life – Page 2 – Martin Simpson

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 10^th, 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!

Another Self-Detonating Hero, and You’ll Never Guess Why the Dems Are Worried about Fetterman (posted 5/9/25)

After two over-long columns on the serious subjects of lawfare and the courts, today I’m returning to the kind of material that is right in my usual wheelhouse: a quick rundown of recent stories requiring juvenile mockery.

But I appreciate the many thoughtful comments that you all posted on my last two columns. I’m going to share a little more next week to answer your questions about how my buddy responded to my emails, and also about my conversion from being a liberal in my callow youth, to the wise old conservative you know and love today.

First up, we have a new candidate for the leftists’ “Self-Detonating Hero” designation, so get ready for a fusillade of “unexpectedly”s:

He is a pro-Hamas, anti-Semite Columbia student (unexpectedly!) from “Palestine” (unexpectedly!), here on a green card (unexpectedly!) named Mohsen Mahdawi.

Mahdawi was taken into custody by ICE, but has been temporarily released on bond on the order of a US District court judge in Vermont. (Unexpectedly!) Of course that judge was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

HA! I kid because I love. He’s an Obama appointee.

Unexpectedly!

And the Dems are already beginning to transfer their schoolgirl crushes from Kilmar to Mohsen, like a 13-year-old girl replacing her Donnie Osmond poster with a Shaun Cassidy one. (I’ll take “Timely late 1970s pop culture references” for $100, Alex.)

Mohsen looks like an Arab Luigi Mangione, and he’s got the soft-spoken peace-loving protestor routine down pat. CBS and the NY Times have already given him tongue-bath interviews. (Unexpectedly!) So start your countdown clocks, because you know he’s going to blow up in their faces soon.

I just came across a group called Canary Mission, who documents and publicizes people and organizations who promote hatred of the US, Israel and Jews, and they’ve put together a great two-minute video of Mohsen spouting some soothing talking points about how his activism “is centered in the energy of love.”

Hilariously, the video intersperses Mohsen’s assertions with video clips and pics that belie his words. He says, “Antisemitism has no place in our movement.” Cut to him holding a microphone wearing a keffiyeh, in the middle of three other people, under the chyron, “Mohsen surrounded by anti-Semites.”

He says, “My compassion is also for the Jewish people.” Cut to him standing on campus, using a bullhorn to drown out a small group of students calling on Hamas to release the red-headed Bibas babies, whom they eventually murdered, along with their mother. (In that clip, Mohsen has a hateful smirk on his face that made me wish the IDF had placed one of their pager charges in his bullhorn.)

My favorite part of the video is when Mohsen mournfully accuses the IDF of killing six of his cousins and his uncle. Cut to a photo lineup of scowling “Palestinian” terrorists, one of them holding an AK-47, identifying them as his cousins and uncle.

It reminded me of a mafia movie scene in which an old gangster looks through wedding pictures. “There’s Sammy the Bull, Fat Tony Salerno, Frankie the Blade Lucchese, Big Paulie and Little Paulie Genovese. All of them upstanding Italian Americans, unjustly harassed by the police!”

I hope the Dems go all-in on dreamy peacenik Mohsen as their newest poster boy. Then, pics of him in a suicide vest, proudly holding up a copy of Mein Kampf can show up in 3… 2… 1…

While the Dems are hot and bothered over Mohsen, they’re very worried about another one of their own, Lurch Fetterman. Last week New York Magazine ran an alarmist story about his health, with the tagline, “John Fetterman’s Struggle: The senator insists he is in good health. But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.”

If you didn’t know what a left-wing rag NY Mag is, you might think that Fetterman has had another stroke, or a heart attack, or is possibly collapsing on a regular basis and bleeding from the eyes.

But if you were a certain hilarious genius with a fully functional wizard hat, you might guess that Fetterman is continuing to make more sense, which his leftist handlers regard with alarm. And you’d be 100% right.

Expectedly!

The story actually has various members of his staff hysterically getting their dresses – or in some cases their gender non-binary onesies – over their heads because Fetterman has demonstrated such ominous signs of dementia as… wait for it… disbelieving that the IDF is bombing “Palestinian” “refugee” camps full of “innocent civilians,” and… wait for it again… considering not voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for SecDef!

One of his key advisors who quit last year captures the tone of the article: “I hope Senator Fetterman gets the help he needs.”

The story is unintentionally funny, and it perfectly sums up the elite left in a nutshell: When Fetterman shuffled around like a stuttering, lobotomized mental patient who would vote for whatever they put in front of him, they praised him to the skies! But now that he’s occasionally making sense, they think he’s lost his mind. Perfect!

Speaking of losing one’s mind, did you catch the CNN interview with a Sinaloa cartel member? They put him in a disguise and altered his voice, and the interviewer talked to him as if he was an aggrieved victim of unfair accusations. She said, “According to the Trump administration, you are a terrorist. What do you make of that?”

