Tag: life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I said, “All of them.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s right.  On the roof. 

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

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

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

That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THAT is an Ameri-CAN, people!

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

Because: toxic (or at least reckless) masculinity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two opening couplets:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

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

That last line always kills me.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes!

And ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tragi-Comic NYC Mayoral Race (posted 7/1/25)

Well thank God that’s over!

I’m referring to the least in-your-face Pride Month (or as I call it, “Haughty Spirit” month) in years.  (“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”)  In every other way, this June was one for the record books.   Which is why I now continue what will be at least a four-column week.

In today’s edition of celebrating the Left’s self-be-clowning, I’m going to focus on last week’s NYC Democrat primary, which promises to be a boon to the GOP and one more self-inflicted Biblical plague on New York City. 

And one that, just like in the original, is going to result in a Jewish exodus, with Mamdani playing the role of Temu Pharoah.  And this time, nobody has to wait around, pleading, “Let my people go.”  Because the Hebrews now have access to U-Haul, and unlike the Red Sea, I-95 South is wide open, baby!

(They said, “Hey Martin, bet you can’t work in half a dozen Old Testament references in the first three paragraphs.”  And I said, “Hold my King James and watch this.”)

If I can be serious before mocking the hell out of the idiotic voters in NYC – and I know that the 90% gives the other 10% a bad name – this really is a sad story.  Truly.  A great nation should have great cities, and NYC used to be one of the greatest cities in the world.  It’s tragic to see what has already happened to it, before we even get to what’s going to happen to it soon. 

I know that some of my fellow conservatives say, “Don’t worry about it.  Let NYC become a warning to the country and the world of what can happen when you elect terrible socialists to positions of power.  It will provide a valuable FAFO lesson.”

That’s true.  But it’s not like we need ANOTHER warning, or more FAFO lessons!  We’ve got Chicago (RIP).  And LA.  And San Francisco.  And Baltimore, and Detroit, and New Orleans.  And the nations of Venezuela, and Cuba, and old East Germany, and current Haiti, and…

Ugh.  As grateful as I am to not be living in a big blue city, watching Dem voters choose their own self-degradation makes me feel the same kind of pity and frustrated anger I get when I see a junkie – ravaged, scarred and dope-sick – shooting up one more time. 

Then I remember that many of those voters would force that hellish descent on the rest of us if they had a chance, and I say – with another famous New Yorker, Jerry Seinfeld – “Yikes.  Good luck with all that.”   

And it’s not like New York City or state were doing great in recent years anyway.   It’s been a one-party Democrat town for what seems like forever – with the brief interregnum of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years – and the old lions of the party were content to turn into hyenas, scavenging off the accomplishments left to them by previous generations, while letting the place slowly go to pot.  Literally, lately. 

(We Midwesterners call this process “eating your seed corn.”)

Many observers say that part of the reason so many lefties were open to a new, younger, fresh face is due to the dysfunctional hash the establishment Dems made of things.  Hochul, and Cuomo before her, and David Patterson before him didn’t exactly blaze a trail of good governance.  And the less said about DuhBlasio, the better. 

But you’d think that there would have to be some quasi-competent Dems in New York who saw Mamdani coming, right?  And yet the best candidate they could muster was Andrew “Grandma-killing Butt-grabber” Cuomo?  Really? 

If they needed an old-school name that dead-end Democrats would vote for just out of familiarity – e.g. Drunk Uncle Ted Kennedy, the second runner-up Kennedy after the first two were out of play – why not pick Chris Cuomo?

Sure, he’s not smart, despite how he tells it: “I can handle things, I’m smaht.   Not like everybody says, not dumb.  I’m smaht, and I want respect.”

(If you don’t get the Godfather reference, you’re dead to me.  Dead!)

So yeah, Chris would be nobody’s first choice.  Even Mario tapped Andy over the Block Head. 

(Chris: Just because I’m younger, I shouldn’t have been stepped over.

Andrew: That’s the way pop wanted it.

Chris (yelling, while slumped in his armchair): Well that’s not how I wanted it!”)

(They said, “Hey Martin, bet you can’t follow an Old Testament main course with a Godfather-reference chaser.”  And I said, “Hold my gun AND the cannoli, and watch this.”)

Anyway, since Chris got canned by the Tattaglias—sorry, I mean CNN – he’s got nothing else to do.  He’s tanned, rested and ready, and at least he can brag that he never killed a bunch of senior citizens by tossing some contagious covid patients into their nursing home like a bunch of wrinkly biological weapons and bolting the door behind them.  

