Tag: Politics

Riding Out the Storm, & What is Wrong With Leftist Men? (posted 10/9/24)

First, I’ve got a quick update on my family during this tumultuous week.  Katie continues to improve in the hospital in Denver, and my wife continues to crush her role as loving and supportive mom with her. 

However, my youngest daughter was booked to fly from her school in the storm’s path to CA on Thursday, for a long-planned visit with some of the friends she’d met in Boulder in the summer.  But since the winds in Orlando during her scheduled take-off were predicted to be out of the northeast at 110 mph, those plans had to change. 

So she flew to Denver yesterday, surprising Katie in her hospital room, in a moment that Karen caught on a video that is so sweet that I can’t share it with you for fear it will give you Type 2 diabetes.  She will spend a few days with sis and mom, before flying on to CA, where the only potentially troubling weather condition is chances of feces-and-dirty-syringe tumbleweeds blowing across the runways.

So Cassie the Wonder Dog and I are going to be hunkered down in stately Simpson manor during the storm.  Luckily for us – though our hearts go out to those in Tampa and the middle of the state – it looks like we are far enough north that we should be spared the worst of the damage, and may even get away with just a short power outage. 

Oddly enough, Karen and I were scheduled to fly to Maine on Friday, from where we were going to drive to Vermont with an old grad school buddy and his wife, to see some fall colors and decompress.  Those plans are up in the air, since my Friday flight was cancelled, and my wife is now trying to re-book so that she can fly straight there from Denver, and I can try to get up there to meet her on Saturday.

Thankfully, I’ve got political shenanigans to write about, to keep my mind off of the storms outside.  

First, when I saw some clips from the Vance/Walz debate, I came across a moment that I hadn’t noticed.  The moderator asked Walz a rare, pointed question, about that time when he told the compelling story of his being in Hong Kong when the Chicoms started murdering free-speech advocates in Tiananmen Square.  (You don’t have to ask which side Wolz was on, sadly.) 

Except that he was in Nebraska then, and only arrived in Hong Kong several months later.

Walz tried to take a page out of Harris’ Big Book of Debate Tactics, and blather.  I’m not sure why it didn’t work for him like it did for his running mate.  Perhaps because he’s neither non-white or a female, which have both been very useful for Kamala. 

She used her gender to get her first important jobs in California politics, and as a political shield to miraculously cover and compensate for her manifest unfitness for high office.  And MSM figures have lined up to point out how all criticism of her is sexist and therefore illegitimate.

She’s basically a vagician, is what I’m saying.  And hapless Tim Walz is not. 

He began his answer with a variation of Que Mala’s “I was raised in the middle class” gambit.  To wit: “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, [in a] town of 400.  A town that you rode your bike with your buddies ‘til the streetlights come on.  And I’m proud of that service.”

He meandered on for several hundred words without approaching an actual answer (a la Kamala), and the moderator actually followed up, pointing out that he hadn’t answered the question.  Whereupon he melted down into one of the worst moments in a very weak debate for him.

But I initially overlooked that first part.  He referred to riding bikes around in a small town to some sort of “service,” of which he seems inordinately proud?!

I’m used to politicians fluffing up their resumes, and Wolz is certainly expert in that skill.  He’s bragged about serving as a teacher and a coach, serving in the National Guard – right up until that would have involved serving in a war zone, at which point he severed himself from that particular service – and serving in Congress and the MN’s governor’s office.

But if riding bikes around small Midwestern towns until the streetlights came on constitutes “service,” I may have to nominate myself for a whole raft of medals.  Because I served six or seven summer terms on a three-speed Schwinn (for which I’d like a Congressional Medal of Honor), which also involved many skinned knees and various bruises (three Purple Hearts, please). 

I also dispatched many pop bottles and cans with a pellet gun.  So I think that at least a bronze star and an infantry sharpshooter badge are in order. 

But I never completed the requirements to become a Command Sergeant Major, and I never stood beside a skinny Chinese hero while the tanks of a murderous socialist dictatorship bore down on him. 

Then again, neither did Tim Walz.  (And as Tampon Tim will tell you, one man’s socialism is just another man’s, “You die now beneath tread of tank, enemy of state!!”) 

Walz is as phony as Kamala’s stories about her deprived childhood.  (“We had to burn mom and dad’s PhD diplomas to keep warm in the harsh Montreal winters, and I had to steal chicken nuggets from my childhood McDonald’s job, just to keep the family from starving!”) 

And only a non-binary far-leftist with fluid pronouns could mistake Walz for a traditional Midwestern male.  Because dressing up an off-putting socialist in a ball cap, flannel shirt and coach’s whistle doesn’t make him an alpha male.  It just makes for a hilarious costume for him to wear at Halloween.

Speaking of caricatures of authentic masculinity, I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the Democrats’ recent weird dysfunctionality on the subject of men and masculinity, can I?

The most flamboyant examples are the many deeply confused trans and trans-adjacent eccentrics in their ranks. They seem to love themselves some gender dysmorphia sufferers, from Biden giving an interview to obnoxious Dylan Mulvaney (a 27-year-old male who identifies as a 13-year-old girl), to Richard/Rachel Levine (a 60-something divorced father who identifies as Captain Kangaroo’s more successful sister, Admiral Kangaroo), to Sam Brinton (the bald guy with garish lipstick in a job involving nukes, but who identifies as a serial luggage thief).    

But it’s not just that.  They’ve also had great difficulty putting forward male candidates whom average voters might consider to be regular men.  And I’m not talking about Mayor Pete, who disappeared for months of maternity leave after not having a baby. 

I’m talking about effete candidates like Beto “Beta” O’Rourke and Ken-Doll Newsom, as well as the afore-mentioned Tim Walz, who has to be the only volunteer football coach in America who also has an unhealthy fascination with putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms and starting transgender clubs in local high schools. 

(For a guy who obsessively threw around the word “weird” about Trump and Vance, he would be well advised to grab a Shakespeare concordance and search for the phrase “doth protest too much.”)

Which brings us to perhaps the oddest of an odd bunch: Doug Emhoff, the “second gentleman” who aspires to be the first gentleman, despite being no kind of gentleman at all.      

Our laughably corrupt mainstream media has been trying mightily to portray Emhoff as an admirable figure and – maybe even a heavier lift? – as a wildly attractive man. 

I’m not making that up. Leftist WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell wrote a glowing opinion piece in which she called Emhoff the “embodiment…of modern female fantasy,” and a “progressive sex symbol.”   She doesn’t dwell exclusively on his appearance – her main argument seems to be that she’s turned on by a man who “prioritize[s] his wife’s ambition over his own.” 

But then again, she does call him “a hunk” and a “dreamboat,” and suggests that Ryan Gosling should “move over,” because here comes Fabio Emhoff.  (Okay, I made up the “Fabio” part.  But that’s the ONLY part I made up.)

I’ll admit it: I am the last one who should criticize anyone else’s looks.  I broke my nose multiple times in high school.  I’m what they call an Illinois 6 (and that translates to a Florida 3) at BEST.  I’ve never heard the whisper of multiple female undergarments simultaneously dropping to the floor because I enter a room.

But look at 30 seconds of any recent interview of Doug Emhoff.  Listen to his voice; note his affect; take in his visage.

If THAT guy is a “hunk,” I’m Brad Pitt’s ruggedly handsome cousin. 

And while I’m too much of a classy and refined gentleman to ask female friends what kind of libidinal effect they experience when looking at Doug Emhoff, I’d be willing to bet that “severe v*ginal dryness” would appear on the medal stand of their responses. 

Perhaps I’ve said too much.  Maybe his strong character makes up for any less-than-optimal physical characteristics.

Annnnnnndddd… NOPE!   His first marriage ended because he impregnated a nanny who taught at their children’s school.  Which is not exactly first-ballot “Great Husband Hall of Fame” material. 

But it gets worse, because nobody has been able to find any trace of the child.  The most likely conclusion is that the baby was aborted, and unnamed sources report that Emhoff paid the nanny a six-figure settlement and got her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. 

(Remember that time when Trump paid Stormy Daniels and had her sign a NDA – with no pregnancy or abortions involved – and the left wanted to imprison and possibly execute him for it?)     

But hey, everybody makes mistakes, and maybe the nanny-banging was a one-time—

NOPE.  Because the story recently came out that he was at the Cannes film festival in 2012 when he saw his girlfriend talking to a valet.  So he slapped her in the face so hard that it spun her around. As one apparently does, if one is a progressive sex symbol.

I mean, how else is she going to learn not to talk to valets?  

Seriously though, what is wrong with these people?  And what is wrong with the media who cover for them and fawn over them?         

If it’s not Nina Burleigh offering to service Bill Clinton just for keeping abortion legal, it’s Catherine Rampell writing a heavy-breathing “50 Shades of Gross” article about the dreamboat nanny-banger.  “He supports women!”  (Yes.  Because after you slap them so hard, you’ve got to support them with both hands so that they don’t fall down, and make a scene on the red carpet.) 

“He supports abortion!”  Yes.  The guy whose nanny has an extremely inconvenient pregnancy is a big abortion fan.  UNEXPECTEDLY! 