The guy answered, “Well, the situation is ugly, but we have to eat.”

Of course you do. And of course the CNN dope didn’t push back at all. Because who among us hasn’t been in that poor criminal’s situation?

I remember my junior year in high school, when I’d smuggled some fentanyl into study hall, shot two of my rivals execution-style, and sex trafficked several of my female classmates for cash, and I got caught. Boy, was my dad mad when he got called down to the principal’s office with me!

But I said, “Dad, if I didn’t sell drugs, pimp out my girlfriends and assassinate my competitors, what would I do for lunch money?”

And everyone agreed that I’d made a compelling case. So I spent a year in juvie and missed my graduation, but four short years later I got a job as a reporter at CNN. True story.

Anyway, I can’t believe that even CNN can be this stupid. They hate Trump and would do anything to discredit him, but do they really believe that a violent cartel thug giving him a thumb’s down is going to help the Dems and hurt Trump?!

You keep doing you, CNN!

Hamas delenda est!

Return of the Dire Wolf, and of Students Paying their Own School Loans (posted 4/25/25)

First up, you probably saw the story a week ago that scientists in Texas have brought the dire wolf back from extinction. And I’m all for it.

Not because I understand it, exactly. The reports say that the Texans “used cloning and gene-editing” from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull, and then took blood cells from a living grey wolf (which is supposed to be the closest living relative to a dire wolf) and genetically mixed that with the old DNA. Then they transferred that to an egg cell from a domestic dog, and then the embryos were transferred to surrogates for gestation and birth.

Okay, now that I wrote that all out, it sounds very weird. It also sounds like the result would actually be a dog/grey wolf/dire wolf mixture, rather than an actual pure, de-extinctified dire wolf. (And yes, that should be a word.)

I’ll grant you that there are a few reasons to worry about the results. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that Nancy Pelosi was created out of DNA from the teeth and skulls of various ancient Egyptians, mixed with the DNA of Lenin, and of a particularly dishonest used-car salesman. And look what a disaster she turned out to be!

Plus there are the obvious, ominous Jurassic Park analogies. Though I think I speak for all of us when I say that I’d much rather have a small pack of those hissing dinosaurs that killed Newman (from Seinfeld) running around, than just the one Nancy Pelosi.

On the other hand, bringing back an extinct wolf from 10,000 years ago is an impressive feat, and we optimists can find bright sides in it, too. I mean sure, we could end up with the wolf equivalent of terrifying hissing dinosaurs, or a horrifically mummified nightmare of a Speaker of the House.

But we could also end up with super-wolves that could help clean up the swamp.

Am I saying that we should release a pack of hungry dire wolves into congressional office buildings, then bar the doors from the outside and turn up Tom Petty’s album Hard Promises in our ear buds so we wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming?

I’m saying that we should have that conversation.

Also, “dire wolf” has got to be one of the best names for any natural creature, right up there with the Black Widow spider and the Venus Flytrap.

I mean, “wolf” is already cool. But “dire?” Are you kidding me? That’s like the animal equivalent of naming your Russian leader “Ivan the Terrible,” or the pirates naming their chief “The Dread Pirate Roberts.”

I looked up the derivation of the name “dire wolf” – because: me – and found that the Latin name is canis dirus, which means “fearsome dog.” Which is AWESOME!

And also a coincidence. Because regular readers will know that my Aussie shepherd Cassie’s most common honorific is “the Wonder Dog.” But a lesser known title of hers – most often used when an Amazon driver comes to the front door with one of my wife’s thrice-hourly deliveries – is “the Fearsome Dog.” (“Cassius dirus.”)

True story.

Anyway, even though I’m glad that the dire wolf is back, I hope that you all know that this fine animal’s re-emergence will not distract me from my focus on the most pressing of all canine or canine-adjacent developments.

I’m speaking, of course, of our society’s urgent need for the fast-tracking of production of the first line of defense against future antifa, BLM, or pro-Hamas rioting mobs: the Robot Flamethrower Dog!

Trump’s re-election and Hulk Homan’s™ presence on the national scene have bought us some time. But we need large numbers of RFDs, and we need them soon!

If I were in charge, I’d put Elon on that immediately. He could start alpha testing with two RFDs roaming around every Tesla dealership. I’d suggest using the video footage from the Tesla cameras to create a series of pay-per-view events.

And before anyone else horns in on this fantastic idea, I hereby copyright the series name: “Apex Predators vs. Beta Males: The Culling of the Woke™”

In other feel-good news, Linda McMahon brought down a folding chair of reality on the heads of delinquent college-loan borrowers on Monday, announcing that as of May 5^th, the feds will officially resume collecting on its defaulted federal student loan portfolio.

Student loan payments were paused as part of the CARES ACT – passed by congress and signed by Trump in March of 2020, at the beginning of covid. Although congress mandated that borrower repayment re-start in October of 2023, the Biden cabal ignored that law just as they did so many others.

