Politics – Martin Simpson

While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

This has been a disorienting month for me. My pinched nerve has gotten me out of all of my normal routines, and replaced them with new ones that I really look forward to discontinuing soon!

Thankfully, my PT has decreased the amount and persistence of pain I was experiencing in the first 2-3 weeks of March, but juggling even milder pain meds has resulted in inconsistent sleep and a lot of fuzzy head syndrome. (Or, as it’s known in medical textbooks, “Democrat Cognition Syndrome.”)

For the first time since I was probably 5 years old, I’ve gone a little over a month without reading a book! I’ve also missed pretty much all church services in the five weeks leading up to Easter, which doesn’t feel great.

On the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some sporadic reading on current events and politics, and I’m really glad to have been able to keep writing columns here, even if at a slower pace. I’ve also had the chance to watch some old movies and new-to-me tv series. I discovered Mr. In-Between, a dark comedy/crime series set in Australia, which shares the kind of admirable/repugnant, morally compromised protagonist that made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos so compelling.

Seeing clips of the dead-on-arrival, virtue-signalling Oscars spurred me to revisit some movies from when movies were worth watching. (I know: I’ve achieved peak old guy vibes. Get off my lawn!) I watched The Searchers, starring a young John Wayne, a Monument Valley setting, and John Ford’s directing; The Man Who Shot Liberty Vally Valance (If Jimmy Stewart ever made a bad movie, I can’t remember it); and Rio Bravo, starring an older John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a young Angie Dickinson. (If anybody was ever cooler than Dean Martin – dressed in black, his cowboy hat down over his eyes while he crooned away with Ricky Nelson as they waited for a shootout – I don’t know who that would be.)

But amidst all of the jarring changes I’ve experienced the last month, there has been one comfortingly consistent aspect of our national life. And that is the egregious dishonesty of our legacy media, advanced in no small part by a ubiquitous double standard.

I’ll just hit two recent examples among many: the third No Kings protest, and the coverage of our month-long, one-sided war against the violent dictatorship of the mullahs in Iran.

The No Kings street theater protests actually do follow in the American tradition of the rowdy airing of grievances against our politicians. Unfortunately, the grievances in this case do not seem to be tightly tethered to reality. (Which is the most polite way I can say that.)

For example, senator Crazy Mazie Hirono accidentally said the accurate part out loud, when she claimed that, “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Ummmm… yes. Exactly. So what is the purpose of this expensive, tedious, time-consuming third iteration of a protest? To prevent from happening what you’ve admitted has never happened, is not happening, and will never happen?

Okay. Well done then, I guess?

Of course we didn’t need an emotionally dysregulated, low-IQ, elected garden gnome to tell us that. Because anybody who knows anything about the history of kings and fascist dictators knows that none of these protests could have ever taken place if there were actually a king or dictator in America.

If you want to test that, quickly rattle off a list of all of the people in human history who ever marched in the streets insulting their king or dictator – even if only once or twice, let alone thrice! — and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

I know. That list is as short as the “days of honest work done” on Bernie Sanders’ resume.

Also, you know how reluctant I am to raise the issue of double standards. But do you remember when Obama proclaimed a dozen times that our immigration laws would not allow him to just declare that illegals now have legal status, because that would be unconstitutional, and that he’s not a king? And then…one month lay-tair… when he declared that all the DACA kids are now legally in the country?

Or remember when Joe Biden dictated that he could use OSHA to force millions of Americans to take an experimental vaccine, and that he could declare that American citizens with no school loans could be forced to pay back billions in school loans taken out by students, who would no longer need to pay them back themselves?

In fact, remember when Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment – which had been rejected decades before – was now the 28^th Amendment to the constitution, because he said so?

Obama and Biden both behaved much more like kings than Trump ever has, and the Left cheered them on. But now that Trump is trying to use much more modest Executive Orders to do what the voters elected him to do, it’s time to break out the frog costumes and ugly papier mache heads, and rail against imaginary monarchs.

Speaking of ugly heads, many hypocrites on both sides of the aisle have raised theirs to criticize every aspect of the Iran war, out of motivations ranging from reasonable to flimsy to hysterical.

For the record, I think there are aspects of our actions in Iran that are worthy of questioning and criticism. But those are being swallowed up and dwarfed by the number of specious bleatings on the subject.

We opened the war with a strategic master stroke, killing around 40 of the top power players in Iranian politics on a Saturday. The first leftist complaint I saw claiming that Iran had turned into a “forever war” appeared on the following Monday. Because if this war could drag on for 72 long hours, who knows how many decades it might last!

A few days later, the IDF took out the Iranian second string as they gathered to elect the next ayatollah.

From those first few days, many on the left were joined by a handful of sad sacks on the right (I’m looking at you, Tucker and Candace!) in a doom scrolling cacaphony of epic proportions. Despite Trump’s insistence that this would be a very short action – and his track record of just that kind of strike – critics started extrapolating the worst-case scenario of a near-eternal quagmire.

“What if Iran rebuilds its nuclear weapons program during the next 172 months of constant warfare?” “How many millions of American soldiers will die after we put 8 million boots on the ground for the rest of the Trump presidency?” “What about $10 a gallon gas? Won’t somebody think of the $10 gallons of gas?!!”

By the way, and speaking of double standards, check out this head-to-head comparison of headlines when gas under Biden finally got down to $4 per gallon, vs. when it just reached $4 under Trump, as presented on the site Twitchy:

CBS headline yesterday: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck.” A user pointed out that even this factual stat was deployed to put the worst possible spin on it, by using (but not mentioning) that the F-150 in question was the extended range version, which has the biggest gas tank, and that the fill-up cost would depend on that F-150 being absolutely bone-dry beforehand.

Meanwhile, a CBS story from July of 2022 was headlined thusly: “Gas prices could soon drop to $4 a gallon, Biden energy adviser says. After hitting a record high in June, prices at the pump have fallen for more than 30 straight days.”

Got that? The article hides the fact that gas is still MORE than $4 per gallon, and it doesn’t even predict that gas WILL drop in the future to $4, saying only that gas “could” drop to that level. (Yes. And Joe Biden COULD step agilely over a sand bag on stage. But the smart money is on him tripping over it, falling, and snapping one of his fragile, bird-like leg bones.) And did you notice the source for this weak prediction? Not an unbiased expert or analyst, but a “Biden energy advisor.”

Obviously, the latter article is intended to give Biden political cover for the increased gas prices caused by his policies, while the former article is intended to do maximum damage to Trump.

Consider these more accurate phrasings of the two headlines:

“Biden employee claims that Biden-caused high gas prices might drop to $4 a gallon at some undetermined point in the future.” vs

“Analysis finds that gas prices have temporarily risen to Biden-era levels, predicts they will drop again when the Iran conflict ends, possibly later this month.”

But my favorite bit of laughably biased “journalism” comes from the Bulwark this week. (You may remember those TDS sufferers from early election night, when they were crowing that Que Mala would defeat the Orange, Hitler-esque convicted felon in a landslide. Or from several hours later, when they wept openly and blamed sexism and racism and American stupidity for the thrashing of the Cackler.)

(Cue the sad trombone, and distribute the word salad of defeat, garnished with the sour vinaigrette d’ regret.)

This article, which I swear I am not making up, was written by Jonathan V. Last. (The “V” is not for “victory,” and “Last” is where he ranks on a list of insightful commentators.) The title is, “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed.”

Did I mention that I did not make that up?

Here’s the opening of the article: “It is true, as the president said last night, that the Iranian navy and air force have been almost eliminated. It is also beside the point. The Islamic Republic has never been – and — never wanted to be – a naval power. They have never made extensive use of air power.”

Then why did they spend billions on all of those ships and planes, J. Last? Just to give the IDF and America a few hours of target practice?

Good lord. The double standard question writes itself:

Can you imagine if the roles had been reversed? If Iran had hit us with a first strike that killed Trump, Vance, half of our chiefs of staff and cabinet members, and our congressional leadership? And then if another strike a few days later killed the remainder of our military leadership, the cabinet, and most of congress, while also sinking most of our navy and destroying all of our air force?

