewhere.  

So check out “An Empire of Terror,” if for no other reason than to say, “Fa’aq Mabhouh!” to Disney and the MSM.

Hamas delenda est!

Some Weird Stories, + A Weird Naming Challenge (posted 3/4/24)

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!

I’m Looking on the Sunny Side, So Far this Year (posted 1/5/24)

I’ve got the uneasy feeling that there’s going to be a lot of unsettling news as 2024 goes on, but for now the year is fresh and new, and I see a lot to be optimistic about. 

FSU got deservedly humiliated in their bowl game, anti-Semitic identity hire Claudine Gay got tossed out of her Harvard presidency, and the Native American president of Penn got tossed overboard even more quickly than Gay did. 

Okay, I’m not sure the Penn lady is an Indian, but since she’s as white as Liz Warren and has nice cheekbones, I’m just assuming.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

In the ongoing battle of Hebrews vs. Terrorists, the good guys are putting wins on the board by taking hateful creeps off the board.  On January 2nd, a bunch of Bond villains from Hamas, Fatah and other “Palestinian” and Lebanese terror groups were meeting in Beirut.  (I picture a bunch of guys with eye patches and facial scars sitting in high-backed chairs around an enormous conference table over a glass floor covering a giant aquarium filled with sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads.)

Then the Mossad and IDF came calling, as reflected in my super-accurate re-enactment here:

Sound at the door: Knock, knock.

Hamas money and weapons guy Salah al-Arouri: Who’s there?

Door:  Kosher drone.

Salah (confused): Did anyone order a kosher drone?

Collection of thugs: We ordered death to Israel, with a side of death to America, but no kosher drones.

Salah: Wait a minute… kosher?

Drone: KA-BLAM!!! 

The following day, an assistant commander in Islamic Jihad’s northern Gaza division with the ridiculous name Mamdouh Lulu was recorded live as he walked on a Gaza street, talking to a companion.  As the Israeli eye in the sky watched, the two split up and Lulu went on his merry way, probably with visions of having non-consensual sex with a goat dancing in his head.

Annnnddddd… he was vaporized in an Israeli airstrike.  Which sounds about right, since lately the leading cause of death for terrorists in Gaza is “spontaneous vaporization.”

I’d like to think that the pilot said, “Screw you, Lulu,” when he fired the missile.

But one thing is clear: Lulu didn’t even have time to say boo hoo before he went bye bye.    

That very same day, a huge crowd of terror enthusiasts gathered for an upbeat tribute to the late Iranian super-villain Qasem Soleimani (or, as he became known after Trump found out his whereabouts, “goo in a Jeep”) in a cemetery (appropriately enough) in the Iranian town of Kernan.

Annnndddd… several bombs went off in the crowd, killing over 100 people and wounding at least 140 more.  And before you can say, “Yeah, but how many innocent people may have been hurt or killed in those explosions?” remember that the crowd was there to venerate the memory of a Jew-hating mass murderer.

So, zero.  Zero innocent people.

As satisfying as it would be to chalk this karmic strike up as yet another successful Israeli chess move, reports suggest that a Sunni Muslim group was behind the bombing.  I’m not a Muslim-ologist, but I understand that many Sunnis are not particularly fond of the Shia running Iran.   

So let me first applaud those Sunnis. And to the Shia, I just have one question:  Are you going to let those guys get away with that?   

But it’s not just vaporizing terrorists who are getting this year off to a good start.  It’s also some imploding DEI spending initiatives.

One hopeful story on Breitbart reported that after a huge increase in DEI programs and hiring several years ago, “tech giants including Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google have slashed their funding of DEI programs in 2023 by up to 90 percent.”   And as AOC could tell you, that’s nearly half!

Even as PR flaks and spokes-castrati at the tech companies continue to mouth platitudes about the value of DEI, their shareholders and bosses have realized that that value is commensurate with the number of innocent people attending Soleimani-Fest ’24, and they’re trying to avoid having the market give them the Lulu treatment.

Meanwhile in Florida, Ron DeSantis has caused yet another big leftist interest group to weep and gnash their teeth.  (Man, I wish we could have a conservative door-kicker like that guy as our president!)  This time it was a huge teachers’ union – the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) in Miami-Dade county – who is looking at de-certification because of a RDS-backed right-to-work law requiring that a union meets a dues-paying membership threshold of 60% to stay in power.

Despite a panicked push to boost their membership – including sleazy tricks like smearing the law’s backers and kicking substitute teachers out of their bargaining unit to lower the number of teachers required to meet the 60% threshold – the UTD came up short. 

And now Florida parents may be about to gain even more control over their kids’ education.  And an influential public union that is way less concerned with educating students than with laundering union dues for Democrat candidates and the DNC. 

Finally, I’ve got a few thoughts about the very encouraging signs coming out of the Claudine Gay implosion at Harvard.  I don’t think that forcing her out means that Harvard and other universities have learned their lesson and will now reform themselves.  If they had, they wouldn’t let her return to a faculty position and get paid $900K a year.  (That’s more than I make in several years, and I never plagiarized in my dissertation, or anywhere else!) (If by “several years” I mean “ten years!”)

But I do think that the damage to the reputation of Harvard and Penn and universities in general is serious.  The public has seen behind the curtain, and now recognizes the corruption and inexcusable and offensive racial politics there.  The empress was obviously wearing no clothes.

And very stupid and ugly glasses!

The premise behind affirmative action was always that it would only involve a very light touch on the scale, and only to tilt an outcome when two job applicants or students were very evenly matched in every other way.  If that was ever true, it hasn’t been true for many, many decades. 

The recent SCOTUS debate and ruling on affirmative action in college admissions revealed the ugly truth that preferred minorities with bottom-quintile test scores and qualifications were being admitted at higher rates than whites and Asians in the top several percent. 

And Claudine Gay’s exposure just hammers that home.  A non-identity hire trying to become president at a top school like Harvard would need to have published a number of books, at least several of which would have to be ground-breaking, influential works in their field, amongst a large number of articles and decades of high-profile service.

Gay wrote a total of zero books, and only 11 peer-reviewed articles. And she didn’t even write most of those, as her prolific record as a high-volume plagiarizer proves! 

Not to mention that every one of those articles was about race – one of the least rigorous fields in academia, to put it nicely – and all of them were predictably banal and unoriginal, as they only re-packaged the fashionable prejudices of the left: whites are evil and racist, the West is terrible and America is worse, “people of color” are eternally oppressed victims.      

Gay is a hack and a mediocrity, and she went out as she came in: playing the race card, and playing the victim, and lying her butt off. 

It’s right and salutary that the American public got to see that.

More please!

Hamas delenda est!