But now, after 5 years of taxpayers who did not take out any school loans being forced to pay interest for people who did take out those loans, the gravy train is ending. By summer, the FSA will send out notices before beginning administrative wage garnishment.

Now we all know that many students – especially those who got various grievance studies degrees (“Anti-Americanism, with a minor in Jew Hatred,” “Gay Stuff,” “BS in Women Good-Men Bad,” etc.) – don’t have any wages to garnish. But as the wailing begins, at least that will be a sobering lesson that may dissuade those who were planning to embark on one of those degree paths.

I’m reminded of an old quote from Edmund Burke, which goes, “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Except that I heard it from an old Bible prof at school as, “Pain is the school of mankind…”

Which rings more true to me. Because these newly resumed payments will definitely bring pain – hopefully a very instructive and ultimately helpful pain – to the lives of many struggling graduates.

I do feel bad for everyone who was lied to by Biden and the Dems in their vote-buying scheme of offering “loan forgiveness.” They’ve had their hopes cruelly raised, and they’ve gotten used to budgeting for the last 5 years without accounting for the payments that they will now have to start making.

Which brings me to closing thoughts on three rotten behaviors that the Left has been getting away with for the last 5 years, and longer.

First, they’ve been wailing about the unfairly high cost of college for years, while at the same causing most of those increased costs. Because even someone with a Jasmine Crockett-level IQ could tell you that when you hand out school loans like free cocaine at one of Hunter’s hookers-and-blow parties, you’re incentivizing universities to jack up costs.

Second, the Dems have been talking out of both sides of their mouths about college for years: screaming about how unfair and impossible it is to expect current graduates to pay back their loans, while at the same time handing out more and more loan money to those who – by their own admission! – will struggle to ever pay them back.

Third, the elite left has been yelling themselves hoarse because Trump has been appealing the rulings of far-left lower-court judges who are doing their best to prevent him from carrying out the job of the president, howling that taking those cases to SCOTUS is an existential threat to democracy!

Meanwhile, Brandon unilaterally declared that tenants no longer had to pay rent to landlords during covid, while admitting that his royal proclamation was probably not constitutional. He did the same thing when he declared that student loans were “forgiven,” with no act of congress or legal justification.

And when SCOTUS slapped him down, he tried to do the same thing with slightly different verbiage, bragging at rallies that the high court “may have blocked me, but they didn’t stop me.”

So the next time a social justice warrior rants at you about how Trump is worse than Hitler because he’s defying the courts, read the last two paragraphs to them, in a clear and slow voice, so they can follow along.

Then unleash your Robot Flamethrower Dog on them.

And don’t call him off until their nose rings have melted and the blue dye has been burned out of their hair.

Hamas delenda est!

Two Cheers for Rosie O’Donnell, & Handcuffs for Letitia James? (posted 4/23/25)

I have no central theme today, just a couple of noteworthy stories I’ve seen recently.

I’ll start with an unusual one for me, because it made me heartily say, “Two cheers for Rosie O’Donnell!”

I can’t give her three cheers. Because, as I mentioned just now, she’s Rosie O’Donnell.

But we live in a world seemingly full of blowhard lefty narcissists who always insist that if the next Republican presidential candidate wins, they’ll leave the country. And then they never do!

But to her credit, Rosie put her money where her extremely large mouth is, and she actually followed through. When Trump won, she moved to Ireland and applied for Irish citizenship. And seriously: good for her.

Obviously I think she’s off her rocker, politically speaking. But if she’s convinced – against all evidence after his first term – that Trump is worse than Hitler, and will bring a nightmarish reign of oppression down on America, she demonstrated the courage of her convictions by leaving. And as odd as this sounds, I think she’ll probably be happier for it.

Because there are millions of her political co-religionists in this country who believe that crap, and I don’t think it’s working very well for them. You’ve seen them. And you’ve heard them screaming, at their protests, and in courtrooms, and at various crime scenes. “Abortions for all! Death to Jews! Bring back foreign criminals! Death to America! Heterosexual sex is gross! Pay me not to work! Screw you, dad!”

Do they seem happy to you?

I’m reminded of a quote from one of my favorite books, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It appears early on, in a scene that is best-known for Satan’s monologue after he’s been cast out of heaven. (His hubris is summed up: “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”)

Shortly before that famous line, Milton captures an essential truth of human psychology in just two lines: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

I first read that as an undergrad, and though it stuck with me, it didn’t make a huge impact. Mostly because I was pre-occupied at the time with weightier philosophical questions. Questions like, “What’s the chances she’ll go out with me if I ask?” and, “Or her?” and, “Or maybe her?”

Also, “Why can’t the Bears draft a decent quarterback to save their lives?”

But the older I get, the smarter John Milton gets. (He’s like my dad in that way, God rest his soul.) And I’ve been around long enough to watch strong-willed people find the silver lining on every dark cloud, and make some hellish circumstances into a little slice of heaven.