And then, for the next 30 days, Iran systematically destroyed our 5000 most crucial military and infrastructure targets, and then blew up the Golden Gate Bridge as an afterthought?

Do you think that after all of that, little Johnny Last would be writing about how, “Iran Lost. America Won. The Ayatollahs Shat the Barn They Share with their Most Attractive Goats?”

Remember that, the next time Tucker or some other MSM empty head brings you latest update from Iran.

Have a good Easter!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post..

Two Dem Governors Demonstrate Leftist Folly (posted 3/27/26)

Today I‘ve got two stories to kick off your weekend. I started drafting them last week, but between the pain meds and the PT and the necessity to write about the passing of creepy Paul Ehrlch, I‘ve been slow to post on these two tales. I hope they don’t seem like old news now.

The common theme in these two stories is that they both illustrate the seemingly intractable wrong-headedness of the left as embodied by the governors of the two biggest blue states, NY and CA.

First, NY governor Kathy “I’ll get you and your little dog too” Hochul’s latest move doesn’t just say the quiet part out loud. It screams the quiet part through a bullhorn.

In 2022, in the first year of her malevolent governership, she displayed the kind of supremely confident ignorance that one only achieves by living in a leftist bubble for her entre life. Fully caught up in the TDS that has swept through her party like STDs through a party thrown by Slick Willy and Hunter Biden, she was full of urine and vinegar as she threw down the gauntlet to any non-leftists who lived in her blue state domain.

To wit: “We’re fighting to bring government back to the people and out of the hands of dictators. And we’re here to say that the era of Trump… is over. Just jump on a bus and head down to Florda where you belong okay? Get out of town! Get out of town!”

And the applause of a dim-witted crowd filled the air.

Then, as the Sponge Bob meme would have it… Four… Years…Lay-tare…

The Margaret Hamilton (look her up) of the Empire State is reaping what she sowed. And it is hilarious.

A couple of weeks ago she gave an interview in which she came crawling back with her broom tucked between her legs and pleaded with the rich New Yorkers she had scorned way back in ‘22.

Sorry, “tail.” I meant with her tail tucked between her legs.

Or did I?

When discussing the giant pile of money she wants to spend on useless and counter-productive social programs — Because: New York liberal – here’s what she had to say:

“I’m being conscious of the fact that I need people who are high net worth to support the generous soical programs we want to have in our state. There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks, if you want to be supportive… but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home. Because our tax base has been eroded.”

“I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states who have less of a burden on their corporations and individuals. Remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan and in NY state, and they were captives to our state, and they were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case on Wall Street, businesses looking at Texas, they’re not going there because they have a nicer governor, that’s for sure. They’re going there for the tax rate. We have to be smart about this.”

Let’s savor the key details, shall we?

Her definition of “patriotic” is being willing to allow greedy politicians who hate you to confiscate more and more of your earnings so that they can be “generous” (aka “wasteful”) with those earnings.

She apparently thinks that financially successful people who were smart enough to follow her snotty commands to “jump a bus out of town” are dumb enough to succumb to the equivalent of an obnoxious solicitor at your front door, entreating you to leave the Free State and go back to New York so that you can once agan be treated like a pimp treats his hookers.

The strangest part is that she actually gets the most important parts right. She correctly realizes that NY State’s tax base has eroded. (Unexpectedly!) She correctly points out that NY is in a competition with other states, and that high taxes are a burden.

She even admits that New York prefers to treat rich people like their slaves. (She uses the term “captives.” But you say “potato,” I say “Gulag Archipelago.”)

She comes to the right conclusion – “They’re going there for the tax rate” – and even clearly states the logical next step: “We have to be smart about this.”

Annnddd… then she falls at the last hurdle. Because if leftists could accept reality, follow logic, and be smart, they’d be conservatives.

Meanwhile her co-religionist commie Mamdani is stepping on the same reality rakes as Hochul. He’s been in office for 20 minutes, and already the combination of his extravagant promises and NYC’s existing ocean of red ink are pummeling him with the groin kicks of financial reality.

Consider: last year NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person, and they’re due to cross into six figures per vagrant this year. And the result?

More hobos than you can shake a crack pipe at. If you could shake a crack pipe. Which you can’t. Because one of the expensive schizophrenic junkies has already pushed you into the path of a subway train, squashing you as flat as the line on Joe Biden’s latest brain scan.

So suck it, Nepo Baby Jihadi and Wicked Witch of Botaxia!

Speaking of spending tons of taxpayer money on eye-wateringly stupid boondoggles, how about that West Coast, featureless, plastic-crotched Ken Doll, Gavin Newsom?

Sure, for pure wastefulness he can’t top the multibillion-dollar high-speed railroad to nowhere, or the gusher of red ink devoted to phony hospice care centers tucked away in every strip mall, P.O. box and mop closet in the greater Los Angeles area. But his latest brainstorm might take the Tinfoil Medal – because there’s no gold left in the Golden State to make medals anymore – for the staggering stupidity of its conception and execution.

I‘m talking about the now-infamous “Wildlife Crossing” (i.e. highway overpass) that is supposed to allow cougars and butterflies to safely transit over the 10 lanes of the 101 in southern Cal.

I know. When I woke up one day last week thinking about this story, I suspected that it was the product of last night’s Oxycodone-created dream. But no. This thing is real. And it’s spectacular.

Let’s start with the details. Haircut launched the project with great fanfare in 2022, saying that the taxpayers had already committed $52 million for the project, and that another $10 million would complete it in 2025. It had the grand name of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC).

Why does a highway overpass require a fancy name and an acronym, you might ask?

Because you’d have to be an absolute moron to pay $62 million for a freaking overpass! Fortunately for Gav, absolute morons are thick on the ground in deep blue California.

Annnndddd… so far the state has spent $114 million of the original $62 million budget, and the overpass is still not finished.

If you’ve got a calendar handy you can confirm that it is 2026. And if you’ve got a calculator handy, you can confirm that 2026 comes after 2025. And also that $114 million is almost twice as much as $62 million.

If you’ve never seen lefty government at work, and if you’ve never read my columns before, you might think that this is some kind of elaborate joke. But you probably have done both, and thus you know that it is no joke.

Let’s consider how many layers of graft and insanity it takes to explain this story.

First, we’ve all seen thousands of overpasses in our lives, and none of them are an engineering feat to compare wth the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or AOC’s juicy booty (her words not mine). (I had to throw a gratuitous reference to AOC in here, because I haven’t taken a shot at her in too long.) It’s a slab with a ramp at both ends, some concrete and some rebar and maybe a railing on both sides if you want to get fancy.

So what’s so special about this overpass? Does it have a climate-controlled bubble over it, made of space-age materials and featuring elaborate lighting and sound systems calculated to attract and relax cougars and butterflies? Are the railings coated in gold and encrusted in diamonds?

Nope. It’s just an overpass. The only thing that sets it apart from every other overpass in Christendom is that it’s got some dirt and a few plants dumped onto the concrete slab of the overpass. Because everyone knows how cougars and butterflies hate to burn their sensitive feet walking on concrete.

And before you can ask, yes, butterflies can fly. It’s right there in their freaking name! So why on earth would they tramp across an overpass when they’ve been given the gift of flight and could easily flutter safely above the cars and U-hauls streaming along the 101 on their way out of the failed state of California, bound for a sane red state?

Obviously they wouldn’t, and they don’t. And CA Dems are idiots for saying such a thing. But this isn’t the first time they have made such an imbecilic claim. If you look back to one of my very first columns – archived on this site in late 2016 or early 2017 – you’ll find me reporting on one of the Democrats’ absurd objections to Trump’s proposed border wall. They said that it would interfere with the migration of hundreds of species…including many bird species.

As I mentioned at the time, the Dems were actually asking us to believe that long lines of birds – who could easily fly right over the wall – would instead clomp across the scorching desert before bonking into the wall, falling over, and starving to death. All because of the Orange Man’s Satanic hatred of all creatures avian.

If Eric Swallwell were here, this is when he’d say, “What about cougars? I’m pretty sure they don’t have wings. And if they don’t, that means they can’t fly over the highway safely! Why do you want to kill cougars?!”