After watching Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary and Kamala, et. al., I know that the powerful leftist women in the Democrat party are pretty terrible.

But their men might be worse!

Hamas delenda est!

On the Anniversary of 10/7, Terrorists Try to Replace Leaders Faster than the IDF Can Kill Them (posted 10/7/24)

Once again, events are happening too fast for me to keep up with.  The presidential campaigns are accelerating, the polls remain tight, and FEMA’s relief efforts in the wake of Helene are being badly bungled, in keeping with Biden-Harris’ sterling record over the last four years.

Meanwhile, my oldest daughter remains in the hospital in Denver – she’s making progress and doing well, and thanks for your continued prayers — and now it’s my youngest daughter’s turn to be in the path of a second storm in as many weeks.  Thankfully she’s on the Atlantic coast, and so Milton will likely be a tropical storm rather than a hurricane by the time it reaches her campus. 

Additionally, I’ve noticed a moment in the Vance-Walz debate that I’d over-looked before, and I also need to take some well-deserved shots at Que Mala’s beta-boy role-model husband, Doug Emhoff. 

But I’m going to have to save all that for a Wednesday column, because today is the anniversary of the evil attacks on Israel last October, and attention must be paid.

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of Israel’s approach over the last several months: they’re ignoring Biden and the Democrats’ advice and input – everywhere and at all times a wise move! – and they’ve been pursuing terrorists with the wrath of an Old Testament God.  (Some might even say THE Old Testament God.) 

I admire the way they’ve minimized civilian casualties, achieving a civilians-to-enemy-combatants-killed ratio far lower than in any war in all of history, including the ones we’ve waged during our own country’s history. 

And I love the way they’ve mixed traditional arms and operations with high-tech tweaks, psychological warfare, and hilarious, intelligence-aided trickery to take out the top levels of Hamas and Hezbollah.  The latest details came out in a story this weekend, explaining how the weapons geeks in Israel had wired the explosive pagers such that an authentication message appeared on the screens of those pagers that didn’t detonate in pockets.

The authentication process to read the page required the users to touch two different buttons on both sides of the pagers, which meant that many of the terrorists who received the page had both of their hands mangled or blown off, along with being blinded if they were holding the pager close to their faces when they pressed those buttons. 

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them, until you remember who they are, and what they did to end up holding those pagers in the first place.  

The frequency of Israel’s successes is making it hard to keep up with the latest news.  I remember that during the Iraq war, we made a deck of cards featuring the 52 top scumbags in Saddam’s regime.  As our forces advanced, we started taking playing cards off the table.

That wouldn’t work for Israel, though, because they’d be changing out cards faster than a casino trying to cool off a gambler on a hot streak at the blackjack table.  In just two air strikes – the one that took out Nasrallah and his deputies and the one the week before that – they wiped out the equivalent of three entire suits of cards.      

Each day I come across a story about the latest Hezbollah boss to assume rubble temperature.  These guys are dropping like old Soviet commies in the Reagan era.  We try to set up a phone call with Achmed Brezhnev, only to find out that he’s been replaced with Muhammad Andropov, and before Tony Blinken can catch a flight over to kiss his butt, he’s replaced by Hassan Chernenko. 

Last Wednesday, Israel located Khider al-Shaebia, the terrorist responsible for the rocket attack on 7/27 that killed 12 Druze children playing soccer.  Apparently al-Shaebia wasn’t carrying a detonating pager in his pocket on 9/17, because he didn’t get turned into the Queen of al-Shaebia that day.  So the IDF had to eliminate him the old-fashioned way: with an airstrike. 

The latest head of Hezbollah was Hashem Safi Al-Din, who enjoyed a tenure of 7 days in office before experiencing rapid molecular disassembly last Friday, courtesy of an IDF air strike.  Several of his likely successor candidates are high-ranking members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Fortunately, they were gathered around Al-Din when the clock struck Boom!     

At this point, I’d love to be a fly on the shell-pocked wall, observing a bunch of the remaining, twitchy Hezbo commanders meeting to decide the next leader.  I don’t know how they do that in the first place.  It’s not like they’ve got a phone chain they can use.  And I’m guessing that emails or zoom calls are out, too.

But however they put the word out, they somehow end up cowering around a folding table with one leg missing under a half-collapsed parking garage down a rubble-strewn alley.  I’m picturing it goes something like this:

Weird Beard #1: You’ve probably already heard that Muhammad Abdul Aziz was killed by the Jewish pig-dogs. 

Weird Beard #2:  Oh no!   How’d they get him?  Exploding pager?  Exploding radio?

WB#1:  Poisoned hummus.  (One guy starts spitting violently.)  What are you doing?

Spitting Guy:  I just ate some hummus. 

WB#3:  We ALL just ate hummus.  The Jews haven’t poisoned all the hummus in Lebanon.

WB#2:  Are you sure?  

(They all look at each other uncertainly.) 

WB#4:  I thought Muhammad Abdul Aziz got killed when his scooter exploded.

WB#1:  No, that was Abdul Aziz Muhammad.  He died last Thursday.  We’re talking about Muhammad Abdul Aziz.  He was halfway through a romantic dinner with his goat bride when he pitched down face-first in his bowl of hummus.

WB#5:  I thought he was blown up when he knelt on an explosive prayer rug?

WB#6:  No, that was Mohammad Aziz Abdul, last Friday.  The hummus thing was this Monday.

WB#2:  Are you sure?  Because I thought—

WB#1:  Okay look.  For the last time, here’s the rundown:

A week ago Friday, Hassan Nasrallah got a building dropped on him, along with a half-dozen other Nasrallah cousins and brothers, two of his brother’s-in-law, and his father-in-law.

On Saturday, Muhammad Suleiman was named as his replacement.  When he went to his brother Abdul Suleiman’s house on Sunday to announce the good news, a ring doorbell that the Jews had installed two months ago blew his head off. 

Abdul became the leader, but on Wednesday he used a q-tip that Mossad had coated with napalm, and his head caught fire.

Hassan Suleiman was elected on Thursday, but on Saturday he found—

WB#5 (snapping his fingers and pointing): The kosher cobra in the toilet!

WB#1 (sighing): Yes, the cobra in the toilet.  Then Hassan Abdul took over, and he stayed in his house until Wednesday, when someone slipped a copy of the Beirut Post under his front door.

(The men in the circle looked at each other.) 

WB#3: Self-igniting newspaper?

WB#4: Poisoned newsprint ink?

WB#6: Oh, I know!  The paper had the transcript of a Kamala Harris interview, and halfway through reading it he shot himself in the head because he couldn’t stand it any more?          

WB#1 (shaking his head):  Exploding eyeglasses, courtesy of Shin Bet Optometrists.

Then it was Abdul Aziz Muhammad on the scooter on Thursday, then Muhammad Aziz Abdul with the detonating prayer rug last Friday, then Muhammad Abdul Aziz with the poison hummus on Monday.

WB#2:  So now who’s up? 

Everyone looks at everybody else, then most of them stare at their sandals, or at the ceiling, or out into the alley, whistling softly.

WB#1 (pulling out a bunch of straws, snapping one off, then mixing them up and holding his hand out with their ends sticking out) Everybody pick one.

They all choose with shaking hands, and Muhammad Muhammad Aziz pulls the short one.  He sighs deeply, while everyone bows their head to him and calls him “Sheik.” 

MMA: Great.  Let me ask one favor though.  Whatever you do, when you are setting up the seating chart for my funeral, don’t seat my goat wife anywhere near my goat mistress.  They do not get along, and I don’t want trouble.    

And, scene. 

On this somber anniversary, I wish fitful sleep, haunted dreams and swift justice for the Iranian government, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.  For the Israelis, I wish good luck and good hunting, and the return of the remaining hostages.

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Goes Michael Corleone on Its Enemies, and J.D. Vance Shines in the VP Debate (posted 10/4/24)

Before I get started, thank you all so much for your kind words and prayers for Katie!  She is continuing to improve, if not as quickly as we’d all like. 

I’ve learned something new about surgeries and the human body.  It turns out that after intestinal surgery, your bowel needs to “wake up” before you can eat solid food and get everything going again.  Apparently every patient is different in this respect, and generally speaking, the more the surgeons had to handle your intestines and work on them, the longer it takes to get to the post-surgery “waking up” part.

Katie said that her surgeons “pulled out and handled my entire bowel before throwing it back in,” which is why she’s not yet been able to start eating normally again. 

I didn’t appreciate her word choice there – I would prefer “…before lovingly and gently putting it back in place” over “throwing it back in” – but she has been decreasing her pain meds and moving around more.   We’re just waiting for everything to wake up.

So now I’ve learned that my daughter has at least one flaw: a drowsy bowel.  (And no, if you’re thinking of starting a garage band and are looking for a name, I do not recommend “Katie and the Drowsy Bowels.” Even though it does sound sort of cool.)

Speaking of drowsy bowels – I know: very graceful transition – how about that Joe Biden?  Even though he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, he’s still keeping his unblemished “wrong about every foreign policy decision he’s ever made” losing streak.

This time he’s very concerned that Israel has been taking down terrorists like Ted Kennedy knocking down rum-and-Cokes at an open bar.  He once again called for the Israelis to grant the terrorists a cease-fire.  You know, like the ones we gave Hitler in April of 1945, and the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August.   