And I’ve seen people like Rosie – and Joy Reid, and Keith Olberman, and Noam Chomsky, and a cast of thousands like them – do just the opposite. They’re living in the best country in the world, blessed with wealth and opportunities, and surrounded by signs and wonders. But they find fault wherever they look, and wallow in their own self-created misery.

They look at a shining city on a hill, and see only a Mordor-ian wasteland of sexism, racism and a plethora of politically incorrect phobias.

They look at a flawed, bloviating president who loves the country and is doing some good things, and they see Orange Hitler. They look at a rich genius who is sacrificing a lot to try to root out waste and fraud, and enable the government to more efficiently serve its citizens, and they see an evil oligarch.

They look at Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren and they see a racist, hideous crone and a phony white lady pretending to be Sacheen Littlefeather—

Okay, I’ve got to give them those two. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say.

Also: #wemustneverstopmockingher

Where was I?

Oh yeah, Rosie. She made a hell out of America for herself, but Ireland seems like a cool place to me, so here’s hoping she can make a heaven for herself there.

Apparently two of her grandparents were Irish, but even so, she is reportedly worried because her application for Irish citizenship has not yet been approved. And I think I speak for all of us when I say…

Oh no you don’t, Ireland! No do-overs or give-backs! You gave us Guinness, Liam Neeson, Yeats, and C.S. Lewis, and we gave you Rosie O’Donnell.

Sure, you made a terrible, terrible trade. But what’s done is done. She’s your problem now.

But to soften the blow, I suggest we start a go-fund-me to get Ireland to keep Rosie, along with any other nation who’s willing to take any other leftist celebrity irritants we can persuade to honor their vows that they would leave America if Trump won.

If we can pay a great Salvadoran (you say, “Nayib,” I say, “BUKELE!) to take the worst of our criminal illegals, we should be willing to open our wallets to get other countries to take the wretched refuse of our teeming lefties.

Speaking of wretched, I’ve got to end with a great story from Schadenfreude Corner: the tale of Letitia James’ impending criminal charges!

No charge against Trump was more bogus than James’ lies about him wildly over-valuing Mar-a-Lago in order to get a more favorable loan rate from banks. She claimed at one point that Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million, by relying on the low-end of a tax assessment (which are always lower than true market value), even though that assessment was 10 years old, and every real estate expert around said it was laughably low.

Later, she stated that the property should be valued at closer to $75 million, but then in an X post she listed the value as $25 million. Trump was similarly inconsistent, valuing it in financial statements at between $426-612 million, but also bragging that the real value should be over a billion.

All of which is moot, because the giant international banks from whom Trump sought the loan always do their own appraisals, rather than relying on biased owners. Valuation of unique, high-end properties are especially difficult to nail down, but you don’t get to be Deutsche Bank by relying on sellers’ fraudulently high valuations.

All of which is even moot-er, because Trump paid back the loans with interest, and the banks said that they’d be happy to do business with him again. Many NY lawyers and real estate investors agreed that this kind of a victimless case of a loan taken out and then repaid in full had ever been pursued before.

And now it turns out that lyin’ Letitia is a real estate investor herself, and that she was actually committing the kind of fraud that she accused Trump of committing. For example, she bought several properties with her dad as co-signer, but falsely listed them as “husband and wife.”

(Rumors that she learned that trick from an Ilhan Omar “Buy Real Estate With Your Brother/Husband” seminar have not been confirmed.)

She claimed a property in Virginia as her principal residence, allowing her to get a lower mortgage rate. Which was problematic, since she could not legally be the Attorney General in New York if her primary residence wasn’t in the state. Also, the neighbors of the Virginia house reported that they’d never seen James there.

She also bought a 5-unit building that she fraudulently claimed had only four units, allowing her to… wait for it…get a lower mortgage rate.

So James was allegedly perjuring her hypocritical arse off, as she was using taxpayer dollars and her powerful position to wrongly go after Trump.

The cherry on top of this delicious schadenfreude sundae is that James’ half-billion-dollar, illegitimate verdict against Trump will eventually be over-turned, and she will almost certainly be convicted of a raft of felony charges.

My hope – sure, you can even call it a prayer – is that those two verdicts will come down around the same time.

Because if I know Trump, he’ll find a way to be outside the courthouse where James will be led out in handcuffs, holding a gigantic, novelty check for the hundreds of millions of dollars he’d had to put in escrow, being refunded to him after he was vindicated in court.

Hamas delenda est!

Moron of the Month – Eastern Division Nominees (posted 4/11/25)

Even though we’re only one-third of the way through April, I’ve noticed that enough morons have already popped up in our politics this month to provide a roster of worthy competitors for a “Moron of the Month” contest.