And I’d say, “Very good, Eric. Now can you go away while the grown-ups are talking?” And I‘d look around to find the closest Asian cutie in the area and point to her and say, “Ooh, look at her! I‘ve heard that she has a crush on you despite her being a 9 and you being a 3, and that her turn-ons are low IQs and flatulence, and that she has no ties at all to the CCP. Go get her boy!”

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Cougars.

It turns out that a study of local fauna – because you can’t build an overpass without paying a fauna-ologist six figures for a comprehensive local fauna study – suggested that there were around a dozen endangered cougars in the area around the overpass.

Whch means that you could much more easily build a top-notch cougar brothel, capture the local cougars, teach the females to wear French maid outfits and lap dance, then put them together and let nature take its course. Or – hear me out – you could just dose their food with cougar viagra, and in a year or four you’d have enough new cougars to release the original dozen back into the wild, and trust them to look both ways before crossing the road, while knowing that the species was safe.

(Full disclosure: I flunked my class in cougar mating, gestation and litter size – my majoring in English and minoring in chasing girls and playing sports really cut into my time spent on cougar fertility studies — so that’s only a rough guess. And I’m not sure whether male cougars technically have laps. So that lap-dancing cougar brothel might need to be Plan B.)

One other hilarious detail which I am not making up is that one side of the overpass where the cougars are is a wilderness area. Not far from the other side of the overpass is a bunch of subdivisions. Right now the people living in those subdivisions only have to worry about their neighborhoods being plagued by illegal gangbangers, mounds of trash and syringes, and recidivist criminals and junkies who keep getting re-released there. Oh, and earthquakes and preventable fires that will definitely not be prevented.

So look at the bright side, blue voters. Once that wildlife crossing is completed, you and your children will likely be mauled or eaten by cougars long before God’s wrath or the lesbian DEI-hire Fire Chief can kill you by earthquake or fire, respectively.

And that’s why the story I read about this was headlined, “The Most Gavin Newsom Story Ever.”

Yes, the whole thing is absurd, and Californians who keep voting Dem deserve to have leftist politicians confiscate their money, pile it up in giant mounds, and then set it on fire. This ridiculous uncompleted overpass has been under construction for 4 and a half years, and will likely cost $200 million, assumng it is ever finished.

By comparison, there was another overpass in CA that took 4.5 years to complete, and for only $35 million. Of course, that was in 1930s dollars. But then again, it wasn’t just an ugly, squat overpass. It was a full-sized bridge, and it was quite attractive compared to the ugly AWAC.

It’s called The Golden Gate Bridge.

Great job, California!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

Remembering an Obnoxious Academic (posted 3/23/26)

I originally meant this column to be about three very foolish ideas of three very foolish leftists: Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and Paul Ehrlich. But as I started writing about Ehrlich, I realized that the column would be too long. So I’m saving the two blue-state governors for next time.

Paul Ehrlich died at 93 on March 13^th. He may have been the most pure distillation of a leftist academic in the world, except that (as far as I know) he wasn’t obsessed with racism and sexism. But he covered pretty much the rest of the leftist catechism. He was arrogant and sure of his superior knowledge, no matter how many times over how many decades his ideas were decisively (and humiliatingly) proved wrong.

He hated humanity and was the kind of “environmentalist” — I use the scare quotes to distinguish moral and legitimate environmentalism from the ignoble politicized variant of it – who saw human beings as a cancer on the planet. His leftist politics immunized him from suffering any damage to his reputation even as he was continually proven wrong; in fact he continued to receive plaudits and awards throughout his career.

Ehrlich was a biologist, but his career was marked by politicized “science.” His most famous and influential work, “The Population Bomb (1968), was full of pessimistic predictions, beginning with its opening sentences: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, “England will not exist in the year 2000; the US would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980; smog in LA and New York would cause some 200,000 deaths per year,” and that Americans born after WWII wouldn’t live past 50.

Think of him as Al Gore with an academic credential: often wrong, but never in doubt.

Ehrlich made one mistake that most academics never make: he actually tested his ideas in a high-profile way in the real world. In 1980, economist Julian Simon offered a public, $10,000 bet: Ehrlich’s leftist theories said that all natural resources were going to become scarcer, and therefore more expensive. Simon was a conservative and therefore a generally (some might say cautiously) optimistic capitalist: he predicted that human ingenuity and a free market would make the price of commodities go down.

So Simon offered to let Ehrlich choose any five resources that he wanted, and Ehrlich could bet that in ten years, those would be more expensive. Ehrlich took the bait, and after insulting Simon’s simplistic ideology, chose five metals as the resources he was most certain about: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.

Annnnnddddd… Simon won the bet in 1990, when all five metals were cheaper.

The way Ehrlich handled his loss was straight out of the leftist handbook: he lied like crazy, insisted that his ideas were still correct, and insulted Simon’s intelligence for years afterward. Simon, enjoying his victory and happy to needle his arrogant opponent, offered to renew the bet, double or nothing, for another 10 years, on any other resource of Ehrlich’s choosing.

Ehrlich was at least smart enough to turn down that offer, and he did actually pay the bet off. Luckily for Ehrlich, though, he could easily pay the bet off, because he had just received a “genius” grant for $450K.

Because: of course he did. Despite, again, being wrong about everything!

When I was still a professor, this kind of thing drove me crazy. No matter how many times lefty theories and predictions failed, the lefties were not deterred, and persisted in their folly. There’s a conservative joke about this, which has a leftist condescending to a conservative, saying, “I know your ideas work in the real world. But do they work in theory?”

Examples abound. The lefty religion of Marxism had massive appeal before it was first put into real-world practice in the USSR in 1917. In the following century it was tried over and over again, all over the world. And failed every time, producing poverty, famine, environmental devastation, brutal police states and at least 100 million deaths.

So naturally, you can look at any course list in liberal arts departments all over the country and find hundreds of courses touting Marxism. And you can find old nitwits like Bernie Sanders and young nitwits like AOC and hundreds of politicians like them, all confidently vowing that THIS time their lefty schemes will work perfectly.

People have been fleeing socialist/communist countries for freer market countries for over a century. Productive Americans have been leaving leftist blue cities and states for red states for several decades.

And still, like Paul Ehrlich, the Dems are convinced that their theories are right.

To the day he died he never admitted any errors in his work, and if you read a legacy media obituary of him, you’ll be slogging through a miasma of covering up and intentional point missing to lionize a lefty co-religionist.

For example, the subhead of his New York Times’ obituary says, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Got that? “Premature!” For 60 years he confidently predicted the opposite of what actually happened. But the NYT asks us to just give it another century or two, and he’ll be proven right.

Ehrlich was sure that even in the first world, life spans would get drastically shorter, and millions would starve. Annnnddd… we’re living longer than ever, and one of our big problems isn’t starvation, it’s obesity.

He was a huge fan of abortion, and left the door open for coerced sterilization and abortion, because he was sure that our skyrocketing birthrates would bring disaster. Annnnddddd… almost all first-world nations have a below-replacement birthrate.

It would be harder to be more wrong, more often than Paul Ehrlich was.

But the left is giving it their best shot.

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

Everybody’s an Expert on Iran Now (posted 3/20/26)

After another week of dealing with the painful pinched nerve – my MRI showed that it wasn’t a bulged disc and I have my first PT session scheduled on Monday – I’ve been keeping up with the news, if only in a distracted way.

It’s been fascinating to watch the polarized reactions to the war in Iran. First because on all sides the talking heads are doing what they always do when a big international story happens: pretending that they are experts on an area that they couldn’t have found on a map a week ago.

It happened during Iraq and Afghanistan – when blow-dried morons who didn’t know Sunnis from sushi, and couldn’t tell the Taliban from either – lectured us on how popular Saddam was because of all of the giant murals of himself all over Baghdad. It happened again in Ukraine when everybody started plastering blue and yellow flags on their social media to show how dedicated they were to a country they knew nothing about.

And now it’s Iran’s turn. Democrats who have screamed for years that the Ayatollah must be deposed and Iran kept from gaining nukes are suddenly bemoaning a “forever war” (which they declared on Day 3!) and raving that Trump has no plan to deal with the IRGC. Or is it the RICG? Or possibly the GRIC?