Biden has perversely made Trump’s prediction from 2015 come true: In his eyes the Jews are doing too well lately, and he’s saying, “No! Please!  We’re tired of winning. It’s too much winning!”  

Within a couple of days of Hassan Nasrallah’s death – reportedly via many 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs – the IDF also took out Nasrallah’s brother-in-law, as well as hitting another building where Hashem Safieddine, who is now presumed but not confirmed dead.

Hashem – his friends called him “Hash,” which is what he hopefully looks like now – was a cousin of Nasrallah’s, and one of the senior leaders most likely to be his successor.  Which appears to be a temp position, now that Netanyahu is ignoring Joey Gaffes, and is busily engaged in a carnival game of “whack-a-turban” with the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is darkly comic to see hapless Antony Blinken trying to negotiate with what one news report called “the remnants of Hezbollah.”  Who could he possibly even be talking to?  I doubt that anybody who was anyone in Hezbollah’s higher ranks is still answering his phone, even assuming his answering hand is still attached to his body! 

Which means that Blinken is likely standing around near a mosque, talking to the first Tom, Dick or Achmed who will give him the time of day.  That’s what Biden’s vaunted diplomatic strategy has come to: the lead guitarist for the unknown band “Ablinken” (I’m not making that up), “negotiating” with a slow-witted, one-handed assistant goat-wrangler who is now the highest-ranking surviving member of Hezbo terrorist union Local 157. 

I love it!  A few months ago, Netanyahu was fighting for his political life.  Now he’s Michael Corleone, settling all the family business as he attends his nephew’s bris. 

Mohammed “Moe” Green gets shot through his glasses by IDF commandos.  The Mossad traps Hezbo’s top drone guy in a revolving door and then beeps the exploding pager in his pocket.  Shin Bet catches Abdul Tattaglia in bed with a goat and machine-guns them both. 

Two Israeli soldiers dressed like Muslim Virtue Police gun down Bilal Barzini on the steps of a Sharia Court-house . 

Nasrallah himself (played by Abe Vigoda in a keffiyeh), when confronted by a senior IDF commander, says, “Tell Bibi it was only business.  Jihadi business.  Can you get me off the hook?  For old times’ sake?”  And the commander says, “Can’t do it, Hassan.”  And then leaves the building right before the bunker buster hits. 

And now the weird beards running Iran are apparently as imbecilic as the former leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, because they fired 180 missiles into Israel, hitting very little, but giving the Israelis the justification (as though they didn’t already have it) to go simultaneously high-tech and Old Testament on their evil arses.

I can’t wait to see what Israel does next.  But if I were working at an Iranian nuclear facility or missile battery, I’d consider calling in sick, like Carlo when Sonny was set up for the toll booth massacre.   

One other positive development was the reaction of many Lebanese and Syrians when the Jews whacked Nasrallah: they were passing out candies and celebrating in the streets!  I’m sure that doesn’t mean that all of those people are enlightened Jeffersonian democrats and philosemites.  They might just be a different brand of Muslim, glad because some of the “bad” Muslims got the crotch-detonating pager treatment.

But still, I was reminded of the mobs of Gazans celebrating on October 7th.  They were celebrating and spitting on the corpses of poor Jewish girls whom their horrible co-religionists had raped and murdered, and then paraded through their streets.  So good riddance to them, and good luck to the Syrians and Lebanese.

In domestic news, I was thrilled with J.D. Vance’s debate performance! He did everything I’d wished that Trump would do in his debate: kept his cool, stuck to specifics, and parried every attack on Trump by citing his record, and then reminding viewers of Kamala’s record.  He also came across as empathetic, sensitive and positive, thus giving himself the best chance to persuade any female voters who are still persuadable.

Walz was better than Kamala – the lowest of low bars – but was still bumbling and gaffe-prone.  Even viewers who were only passing through an airport and didn’t hear him call himself a knucklehead – fact check: true! – got a visual of his bug-eyed awkwardness. 

The moderators were once again biased hacks, though not as thoroughly awful as David Muir and Linsey Davis.  I’m more convinced than ever that I was right in my columns a couple of weeks ago: future debate moderators should just be time-keepers, and stay out of the way.

It’s infuriating to see some “journalist” cutting off the candidates with comments like, “I want to move on” and “There’s a lot more to get to.”  We don’t care what you want, Teleprompter Reader.  No one’s voting for you, and you’re not the candidates’ parents!

They once again fact-checked the GOP candidate, even though they had agreed not to fact-check either side, and their “fact check” was once again wrong.  When Vance called the Haitians in Springfield “illegal immigrants,” Margaret Brennan jumped in to misleadingly condescend:  “Just to clarify for our viewers, [the Haitians in Springfield] have legal status.”

Vance handled it perfectly.  As soon as he started to correct her, both moderators interrupted him and tried to move on, but he wouldn’t let them.  He kept speaking until they had to momentarily shut up.  He pointed out that they had broken their promise not to do fact checks, and then accurately destroyed the faux fact check. 

He correctly said that the Haitians came illegally, and then used the CBP-1 application to file an asylum claim and then, “be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.”  As he pointed out how different that was from going through the legal immigration process, the moderators realized he’d just pantsed them on live tv, and frantically cut his mike. 

Perfect!

I don’t know where this race stands, because there are contradictory polls everywhere, and the average of all polling shows the race tied.  That’s a depressing thought, but my gut instinct is to guess that Trump’s at least a little ahead.  Though it’s only a guess, I will cite two bits of evidence.

First, Kamala has been her terrible self in a series of recent interviews.  Her rambling, word-goulash answers (“word salad” is a too healthy and positive metaphor for the verbal dog’s breakfasts that she has been serving up) aren’t getting any better. 

You can always tell when she learns a new word or phrase, because she immediately starts beating it into the ground.  We all know “see what could be, unburdened by what has been,” and “in terms of…” and “dreams, aspirations and ambitions.”  Last week someone gave her a notecard with the word “holistic” on it, and she went on a compulsive, Tourette’s-like seizure of  holistically holistic holisticality.   

In her recent talk to a bunch of athletes – huh? – she rolled out one of her old favorites, which she must think makes her sound tough: “I eat ‘no’ for breakfast!”

And Willie Brown for lunch.

Okay, that was beneath me.  Withdrawn.

By the way, I am pleasantly surprised that her handlers have been putting Que Mala out there as much as they have over the last couple of weeks.  They have to know how terrible she is at speaking, and they’ve gotten her into a dead heat by hiding her completely. 

In fact, my main argument for Trump debating her again was that she otherwise won’t say another word in public between now and election day, thus hiding her total vacuity in a way that she wouldn’t have been able to in a debate.  But she’s actually been fielding some pitched softballs in interviews, and somehow still managing to miss the balls and hit herself in the head with the bat.

And I know what you’re thinking when you heard ‘softballs’: “Ooh, Martin’s going to talk about Doug Emhoff now.” 

And I am.  But not until my Monday column. (Consider yourself teased.)

The only rational reason I can think of for the Dems putting her out there is that they must have some internal polling that shows that Trump is ahead of her.

Which brings me to my second and last point: the cross tabs in the polling don’t make sense.

Nearly all polls show the overall race within the margin of error, but they also show Trump doing substantially better than he did in the past with important sub-groups of voters.  For example, he trailed Biden in 2020 among Hispanics by 34 points, but is only down to Kamala with them by 14. 

The same goes for a lot of groups: blacks, young people, independents, etc.  In every case, Trump is doing markedly better with each sub-group than he did in 2016 or 2020, yet he’s supposed to be in a dead heat with the electorate as a whole.

He was never going to get votes from hard-left Dems.  (Fun fact: after the Biden self-immolation/train-wreck debate in June, 20% of viewers said that BIDEN WON!  Those people are un-freakin’-reachable.)  But he certainly hasn’t lost any of his base. 

So either the internals are accurate and Trump is ahead overall, or the internals are all wrong and the overall race is really tied.  Either way, the left is going to try to cheat, so we need to get out our vote and aggressively poll watch.

The bottom line:  I won’t be able to relax until Katie is home and fully recovered, and Trump has won the election. 

And I’m praying for both! 

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Continues to Win, and a Hurricane Approaches (posted 9/27/24)

Before I get on to personal stuff, I saw that Israel took out yet another Hezbollah big shot yesterday, this time the head of their drone unit, a guy named Mohammed.  (Unexpectedly!)  He had an apartment on the third floor of a 10-story building, and the IDF managed to put three missiles into his apartment. 

The tone of the media coverage is interesting.  The AP mentioned that Mohammed’s apartment – it used to be turn-key, but now it’s a fixer upper – is in a building very near the one where the Dirty Dozen Hezbo commanders were flattened last Friday.   The story noted that Thursday’s strike was the fourth to hit a specific area in Beirut, calling that neighborhood “a Hezbollah stronghold.” 

The AP needs to look up the definition of the word “stronghold,” because I think they’ve confused it with “missile magnet.” 