In fact, I’ve already got 6 potential nominees. Maybe we can do this in rounds, like the March Madness basketball tournament. (Which I may have previously mentioned that my fightin’ Gators won on Monday night.)

So here are my first three nominees, from the Eastern division:

1. My first choice technically didn’t make her nominated performance in April, but on March 31^st. But since she doesn’t recognize boundaries like those between male and female, I’m going to disregard the boundaries between calendar months to move her into the April competition.

The special gal I’m talking about calls herself “Chase Strangio.” And ze oh ze, is that name spot-on! (See what I did there?) She’s the “trans man” – “trans” being Greek for “not,” as far as you know – who argued at SCOTUS in December against the Tennessee law banning “trans” surgery for minors.

You’ll recognize her if you see her, on account of her sad little beard and mustache combination, which you normally only see on barely pubescent boys who are trying too hard, or confused girls who take testosterone shots. (I call it “the David Hogg.”)

Strangio appeared on CNN on the last day of March, where literally dozens of viewers saw her say the following, in her obviously female voice, “The president is lying when he says that there are men impersonating women and participating in women’s sports. There are no men impersonating women that I’m aware of.”

Said the woman who is impersonating a man.

2. My second choice needs no introduction, since he is the infamous senator Cory Booker, whom we should never stop mocking because of that time he called himself “Spartacus” with a straight face, and non-ironically.

Regular readers might object that I occasionally call myself Martacus, but that’s ALWAYS with my tongue in cheek. Except for when my wife asks me to put on the Roman outfit and recite some famous Latin lines. (And if you think that’s weird, how about you explain what strange things you and your spouse are into, Mr. “Plank-in-Your-Own-Eye?”)

So once I’ve got the breastplate strapped on and the helmet in place – and no, I never forget the gladius – I’ll stride in and say, “Vini, vidi, vici. But not in that order.” And then my wife and I will laugh and laugh, because we both appreciate a sneakily off-color Latin joke.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

(By the way, one could make the argument that the fact that I know the Latin name for the Roman short sword is one more data point suggesting that one of my secret identities is in fact Martacus.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. “Spartacus” Booker.

That guy is a well-known moron already. But when he started speaking in March and finished on April 1^st, he took stupid to a whole new level. Not just because it’s hard to speak for 25 hours straight, but because it’s really hard to speak for that long and say absolutely nothing of any substance at all!

Dim-bulb Dems praised Booker for his stirring “filibuster.” But a filibuster is a purposefully long political speech made to forestall or prevent a legislative action. Ted Cruz and Ron Paul have filibustered in recent years to stop a couple of terrible leftist bills from being brought up and voted on, and Strom Thurmond – in 1957, when he still belonged to the party of slavery, the KKK and Jim Crow – filibustered a Civil Rights Act.

But Booker had no such purpose. He just got up and rambled on like the worst drama-queen theatre kid in the worst Junior High production of Streetcar Named Desire you’ve ever seen in your life. Except that instead of hollering, “Stella!” he yelled, “Donald!”

It was the perfect encapsulation of the Democrat party in its current, rudderless state: A speech given by an idiot, full of sound and histrionics, signifying nothing.

3. The third candidate has not been on the political scene for long, but she’s already building up a body of work that might one day qualify for first-ballot entry into the Moron Hall of Fame. This is Jasmine Crockett, the phony congresswoman who went to an expensive private high school and college, but who pretends that their curricula never covered “how to correctly conjugate the verb ‘to be’.”

Previous low-lights of hers include calling wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels,” and calling black GOP congressman Byron Donald a race traitor because he married a white woman. (Of course, she doesn’t mention that her favorite presidential candidate last time around – part black, part Indian, and all inarticulate – also married a white woman, Doug Emhoff. But never mind that.)

She started the month strong, when – in a talk on the House floor on April Crockett’s Day (i.e. the first) – she expressed outrage that the Trump administration has been saying that we should “ignore the orders” of the far-left district court judges who have been found dozens of “legal” reasons why the President can’t go around carrying out the role of President.

Saith the Eyelashes, “Law and order [means] that you follow the order and go through the appeals process, even if you dislike what the judge did.”

Darrell Issa, (R)ational, then immediately pointed out that less than a year ago, Crockett co-sponsored articles of impeachment against Clarence Thomas and Alito because she disliked what they did, i.e. ruled correctly.

D’oh!

The very next day, Crockett was dumb enough to admit on camera that she was a DEI hire. (Sidebar: Sweet pea, everyone knew that the moment you opened your mouth.) She said, “When I first became a public defender I had no criminal defense experience. And I walked in and I told my boss Charlie and said, ‘You should hire me.” And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m black.’”

And when Charlie (rumors that his last name was either “Brown” or “Manson” have not been confirmed) didn’t immediately say, “Get your no-experience-having black behind out of my office, you racist beeyotch!” he proved that he shouldn’t have his job either.

But as dumb as those examples are, she topped them on April 6th, when she tried to defend illegal immigrants, but staggered into a hilarious self-own. Because she’s a moron.