I‘m no better than most. I knew what the Strait of Hormuz was, but if pressed I‘d have guessed that Kharg Island was the capital city of the Klingon Empire. But I can’t get too down on myself after watching Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar criticizing Trump’s military strategy, when you know that those crones don’t know the Strait of Hormuz from the Gay of Juarez. (Who could be the most popular rent boy south of the border, for all they know.)

Even I know enough to know that the critics who are wailing that we’re losing the war are full of it. We took out forty of their top leadership in the opening minutes of the action, and then blew up another three or four dozen of the “Council of Experts” several days later, when they were in the act of the choosing the next ayatollah, who was atomized before he could take the oath of office.

We took out their air force last year, we sank their navy in 10 days, and about 90% of their missiles and drones have been used or blown up. The IDF lit up their top three remaining military leaders in the last several days. Can you imagine how far down the depth chart they have to be right now?

Well, you don’t have to. Because some guy who was in The Teheran School of Cosmetology a month ago is now writing threatening press releases claiming to be from the newest Ayatollah, who – I Schiff you not – is made out of cardboard. Literally.

How am I supposed to write satire when the Supreme Leader of Iran is indistinguishable from something out of a South Park episode?

I don’t want us to end up in a drawn-out war in Iran either, but I think that even with all of his flaws, Trump is not going to let that happen. After his foreign policy successes – taking out Soleimani and al-Baghdadi; ending a half-dozen wars and getting the Israeli hostages released; taking out Iran’s nuke sites in an evening; snatching Maduro out of Venezuela in two hours; getting Rosie O’Donnell to leave the country – I think he’s earned enough trust for us to let him cook.

If this war lasts for over 4-5 weeks, we can always get our dresses over our heads and run around shrieking like hysterical Democrats then.

One bit of good news that the MSM didn’t cover – unexpectedly! — was that lots of everyday Iranians are calling in the locations of IRCG road blocks and gatherings, which then get a quick drone strike. The story suggested that the calls were to some Israelis, which sounds like just the kind of thing those bad-asses are known to handle well.

In that same vein were reports that some Iranian Kurds were positioning themselves just over the border, ready to go in and start killing some Ayatollah fans. The Kurds have always been known as tough fighters; I think of them as the Rooftop Koreans of the Middle East.

Would the subsequent movie about the adventures of the Kurds wreaking havoc behind Iranian lines be called “Inglorious Bas-Kurds?” It will if I can get the financing together.

I do hope that we have a plan to get lots of small arms to a lot of motivated Persians who would happily use them to secure their own freedom the good old-fashioned Second Amendment way.

Our military is doing such a great job devastating the regime and destroying their ability to project power outside of their own borders, but we don’t want to get stuck trying to install a new regime or get involved in their internal politics. (Other than teaching them the one indispensable rule that we have already taught them: don’t follow in the footsteps of the ayatollahs and make us come back in and level your whole government again.)

The best way to avoid that seems to be to give the Persian non-jihadist majority the ability to win their freedom and establish their own non-genocidal government.

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

Strategic RINO-ism vs. Satanic RINO-ism, & the SAVE Act (posted 3/11/26)

Sadly, all conservatives are familiar with RINOs – those Republicans in Name Only who pretend to be conservatives when they’re running, only to betray their conservative voting base by voting like (and with) leftists.

I actually prefer the term CINOs – Conservatives in Name Only – since the GOP has often been a home for mushy centrist and center-left pols. That being the case, a liberal Republican can’t fairly be called a RINO, since the “in name only” part suggests that a left-leaning Republican is necessarily an oxymoron. Which, tragically, it is not.

But I’ll use “RINO” in the commonly accepted meaning, since I can’t change our language single-handedly. (If I could, I’d start with the phrases “my truth” and “sex assigned at birth,” the use of which would be capital offenses in an Edenic world in which I was King Martin the First.)

(And what a glorious world that would be!)

Though RINOs are often the bane of our existence, I’ve argued elsewhere that in our political system, they are sometimes necessary. If, for example, a Republican candidate tries to get elected in a purple or even blue state, he or she will necessarily have to run and govern as a moderate or centrist – i.e. a RINO. The kind of rock-ribbed conservatives that I prefer would have no chance of getting elected in a purple or blue-leaning state.

So our real-world choice is usually between a frustratingly centrist RINO type – a Susan Collins in Maine or Mitt Romney in Massachusetts – and a far-left loon. And if a Collins or Romney would vote with us more often than not, they are a better option than the leftist alternative we’d get if we ran a ruby-red conservative who was sure to be defeated there.

As the famous dictum of William F. Buckley (Peace Be Upon Him) says, we should vote for the most conservative electable candidate in every race.

What I’ve been describing so far is strategic RINOism, i.e. the pragmatic decision to support mushy moderates with an R beside their name in districts where such candidates are the least bad options, given an electorate that runs the gamut from deep blue to faintly red.

By Satanic RINOism – and I’ll grant you that the adjective may be a tad harsh – I mean mushy candidates pretending to be conservative when running in a deep red district. In such districts, there is no reason for a conservative base to settle for anything less than a consistently conservative candidate; thus, any stealth RINOs in such areas should be run out of town on a rail, forthwith.

Mitt Romney might be the archetypal example. He was a great GOP choice for MA governor, since he was competent, and the most conservative governor anyone could hope to get in that benighted, midnight-blue state. But he was a terrible choice for Utah senator, where he was a Satanic RINO, i.e. a faux conservative who could have governed extremely conservatively, and yet he governed like a strategic RINO centrist, unnecessarily.

Which brings me to the most infuriating current example of an issue on which Satanic RINOs seem to be hell-bound and determined to torture me, personally: the SAVE Act.

This act is a tailor-made, perfect-for-a-mid-year-election issue. By calling for the most common sense, unobjectionable method to preserve the integrity of our sacred democracy – requiring proof of citizenship and proof of identity to vote – it creates the ultimate trap for dishonest, leftist hacks. There are no legitimate grounds on which to oppose it, which is why the pathetic Democrat arguments against it are so transparently corrupt and false.

Their real argument is that the SAVE Act would drastically reduce the amount of fraudulent votes that could be cast. Because the Democrat party depends on those votes – either from illegals, or from imaginary or dead voters – they need to preserve the fraud at all costs. But they can’t say that out loud.

So they are reduced to bald faced lying (the native language of the Left) – “Nobody ever votes illegally in this country!” – or racist and sexist smears against their own voting base – “You can’t expect women and minorities, with their tiny brains and their pathetic ineptitude, to be able to secure a photo ID just like grown-up, intelligent white guys can do!”

Both of those strategies are ballot box poison, as the aggregate of all polling indicates. Overall, Americans favor the SAVE Act by approximately 84-16%! As many as 70% of Democrats are for it, and the numbers among Independents and Republicans are much higher.

This is not a controversial issue like abortion, or a complicated and potentially confusing issue like health care or tax rate policy. It’s simple, easy-to-explain and understand, and a lopsided winner for conservatives. As such, even the most basic, Politics 101 level of competence makes the proper response obvious:

Run on this! Make it the front-and-center, number one issue in your public campaigning. If you’ve got a majority, force votes on this early and often. Use the filibuster – the real one, where you force your opponents to get up and talk for hours and hours – to publicize the debate. Force them to make their ridiculous arguments in public, which will get them on the record, and provide you with hours of invaluable material for honest, devastating future ads.

The ads write themselves. Show Senator X talking to the point of exhaustion in a transparent attempt to block this popular legislation.

Even if you can’t break the filibuster – and everything I’ve read about this issue suggests that we can – you can still get your opponents on the record as voting against this great legislation over and over again. (The ad Voice-Over: “Senator Jackass took 135 votes in the last 3 months. 14 of those votes were to name bridges after himself; 5 were to support Hamas fans in our colleges; 3 were to dedicate post offices. The other 113 were to ensure that illegals and fraudsters can continue to vote in our elections!”)