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the no-win situation the terrorists have gotten themselves into.  They can’t use cell phones, pagers, radios, walkie-talkies or smoke signals – unless the smoke involved is rising from their braised hands or genitals.  They can’t meet out in the open, and they can’t meet in an office building.

And now they can’t spend time relaxing in their own apartments, flipping through potential matches on Goat Tinder™. 

And you know that none of them saw this coming when they decided to fire off a few hundred missiles at Israel, thinking that they were preoccupied with the terrorists in Gaza, and wouldn’t be able to respond effectively.

How does that old cliché go?  “Everybody has a plan until their pager blows various appendages off?”

On a personal note, I am writing this from Tennessee, where I have once again come up to visit my mom, while my sister and her husband took a previously scheduled trip for a few days.  Regular readers will remember that mom is dealing with Alzheimer’s, which makes every trip to see her both precious and a little heartbreaking.

This trip is a little more fraught because I’ve inadvertently left my wife at home in Gainesville, to ride out a hurricane!  When I got up here on Tuesday, Helene was tracking out in the Gulf, around 300 miles from our home in the middle of north central Florida, so we expected some heavy rain and only some moderately gusting winds.

But the storm grew stronger in the last two days, so even though the track has not come closer to our area, the expected winds are stronger.  As I’m writing this overnight, my wife has texted to say that she’s lost power, and she’s going to be updating me regularly.  She’s got the company of our Wonder Dog and three moderately-useful-at-best cats, and her brother lives nearby, but it feels lousy to not be there with her.

Of course we are praying for the residents of the Big Bend area where the storm has made landfall.  The expected devastating effects there will dwarf any that we expect to see in our area, so we won’t be complaining about any clean-up that we’ll need to do in the coming days. 

At a time like this I’m grateful for our excellent governor, and the efforts that our state has made to prepare for and respond to this storm.  And I hope to be able to report good news and then get back to the usual commentary and snarkery next week.

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Still on a Roll, + Advice for Trump (posted 9/23/24)

In my first two columns last week, I made a case for why Trump should try to take on Kamala in one more debate.  In my other three columns, I focused on Israel’s amazing technical feats, including blinding the Iranian ambassador with science (ear worm!), and converting thousands of Hezbo pagers into pocket-sized Elvis impersonators (“We’ll take your hand/ we’ll take your eye sight, too/For we’re Mossad/and we’ll have revenge on you!”)

Boom!  Double-ear-worm paragraph, right out of the box!

Oh, wait! 

“Last Tuesday, all the Hebrews seemed so far away,

Now it seems they’re in Beirut to stay,

Oh I regret…last Tuesday. 

Suddenly, I’m not half the thug I used to be.

All my friends are calling me Lefty,

That phony page, came suddenly.”

That’s an ear-worm stand-up triple to start the week.

The good news is that Israel is still on a roll.  No, they haven’t pulled off their next sneaky tech masterpiece yet – I’m betting on either exploding K-cups (the “k” is for “kaboom!”) or else chemically re-engineered breakfast cereal (in the bowl they look like normal Frosted Flakes, but add milk, annnnndddd… Shrapnel Flakes!) (“Theyyyyyrrrrrrrreeee Grape[shot]!”)

But they did execute a Friday airstrike (9/20/24) that collapsed a building in Beirut on 12 senior Hezbollah commanders.  How spoiled am I by the wizardry of Operation Pin-Point Pager on Tuesday? 

So spoiled that when I heard that the IDF flattened the Hezbollah Dirty Dozen in a conventional airstrike, I thought, “Borrrrrinnng!”

And just in case any CNN hacks are reading this, of the 12 ex-terrorists now being spit-roasted by Satan, one was named Abdul, but there was also one Abdullah, one Abu, two Husseins and three Hassans.

[engage Hans Landa filter] That’s a BINGO! [end Landa filter] 

And I didn’t even have to use the free space on my “Smashed Jihadis” bingo card. 

How would you like to be a terrorist Hezbollah member right now, even assuming you weren’t badly wounded last week?  You can’t call your fellow scumbags, you can’t page, you can’t text, you can’t radio.  And now you can’t talk in person! 

The best their propagandists could do over the weekend was to make the scary announcement that Hezbollah is now calling for “a new phase of battle!”

I’ll bet they are, since the last phase was the “Getting Your Cojones Blown Across the Lebanese Countryside” phase.  I should think they’d like to put that phase in the rear-view mirror.

Except that they can’t adjust the rear-view mirror, since their mirror-adjusting hand has been blown off.  And it wouldn’t do any good anyway, because during two-fer Tuesday, they lost both their hand and their eyes, and thus can’t use any kind of mirror. 

So that’s the good news. 

The bad news is that there has been no movement on the “Trump should debate Kamala” front, though I’m still holding out a faint hope.  I think she’d be stupid to debate Trump again, because she’s so vulnerable, and she may well win by hiding for 6 more weeks. 

But because I know that she could do so much worse than she did in the debate, and that Trump could do so much better than he did, I’m still hoping it could happen. 

Even if it doesn’t, I’ve still got some advice for Trump that would work well in a debate, and also in future interviews, since his interviews with MSM “journalists” are basically hostile debates anyway. 

I know I’m far from the only one to comment on this, but I’d love to see him make more specific claims, instead of defaulting to making bombastic/exaggerated claims, and vague ones – often at the same time.  Both of those allow his opponents easy opportunities to refute him.

The exaggerated claims can be discounted because they can be factually refuted.  Ex: “We’re winning by a lot,” (when he’s winning within the margin of error); “We had the best economy the world has ever seen,” (there are so many ways to measure that, and one indicator or another can always be cited to show stronger performance in some other historical period). 

In the debate he said (roughly) this about immigration: “Biden didn’t let in 10 million, like people say.  It’s more like 21 million.  In fact, I’m sure it’s more than that.” 

As is often the case with Trump, he’s far closer to right than the Dems are.  If they’re admitting that 10 million have come in, you know there are a ton who got in without being caught or counted, and they’ve got every incentive to keep their estimate on the low end. 

But if Trump is going to cite a stat, he needs to back it up with a source… and it’s never a good idea to undermine your own statistic!  “It’s more like 21 million… it’s probably way more than that?”  Which is it?  It looks like you’re just picking a number out of your AOC, and that’s not a good look.

The histrionic claims are mistakes too, because they cannot be fact-checked or supported, and because he throws out so many that it’s easy for many persuadable voters to start discounting everything he says. 

Consider the impact of this example:

Kamala says she’s going to do everything possible to bring down inflation.  (And yes, it’s a lie, and she’s the one who caused it, and etc.)

Option A: Trump responds with, “Under Biden-Harris, inflation exploded!  No one had ever seen anything like it.  I left them perfect inflation and the best interest rates in 100 years, and they blew both through the roof.  People didn’t think such a thing was possible, but they did it.  They destroyed the economy with their skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.”

Yes, Trump’s basic point is true.  But by not giving any numbers at all, and piling bombast upon bombast, he makes it too easy for anyone not already in his camp to either tune him out or disbelieve him.

Option B: “The day I left office, inflation was 1.4%, and it had averaged under 2% for my entire term.  Biden-Harris and a Democrat congress pushed through $4.7 trillion in extra borrowed money in the mis-named ‘Covid Relief Bill’ and the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ and within 16 months inflation had exploded to a peak of 9%.  Today it’s still 2.7%, which is almost double what she inherited from me!  That shocking inflation spike forced the Fed to raise interest rates; when I left office the 30-year mortgage rate was 2.65%.  Today it’s over 6%, meaning that a $220K mortgage that used to cost you $778 per month now costs you $1297!”

It’s easy to refute glittering generalities, but how can she (or some MSM hack) refute or distract from statistics like those?  I guess she could say that he’s making up those numbers, and she doesn’t believe him, but that’s only setting herself up to get pantsed, when he comes back with, “The interest rate numbers are from the Federal Reserve, and the inflation rates come from X government agency.  If you don’t accept those numbers, what numbers would you cite instead, and from what source?”

Trump has a great story to tell, and the Dems and the MSM – but I repeat myself – are doing everything they can to keep him from telling it.  He spent too much of the middle of the first debate helping them. 

He’s been doing better at many events since then, and I’m really hoping he takes one more shot at her in a debate, and uses the opportunity to tell his story, and destroy hers.

If she chickens out, he should hammer her on that in every speech and appearance.  And then he should treat the MSM drones who interview him as if they are nothing more than a platoon of little Que Malas.

Because they are.

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Ends a Great Week, & CNN and Massachusetts Beclown Themselves (posted 9/20/24)

Well, here it is: my fifth consecutive column in one week. 

Many people said it couldn’t be done, and that I shouldn’t even attempt it.  “Sir,” they said to me, “It can’t be done.  Not do-able!”  (How’s that for just a light dusting of a Trump impression?)

But it’s Friday, and by the time this column is finished, I’ll have produced almost 9000 words of high-quality snarkery in one week. That’s a little more than 32 Gettysburg Addresses-worth! 

And Lincoln didn’t manage a single “terrorists have carnal relations with goats” jibe, even though everybody knows that you’re supposed to open a speech with a joke.  That’s Public Speaking 101.  (And it probably explains why his speech received very few laughing-face emojis, and he had to settle for the title of “Great Emancipator” instead of the more coveted, “President Hilarious Genius.”)