But no.  The Dems went with Raggedy Andy, despite the sexual harassment claims that allegedly did him in.  Though I think we all know that that was more of a “straw that broke the horndog’s back” kind of thing.

Because this is the Democrat party we’re talking about.  If you could go to the congressional offices of any 10 randomly chosen male Dem officeholders and dust the rumps of their 20-something secretaries for prints, you’d come up with 8 positives for groping. 

And that’s only if your 10 chosen Democrats included Mayor Pete and Spartacus.

Okay, I’ve got to interrupt myself to say that I believe that God is just feeding stuff straight into my brain.  Because I just free-styled the last 8 paragraphs or so, and that Buttigieg and Booker reference even caught me by surprise.   And I know that it’s immodest to admit it, but I just laughed at my own joke. 

In fact, when I’m done with this column, I’m going to pour a second glass of Knob Creek 9, clink the two glasses together, and congratulate myself.  Because it’s the middle of the night, and my wife is sleeping, and she would be furious if I woke her up right now to read her this column. 

Not that Cassie the Wonder Dog is not smiling at me as I look at her right now.  But that’s because she’s one of God’s greatest creatures, not because she appreciates my skewering of hypocritical Democrat politicians as they dictate self-righteous “we’re shocked by Trump’s sexism” press releases while chasing their secretaries around the desk like so many Benny Hills with plum committee assignments.

Ooh, I just thought of one more thing: I can’t wait to see what AI-generated graphic CO comes up with to accompany this column!  Keep it PG-13, CO!

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  To quote some wit on the internet, “Defeated Cuomo left groping for answers.”

So that brings us to Zohran Mamdani…    

…and that’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because I’m over 1100 words in, and this bourbon isn’t going to sip itself.  Also, I’ve got over a thousand words drafted about Mamdani already, so I won’t test your patience with a 2000+ word column now.

So think of this as a tease, or a cliffhanger, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

In the meantime…

Hamas, Hezbollah and Mamdani delenda est!

The Left is Not Handling All of This Good News Well (posted 6/30/25)

I virtually “met” CO many years ago – that’s a story for another day, but I can tell you that it was reminiscent of the Three Wise Men finally making it to Bethlehem.  Although CO is not exactly the baby Jesus, and I was just one lone wise man.  More of a wise guy, really.  But as Bogey said at the end of Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

I wrote my first column for CO’s site on December 9th, 2016.  You can find it, along with the rest of my archives here at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  (And don’t miss the prescient “future conservative SCOTUS” joke in that first column, which was written before I’d acquired my conical purple wizard hat that allows me to see the future.)  

Since then I’ve written 683 columns – this one makes 684 – and I’ve had an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature just gathering dust in my desk, tragically unused, for most of the last 8 years.  And yes, I wrote it in a comedic Donald Trump voice, which I’m sure would go over great with the Nobel crowd in Stockholm. 

Oh okay, if you insist, I’ll give you an excerpt from it, featuring the first few paragraphs and the last lines:

“I’d like to thank God, CO and every member of CO Nation, and I’d also like to thank the European elites who hand out these awards.  But I can’t, because many people say that you’ve turned these awards into the fake news of awards, giving them to every leftist lunatic who ever put pen to paper.  They’ve become totally fake.  Fake awards! 

But still, you’re doing a tremendous thing tonight, though frankly, it’s embarrassing that it’s taken you so long.  So embarrassing.  I mean, I get it.  I stand before you as a representative of the greatest country in the world, a man with a wit as sharp as my gaze is steely and my jawline is firm.  And you’re looking around at each other glumly.  Look at Hans over there!  So glum.    Your men are simpering and your women are ugly, and your nonbinary children are cowering in a corner, hoping that you won’t let Putin conquer your countries and enslave them.  Sad.”

[Jump cut to the end of the speech]   

“…like nobody’s ever seen before. 

Now please, go back and read through my body of work, and learn its lessons.  Otherwise, people are going to think that you just don’t know what the f**k you’re doing.  Thank you for your attention to this matter.”  

And, scene.

I say all that to say this: in the nearly 9 years I’ve been writing on this site, I don’t know that there has been a week packed with more good news (other than the weeks featuring the epic losses of Hillary and Que Mala) than this past one.  And now I’ve got such an embarrassment of riches to write about that I don’t know what to do.   I’ve been writing three columns a week, but I could write three columns a day this week, and still barely scratch the surface!