The issue will even be useful against the treacherous RINOs in your own party, too. Force the spineless wimps representing red states and districts to either vote as conservatively as they’d promised to, or to betray their base, and thus ensure that they’ll be primaried and forced out at the first opportunity. And you’ll also get the ancillary benefit of providing a useful lesson to everyone else in the party: don’t even think about betraying conservatives or you’ll be dispatched just like Thom Tillis or Liz Cheney!

So what is the GOP doing with this golden, election year opportunity? They’re only tepidly supporting it, like feckless weasels.

Unexpectedly!

John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader, representing deep red South Dakota, which last voted Democrat in a presidential election 62 years ago! He’s not up for re-election until 2028. He’s voted mostly conservative – over 90% with Trump during his first term – but not as conservative as he could or should have – voting around 30% with Biden during his posthumous term.

Even given those RINO-esque tendencies, it should be a no-brainer for him to support and push the SAVE Act. But he’s making idiotic excuses not to. He says he doesn’t have the votes to defeat a filibuster, or to pass it in the Senate.

Again, that kind of wussiness might make sense in an election year if it were a controversial issue – a hard-line anti-abortion bill, or a necessary-but-unpopular budget austerity measure. But this is a 90-10 issue with your base, so even if it did actually fail to beat the filibuster, it would then become a great election issue to beat your opponents with!

Even if Thune were just a craven self-preservationist, it would STILL make sense for him to force a vote. Because that would take the pressure off of him (“You can’t blame me, because I supported it and got it to a vote!”) and put it on the posers in his own party and the dishonest creeps in the opposition. Force them to take a stand on it, and then face the consequences if they vote it down.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the week-kneed GOPers — who are whispering that it can’t pass and hoping that they don’t have to vote on it – actually voted for it, if push came to shove.

And dammit, this is one time that push should definitely come to shove!

Even if it means – correction: ESPECIALLY if it means – that some Satanic RINOs are shoved right out of congress if they won’t do the right thing.

Everybody, call your House members and senators about this!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

NYC Leftists Lie About Jihadi Would-Be Bombers (posted 3/9/26)

Here’s a few questions you’ll never have to ask me, because you already know the answers:

Should we ever stop mocking Elizabeth Warren for launching her academic and political careers by being a pretendian?

Isn’t the fact that billions of people worldwide love soccer proof that it’s a great sport?

Do we hate the media enough?

(For any thinking- impaired folks who have somehow stumbled upon this column, the answers are, “No. NO! And AW HELL no!”)

Because Lizzie is obviously as white as a curling competition in Helsinki in a snowstorm. And no “sport” where grown men who allegedly identify as men throw themselves on the ground and feign injury from the slightest physical contact, and half the games end in a scoreless tie, can be considered “great.”

And for yet another example of how we don’t hate the media enough, one need go no further than this past weekend’s coverage of two Muslim jihadists trying to murder dozens of innocent spectators with IEDs in the caliphate of New York City.

What actually happened is that a small group of citizens gathered outside Gracie mansion (where communist jihadi mayor Zohran Mamdani lives) exercised their First Amendment rights to free speech to protest. Their protest was called, “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City.” Leftists organized their own counter protest, called “Run the Nazis out of New York City.”

Sane observers might notice that there is actually an ongoing Islamic effort to take over NYC, whereas there are no Nazis in NYC trying to do the same. Despite having reality on their side, the protesters were outnumbered by the counter-protesters by around 5-to-1.

Because: big, blue Sanctuary City!

The anti-jihadi protesters were actually peaceful. The pro-jihadi protesters, not so much. Two of them – Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi – brought IEDs to their peaceful protest (as one does). They lit the devices, which were filled with nuts, bolts and screws, and threw them at the conservative protesters, screaming “Allahu Akbar!”

Fortunately, the jihadists’ brains are apparently as tiny and dysfunctional as their phalli, and their improvised bombs failed to detonate.

An honest journalist’s headline for this story would be something like, “Islamists demonstrate how peaceful Islam is by trying to murder unarmed protesters with bombs.”

The NBC news headline? “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.”

Anyone dumb and gullible enough to be getting their news from NBC would think that those evil conservative anti-Islam protestors had tried to kill peaceful Islamists.

And Mayor Jihadi did his best to reinforce that lie, putting out the following statement: “Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city’s values and the unity that defines who we are.What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.”

Not content to be out-lied by Mamdani, a NY congressional candidate named Brad Lander (from guess which party?) doubled down on the smear: “Happy to know that our Mayor and First Lady are safe, but horrified that there was such a disturbing threat of violence outside their residence. Vile displays of Islamophobia will never be tolerated in our city.”

Ugh. It’s the same story, time and time again: Violent Islamists try to murder peaceful protesters. The leftist media lie about it, and leftist politicians repeat the lie and amplify it, until the “heroic victims” become the violent Islamists, and the real evil is Islamophobia.

We don’t hate them enough, people.

In happier news, a violent leftist in Portland reaped what he sowed this weekend, and hilarity ensued.

You might have figured that after so many months of futile protests against ICE in Portland, the surly insurrectionists have probably given up, and gone back to their jobs. (HA! Get it?) But no, they’re still at it. This weekend, one of those geniuses tried to light an American flag on fire.

Because of course he did.

Annnndddd… he ended up temporarily in flames.

Sadly, he was able to dislodge himself from the burning flag before he suffered more than superficial burns. Someone recording the incompetent arsonist narrated the action by saying, “What an idiot!”

Ouch! When even other antifa mouth-breathers are calling you an idiot, that’s got to sting.

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

Fighting Through the Pain Meds to Laugh at Lefties (posted 3/6/26)

Since my last column four days ago, I’ve spent 3 months suffering from this pinched nerve thing.

Apparently there is a nerve that goes from the base of your skull, down your neck, across your left shoulder and down into your left hand, and if something goes wrong with it, you experience a pain cocktail made up of equal parts deep, throbbing ache, and sudden, stabbing agony.

Also nausea, and a left arm so numb it could be confused with the skull of AOC.

My wife has been great, driving me to a meeting with my primary care doc and to a CT scan, while I was laid out across the back seat biting down hard on a leather belt. Because that’s the way they did it in old Westerns when some gunfighter dug a bullet out of your side with a bowie knife that had been heated up over an open flame.

I helpfully explained to her that the pain was just like what she felt when giving birth to our daughters, only a hundred times worse. It seemed like she almost lost a little bit of respect for me for a minute there, but that was probably just the Oxycodone playing tricks on me.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m taking Oxycodone? Along with muscle relaxers, steroids, and that stuff they tranquilize horses with?

Before you ask, yes I realize that it’s not good to combine booze with a fistful of narcotics, so I haven’t touched any Knob Creek 9 since this affliction befell me.

Because it sounds way better to say, “I’ve given up bourbon for lent,” than to say, “I’ve taken up Oxy for lent.”

Anyway, enough about me, and the soul-testing trials that I am too stoic to yammer on about. Here are a few comments about events in the news that I’ve observed, between trips to urgent care and the pharmacy:

So far the much-deserved and long-delayed beating we’re giving to the Iranian mullahcracy seems to be proceeding nicely. Trump clearly has no interest in long, drawn-out foreign adventures in nation building, and we should all be wishing him godspeed in Iran.

Of course, the first Democrat shrieking about a “forever war” and a “quagmire” has already started. And that was on Monday!

Remember how Obama started a bombing campaign in Libya without asking for permission from congress, Reverend Wright or Michelle, and it went on for 7 months, and no Democrat so much as muttered, “no war for oil” in a wee, small voice?

But when there’s a GOP president, “forever war” equals “three-day weekend.”

After the IDF took out the Ayatollah and 40 of his best friends at the breakfast bar last Saturday, I thought it would be very hard to top that achievement. But then on Monday, the second string gathered together to elect the new top dog. (Which is a huge insult to dogs, obviously.)

Annnnddddd… apparently the Israelis had been following those weirdos on Linked in, and knew where and when the meeting would be taking place. Because just as the votes were being tallied, some warheads arrived and dropped the entire building onto the assembled Ayatolli in the first ever celebration of a new Jewish holiday I’m calling… wait for it… Squash Hashanah.

You’re welcome. I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

My second favorite detail of that story – after squash hashanah – is that those dopes called themselves the “Council of Experts,” which sounds like something a third-rate screenwriter would come up with when the coke has just run out and the studio is demanding a completed draft by tomorrow morning.