Of course, I’m not saying that taken together, my columns this week are 32 times better than the Gettysburg Address.  But I’m not saying that they are NOT 32 times better than the Gettysburg Address, either.  History will have to be the judge.

And I don’t envy History its very difficult choice.

Anyway, just when I thought I’d wrung every possible laugh out of this week’s cascade of Jewish secret agents – “The name is Bond, Schlomo Bond.  And I take my Manischewitz shaken, not stirred” – giving Hezbo terrorists the best prank calls ever – what with the hand-putations, the high-powered Lasik procedures, and the ballistic circumcisions – I saw CO’s iconic post:

Shabbat Kaboom 

Man I wish I’d thought of that one! 

How did I miss it?  There’s no way I’ll be able to top that.

Wait.  How about “Yom Kaboom?”

“Blast Hashanah?” 

“The Eight Days of Hannu-kaboom?”

No, forget it.  Too derivative.  The moment is gone, and CO has stolen my thunder.

I haven’t been this upset with him since he called me a diva, and said I was getting a big head.  Can you imagine?

I stalked right back to my trailer and locked myself inside.  Then I had one of my people tell one of his people that I’d only come out and write another column after I received two dozen long-stemmed roses and a sincere apology. 

Ah, who am I kidding?  We all know two things about CO: ladies dig him, and men can’t stay mad at him. 

Anyway, while I was fixated on Hezbollah members receiving the scariest phones calls since the famous one in the Muslim horror film “The Syria Scimitar Massacre” (“The call is coming from INSIDE the mosque!”), Democrats were still doing stupid things in this country.

I have time for two examples.

This week a freak-show panel on CNN was discussing what a dangerous, Hitler-y existential threat Trump is and how someone should really rid them of this meddlesome ex-president with a firearm of some kind.  (I’m loosely but accurately paraphrasing.)

Their latest bit of evidence was that Trump recently described how he talked to the Taliban leader, whom he called “Abdul,” about what would happen to him if he killed any American troops.  (He gave the guy a satellite picture of his house, which sent a clear message: if I want to talk to you, I’m going to skip the pager step and go straight to a Hellfire missile.)

So the CNN mouth-breathers barked and yapped about what a racist hack Trump is, saying something like, “he couldn’t even remember what the Taliban leader’s name was, so he just picked the most idiotically cliched Muslim name he could think of: Abdul.  What a xenophobic dope!”   

Annnnnddddd… it turns out that the Taliban leader’s actual name is… wait for it… but you don’t really have to, do you?…. ABDUL!

That’s right.  Nobody on a tv show – surrounded by technology which would allow them to instantaneously find out what the Taliban leader’s name is – could be bothered to instantaneously find out what the Taliban leader’s name is.

Great job, MSM hacks!  You’ve done the nearly impossible, proving that you are actually even lazier than you are stupid!

Our final story of leftist moral idiocy comes from Massachusetts (Unexpectedly!), where a week ago, a small group of people held a pro-Israel demonstration in Newton.  A 31-year-old named Caleb Gannon – he was wearing a pro-Palestine pin and a covid mask, so you know he really has his act together and is firing on all cylinders – noticed the demonstration from the other side of the street.  

So he crossed the street and calmly engaged the pro-Israelis in a respectful and substantive dialogue.  The end.

HA!  I kid.  He actually started screaming, “You’re sick!  You’re supporting genocide!” and then raced across the street through traffic – tragically, he was not hit – and violently tackled 47-year-old veteran Scott Hayes from behind.  Because: compassionate leftism!

Gannon wrestled with Hayes on the sidewalk, punching and trying to choke him, until Hayes pulled out his legally carried pistol and shot Gannon in the abdomen.  It was a clear-cut – and recorded from several angles! – example of self-defense.  Gannon survived, thanks in part to the first aid administered by members of the group he’d just attacked, including Hayes. 

“Has Hayes been given a ticker-tape parade, Martin, or just a key to the city for his heroic actions?” you might be asking.  But not if you’re as smart as I think you are. 

Because this is Massachusetts, and as a reporter explained, they don’t have a “stand your ground” law.

They apparently have a “watch helplessly while a hateful leftist freak charges you and knocks you to the ground” law.  

So Hayes was immediately charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and violation of a constitutional right causing injury!  Supporters quickly raised $5000 to get him out on bail, and then another $250,000 for his legal defense.

Gannon was not immediately charged with anything (like the guy he attacked was!), but after a public outcry, he was also charged with assault and battery later.

It turns out that Gannon’s social media is full of posts condemning Israel and not Hamas for October 7th, and responding to American Jewish college kids complaining that they’ve been attacked on their campuses by the radical “tent-ifada” Hamas imitators by saying, “good, Zionists should feel unsafe everywhere.”

So stand by for the Massachusetts media’s forthcoming statement that, “We may never know what motivated Gannon to attack the pro-Israel group.” 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to begin my refractory period after this historic 5-column week by taking a little medicinal bourbon and sleeping for 12 hours.   

Hamas delenda est!

More Explosions in Lebanon: This Time it’s Radios & Walkie-Talkies (posted 9/19/24)

You’re not going to believe this, but this is my fourth daily column in a row, and I’ve got another one holstered and almost ready for tomorrow.  Which means I am in the midst of pulling off the unthinkable: the fabled 5-column week!

I’m like a clutch receiver at the height of his powers, on 3rd-and-6 with the game on the line: you can’t stop me, you can only hope to contain me.

One of my contacts in the Trump campaign told me that the big guy just heard about this, and said, “Five columns?  I heard that, and I said, ‘A five column week?!’  This is like something nobody’s ever even thought of. People are saying it’s unprecedented.  No precedent for it!  First his great advice on debating, then his instant classic “Muhammad Dangerfield” bit, and now this?  I need that guy in my cabinet.  He’s just fantastic, right?”

How do you know that that quote is authentic, and didn’t come from Joe Biden?  Because it didn’t end with, “Pause.  Repeat the line.” 

I took a nap yesterday, right after reading about the Iranian diplomat who lost both of his eyes to an exploding pager, and the last thought in my mind before falling asleep was, “What would an Iranian diplomat be doing with a terrorist’s pager?”

You can imagine how my subconscious mind works, since you’ve been reading how oddly my conscious mind works.  So… yep.  My first thoughts when I woke up were, “Does this mean that Iranian diplomat is just a Ranian diplomat, now?”  (Boom!  Missing eye joke when you least expect it!) (He never saw it coming, either!) (I’m here all week, people.)

By the way, I’ve been reading all of your comments this week, and I appreciate them.  But I haven’t had time to respond to them.  Because I may not have mentioned this, but I’ve been turning out another solid gold column every 27 minutes over here!

Still, I appreciate your kind words, and thanks.

Just when I feared that Tuesday’s pager-palooza in Lebanon might be inducing a dangerous redirecting of my blood flow that threatens to last for more than four hours, a sequel appears, this time involving walkie-talkies (or as they’re now being called, “talkies-no-longer-walkies”) and radios!

Who knew that jihadis listened to radio?   (“Hey, cool camels and kittens, you’re listening to your 50,000-watt blowtorch out of downtown Beirut – the station with all the ululatin’ – and you knoowww our call-sign: K-BOOM.  It’s another wacky, Death-to-Israel Wednesday!  Fifth caller gets a signed copy of Hassan Nasrallah’s biography, “Mein Kampf? Me Too!”  Now sit back and listen to the Madrassah Boys, and their remake of the infidel surf group’s “Little Deuce Coupe!”  “She’s my little goat bride, you don’t know what I’ve got.  Well, I’m not bragging, Hamid, so don’t put me down, But I’ve got the sweetest she-goat in this one-camel town, I met her on a Monday in the neighbor’s barn, and soon we were talkin—”  BOOM! (then static)

You see what I did there?  It’s my version of the Mossad mind trick.  They implanted explosive devices in the ears of terrorists, and I just implanted an ear worm in your head.  Because right this minute, those of you old enough to remember the Beach Boys are bobbing your head and softly humming to yourself, “She’s my little goat bride, you don’t know what I’ve got.” 

Sorry about that.

This story just keeps getting better and better!  Imagine you’re a black-hearted little Hezbo anti-Semite.  All you’ve ever wanted to do is stuff women into bee-keeper outfits, toss gay guys off roofs, and kill unarmed Jewish civilians.  But on Tuesday your dad (Muhammad) and your uncles (Muhammad and Muhammad) and your grandpa (Muhammad) and even your cousin Joey – he’s always been an odd one – all answered their pagers, and no one’s heard from them since. 

Which reminds me of an old joke:

A young Muslim is seeking a divorce.  (He should have known the marriage was doomed right from the wedding vows, when the imam asked his betrothed if she takes this jihadi to be her lawfully wedded husband, and she just bleated and continued chewing on a tin can.)  But he doesn’t know marital law, so he looks for a local attorney.

He comes across a firm that sounds promising: “Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad & Muhammad, Esquire.”  So he calls, and someone picks up.  (This joke takes place before all the phones in Lebanon went ballistic.)

Voice on phone: “Hello, Muhammad and etc.”