I see two broad categories of good-news stories: those involving big wins for our side, and those involving hilariously entertaining, schadenfreude-infused tales of various leftists melting down in theatrical glory.

So I’m just going to jump in and start celebrating and mocking, and see if I’ve got the gas in the tank for another 5-column week. 

I’ll start with a guy whose name I’d never heard before, possibly because he’s a columnist for USA Today.  Which is a paper that people fold over their heads and press tightly against their ears if they’re stuck in an airport where CNN is playing on every tv. 

His name is Rex Huppke.  After I saw the column I’m about to tell you about, I researched him a bit, and the first thing I came across was a column he wrote last weekend, right after Trump took out Iran’s nuke sites.  Instead of waiting a few days, lest intervening events make him look very stupid – a phenomenon that I’m guessing he experiences quite often – he opened up on our “dumb president.”

He predicted a coming “quagmire in the Middle East,” and after a few hundred words of dire warnings that have already been proven to be as smart as Jasmine Crocket with a concussion, he ended by saying that if the bombing proves successful “it’ll be dumb luck.  But if it leads to disaster, it’ll be exactly what anyone paying attention to these reckless hucksters predicted.”

Wow.  Nicely done, Huppster.  You tried for the old “heads I win, tails you lose” trick, and yet you still managed to lose.  How does it feel to have the dumbest guy around be proven smarter than you and all of your egghead co-religionists in the MSM? 

Unexpectedly!

But that’s not why I’m writing about Wretched Rex now.  Because after that disastrous column a week ago, Huppke took another swing at it…

One. Week. Layter.   

This time, he wrote about the SCOTUS ruling saying that public schools can no longer force grade school kids, against their parents’ consent, to learn all about how they can change their sex (in a textbook called, “Science, Schmience,” I’m guessing).   This ruling gave Rex what he thought was a very clever column idea. 

As we say in the South, “Bless his heart.”

In an op-ed titled, “Thanks SCOTUS!  It’s now my right to prevent my kid from learning about Trump,” Huppke argues that SCOTUS preventing kids from being indoctrinated in the LGBTQ+ religion is analogous to allowing kids to opt out of any school lessons discussing US presidents of whom Huppke doesn’t approve.

(Did I mention that Huppke’s email address is @bluesky?  Because of course it is.)

Seriously.  Because Trump has made boorish comments about genitalia grabbing and illegal immigrants, and was found liable for sexually assaulting a mentally unstable woman in a transparently bogus civil verdict that will definitely be overturned eventually, Huppke believes that his kids should be prevented from learning anything about Trump and his presidency.   

Think about that for a second.  If children were kept from learning about any US presidents whose behavior offended Rex’s tender sensibilities, our history textbooks would be as short as AOC’s attention span.   

(If I were delivering this next part as a speech, this is where I’d take a drink of water and a very long inhale before running down the following list…)

No Washington or Jefferson (who owned slaves), nor any other presidents before Lincoln, since they all at least tolerated slavery.  Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and said some unkind things about black folks.  Grant was a horrendous bully, since he gave the Democrats of his day wedgies and swirlies, and then took their slaves away and freed them.

TR hunted, Wilson was a racist, FDR undoubtedly called the people he put in camps “Japs.”  Ike killed a lot of people, and Truman dropped a couple of bombs that were even more offensively penetrative than the MOP (stop snickering).  JFK banged every female within arm’s reach, LBJ said the n-word more often than he said hello, and Richard Nixon was Richard Nixon.  Reagan whipped the Dems’ co-religionists in the USSR and Nicaragua, and Clinton repeated JFK’s sexual crimes, while adding perjury to the mix.  W was Bushitler, Obama deported 3 million angels in human form at our southern border, and Biden raised Hunter and used him as his bag-man/cut-out with the Chicoms.    

The only president who might possibly pass the Huppke Standard of Non-Offensiveness might be William Henry Harrison, who died in 1841 after serving only 30 days in office. (History Note: This was too long ago for that stunt to be called, “Pulling a Biden.”)   

On the other hand, I’m sure that once the leftist cancel squad has a chance to examine those fateful 30 days, they’ll find that Harrison allegedly told one of his cronies that women would let him “grab them by the bustle,” or else he called some of the Native Americans he fought against in Tecumseh’s War a “whiny bunch of Liz Warrens.”  