Apparently “Council of Incompetents” and “Council of the Clueless” were already taken.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the leadership in Iran without a scorecard, and every score card looks like everybody’s March Madness brackets after a couple of 16 seeds somehow make it into the Final Four. Most of the first string was taken out in the 12 Days War. Then the Ayatollah and most of the second string was taken out last Saturday.

Then the third string learned a lesson about voting: The good news is that at least they didn’t have to deal with any hanging chads when examining the ballots. The bad news?

Exploding chads.

So then I’m scrolling through my feed last night, and I see a story about how many of the IRCG and Iranian police aren’t showing up for work.

Unexpectedly!

One other feel-good story was that we’ve apparently sunk most of the Iranian navy already. We sent the most recent frigate to the bottom via a torpedo from a submarine. The story about that mentioned that it was the first such sinking since WWII, which doesn’t really make sense to me.

I know that we mostly use subs as a means of launching missiles nowadays, but what’s wrong with an old-school torpedo? I mean, our subs are obviously still carrying them right? So torpedoes aren’t broken.

I might be just an old softie, but I’d like to think that some day in the near future I’ll open my laptop and read about how our navy has taken out a Somali pirate ship with a good, old-fashioned torpedo.

Am I saying that I hope it turns out that that pirate ship will have been carrying Ilhan Omar and her brother-cousin-husband, and the entire faculty of the Somali Learing Center?

I’m not NOT saying that.

In other news, Kristi Noem is out and Markwayne Mullin is in at DHS, and I think that is for the best. Trump’s staffing picks have definitely been stronger in his second term than they had been in his first term. His only weak picks this time around have been Bondi and Noem, and Bondi has been more inconsistent than terrible.

And to be fair to them, they were each at least three standard deviations better than Biden’s choices of Mayor Pete, Que Mala, Alejandro “The Border is Secure” Mayorakas, or his two confused cross dressing appointees, to name just a few. (You know things are bad when the best defense of Richard/Rachel Levine is, “Sure, he is a disordered gender-dysmorphia-sufferer, but at least he’s not a recidivist luggage thief, too.”)

From all I’ve seen, Mullin looks great: serious, focused and disciplined. The only strike against him is the way that he violates Simpson’s Rule of Eccentric Names. “Mark” and “Wayne” are both fine names, but putting them together gives famous three-name killer echoes (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wayne Gacey). And you can’t just jam two names together to make one first name.

Finally, in Texas, Jasmine Crockett got stomped in her Dem primary, and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at that. Someone needs to put together a video montage of her lowlights, and it needs to end with her reaction on election night, when she made her pouty little concession snarl.

Sorry, I meant “concession speech.”

Or did I?

Her tone-deafness was perfect. After literally years of her party throwing tantrums and insisting that anyone who questioned the integrity of elections was an insurrectionist threat to democracy, Crockett questioned the integrity of her election.

Because of course she did.

She somehow managed to blame her loss in a Democrat primary – where the voters were 100% Democrats – on… Republicans! (You thought I was going to say “racism,” didn’t you?)

She claimed that the GOP made sure that the voting hours were the previously scheduled voting hours. So that the Democrats voting for her opponent were able to vote, but her voters were prevented from voting for her.

Because: voting hours?

“Unfortunately, this is what Republicans like to do,” Crockett said. (And by “this,” she meant, “tricking Democrats into voting for Democrat candidates during the previously scheduled voting hours.”) (I just read that last sentence out loud, and now Cassie the Wonder Dog is staring at me with her head comically cocked at a 38-degree angle to one side.)

“And, so,” continued the race-baiting, low-IQ gal whom we won’t have to kick around any more, “they specifically targeted Dallas County, and I think we all know why. I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.”

We’re going to miss you, Jazzy.

Or, to put it in words I know you’ll understand, “Don’t axe for whom the bell tolls. That b***h be tollin’ for ya’ll, girl!”

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

The Ladies of the View & New Yorkers Get What They Deserve (posted 2/20/26)

Okay, today is officially Schadenfreude Friday. (Because “Schaden-Friday” was just a little too cute.) That’s when I only cover stories in the news that give me joy from the well-deserved karmic arse-whoopings received by bad actors in our society.

First up is Whoopi Goldberg and the round table of ten-cent heads at the View. That televised Mensa Meeting had a field day last year, when Trump’s name turned up many times in the Epstein files. While many people’s names appeared because they were sleazebags who were chummy with Epstein for many years and implicated in his bad behavior, many were there in non-incriminating contexts.

For example, while Trump was photographed with Epstein numerous times before Epstein’s crimes had gone public and he was charged, he also kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago, called the cops on him, and eventually arrested him. Also, something like a thousand of the references to Trump were from Epstein, who hated him and constantly badmouthed him.

Legal and PR tip: If your name ends up in a criminal sleazebag’s files, you don’t want it to be in the context of what a great guy and a close friend you were.

Anyway, the gals of the View had a lot of theories about why Trump was in the files, and all of them were in the “What does he have to hide?” and “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” vein of innuendo. If Trump’s name was there, it proved that he was guilty of very bad things.

Annnndddd…a few weeks ago one tranche of the Epstein files included Whoopsie Goldberg’s name 21 times.

Unexpectedly!

Now I’m not going to act like them and say that Whoopi is automatically guilty. But at best, she’s a colossal hypocrite. The only reference to her I’ve seen quoted is a perfect distillation of lefty privilege, as she requested the use of one of Epstein’s private jets: “Whoopi Goldberg needs a plane to get to Monaco. John Lennon’s charity is paying for it. They don’t want to charter so they are looking for private owners.”

Before you can ask, no, Goldberg wouldn’t think of flying commercial, not even in first class. And no, a chartered plane wouldn’t be acceptable either. She needed to go private, and at no cost to her Predator-looking arse. Because: Leftist Woman of the People!

When the news of her appearances on the list first came out, Whoopi tried the ol’ Leftist 101 response: She denied it. “There is a fake list. And I’m on it.” She went on to lie-splain that there are a lot of “satire sites” out there, and “that people don’t realize that they can be harmful.”

When that explanation collapsed like a chair that Whoopi or Ana Navarro sat in, she revisited the issue this week: “In the name of transparency, my name is in the files.”

Transparency! Once you get caught lying and then admit what can no longer be denied, that’s apparently being “transparent” now.

Joy-less Behar tried to help Goldberg, pointing out that “anybody can be on this list.” Gee, that’s not what you harpies said when Trump’s name was reportedly on the list, was it?

But Whoopi couldn’t leave bad enough alone, because she couldn’t even stop lying once she was obviously caught. She made it sound like Epstein tried to trick her into taking his plane – “So they’re trying to get me on a plane to get to this thing for Julian Lennon” – instead of HER asking HIM for use of the plane.

“And no,” she continues, “I didn’t get on the plane because you know what I would have to do to get on the plane.”

Actually, it appears that Epstein turned her down, because she was never offered the use of his plane. I guess Epstein didn’t want his reputation to be sullied by being associated with Whoopsie.

Oh, and one more thing: Trump kicked Epstein out and called the cops on him before he was charged and pled guilty in 2008. And Whoopi asked to fly on Epstein’s plane in 2013, five years after he was a convicted felon.

Perfect!

Next up is New York City, where Dem voters are getting a taste of that sweet Mamdani-mania that the commie jihadist promised. Or is he a jihadi communist?

Either way, the schadenfreude sandwich with a schadenfreude salad is being served, and the gullible leftist voters are already having second thoughts.

First, it turned out that the “warmth of collectivism” actually results in homeless Dem voters freezing to death. (Oh, the irony.) On inauguration day Zohran nixed the practice of forcing mentally ill addicts inside during winter.

Annnnddddd…six weeks and 16 deceased meth-sicles later, Mamdani sheepishly reversed course.

Unfortunately, when another one of his promises – blowing out the city’s already profligate spending – proved to be equally stupid and painful, Mamdani stayed the course, at least so far.

His first choice was to add yet another ruinous tax on the richest New Yorkers to pay for free buses, driving out the Jews, giving illegals benefits, and seizing the means of production.