Jihadi: “Can I please speak to Muhammad?”

Voice: “I’m sorry, he was droned last week.”

Jihadi: “Well then, can I speak to Muhammad?”

Voice: “He’s in Qatar until Thursday.”

Jihadi: “Then let me speak to Muhammad.”

Voice:  “He’s hiding in a ‘freedom tunnel’ and defecating into a bucket all afternoon.”

Jihadi: “Okay, can I talk to Muhammad, then?”

Voice: “Speaking.”

Back to the young Hezbollah would-be terrorist: What’s he supposed to do now?  His older brother (Muhammad) and his second cousin once removed (Muhammad) thought they’d found a work-around to communicate: two cups connected by a very long string. 

But in the middle of a conversation about murdering elderly Jews in wheelchairs, one of them said, “Hey, wait a minute.  This isn’t string.  It’s primer cord!  You filthy Je—” And… KA-BLAM!

Rumors that Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar are now training a small flock of carrier pigeons have been confirmed.

Meanwhile, in a secret lab hidden deep beneath Mount Sinai, three guys in yarmulkes are gathered around a fourth, who has just put down a soldering iron.  He steps back, holds up a small metal band that would fit around a pigeon’s leg, and says, “Gentlemen, I give you the C4-DEADS.”

“Ooh,” one of them says.  “The C-4 Detonating Explosive Avian Delivery System? Nice!”

Next up: Shin Bet is working on a plan to make it so that if two terrorists cup their hands around their mouths to yell to each other across a rubble-strewn street, their fingers explode.

And, scene.

Oh, another layer of sweet irony in Pager-Gate just occurred to me. 

In the decades since 9/11 – memo to Que Mala: that day was just a tad bit worse than January 6th, you moron – terrorists throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan have been using cell phones and pagers to send signals to detonate roadside bombs and IEDs.

I bet they did not see this “Reverse” UNO card coming!

I cannot get enough of this story!  As Billy Edd Wheeler might say, I’m happy as a pig in slop right now.  (How’s that for an abrupt transition?)

Who’s Billy Edd Wheeler, you may be asking, if you don’t know as much about high-brow culture as I do?  He’s the songwriter with the most country music songwriter name ever, and he just died yesterday at the age of 91. 

Among other great hits, he wrote the most concisely evocative description of divorce ever, in Johnny Cash’s hit, “Jackson: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout./We’ve been talking ‘bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”

(Taylor Swift has written 3,261 songs, and all of the meaning in all of them put together can’t match that one couplet.)

He also wrote one of the strangest songs ever, for Kenny Rogers: “Coward of the County.”  (It’s about the darkest subject, and yet treated so bizarrely, and put to such a jaunty tune.)  

If you’ve never taken a piece of advice from me before – and if so, see how your life is turning out?  That’s on you. – take this one:

Use “Duckduckgo.com” (NOT commie Google) to search “Norm Macdonald and Adam Carolla discussing Coward of the County,” and then listen to some 24-karat comedy gold! (I really miss Norm!) It’s two parts, and it’s worth it.

In fact, they also do a hilarious break down of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”  And I’m just a simple, country doctor of literature and not a psychiatrist, but if you don’t think that’s funny, you are clinically insane.

In fact, if you listen to those two gems and don’t agree that your life has been improved by at least 1%, I will happily refund all the money you’ve put in my PayPal tip jar at Martinsimpsonwriting.com. 

What’s that?  You’ve never put anything in my tip jar?

I’m slowly turning away from you now…

RIP, Billy Edd

Not so much, Hezbollah terrorists.

Hamas delenda est!

Paging Hezbollah: There’s a new “Feel-Good Story of the Year” Leader in the Clubhouse (posted 9/18/24)

For those of you scoring at home, this is my third column in as many days, and I’m writing one for Friday, too.  I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I gladly accept the thanks of a grateful nation. 

Speaking of guys who are crushing it at life, how about those Israelis?  I thought they’d peaked for this week on Monday. 

Ooh, let me start this story a different way: 

Once upon a time, there was an Iranian-funded underground Hezbollah missile production facility near Masyaf, Syria.  (And yes, many Middle Eastern town names are apparently translations from Klingon.) But that was on Sunday, when Israel started hitting Syrian military sites in the area with very distracting air strikes.   

On Monday – as the local Syrian fighters were peeking their heads out, checking on the condition of their fellow jihadis and their goat girlfriends — Israeli special forces bad-asses fast-roped down onto the missile facility from a helicopter.  They killed 13 fighters, stole a bunch of intelligence documents, and then set explosive charges and got back into their helicopter, taking off and banking away as the missiles intended for Jew-killing blew up behind them. 

And if they weren’t blasting some eerie shophar music from under-mounted speakers as they streaked across the desert back home, they left some terrorist-intimidating money on the table!

So that was Monday, and already it was a great week.  But then… Man o’ Manischewitz!  On Tuesday, pagers started going off all over Lebanon. 

And I don’t mean “going off” as in beeping and words scrolling on a screen, but “going off” the way a hand grenade goes off.  Only much, MUCH funnier!

It seems that in recent months, terrorist leaders in the area had noticed that when many of their colleagues and underlings were on a cell phone, they had a tendency to get a spontaneous, drone-assisted colonoscopy courtesy of Mossad Mobile Phones.  After which their fighting effectiveness declined precipitously.  

So the leaders came up with a brilliant plan: let’s buy 3000 old-school pagers, and distribute them to all of our terrorist brethren throughout Lebanon.  They can’t be traced like cell phones, and if they were good enough to coordinate weed sales throughout NYC in 1990, why couldn’t they be used to coordinate Jew murdering in Allah-ville in 2024? 

Hilariously enough, they’d forgotten the third most famous rule in foreign policy, right after “Don’t invade Russia when winter is coming on,” and “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line”:

“Never screw with a nation that has more Nobel prize winners than your nation has unmolested goats.”

It’s a cliché because it’s true. 

So somewhere between the pager factory in Taiwan and the filthy Hezbollah HQ in Lebanon, some clever Hebrew hackers get hold of the 3000 pagers and equipped them with the latest upgrade in detonating communications software. 

It was like the old Jewish vaudeville routine of putting a little charge in a cigar to make it explode.  Only much, MUCH funnier! 

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the jihadi Costco warehouse where the pallets of pagers were being unloaded!  I picture a couple of flunkies slicing the packing tape on pager boxes, making small talk: 

Flunky 1: “How’s the missus, Bilal?”

Flunky 2: “Very content.”

Flunky 1: “You’re a lucky man.  She is one attractive ungulate!”

Flunky 2: “You too have done well for yourself.  Your Fatima has very shapely hooves.  And her coat? As white as the infidel Senator Elizabeth Warren!”

Flunky 1 (nodding modestly): “Hashtag ‘we must never stop mocking her,’ am I right?”

Then a middle manager comes in and gathers a crowd of jihadis around a long row of pallets.  “All right men, distribute these to everyone in your chain of command.  Make sure that they keep them on their persons at all times, preferably attached to their hip or in a pocket, close to their groin.  When the beeper sounds, have them hold the pager in their dominant hand, and look directly at it from a very short distance, to see the message.”

There probably aren’t any comedy clubs in Beirut, but if there are, I’ll bet Muhammad Dangerfield is facing a tough room right now. 

“It’s great to be here, you’re a wonderful crowd.  I’ll tell ya, I don’t get any respect from Nasrallah at all.  The guy hasn’t even talked to me in days.  (raising his hand) Has anybody else heard from him lately?  Show of hands?” (awkward silence, as angry weird beards stare sullenly at their bandaged stumps)  Oh, right.  Too soon.”

“Hey, things have been hectic at work, haven’t they?  I mean it’s only Tuesday, but this morning, pagers were blowing up all over the office.” 

Heckler: “Boo!  Get off stage!”

“My brother-in-law, he’s no prize either.  He got a message today asking him if he’d like to change his long distance carrier to Sprint.  As in ‘Sprint away from this pager as fast as you can!”

Heckler: “You are not funny man.  Go away now!”

“I’ll tell ya, he’s not doing well.  His beeper went off, and he lost his new robe and his old pronouns, if you know what I mean.”

And, scene.

Man, I love this story!  It’s such a masterstroke, tactically and morally.  There could not be a more satisfying way to strike evil people than to trick them into maiming themselves.  And this “Trojan pager” move has – for one, shining moment – solved the age-old dilemma of how to fight terrorists imbedded in a civilian population without killing tons of civilians.  And all without putting IDF soldiers at risk!

Every person with one of those phones proved his guilt and invited his just punishment, simply by possessing it.  And other than one or two innocents who might have been standing next to daddy (assuming daddy is a murderous scumbag) when he got his message from Jehovah, every person killed or wounded is part of a self-selecting surgical strike.

This ingenious move is going to bear fruit for a long time.  The terrorists had only gotten the pagers in the first place because their communications networks had been severely compromised.  Now they’re going to be frozen in place, and completely paranoid.  The only way to send messages will be by courier, and IDF drones can look for anybody running down a street with a missing hand or a scorched groin, and blast away. 

Between the PTSD, the career-ending wounds, and the recovery time necessary for those who can recover, thousands of evil killers have been taken off the board.     