In a speech that desecrated the Grace Baptist Church in Waterbury, Connecticut, she said that she “had to go around the country and educate people” (HA!) about how we need illegals, because no Americans will farm anymore.

Or, as the expensively “educated” imbecile put it, “The fact is ain’t none a y’all tryin’ to go and farm right now….We done pickin’ cotton.”

In addition to making anyone within earshot dumber after hearing that, Crockett said the quiet part – the incredibly evil, quiet part – out loud, arguing that we need illegal immigrants, so that… wait for it… they can be our slaves!

Now THAT’s an old-school Democrat for you!

In your comments, please choose which moron should move on to the next round.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The analogy is that a nation is like a house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then their first rent check bounces.

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

And our neighborhood cop is Hulk Homan.™

Hamas delenda est!

Why is the Left so Mixed-Up About Sex? (posted 2/28/25)

Even with all of the misbehavior being uncovered in various government agencies, I had not imagined a spot on my “Feds Engaging in Shenanigans” Bingo card for “Bizarre sex chat rooms within the National Security Agency.”

But here we are.

When I first started reading this story, I had to make sure it wasn’t a hoax, or a Babylon Bee parody. But as I read on, I realized that I might have to give up satire, because even my eccentric mind couldn’t make this up.

And just like having sex with your cousin on a moving elevator in a skyscraper, this story is wrong on so many levels!

First, these were government workers talking dirty to each other on our dime, and that’s wrong enough to get fired over, just by itself.

Second, these people aren’t attractive Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt types, steaming up a dimly lit employee lounge in some kind of 50 Shades of Grey fantasy situation.

No. These are – hold on to your gag reflex, all ye who enter here – cubicle-dwelling government employees. And you know what that means.

Vaguely spheroid, gelatinous bodies under unflattering, buzzing fluorescent lights, the sickly pallor of their skin like one of those deep-ocean-dwelling, eyeless fish who never see the sun, or else Lizzie “Grandma Squanto” Warren.

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And they’re all either way too big or way too small, and the contrast between the morbidly Jabba-esque beside the frail, spindly homunculi makes both extremes look even worse somehow.

And third, even if you could get past their disturbingly froggish appearance – and you absolutely cannot – there’s the nature of the sex talk. It’s not even the sexy kind of sex talk. There are no Viking warrior princesses with form-fitting metal breastplates, or French maids with the seamed stockings, or sorority girls getting ready for a pillow fight, or…

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The horrible, horrible sex talk.

It was all about nightmare fetishes and polyamory and genital mutilation. One guy who got de-junkified claimed to enjoy being on the other side of the stick, so to speak. Another was just thrilled because his newly Gavin Newsom-esque featureless crotch allowed him “to wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it.”

I’m not looking that up, but I’m assuming that he didn’t mean “gaffe.” Although…he certainly did.

Another sang the praises of “getting my b*tth*le zapped by a laser.” For a moment I wanted to believe that he meant that somebody had finally fired on Adam Schiff with one of those phasers from Star Trek. But alas, no.

There was a lot of talk about “polycules.” None of us knows what that means, but all of us somehow know that we do NOT want to know what that means.

As incomprehensibly gross as this all is, it’s not inconsistent with the odd fixation that so many on the left seem to have with eccentric (to put it mildly!) sex and gender weirdness. Just within the last week, two Dem Governors have creeped out the nation on this issue.

Maine’s Janet Mills is so dedicated to the proposition that males should be dominating girls in high school sports that she is risking her political future and $250 million in federal funds to pursue that obsession.

“Martin,” you might ask, “has Mills also danced in a drag show wearing an unconvincing Wonder Woman t-shirt?”

What an odd question. But yes. Yes she has. And no, Gal Gadot (giggity) is in no danger of losing her Wonder Woman role in any upcoming movies to the septuagenarian Maine governor.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin, oddball Governor Tony Evers, (D)imwit, hopped onto the “let’s screw up the language” bandwagon by inserting ridiculous gender terms into the state budget proposal, for some reason.

My theory is that he watched the way the Biden administration got mocked for referring to expectant mothers as “pregnant people” and “birthing people,” and he turned to an aide and said, “Hold my cheese curds, and watch this.”

Then, instead of using the word “mother” in the Wisconsin proposed budget, he used… wait for it… “inseminated person.”

Good lord!

One of the things I love about the English language is its vast vocabulary, which allows for finely detailed shades of meaning to describe anything. If you want to describe people as “thin,” for example, you can choose from several pages of variants, from the very positive (slender, svelte) to the negative (skinny, bony) to the extremely negative (emaciated, gaunt).

In addition to being the biologically correct term for a woman who has given birth, the word “mother” is entwined in a constellation of comforting, evocative connotations. Safety, warmth, nurturing. Unconditional love.