But NY Governor Hochul is apparently smarter than she looks, because she quickly said no bueno to “taxing for the sake of taxing.” (Could she be the rare lefty who realizes that rich people who are already paying the lion’s share of taxes can always move, rather than staying and being victimized by greedy Dem politicians?)

So Zohran slapped on his Marxist blinders and declared that there is only one other possible choice: raising already high property taxes on all New Yorkers by another 9.5% As he put it, “[T]he city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice…we would have to raise property taxes.”

Yes. They would be forced. There’s no other choice. They couldn’t possibly cut any current spending – say, the estimated $5 billion they’ve been spending on illegals – or cut back on any of their bold, new, cash-incinerating programs. Nope. They must raise the mortgage and rent payments of every single New Yorker…so that they can make things more affordable.

If only there was a certain Free State, with the Best Damn Governor in America™, to give them a few pointers.

Oh wait. There is.

Within a few hours after Zohran gave his dire budget warning, Ron DeSantis released a few helpful facts. To wit, Florida has over 23 million residents, and the budget for the entire state is $117 billion this year. By comparison, NYC has 8 million people, and Mamdani just proposed a budget of $127 billion.

So if Zohran gets his way, he’ll spend more than 3 times as much per resident as Florida is spending. And for that money, New Yorkers get frozen homeless, millions of rats, bad roads, worse schools, armies of illegals, high crime, and more bureaucrats with their hands out than there are rats and criminals.

It’s going to be fun watching Zohran sell this plan to his naïve voters.

Buckle up, Bolsheviks!

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

In Case You are Wondering Whether We Hate the Media Enough…NOPE! (posted 2/13/26)

Because I don’t want to write yet another column about the events in Minnesota right now, I thought I’d hit some of the stories I’ve noticed but haven’t commented on during my deep dive on the legal issues and vigilantism in the frozen north.

Under the heading of, “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough,” three stories jumped out at me.

Two of them came from the same source – Axios – and appeared within 24 hours of each other. To produce two such transparently biased and dishonest stories in one day is quite an accomplishment, so congrats, you weasels.

The first story is about the SAVE Act, which requires people to prove that they’re citizens when they register to vote, and to present a photo ID to prove their identity when they vote.

I know: the horror!

Just for fun, I tried to find another country that doesn’t require their citizens to provide ID when voting, and I couldn’t do it. Mexico requires voter ID. So does El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. So does the Congo. Every country from Algeria to Zimbabwe requires voter ID.

Guess who else? Freaking Somalia!

That’s right, the nation where the two leading occupations are “Pirate” and “Learing Center Fraudster” requires Voter ID.

But American Democrats say that doing what all other nations do – including those who can’t feed their people or provide a modern sewer system, and who burn dung for warmth – cannot be required in America, because their voters could not handle it.

Speaking of burning dung, Chuck Schumer.

Oh sorry. Let me finish that sentence.

Speaking of burning dung, Chuck Schumer says requiring voter ID would be “Jim Crow 2.0.” And as one of the leaders of the party who invented “Jim Crow1.0” (they call it “Classic Jim Crow”), Chuckie should know.

Let’s play a quick round of Adam Carolla’s “Stupid or Liar” game, in which we have to guess whether a politician saying something ridiculous is one or the other. But for this round, I think we need to modify that to “Racist or Liar.”

Because anybody who claims that black people are such mouth-breathing dullards that they couldn’t secure an ID are either bald-faced liars, or the kind of Democrat racists who would make even the old school Democrat racists in the KKK say, “Damn, them boys are RACIST!”

Full disclosure: I do believe that Joy Reid, Whoopi Goldberg, Jasmine Crockett, Hank Johnson and Ketanji Brown-Jackson might actually be too imbecilic to get an ID for themselves. But that is because they each have a ten-cent head. It has nothing to do with the color of their skin.

Anyway, the Axios story in question adds a big ol’ helping of sexism to the Dems’ usual racism stew, because it argues that it’s not only black people who can’t manage to get an ID. It’s ladies too.

Axios puts it this way: If the SAVE Act passes, “millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports” will face extra barriers to voting.

And that’s why, every time you get on a plane you can always stretch out over several empty seats, because of all those gals who would otherwise be flying here and there, except that they got married several decades ago, and they’ve been trapped at home ever since. Foiled by the insurmountable task of updating their ID.

How does Axios try to get away with saying something so outlandishly sexist and racist? By going to one of the favorite tricks that profs in J-school teach their students: always attribute your own bigotry and propaganda to unnamed experts.

The tagline for the story says, “President Trump’s push to “nationalize” elections including his backing of a bill that could be a “nightmare” for voters, election experts told Axios.

Yes. Those dastardly “election experts.” The entire story is full of them. They attribute the “women can’t overcome the married-name conundrum” to “researchers.” When they do cite somebody claiming that “21 million Americans lack ready access” to ID, it’s a “Brennan Center analysis.”

If you don’t know them, the Brennan Center is the kind of hard-core leftist advocacy group that puts the “anal” in “analysis.” Every “finding” by their “analysts” just happens to be one of the talking points of the DNC.

Unexpectedly!

Immediately after posting the “women and minorities are too incompetent and dumb to get an ID” story, the crack staff at Axios went to work on their next scoop. This one demonstrated another trick right out of the J-School 101 Playbook: AMCE (Always Misunderstand Cause & Effect).

A famous example of this technique was a story from decades ago claiming that “despite a record number of Americans in prison, crime continues to drop.”

Axios is reporting on a similarly mysterious drop, and they start out so promisingly: “Violent crime dropped sharply across America’s biggest cities in 2025, according to new data.” They even show a chart that documents crime rates dropping in many cities between 25 to 58%.

Now you don’t have to be Einstein – or Sherlock Holmes, or me – to deduce a blindingly obvious cause that might explain this effect. Trump came to office at the beginning of 2025 promising to close our borders and start mass deportation of millions of unvetted illegal aliens. Over the course of the year, nearly 2 million people either self-deported, were caught and deported, or were caught and detained pending deportation.

Some insightful types might anticipate that removing several million illegal renters from the competition for rental housing might decrease rents. (Because: supply and demand.) And that removing many competing illegal workers might cause wages to rise. (Because: ditto.) And that removing several million criminals might result in a drop in crime. (Because: duh.)

So a restless nation sat on the edge of their seats, having read the Axios tagline, and having seen their chart documenting the drop in crime over the last year. The anticipation was killing us! Would Axios actually stumble into the obviously right conclusion?

Annnndddd…they titled their chart, “Crime plunges in major cities despite Trump’s crackdown rhetoric.”

Despite! Trump promised a crackdown, then he implemented a crackdown. But crime went down ANYWAY?!

Good lord. With brains like these, is it any wonder that they are continually surprised when raising taxes on the rich makes the rich move to a lower-tax state, or when hateful, dimwit celebrities tell their audience that they hate their guts and then 14 people watch the Grammys?

My final item today isn’t about a story written by journalists, but a story about them. Specifically the fired journalists at the Washington Post. (“Where Democracy gets beaten to death with tire irons in the Darkness.”)

Jeff Bezos bought the struggling WAPO a while ago, but he kept nearly all of the same journalists who had been doing the kind of work that resulted in a paper that was struggling.

Annndddd… it lost nearly 90% of its readers in the past 4 years. Last year alone it lost $100 million.

Now most sentient mammals, when confronted those facts, might say something like, “Yikes! This can’t go on!”

But the lefty genius reporters at WAPO said, “This can go on forever!”

I’m not making that up. One retired journalist said that with all of Bezos’ billions, he could afford to lose $100 mil a year “indefinitely.” Veteran WAPO writer Sally Quinn was shocked at the layoffs Bezos just announced, reflecting that when Bezos first bought the paper, he was great. “He was wonderful. He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience….And now I don’t know who this person is.”

I’ll tell you who he is: a guy who has been taking giant financial groin kicks for years. He bought the paper in 2013 for $250 million, and he’s lost $274 million on it in just the last three years!

You know what’s consistently pretty close to the top of a list of “Things Billionaires Don’t Do With Money?”