Congrats, bravo, and l’chaim, IDF! 

And now, more than ever…

Hamas delenda est!

More Thoughts and Suggestions for Debates (posted 9/17/24)

After reading the comments on my column yesterday, I see that some CO-ers either think that Trump shouldn’t debate again because he’s winning without it, or because of the bad debate format he’d be stuck with. 

I hope that he’s winning, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence that he is winning by enough to overcome the margin of Democrat fraud.  And if there’s a straightforward way for him to widen his lead on her – which I argued yesterday he can very likely do in a second debate – I think it’s foolish to not take the fight to her.

Not to mention that it shows too little faith in Trump, and too much faith in Kamala, IMHO!  

Several of you also argued that Kamala will never agree to anything like a fair debate format.  I’ve got some suggestions about that below, but you may be right about that. 

But if so, it’s still a win/win for Trump to try to set up a second debate: he wins if he gets another chance to show the truth about Kamala in a debate, and he wins if he offers to debate and she runs away.

But even if none of my pragmatic reasons for a second debate have swayed you, I think there is an important philosophical reason that we should make the case for robust debates, and this applies to this election and future ones.

As much as people forget this, in a democratic republic, politicians are our employees.  Campaigns are a long series of job application tests, and debates are job interviews. 

Debates aren’t perfect, of course, and are a flawed mechanism to demonstrate who deserves our votes.  Often charisma can count for more than demonstrating a mastery of policy and the ability to govern, and too often both of those can be at least temporarily defeated by a near-sociopathic ability to shamelessly and convincingly lie.

But can you name a better mechanism? 

Stump speeches can be useful, but they’re canned and controlled, and usually not even written by the candidate.  Ads can be very effective, especially when they reinforce impressions that people already have about a candidate or policy, but they’re often even less honest than politicians!  Fundraising can gauge a candidate’s breadth and depth of support, but provides no direct evidence of his/her merit.

The closest option we have to a debate, in terms of preserving the Founders’ idea of legitimately informing voters, is a town hall.  And of course a town hall can be a format for a debate.  But it also suffers some of the weaknesses of debates, in that it is susceptible to using ringers in the audience to steer the proceedings.    

I’m glad that Trump has done a lot of town halls, but the issue is Kamala.  She hasn’t done any, and there’s no reason to believe that she will ever do one, unless it’s totally rigged in her favor.  Which brings me back to the importance of a second debate: it’s Trump’s best (and possibly only) chance to expose her truthfully to the American people.

The elephant in the room (if the Haitians haven’t eaten it yet) (I kid the Haitians!) is that our current system of debates sucks.

To fix our debate system – as with fixing anything that has become dysfunctional – we must first identify why and how it has gone wrong.  I see three main reasons:

1. Moderators have a self-interest in using their bias to favor their preferred candidates in the rules, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for the last several decades. 

2. Moderators have a self-interest in making themselves the center of attention. (When a Candy Crowley or David Muir type says something like, “I’m going to fact check you, because I don’t think you’re right about that,” or “I want to move on to another topic,” the only correct response is, “Who gives a damn what YOU think?”  And also, “Suck it, Trebek.”)      

3. Candidates have a self-interest in only debating if and when it helps them. 

The third reason presents a difficult challenge, but there are many ways to straightforwardly fix the first two, either by choosing the moderators objectively, or by minimizing the moderator’s role to near-invisibility.

Ben Shapiro cited an interesting Jewish model for choosing good judges/mediators of disputes: each side picks their own, and then those two choose a third. The resulting three-judge panel embodies the kind of checks and balances that our Founders initiated.

Other options could be to use a pair of moderators, one chosen by each side, or to schedule two debates, one format and location chosen by each of the participants.  But I would prefer the other choice: shrink the role of the moderator to a time-keeper and nothing else.

During my decades of teaching debate and argumentation, I saw that that can work just fine.  I learned that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because we have existing, time-tested debate templates that we can adapt and tweak as necessary. 

There are various good models – going all the way back to the Greeks, and more recently being used in law schools, and in academic forensics competitions.  Uncle Aristotle – and two millenia of smart people after him – offered a good basic partition still used today, in which each competitor gets a chunk of time to do two basic things: “confirmation” (advancing your own argument) and “refutation” (addressing/refuting your opponent’s argument).   

Some models offer debaters the chance to choose the topics – sometimes by mutual pre-arrangement – while others offer a list of main topics to be covered, with time allotted for confirmation and refutation on each topic.  A block of time for a closing statement is almost universal. 

CO mentioned that he saw a talk by Douglas Murray last week, and I love that guy.  (Murray I mean, though I love CO too of course.  Because to know him is to love him.) Murray would have a black belt in debate, if there were such a thing.

Everybody in CO nation should look up the Munk debates – they’re held in Canada, of all places – and watch the one from June, in which Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff took on Gideon Levy and the execrable Mehdi Hassan on the subject of anti-zionism vs. anti-semitism.  The twist to the Munk debates is that the audience votes for who they thought won the debate immediately afterwards.  (Murray and his partner stomped their opponents, winning 66-34.) 

Trigger warning: if you watch last Tuesday’s pathetic ABC debate and then immediately watch a substantive, enlightening Munk debate, you might get the bends.  (You may also notice that in the Munk debates, the moderator is invisible.)

While the moderator issue is easily solved, the candidate issue is trickier.  I think we should require our candidates to have at least 2 – preferably 3 – presidential debates, and 1 VP debate, as had been the practice since the late 80s, until 2020.  (The Commission on Presidential Debates, who ran that system, was biased and did a mediocre job, but that could be solved by the alternative ways to choose moderators listed above.)

The trend for the last two election cycles has been for candidates at every level to strategically refuse to debate when they thought it helped them, and I hate that trend.  I’ve discussed how I think our debate system needs reform, but I’m a conservative because I want to conserve the traditions that made this nation great, and one of those traditions for a self-governing republic is debate.

I was pissed in 2020 when the Dems ran a basement campaign for Biden, using covid as an excuse to hide him from the public as much as they could.  They obviously did so to lie about his policies and the shape he was in, but he did do two debates with Trump. 

When I found out in 2022 that dimwit AZ Dem governor Katie Hobbs was flat-out refusing to have even one debate with Kari Lake, I was disgusted.  The trend continued with Fetterman only agreeing to one debate with Dr. Oz, and that one so late that a ton of early voting had already been done.  The extent of Fetterman’s brain damage revealed in that debate illustrated the folly of exempting candidates from debating. 

I’m going to anger many always-Trumpers now.  You know that I’m all-in for him, and will be ecstatic if he wins and devastated if he loses (to the point that my wife is worried about me if Que Mala wins!).  But I hate that Trump refused to debate in the primaries.  The debate is a job interview, and I don’t think you should be considered for the job if you blow off the interview. 

I know: Trump had already had the job, so it wasn’t like he hadn’t been interviewed before.  And seeing the way his polls took off when the Dems started indicting him on BS charges, I’m sure that he would have mowed through DeSantis and the rest just like he did in 2016.  But I still wish he would have showed up and fought and won, rather than taking what felt like a negotiated forfeit.

In a Machiavellian sense, of course, Trump was smart to skip the debates.  So were Katie Hobbs and John Fetterman, and so was the Hidin’ Biden strategy in 2020.  They took the most self-serving path, and they won.

But there’s a reason that “Machiavellian” is not a compliment.  The diluted moral taint accompanying it often carries karmic payback.  If Biden had been smart, he would have refused to debate Trump this year, and he’d still be the candidate.  And if he hadn’t deteriorated so badly, there’s a reasonable chance he could have squeaked through again. 

We would all be howling about that, and for good reason. Trump would have been howling too, but with no justification.  How could he demand that Biden debate him – because the voters deserve it, or it’s not fair to duck a debate? – when he refused to debate in the primaries? 

Trump correctly calculated that he had nothing to gain by debating in the primaries, so he didn’t.  But if you defended that choice, you can’t complain if either Biden or Kamala had refused to debate Trump in the general. In fact, they had much more justification for that self-serving choice than Trump did!  He was a clear front-runner, and had showed he could defeat all comers in 2016, while Biden and Kamala are both fragile frauds, and likely to get their lyin’ arses whipped by him in a debate.    

Okay, now that I’ve enraged everyone (!), let me close by reassuring you all that I know that Trump’s flaws are tiny and his virtues gigantic, when compared to Que Mala and A-WOLz, and he has to win in November! 

But I hope he does decide to at least try to arrange a second debate, hopefully with a modified format, different moderator system, or etc.  I think JD is going to wipe the floor with Walz, and I know that Trump might well win without a second debate.  But I’ve got faith that he can crush and expose Kamala in a second round, and that doing so is his best path to opening up the kind of lead that all the leftist cheating in the world won’t be able to overcome in November!

And looking forward – after Trump begins his second term (please God!) in January – I hope we can start working hard to come up with a debate format and schedule to implement for future elections. 

Because giving up on the prospect of ever having fair and substantive debates again is the farthest thing from a bunch of hardy Ameri-cans being cautiously optimistic that I can think of!

Hamas delenda est!