(Supplemental Historical Note: This was long before they had hashtags. But we have them now.  So #wemustneverstopmockingher )

Ironically, Huppke has probably out-smarted himself – thus creating this SCOTUS argument which future legal scholars will probably refer to as the case of “Half-wit v. Half-wit” – with his call to ban teaching anything about Trump’s presidency in K-12 public schools. 

Because ANYTHING taught about Trump in public schools run by leftist teachers’ union activists would be such hateful and farcically dishonest propaganda that Huppke is unintentionally doing those future schoolchildren a great favor.

Besides, they’ll be able to learn plenty about Trump’s accomplishments at the colossal Trump Presidential Library (which at this pace will be solely funded by billions of dollars won in defamation suits against various MSM propaganda outlets), as well as the plaques and carved speeches on thousands of Trump statues and monuments across the nation, and from the documentaries playing on whatever television networks replace the desiccated media husks that once were PBS and NPR.

(I exaggerate for comic effect.  And in the hopes that Rex Huppke will somehow see this column, causing the top of his head to blow off in a fit of narcissistic rage.)

See what I mean?  I just produced 1500 words of cathartic bliss, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of all the great things that happened last week.  So assuming I have the time – I may be spending many hours in a doctor’s waiting room if this condition that has already lasted way more than 4 hours doesn’t subside – I’ll be back with another column tomorrow.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So God bless us, everyone, I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

While I Spend Time in TN, LA Goes Crazy and Israel Goes Roman on Iran (posted 6/14/25)

So I drove up to Tennessee on Tuesday to spend a week with my mom while the sis and her husband take a vacation, and it’s been a little rough.  Mom’s still putting up a game fight, but her Alzheimer’s is breaking our hearts as it continues on its cruel path. 

The ratio of lucid moments to foggy ones is diminishing, but she’s at her best in the daytime, and we’ve had some laughs and some good food.  I’m storing up more good memories, and trying to appreciate every moment with her before I head back to Florida on Monday.

The nature of this kind of visit has imparted a little fogginess to my own thoughts, and put me into the kind of weird, suspended animation that I always feel while traveling.  The world is still going on around me, but I’m disconnected from it in a way I’m not when I’m at home and in my own element.  I catch a few snippets of news during the day, and then a bit more before bed, with insufficient time to digest most of it.

Of course, I managed to be here during a slow news week, right?

Holy cats!  Before leaving home I barely had a chance to consider Greta’s Grifter Flotilla being stopped by the Israelis before they could deliver to the starving Gazans their desperately needed bounty of… four cheese sandwiches and a bag of chocolate chip cookies that someone had already half finished.

I sensed fodder for a solid column out of the Doom Pixie’s prevails, but that story was quickly pushed to the back-burner by the developing story of the LA riot, during which the leftists have beclowned themselves six ways to Sunday. 

And that was just by last Sunday.  Since then, they’ve beclowned themselves twenty-two ways to Thursday, with much more beclownation to come. 

Melting-face Maxine Waters – a fright wig atop a fright face – got a door slammed in her face by a no-nonsense employee when she tried to awe him with her congressional privilege.  Later she confronted some armed National Guardsmen and challenged them to gun her down, warning them that, “If you’re gonna shoot me, you’d better shoot straight.”  (“Whew!” said Mayor Pete.  “I’m safe.”)  

Tragically for the nation, no one took Waters up on her offer.  So she was still un-shot when she later gave a press conference in which she categorically denied that there had been any violence during the violent riots.

Unlike most of the lying leftists, who were smart enough to downplay or excuse the violence of their mobs (“It wasn’t a problem until Trump called out the guard, 99% of LA is totally peaceful,” etc.), Mad Maxine swung for the fences, denying what PWFE (People With Functioning Eyes) had actually seen. “Don’t think that somehow, because they called out the National Guard, there was violence.  There was no violence! I was on the street!  I know!” 

Some were tempted to believe her, because she did look like she had been on the street.  More specifically, like she’d been tossed onto the street and landed face-first.  And then bounced several times, still face-first.

But even those who tried to be cagier, and just downplay the violence, were humiliated by a combination of inept staffers and a loving God with a great sense of humor.  Two Dem congresswomen – the one whose name I remember is Judy Chu – appeared on a CNN interview, with their heads in a small box on the screen, while most of the screen was showing live coverage from LA.  