Continue to drop $100 Mil Per Annum on a Failing Freaking Business!! OH! OHHHHHH! (Surprise Billionaire Kinison Insert)

But do you know what the schadenfreude cherry on top of the “learn to code” sundae is?

On Monday, a bunch of WAPO workers threw a tantrum – er, held a protest – at the WAPO building. Led by a guy in a Where’s Waldo hat, the protest was meant to, “Show management that they can’t trample our rights.” He said that even though “today is a scary day,” the fired WAPO workers were going to “demonstrate our collective power” and “to show our right to work.”

He finished with a stirring statement that, “Management has locked us out. Let us show them that they can’t just do that.”

And then, several dozen fired workers walked inside and up to the glass-partitions in the lobby that function like subway turnstiles. And one by one, each worker slid his or her employee badge over the scanner.

Annnnnddddd…nothing happened. Each worker swiped, then frowned, then turned dejectedly away. Followed by another worker, and another worker. Some of them seemed to be surprised when their badges didn’t work, stepping confidently forward, then swiping the badge several more times.

Afterwards, Waldo said that the workers deserve to work at the Post and have a right to work at the post. Then they all went outside and waved at the building, engaged in the saddest little chant I’ve ever heard: “We’ll be back. We’ll be back.”

Um. You just “demonstrated your collective power,” and were defeated by a piece of glass. I don’t think that failing, and then chanting that you’ll be back at some point in the future to fail again, is quite the blood-curdling message that you think it is.

I know that it’s a tough thing to lose your job, especially when you’re in a grim, declining business like newspapers, where finding a new gig is going to be hard. And I know that a lot of the workers – especially the non-journalist staff – are suffering because of forces beyond their control.

But the journalists at WAPO have been lying – continually, consistently, and without remorse – for many decades. You could fill a book with the many outrageous smears they’ve pushed, from the Russia Hoax to the healthy Biden hoax to the “America is horrible” slanders.

And when blue collar folks – from the workers on the Keystone Pipeline to farmers to everybody fired because they wouldn’t take the experimental covid vax – lost their jobs, the WAPO elitists sneered, “Learn to code,” and went on to the next attack on conservatives.

I generally hate to see anybody lose their jobs.

But for the “journalists” at the WAPO, I can make an exception.

I won’t have a column on Monday, because we’re going up to Tennessee this weekend, and my mom’s funeral is Monday. Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

The Godfather, Vigilantism, & anti-ICE Protests, Part 2

In the last column I discussed the opening scene of The Godfather, and how leftist protesters wrongly see themselves as the good kind of vigilantes when they are quite the opposite. But I left two groups out of that category. Because it’s not just the protesters, but elected politicians and many judges who are also acting as vigilantes, IMO.

Which seems counter-intuitive, to say the least. How can elected leaders – Mayor Small Frey and Governor Jazz Hands – become vigilantes who rebel against the government when they run the government? And how can judges – Boasberg and the hundreds of Boasberg clones throughout the nationwide district and (sometimes) appellate courts – be circumventing the laws when they are in charge of upholding the laws?

The answer is simple: the politicians and judges are local officials who are opposed to the federal laws of the land – embodied in our Constitution, our immigration laws, and the sections of the U.S. Code that deal with interfering with federal officers in the performance of their duties, etc.

So yes, elected officials and local judges can be insurrectionist vigilantes in 2026, just as their Democrat forebearers were in the Southern slave states in 1861.

Having said that, I’d like to turn to the potential for right-wing vigilantism, if the current administration isn’t able to stop the lawless anti-ICE protests occurring in various blue states and sanctuary cites around the country. I hope it doesn’t come to that, because vigilantism is always fraught with dangers for a society.

But as I discussed in the last column, it can also sometimes be a proper course of action.

Let’s briefly revisit the Godfather. The mortician comes to Vito as a patriotic American citizen. “I believe in America,” he says, in the words that open the movie. “America’s made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.”

He is, in other words, the kind of legal immigrant we would like to see. He appreciates the country and the blessings it’s given him, and he has assimilated. When his daughter is attacked, he goes through the proper, legal channels (the cops and the courts).

But it’s significant that his name is “Amerigo Bonasera,” meaning “America, good night.” Because the American government betrayed him in his hour of need. So now, the proper (though morally problematic) course of action is to go to the Godfather for the justice that the justice system did not provide.

Vito knows that, even though his initial words demonstrate why mob justice (in this case, literally “mob” as in Mafia) was his preferred first choice: “Why did you go to the police?” he asks. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”

The answer is clear for all of us conservative, law-and-order types: Because we SHOULD go to the police. They’re supposed to protect us from criminals and give us justice. And in a society in which the justice system is functioning properly, all vigilante action would be disordered and wrong.

But when the government has failed (or even intentionally abandoned) its core function of protecting citizens from criminals – I’m looking at you, Democrat party! – many people see vigilante justice as a viable option. During the dark days of the Biden maladministration, as we watched millions of foreigners lawlessly pouring over our border, day after day for years, many of us on the right and center felt a kind of growing desperation and despair.

A few states took small steps toward taking the law into their own hands, Texas being one example. When Governor Abbott pleaded with the feds to enforce the border in his state, he proposed that Texans secure their own border, if the feds wouldn’t. When Biden forbid Texans from protecting themselves – immorally forcing Texan citizens to suffer the ongoing harm from the flood of illegals – Abbott appealed that to higher courts, while in the meantime defiantly maintaining his own barriers at the border.

Fortunately, there is a sane but narrow majority on SCOTUS that allowed Texas to reinforce their border, even if only on a watered-down technicality, i.e. the barriers that Biden started destroying were on municipal or private land, not federal land.

But that was a terrifyingly close-run thing. If Hillary had been able to appoint a couple of SCOTUS judges, or if Trump hadn’t won in 2024, who knows how badly things would be going right now?

This is why I think conservatives are being ever more tempted to explore dramatic alternatives to resist the cascade of illegitimate power grabs by national Democrats, which are still going on. The left has relentlessly attacked the integrity of our democratic republic in multiple and critical ways.

• They’ve illegally declared sanctuary territories, in blatant contravention of the Supremacy Clause and other parts of our Constitution.

• They’ve admitted tens of millions of illegals and tried to give them the vote, and thus an insurmountable lock on all future national elections.

• They’ve resisted all attempts to ensure the integrity of our elections (through no ID requirements, unrestricted mail-in voting, vote harvesting, unvetted vote counting, etc.)

• They’ve pursued widespread judicial insurrection, via partisan local judges who transparently rule based on their political priors instead of our laws.

• They’ve allowed massive fraud networks in their states, which steal from all American citizens, since the lion’s share of the stolen funds come from the federal taxes we all pay.

For these reasons and more, we cannot allow the feds to back down, and allow insurrectionist mobs in Minnesota – or Portland, or LA, or anywhere else – to drive them out and get away with it. That’s what happened when the Democrats started the Civil War. Just like Small Frey saying, “ICE, get the f**k out of Minneapolis,” they said, “Federals, get the f**k out of the South.”

That time, a Republican president marshalled some forces and went down and militarily disabused them of their insurrectionist notions. After some false steps with some 19th century versions of RINOS – I’m looking at you, McClellan! – he got himself a future GOP president in the form of bad-ass Grant, and achieved some good old fashioned “peace through strength” by 1865.

But the Dems didn’t completely get the message. They formed the KKK, and they passed Jim Crow laws, and after some more decades of their insurrectionist schemes, more Dem governors (the Tampon Tims of their day, except without the effeminate Jazz Hands demeanor) once again defied the feds. They stood in the doorway of schools and harassed worshippers at churches, until another GOP president sent the National Guard to kick their arses and restore the law and the constitution.

Now we’re in the same position, and we’ve got to make the dishonest hypocritical Dems eat their own words. For years they’ve demanded that “nobody is above the law” and “insurrection must be punished.” We agree. And now they need to find themselves on the pointy end of those particular sticks.

Otherwise, the eternal call of vigilante justice, as embodied in the Godfather, might one day be listened to by American citizens who are not going to tolerate mobs of violent criminals – foreign AND domestic – taking over their cities with impunity.

Because we don’t want to see Amerigo go silently into that Bonasera.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.