Dying soldiers on battlefields all over the world often use their last breath to cry out for their mothers. If you want the most reliable shortcut to a righteous beatdown, insult a man’s mother.

When normally mild-mannered women throw themselves in front of their babies in moments of great danger, we call that “maternal instinct.”

What does “inseminated person” evoke?

A sterile biology textbook. Something a jaded sexual assault investigator scribbles in his notebook at a crime scene. A phrase in a transcript at a war crimes tribunal.

Is any sane person ever going attribute an act of sacrificial love to “inseminated person’s instinct?”

If Tony Evers has managed to get a woman to marry him and father children (unexpectedly!), and his wife dies first, is he going to put her names and dates on her headstone above the phrase, “Beloved Inseminated Person”?

Ugh. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, and I’m no (real) doctor, but I think they need some intensive psychotherapy, with at least a dusting of electroshock sessions. Because they’ve got some cranial crossed wires when it comes to sex that would send Sigmund Freud screaming into the night.

Am I saying that in a fair world, Tony Evers would be convicted of some kind of felonious governmental malfeasance and end up in a prison, where he would gain some karmic, first-hand understanding of being an “inseminated person?”

To quote a former terrible presidential candidate, I’m saying that we should have that conversation.

Hamas delenda est!

Christmas, Losses, & Remembering My Dad (posted 12/13/24)

This column will be an unusual one.

Today my wife and I are heading down for my daughter Emily’s graduation from college on Saturday. We’ve got a four-bedroom Airbnb through Tuesday, and we’ll be joined by Katie and her husband, Karen’s two brothers, and one of my cousins. After the graduation, we’ll be having an early Christmas with Katie and Ryan, since they’ll be back in Denver and working on Christmas Day.

In other words, we’ll be making rather merry for the next four days, and I won’t be posting my usual column on Monday. But I’ve got some things on my mind that I thought I’d share before leaving town.

December is my favorite month of the year, and after the relief of Trump’s win last month, this has been an easier year than usual to get into the Christmas spirit.

We’ve got the tree and lights up, and last weekend we saw the town tree-lighting – with carolers, horse-drawn wagon rides and luminaries lining the streets – in an old hotel where Robert Frost spent his last winters, in one of our town’s oldest neighborhoods. The advent services at church have been great, and the weather has cooperated by giving us enough cold nights to justify having a few fires in the fireplace.

But I’m also reminded of the bittersweetness of the Christmas season for many, especially older people. The sweetness is obvious, especially for Christians, for whom the holiday marks the pivot-point of human history.

But the bitterness is there too, because for most of us Christmas is the most nostalgic of holidays, and nostalgia always combines happy remembrance with the ache of loss. If you had a reasonably happy childhood, some of your best memories invariably involve Christmastime and the traditions and people you loved, magnified through the rosy lens of your own innocence.

The older we get, the greater the chances that the holiday also carries bad memories of tragedies that happened around the holidays, the pain made sharper by the jarring confluence of a happy event – a birthday, an anniversary – with a devastating loss. After you’ve lived a while, you’ll inevitably have some poignantly empty chairs around your Christmas table.

I’m thinking about this now because tomorrow is both Emily’s graduation day, and the tenth anniversary of my dad’s death.

Ten years seems like a perfect amount of time to illustrate how strangely time works on us. By the time you’re middle aged, events from a decade ago alternately feel like they happened eight months ago, or in a different lifetime.

(It’s disorienting. I mean, I’d guess that Kurt Cobain died around 10 years ago, around the time when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But no. Cobain died thirty years ago, and Biden was still in the race 6 months ago!)

I think it was C.S. Lewis who cited this kind of alienating strangeness in the way we perceive time as, if not dispositive proof of the soul’s immortality, at least a persuasive indicator of it. He used the analogy that fish are not constantly surprised by the water they live in, but we are constantly surprised – fooled, and vexed, and startled – by our experience of time. We are created for immortality, and this current life hints at that fact constantly.

So on the one hand, I wish dad could be there to watch my astrophysicist daughter walk across that stage tomorrow. And on the other, I know that he will be. And that the only reason he’s not as proud of her as I am, is that it’s not possible for anyone else to be as proud of her as I am!

Okay, I said that this would be an unusual column, and I think I’ve delivered on that. So I’ll finish the same way.

I wrote a remembrance of my dad for Father’s Day in 2017, which now seems like 6 months ago. (See what I mean?) I’ve re-posted it on a couple of Father’s Days since then, and I’m happy to say that thinking of him these days brings back nothing but good feelings.

I’m reposting it here for one last time before retiring it for good. Whether you’re a newcomer to the CO site and haven’t seen it before, or you’re seeing it one more time, I hope that even though it’s not the least bit Christmas-y, it will help you to appreciate the time you’re able to spend with your family this Christmas.