So as Judy prattled on about how the protestors were really remarkably restrained and peaceful, right beside her stupid head was a giant video of clouds of black smoke roiling up from burning cars, and clips of rioters throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at cop cars.  Many commenters observed the parallels to the infamous video from a blue city in 2020, in which a “journalist” insisted that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” as he was framed against the hellish conflagration of an entire city block behind him.  

Two of the most iconic images of the latest unveiling of the left’s true nature have been the moron on a motorcycle riding around a burning car while waving a Mexican flag, and the Waymo cars being devoured in roaring fires.

The fact that they were Waymo cars brings extra layers of irony to the rioters’ behavior.  If they had attacked vehicles that are logically associated with what they are ostensibly outraged by – an ICE van, cop cars – that would still be evil, but at least comprehensible as the kind of political gesture that narcissistic social justice warriors would make. 

But Waymo has never done anything to these troglodytes, other than offer an innovative way to get across town that is much cheaper than the car they can’t afford.  (Because living in mommy’s basement and whining on Bluesky has no monetary value whatsoever.) 

And the technological sophistication it took to develop and deploy driverless vehicles poignantly contrasts with the mindless urge to destroy that motivates the thugs who can barely make a Molotov cocktail work.  (And that involves fire, one of mankind’s first discoveries!)

That technology also highlights the petty cruelty of the rioters.  They call a vehicle made by a company that has done nothing wrong, and it faithfully shows up, and welcomes them with open doors.  And the mouth-breathing scavengers set it on fire, and dance around its flaming corpse.  

But then the horrific story of the first-ever Boeing Dreamliner crash in India…battled for news time with a handful of super-satisfying arrests of some of the worst of the bad bunch of leftist nihilists who are being quickly caught during riots. 

But that was bumped by Senator (guess which party?) Alex Padilla’s painful theater-kid turn when he interrupted Kristi Noem’s press conference by trying to bum-rush her while hollering dishonest non-sequiturs with all the persuasive power of a bag lady disrupting a city council meeting with a shrill screed about the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission. 

Then last night, the news starts coming in from Israel:  Netanyahu has gone full Michael Corleone at the Christening, and today he’s settling all family business.  Initial reports are that Israel killed a bunch of top iranian generals and nuclear scientists, and blasted the most prominent nuclear enrichment sites, along with some missile batteries that Iran might use to retaliate against Israel.  And new waves of strikes are on the way as we speak.

Reading about that made me wish that we’d consulted with the IDF months ago.  Because if they could pull off that pager masterpiece, I’m sure they could have equipped some Waymo vehicles with ball-bearing-laden plastic explosives, or exotic poisonous snakes in tiny catapults, or a noxious gas that causes explosive diarrhea and temporary blindness when the doors open.  Then our guys could just wait at a parking lot full of Waymos, until one-by-one, the vehicles get called by some anarchist creep, and pull out and hum away, carrying their surprise for the malevolent revolutionaries.

Am I saying that we should set up violent nihilists to become diced, blind, envenomed and beshitten because of their own evil schemes?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

Okay, I might not be able to write another column until after I get back home on Monday night.  But in the meantime, pray for our law enforcement, root for the Israeli badasses bringing the karma to Iran, and as always…

Hamas delenda est!

My Birthday, and More Dems Behaving Badly (posted 5/28/25)

Before I left on the cousins’ trip, I’d made some notes on a few “lefties behaving badly” stories.  Even though those examples are now two weeks old, and there have been hundreds more similar stories since then, I like to think that these stories are evergreen.  So I will share them with you now.

But first, I have to acknowledge a painful reality.  Today is my birthday, and I am 63 years old.  Some of you who have seen my most recent video – in which I was rocking my gray, poison-ivy beard – are probably saying to yourselves, “No way, Martacus!  You don’t look a day over 61 and a half.”

But sadly, that’s not the case.  I can verify for you youngsters that all of those cliches about life going by too fast are true.  I remember the 1980s like they were yesterday.  Even when I’m feeling my age, I like to think of myself as middle-aged. 

Which I am… assuming I live to be 126.  (And on that day – mark it on your calendars: May 28th, 2085 – I’ll STILL be more fit to be president than Joe Biden was.)

I didn’t tell you this just to get a bunch of gratifying “happy birthday” wishes.  (Although, considering how little time I have left on earth, a rousing round of “happy birthday to you” wouldn’t hoit.  Just be sure to sing into my good ear.)  I’m also telling you because of an embarrassing error I made many years ago.

