Tag: Politics

Introducing New Column Features (posted 3/13/24)

As I was plowing through material these last several days, I’ve realized that I might want to institute a few specific, recurring features in my columns, because so many stories fit familiar patterns.  Here are a few categories I’m thinking about:

Schadenfreude Central – for stories in which bad actors receive their just desserts, to our delight

Stupid Criminal Stories – similar, but sometimes with tragedy mixed in

Unexpectedly! – for stories about the easily predictable outcome of a terrible leftist policy, reported by clueless dolts who were somehow shocked by that outcome.

Celebrations of Excellence – as an antidote to the many stories of incompetence and imbecility, I’ll highlight skilled, talented people doing great things, to help maintain our cautious optimism.

Not every story that catches my interest will fit one of those categories, of course.  And I’ll always have time for some interstitial mockery of various boneheads – Mexican president Al Sisi can see the pyramid where Imhotep Pelosi grew up from his office; Liz Warren is as white as the crowd at an ABBA cover band performance in Stockholm (#wemustneverstopmockingher), etc.

So here’s a first try.  I’d appreciate any feedback, and if you have suggestions for other categories, please share them.

Schadenfreude Central

If there’s one thing we all know about AOC – aside from the alleged juiciness of her booty, according to her – it’s that much like Wile E. Coyote, she is a super-genius.  In December of 2020, she shared some of her deep thoughts in an online post reacting to defund-the-police activists who had confronted politicians in public spaces:

“The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable.” She argued that only by causing discomfort can activists get “traction,” saying, “To folks who complain [that] protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.”

Well, last weekend AOC was in a public space – going to a movie with her low-T boyfriend – when some obnoxious protestors started following her through a building and down a street.

They had cell phones out, and kept haranguing her.  “We love Hamas!  We insist that you call Israel’s self-defense a horrible genocidal war crime.  Call it genocide!  Say it!!”  (I’m loosely paraphrasing.)

AOC, because she always supports protest for social change, said, “Great job guys!  Thanks for speaking truth to power, because people like me need to be held accountable, even if it makes us uncomfortable.  I will happily parrot whatever you want me to say, and then pose for selfies with you.  Also, do you think these jeans make my booty look juicy?”  (I’m loosely paraphrasing.)

HA!  I kid.  What she actually did was yell, “You’re lying!” at them, and shake her finger in their faces.  She also complained that they were going to edit her response “totally out of context,” then said, “It’s f—ed up, man!  And you’re not helping these people!  You’re not helping them!!”

To a normal viewer, it almost appeared as if she doesn’t think obnoxious protestors have the right to make HER uncomfortable.

And I’ll admit it: the protestors were obnoxious.  The “male” was wearing a covid mask (in 2024!) and looked to be well into the second trimester, and the female had crazy eyes, and they both spouted the kind of aggressive pro-Hamas propaganda that invites a good face punching.

In other words, they’re AOC’s kind of people…as long as they’re harassing Republicans.  But like all socialists, she doesn’t like it when the proles turn on their betters.   

Did that make you uncomfortable, AOC? 

That’s the point.

Stupid Criminal Stories

Antoinette Baez worked for Safeway grocery stores in California for 22 years, but last year she got fired.  Guess why.

No, it wasn’t for shoplifting.  And it wasn’t for showing up late, or sleeping on the job, or wearing a MAGA hat.  And no, it wasn’t for pooping in the aisles.  (This is California we’re talking about, so that’s not as far-fetched a scenario as it might be in a sane state.)

She was fired because a lazy bum of a shoplifter tried to waltz out with several bags of groceries she didn’t pay for, and Antoinette grabbed one of the bags.  The shoplifter pushed and shoved her, but then gave up and left without stealing anything. 

Three days later, Safeway fired Baez.  Because they’ve got a policy that no employees can touch a shoplifter or pursue them to prevent their thieving, which they claimed Baez violated, even though she never touched the thief.  A judge has miraculously sided with Baez, and she won a judgment for her back pay, though they haven’t offered her her job back.

Her lawyer said, “Safeway’s a food bank for thieves.  The moral of the story is that it makes way more sense to steal from Safeway than to work for Safeway.”

Yep.  This is why you can’t have nice things, Californians.