From June, 2017:

“As this Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad. He died not long before Christmas in 2014, and time has been doing its work, to the point that thoughts of him have shifted over to a mix of many happy memories of him, to go along with the pain of his loss. I’m a father to two daughters, and have known hundreds of other fathers as friends, relatives, co-workers and acquaintances, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who carried out that role any better than my dad.

He was born into a family of four boys and four girls to working class parents in Illinois in the late 1930s. He married my mom not long after high school, and had me and my younger sister, and raised us while working at the Northern Illinois Gas Company, until he was forced into an early retirement at the age of 57 by injuries. He operated a variety of heavy equipment, and he took great pride in his work.

When I was little, I can remember him pointing out subdivisions or houses that he’d run services to, and whenever we’d pass a parking lot with heavy machinery, he’d brag that he could operate anything on that lot. My mom had to explain to an excited young me (at maybe age 5 or 6?) that no, she was not going to let dad scratch my back with his backhoe. (He’d assured me that he could do so, no problem.)

He was not perfect, as none of us are. He could be short-tempered and impatient, for example. But even then, he was the most unusual of people: he was a short-tempered man whom I never heard swear. Not once in my life. Not when he bounced a hammer off his thumb. Not when the Bears or the Cubs went O-for-a-month. Not when a Democrat got elected.

He used ridiculous euphemisms to avoid cursing – “son of a buck,” “dirty rip,” and the like – but as a grown man who rarely makes it across town in heavy traffic without dropping at least one trenchant Anglo-Saxonism at one of my many brain-dead fellow citizens who cannot seem to master a turn signal or figure out which lane is for passing, that’s almost more than I can comprehend.

People are freaking idiots all the time — I am too — and my dad was surrounded by them his entire life, but he never swore in front of his son!

In the summer of 2014 dad had cancer surgery that we initially thought had been successful. But a month or so later we found out that it had metastasized, and a month after that we learned that it would be fatal. I spent much of the fall of that year with my mom and dad in Tennessee, and I’ll always be grateful for that time. I recorded dad sharing a lot of memories from his life, and I saw the evidence of how many lives he had touched in the form of a steady stream of visitors who came to see him, and to see what they could do for him and for my mom.

He kept his sense of humor throughout his final illness. One of my cousins was visiting not too long before dad died. That cousin is known for sarcasm and smart-assery – even by Simpson standards – and he has some Scottish background on one side. Dad was sitting in a recliner and drifting in and out of the conversation, and the cousin was joking that he was going to try to learn the bagpipes. He promised (tongue-in-cheek) to play them at dad’s funeral.

Dad delivered his line with a perfectly dry tone: “That’s it. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not dying.”

Dad died on a Sunday evening, and he told me his last joke two days earlier. He and I had both been Chicago Bears fans for life, and the Bears really stunk in 2014. In the last couple of months in that season, they were on tv unusually often for a team that bad. On the final Thursday of dad’s life they were on Thursday Night Football, and dad and I watched from our dueling recliners. He was pretty heavily medicated and drowsed on and off; each time he woke up a bit, he’d ask me the score, and I’d report that the Bears were down by another touchdown or so, and he’d roll his eyes and make some comment before sliding back to sleep.

The next day, he asked me for a favor. He had been unable to make it to church for a while by then, but his church made each week’s services available on DVD for members who had been unable to make it on Sunday. Dad had several of those stored up to watch, and on that Friday, he asked if I could put a DVD in for him. He seemed a little drowsy, but I put in the DVD and handed him the remote, asking if he thought he could stay awake for the sermon.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “But I don’t want the last tv I ever watch to be that stinking Bears’ game last night.”

To end his good life, he died a good death. He had hospice care in his home, and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and I spent some time with him every day in his final months. He had the chance to tell everyone he knew how much he loved them, and that he was ready to go, and he was solicitous of others at a time when most of us can focus only on ourselves. Because of great hospice workers and morphine (which by itself is proof to me that God exists, and that He loves us), he was able to die at home.

He slept for most of his final day. In the evening, mom and I arranged a schedule; I would stay up with him, and give him morphine twice, and then she would get up early and administer the morphine while I was sleeping in. She spoke to him the last time, kissing him and telling him that he had been a great father and husband, and that he could go. Then she went to bed, and I’m convinced that he passed before she fell asleep. I had some papers to grade, so I went down the hallway to get my computer, and brought it back to set up in the chair next to his. By the time I got the computer plugged in and checked on him, he was gone.

Ronald Lee Simpson was born on January 22, 1938, and died on December 14th, 2014. In between he lived a loving and generous life. I think it is hard for some people to come to faith in a loving heavenly Father if they have an abusive, or neglectful, or absent earthly father. I am a Christian because of both of my parents, but my path to God was made much easier by the example of a father’s love that I witnessed all my life.

I can’t wait to see him again.

I wish for you all that you have had a father like mine, or that you marry a father like mine, or that you are a father like mine. Happy Father’s Day!”

…and Merry (early) Christmas, everybody!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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