When I created a personal Facebook page – which I neglect for months at a time, so if I haven’t responded to your post there, please don’t take it personally – my tech incompetence and short attention span quickly raised its ugly head.  I lost interest shortly after starting to complete the various “profile” information fields, and thus left the default setting for date of birth, which was January 1st.

So over the years, I’ve received some very sweet “happy birthday” messages from people… on New Year’s Day.  Please forgive me for my sloth.  My only social media activity takes place on this wonderful CO site and my own WordPress page, so I apologize for my inattention elsewhere.

But enough about me behaving badly.  Let’s move on to lefties doing so…

You may remember when a handful of Democrat elected officials led a mob of low-IQ protestors and tried to force their way into a NJ ICE facility back on May 9th.  That story continues to unfold hilariously, with congresswoman LaMonica McIver having since been arrested and charged with assault.

She made a classic blunder: when you’re going to participate in an unruly mob and assault a government official while cameras are recording, try not to be an obnoxiously loud, plus-sized person wearing a bright red coat. 

I think Sun Tzu said that.

But the Red Menace was not the only one arrested that day.  She was joined by Ras Baraka. 

Despite having the name of a Klingon warlord, or possibly a Jamaican reggae band, Baraka is actually the mayor of Newark New Jersey.  He’s done such a bang-up job with Newark – as everyone knows, when you think of stellar governance, you think of Newark – that he’s now planning to run for NJ governor.

And what could be a better way to launch a gubernatorial bid than to get some national attention by being arrested in a high-profile incident?  Unfortunately for Ras, he is apparently taking his PR cues from Cory “Spartacus” Booker, because in a press conference after his arrest, he compared himself to David.

I don’t mean David Hasselhoff (although the mayor’s clarity of thought suggests that he too may have a problem with the bottle), or David Schwimmer (though the mayor would be well advised to PIVOT from his recent strategy). 

I mean the Biblical David. 

Because we all remember the story of how King David overcame Goliath by yelling incoherently until the Philistines freed a bunch of foreign criminal gangbangers, don’t we?  Good grief!

Speaking of famous Davids, do you know what’s funnier than the Dems picking Lil’ Davy Hogg for their DNC co-chair?  Giving him the boot less than three months later! 

I can’t wait to see who they replace him with, since their fig-leaf reason for dumping him – as opposed to the real one: he’s a narcissistic zygote with no life experience whose first decision was to spend $20 mil trying to primary a bunch of old Dems – was that the committee who elected him wasn’t “diverse” enough!

Man, I’m hoping that they roll out a previously unknown niece of Que Mala!  Or maybe Joy Reid?  I hear she’s looking for a gig.

Anyway, have you noticed how quickly the Dems dropped the main talking point that they’d been beating into the ground for the last year?  No, I’m not talking about “Trans women are women!”  That was second place.

First place by a mile was, “We have to defend democracy!  Our precious, sacred, inviolate democracy.  Oh, won’t someone please think of the democracy!”

And then Trump won the electoral college, and all seven battleground states, and the popular vote.  And all of a sudden, they’re not so excited about democracy anymore.  So how can we be surprised when they elected Davy Hogg – fair and square, and oh so democratically! – and as soon as he turns out to be the petulant child he obviously was when they elected him… they un-elect him!   

That’s the Democrats, people.  Gaslighters gotta gaslight, and they are the gold standard of gaslighting.  If they’re not trying to convince us that Tampon Tim Walz is a man, they’re trying to convince us that Michelle Obama is a woman, or that Joe Biden was in tip-top shape all through his presidency.

It’s been great fun lately to watch all of the top Dems scrambling for cover when asked about their scandalous cover-up of Biden’s obvious dementia.  Someone obviously came up with a lame talking point, which was shortly spouted by Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and a dozen others: “We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”

That’s comically inept.  Can you imagine it working with any kind of scandal?  Could Letitia James get away with saying, “All of my fraudulent mortgages are in the past. Let’s look forward!”

Or could Bill Clinton have had a much more tranquil 1998 by saying, “Oh, come on!  Who can even remember who was taking Chicom cash from Charlie Trie, or banging cocktail waitresses two at a time so that customers couldn’t even get a drink at the White House bar?  That’s all past stuff.  I’m looking forward now.” 

Still, I guess we can be grateful that no Democrat will tell any more tired lies about January 6th, or refer to Trump’s 34 bogus convictions, since those are both in the past, right? 