Some Thoughts & Advice on Debates (posted 9/16/24)

Over the weekend I gathered some more good news stories, but I’m going to hold off on those and post them in a Wednesday column, because I’ve had the more serious subjects of debates on my mind.

As I started drafting a “debate” column, however, it kept getting longer.  And since the only repeated quibble about my columns is that they are too long – you know who you are, and how dare you! – I’ve decided to give you one column per day for today, Tuesday and Wednesday.

I know: it’s like Christmas in September!  And you’re welcome.

To start with an example of why this column got too long and must be broken up: I can’t even get into my thoughts on debates without first quickly pointing out the funniest story of last week, which happened when A-WOLz was giving what seems to have become his usual stump speech – no substance, no policy, lots of Trump-smearing and pseudo-“I’m a Midwestern dad/coach/military hero” blather. 

But in the middle of the dishonest boilerplate, he made the most Freudian of all Freudian slips.  (That’s when you say one thing but mean your mother.)

He started telling a positive story about Kamala, but instead of describing her as a “young prosecutor,” he called her a “young prostituter.” 

I’d give that reference a “chef’s kiss” of approval, but that sounds like it could be a veiled reference to Que Mala’s Willie Brown days.  And because I’m not up on my California leftist sexual slang, I’m going to leave that one alone.

But it’s still funny!  And before you can say it, I know: let’s not act like children.

Okay, on to debates – both last week’s, and in general.

I’m very happy that five days later, the shameful tongue-bath that the MSM gave to Que Mala has done her no good, and may even have hurt her.  The over-the-top leftist moderators’ bias did not gain her any of the independents she needs, and even though Trump displayed some of his less pleasant attributes, his essential Trumpiness – for good and ill – has been so baked in that it doesn’t seem to have hurt him at all.   

Kamala’s empty and evasive answers have not gone unnoticed, either.  Perhaps the most explosive post-debate development is the report from an alleged ABC whistleblower that Kamala had the questions given to her before the debate.  That is shocking to me!

Not because the idea of corrupt leftist media types cheating for the Democrats is shocking – does anybody remember Donna Brazile giving Cankles McPantsuit the questions before the debate in 2016?

No, what’s shocking is that she could have performed like THAT, even though she had the questions beforehand!  The first question was, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

I wrote about her 330-word verbal dumpster-fire of an answer a couple of columns ago.  I pointed out how awful it was, and how she never came within 100 nautical miles of answering that rote question, which she should have been able to anticipate anyway.

But if she was GIVEN that specific question ahead of time, and had a week of intense “debate camp” to prepare, and THAT was still the best she could do?!  Sweet, merciful crap!

In tomorrow’s column I’m going to throw out some ways I think Trump can and should negotiate conditions for another debate with Kamala, because no GOP candidate should ever do a 3-on-1 cluster-schtup like last Tuesday’s “debate” again!    

But since CO posted a great question yesterday – “Which candidate needs a second debate more and why?” – that elicited thoughtful and varied responses, I thought I’d first give my answer.

And remember that while you obviously have a God-given right to disagree with me, you’re just going to make yourself look ridiculous.  So c’mon, man. 

(Why do I kid?  That’s right: because I love!)

While it might be too strong to say that Trump NEEDS a second debate more than the Cackler does, and he does need to negotiate conditions for a second debate carefully, he should definitely do a second debate.   

Because this election is way too close, with polls in nearly all the battleground states within the margins of error. There are some reasons to believe that Trump is doing better than the polls are showing – his numbers were underestimated in pre-election polls in both 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing better with blacks, Hispanics and independents than any Republican (including him in ’16 and ’20) has ever done, which should mean that he’s leading overall.

But there are also reasons to believe that Que Mala will do better than her polls indicate, primarily because of the depth of the Trump hatred that will motivate the other side to vote no matter what, and the well-known Dem fraud efforts (ballot harvesting, resisting voter ID, hinky drop box and vote by mail usage, etc.). 

We all know that Trump needs to win by enough to exceed the margin of Democrat fraud, and as close as this looks now, I’m not at all confident that he’s ahead by that much. 

So he should debate her again, for two types of reasons why – the first pragmatic, and the second philosophical. 

Let’s look at the pragmatic ones first: Kamala was as good as she could be in that debate; Trump can do much better than he did in that debate; and the moderator (if any) will be MUCH better than Muir and Davis.   

1. Kamala did as well as she possibly could… and she still wasn’t good!  Even with the moderators running interference, her vague and rambling answers left her vulnerable, time and time again.

In fact, most voters have no idea that Kamala did a solo interview with a local Philly ABC anchor on Friday.  It was a pre-recorded softball-fest with a sympathetic MSM lackey, and she STILL screwed it up.

She even repeated her first gaffe from the Tuesday debate; when the reporter asked, “What are your specific plans to bring down prices?” she launched a verbal death march of an answer with, “I grew up a middle class kid…”

You would think that after a presidential candidate went all this time without giving a press conference or a solo interview, this sit-down would have been heavily covered everywhere.  But it got nearly zero MSM attention, and for the obvious reason: she completely blew it.  (I know, but let’s not act like children.)

The more voters get to know her, the fewer votes she’s going to get, so she’s going to do as few interviews as possible. And when her best chance is to hide, and a debate with Trump involves total exposure, he should debate her, and hammer her if she won’t.       

2. Trump can do much better than he did in the first debate. While his first 20 minutes and closing statement were solid, he did pretty poorly in between, and I believe that he can learn from a painful lesson that is this fresh: don’t take the bait and get distracted, and stick to the specific facts on the issues!  (Melania should attend, and if he brings up crowd sizes or Haitians eating cats, she should walk on stage and kick him in the groin!)

On this point, he’s also got a great template to follow, provided to him by his strong VP choice.

I’ve been very happy to see the way JD Vance has handled himself over the last month.  He’s given over a dozen media interviews to MSM hacks, and he’s “won” every one of them, to one degree or another, by doing exactly what I’ve been talking about.  He doesn’t take their bait, but calls them out on the bias and distortion in their questions, and then doggedly advances his arguments.

His interview with Dana Bash yesterday was a great example.  If you haven’t seen it, you should watch.  (But make sure you’ve got an empty stomach, because she is absolutely nauseating.)  She “pulled a David Muir” – which sounds like a double-entendre, but I don’t know gay slang, and I don’t mean it that way – spending a ton of time talking up the “Haitians are not eating cats!” angle, coming back to it repeatedly, and making herself look totally obnoxious to anyone who’s not an all-in, far leftist.

JD parried her efforts well, doing the minimal amount of defending the constituent reports, and pivoting constantly back to the substance of the immigration issue, which Dana desperately did NOT want to talk about.  

Because the elephant in the room re: Springfield is the horrible results of the flood of illegal immigrants there.  And no, I’m not suggesting that the Haitians are eating elephants now! 

But only because there is no zoo in Springfield.

HA! 

(And that is why I’m cut out to be a harmless smart-ass, sniping from the comfortable environs of stately Simpson manor, and not a major-party political candidate.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

The main point of the story – which is horrible for the Dems and Que Mala, because it is entirely their fault, and incredibly unpopular throughout the country – is the cascading catastrophe caused by millions of illegals: hundreds of billions redirected from services for American citizens, increased crime, strains on schools and hospitals, etc.   

The best way to distract from that obvious truth is the “Trump’s racist cat-eating Haitians slur” talking point.  So Dana did her repulsive best to continually try to sell what JD wasn’t buying.  

But Vance knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.  (By the way, rumors that “More Than One Way to Skin a Cat” is the title of the best-selling cookbook in Port au Prince have NOT been confirmed.  So stop spreading them, people!)  And he beat her at her own game, and made her corrupt favoritism obvious.

3. The first moderators have been roundly lambasted by everyone, including many on the left, and EVERYONE not on the left!  Trump should be able to hold out for a better moderator — ask for Brit Hume and then Joe Rogan, and settle for Megyn Kelly maybe? – or even just a time-keeper who enforces time limits without interjecting otherwise.  But whoever he gets will be on notice that s/he can’t afford to repeat the level of corruption of Muir and Davis.

And even if they tried, the entire audience will be hyper-aware of that this time, and Trump can have some responses holstered and ready if they start going down that road again.

One suggestion, for the first time they show blatant bias: “I think it would make things easier if you just joined Kamala at her podium, so everyone in the audience knows where we stand.”

He could also be primed to respond to any of Kamala’s rote lies – fine people, bloodbath – if she’s desperate and stupid enough to use them again.  Just do the Reagan-esque, “There you go again,” and calmly point out the specific facts.    

Bottom line: Trump is a much better candidate than she is, and his track record is light years better than hers.  He’s an inconsistent debater, but she’s a consistently fragile and terrible debater.  And the optics of her challenging him to a debate that he refuses creates a lose-lose situation: it contradicts the reality that Que Mala is fearful and in over her head, and undermines Trump’s core brand as a bold fighter.

With this election still as tight as it is, I think it would be political malpractice for him to not take Kamala on in another debate.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a couple of philosophical reasons Trump should debate her again, and suggest ways that he can negotiate a rematch that circumvents the pitfalls of recent debate formats.  

Hamas delenda est!