But my favorite example of Democrat self-beclowning from the first half of May came from smelly Eric Swalwell.  During congressional questioning of Kristi Noem about whether proven MS-13 member Kilmar Garcia is an MS13 member, Swalwell took the obviously wrong position, and bragged that he was correct because of his very accurate “bullsh*t detector.”

Hey Eric, it’s probably not a good idea to brag about how you are incapable of being fooled.  Because we all remember that time when a Chinese spy sidled up to you, batted her eyes, and whispered, “Me love you long time.” And you didn’t think, “Wait a minute, that’s a line from the Vietnamese hooker in Full Metal Jacket, and I’m a 4 at best, and that’s before taking my low IQ and flatulence into account.  And she’s a lot younger, and a 7 or 8.”

But no.  Your bullsh*t detector must have been on the fritz.  And it stayed that way for several years, until the FBI came to you and said, “You know that Chicom cutie who pretended to fall for you, even though she would never fall for someone who looks and smells like you in a million years?  Yeah, she’s a spy.”

Well done, Eric!  You keep doing you, and we’ll keep laughing at you.

Hamas delenda est!

Response to Last Week’s Posts About Debating Lefties, + My Dark Secret (posted 5/15/25)

By the time you read this, I’ll be on the road up to Tennessee, and then on to Illinois.  I think I’ll be posting a column tomorrow on the Dems’ entertaining, continuing implosion, and I’ll do my best to post at least one or two columns next week from the road.

Last week I posted a slightly edited version of an email exchange I recently had with an old friend of mine who is a committed lefty, on the subject of the rule of law, and the potential for a “constitutional crisis” that may arise if SCOTUS doesn’t shut down the dozens of district court judges who are filing frivolous lawfare TROs against every move he makes.   

Many of you asked how he responded to the points I made, and many said that they have stopped even trying to discuss politics with the lefties in their lives. 

I haven’t heard back from my friend about my last two responses yet.  He received the first one the night before he was leaving on a two-week trip, and said that he’d need time to go through it and think about it, and I sent him the second one while he was on the road, and said we could talk about it when he gets back.

But over many years of such exchanges, I think that each of us has changed the other’s mind on individual points, but not on any of our larger beliefs.  (E.g. I think I’ve been able to prove to him that individual lefties have been corrupt and that some conservatives have governed better than some lefties, but not that leftism itself is based on false premises and doesn’t work in the real world.)  He’s one of four leftist friends of mine, and I think that statement applies to all four of them.    

Since none of them are the deranged, extremist, “you’re cancelled if you don’t agree with me” types, I’ve still been able to discuss politics with them, to varying degrees.   And I appreciate that, for a couple of reasons.  As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy clarifying and testing my arguments in good-faith debates.  (Teaching argumentative and persuasive writing was a good fit for me!)

I also think that my friends and I have served a very useful moral purpose for each other: reminding all of us that the other side is not made up entirely of malevolent idiots and worse.  It’s very easy to watch bad-faith hypocrites and liars like Biden, Schumer, Grandma Squanto et al and start thinking of all Democrats as irredeemable creeps.  (And there are plenty of GOP morons who can make regular conservatives look like idiots!)  But knowing my friends reminds me – and I hope that knowing me reminds them – that that’s not the case.

In a way, this point dovetails nicely with my Christian faith.  We’re supposed to be as aware of our own flaws as we are of others’ flaws, and it’s good to be reminded of other people’s foibles in a way that doesn’t lead us to demonize them.  People make ridiculous choices in many areas of their lives, not just in politics.

Some people willingly drink ouzo.  Some are vegans.  Some root for FSU.  Some like soccer.  Some don’t like dogs. And some vote down-the-line Democrat.  What are we going to do?  Uncle Jesus tells me I’m supposed to love them anyway, and reminds me that I might have made a few stupid choices along the way myself.

I mean, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me, with my smoke show wife, my great kids, and my Wonder Dog, living my best life in the Free State of Florida.  But even I have had some dark chapters in my life. 

What I’m about to share with you needs to stay between us, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it.  Like Joy Reid when her homophobic posts came out, I’ll just claim that my email was hacked.  (Joy Reid is this angry racist lady who used to be on tv.  Or on MSNBC.  Which is kind of like tv, except without the viewers.)

So if others are in the room or reading this over your shoulder who can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut, please go somewhere else, or ask them to leave. 

Okay.  Here it goes. 

I was basically a Democrat until I was in my late 20s.

I know. I just threw up in my mouth a little, too.  And Cassie just looked at me with her head turned sideways, because I forgot that she can read.  Annnndddd… now she’s trotting out of the room, giving me a withering look back over her shoulder. 

Please, let me explain! 

I was pretty a-political as a teen and young adult.  I was one of those weird young men who was preoccupied with sports and girls, with an added layer of voracious-reader book nerd. 

Then I went to grad school for seven years (the PhD took me an extra year because I wrote a novel instead of my dissertation in my fourth year), where I was surrounded by lefty professors and students.

The pressure to conform was pretty strong.  If taking a lefty position in class was more likely to get me the 4.0 that I was looking for, okay.   If pretending to have read Das Kapital and Noam Chomsky’s latest drivel increased the chances that a female classmate would overlook my pedestrian appearance and thrust herself upon me, I’m in.  (If not like Flynn, at least like a young, proto-Martacus.) (100-year-old movie references for $100, Alex.) 

Whew, this is tough to write.  In the years since, my shame has driven me to confession about this multiple times.   And I’m not even Catholic!  I’d just randomly stop in a Catholic church and step into the shame booth.  (Have I mentioned that I’m not Catholic?)  But even then, I’d be tempted to falsely confess to murder or robbing a nun, just to avoid saying the words, “I once voted for Jimmy Carter.”

In my defense, I’d never paid enough attention to politics to be a down-the-line lefty.  I’d always had enough common sense to know that affirmative action was just reverse racism, and that abortion was wrong, for example.  And as I was forced to read leftist literary criticism – anti-Americanism and CRT were already making themselves felt, even in the Midwest, in the 1980s – I started to feel more and more repulsed.

By the time I finished my PhD, I had resolved never to read Lacan, Derrida, Marcuse or any of those weirdos again.  In fact, I started to read a lot of history, and then military history.  And then I came across Thomas Sowell, and Milton Friedman, and eventually VDH. 

Within two years of getting out, I was a confirmed conservative.

My transformation was completed a few years later, when I realized that the vow of poverty that I’d taken when I became an English professor was not a joke.  I started researching ways to buy fixer-upper real estate so that I might be able to retire before age 90. 

Some real-world experience with entrepreneurial risk-taking quickly cured me of the last vestiges of my youthful dalliance with liberalism, and I started down the road to becoming the conservative stalwart you know and admire today.      

Thus I became the old political cliché: a soft-hearted, naïve liberal at 20, but a reality-appreciating conservative by 30. 

My example does give me hope, though: sometimes it seems as if everybody is in their own bubbles, and people cling so stubbornly to their own priors.  But I made the change, both through reading ideas from the other side, and from life experience.  My guess is that the latter changes a lot more minds – the old “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” idea. 

But as a bookish type with a taste for logic and argument, my conversion began and moved pretty far along purely because of reading and thinking, before I staked my meager life savings on several real estate investments, and thus sealed the deal.

So while it often seems that our politics are so polarized in recent years, I still retain some cautious optimism that at least some liberals are persuadable.  In fact, their own party’s insane race to the far left is pushing some of them toward our side by default.  

I think many of these types now feel – or soon will – like Reagan did when he said that he didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him.  Elon certainly does.  A year or two ago he posted a cartoon showing him standing in the same place, but the leftists running so far to the extreme left that his unchanged position – which was once a little left of center – is now firmly on the right. 

A similar process happened for RFK Jr., Tulsi, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, and many more.

So I enjoy debating my lefty friends, even though I don’t expect that any of them will necessarily undergo the conversion that I did. 

But even if they only become more aware of and turned off by the extremists on the far left, they will be doing themselves and the nation some good.

Our country would be better off with a sane, center-left liberal party, and a much more marginalized and impotent far-left fringe (rather than the radicals who are steering the Democrats today). 

Such a centrist party could mitigate the damage done when the Dems next have power, and could even be cooperative partners with some conservatives on a small range of issues where we have some common ground. 

If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I see that happening anytime very soon.  But we’re cautious optimists around here, and I’m trying to keep that hope alive!

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus proving that her mind and memory are still strong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because: self-detonators gotta self-detonate!

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

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

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

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

She seems nice.   

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

Crazy eyes?  (You betcha.)

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

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

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

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

Any pics of the rainbow flag?  (Obviously.)

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

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

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

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

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!