And in this case, the stupid criminal isn’t the shoplifter, because she faced no consequences for her crime.  The stupid criminal is whoever is making corporate policy at Safeway.   They should be paying a civil penalty to Baez in her upcoming wrongful termination suit.

Hopefully before they go bankrupt for being criminally stupid.

Unexpectedly!

The leftist residents of Austin, TX voted to cut funding for their police department in 2020.  Annnnndddd….

“The city has been plagued by police staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times since.”

Unexpectedly!

The top cop in Austin reports that they’ve had two contracts fall through, they’ve lost more officers than they’ve hired for each of the last 6 years, and 40 officers filed retirement papers at the same time after the leftist city council “voted to scrap a 4-year contract that the city had already agreed to in principle.”

Residents have reported taking a Lyft to a hospital after a car wreck because nobody answered 911 calls, and the crime rate has gone way up.  Even after the state legislature forced Austin to restore police funding – proving that Texas is still a sane state, even if the idiots in Austin have lost their minds – the officer shortage persists.

It seems like in a town where residents dislike cops and don’t want to pay them, cops are reluctant to take a job there.

Unexpectedly!    

Celebration of Excellence

Normally I am annoyed by people with ridiculous names, just on general principle.  But I am happy to make an exception for Nayib Bukele. 

In fact, I put his name in an anagram maker, and found that those same letters spell “Beanie Bulky.”  And I know how to pronounce that, and it makes me laugh.  So with all due respect – but I really mean it this time! – I will refer to Bukele as Beanie Bulky from now on.   

When B-squared was elected President of El Salvador four years ago – an office that nobody would seek were their cojones not bulky (see what I did there?) – it was the most dangerous country in the western hemisphere.  He was elected specifically to crack down on the violent criminal gangs that had tormented and destabilized the country. 

And he actually did it.  Through a combination of tough crackdowns, limited negotiations with gang leaders, and canny moves to set gang members against their feckless leadership, Bulky has made El Salvadore the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and won re-election with over 90% of the vote last month. 

And that’s not a Saddam-esque “everyone voted for the dictator because they’d be killed if they didn’t” sham vote total.  The people recognize that BB has hammered the criminals and kept the citizens safe, and they rewarded him accordingly.

No one knows if this will last, or if the criminals who run so much of Central America will make a comeback.  But for now Bulky Bukele has provided an encouraging example for neighboring nations. 

The ACLU doesn’t approve of all of his methods (shocker!), and he’s walking a dangerous tightrope.  But when push comes to shove, his instinct has been to favor the rights of law-abiding citizens over those of the criminals who prey on them – unlike, for example, California or Austin.

And I’ll bet the new El Salvador model is looking pretty good to the beleaguered citizens of large parts of Third-World-adjacent blue cities like San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

So three cheers for Beanie Bulky and the long-suffering citizens of El Salvador!    

Hamas delenda est!

More SOTU Thoughts, Rare Good News out of Cali, & RuPaul Gets Schooled in Virtue Signaling (posted 3/11/24)

This might have to be a three-column week for me, because the pace of odd political stories is increasing.  So here goes.

Because I have a weak stomach, I limited my live exposure to Biden’s State of the Union speech, but I’ve read some more excerpts and coverage, and have a few more thoughts. 

To start, I don’t know why any Supreme Court justices still come to the SOTU.  Only six of the nine showed up this time, but that’s still six too many.   There may have been a reason for the highest court to be on hand for the SOTU back in the day, but ever since Obama lied about a recent ruling and insulted them to their faces in 2010, they should have all stopped attending.

When Biden brought up abortion, he addressed them directly, and – unexpectedly! – both angrily and incomprehensibly.  This is a transcript, which I only wish I were making up: “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electric–…electoral power, excuse me, without electoral or political power.  You’re about to realize zzhh ow mush (which I think was supposed to be “just how much”)…

I put the ellipses in at the end because it seems like Biden stopped there, and that’s not a grammatical end to a sentence.

I actually do like prefacing a statement with “with all due respect,” because what follows is inevitably never respectful.  Which makes the point pretty artfully: I’m going to treat this next point about someone with all the respect it is rightfully due, which is none at all.

I’m going to try to start working that phrase into my columns more often.

Biden used that phrase in his typically hostile way, but he showed that he doesn’t even know how to threaten correctly.  His point seemed to be that since women have so much electoral power, the justices will regret opposing them – even though judges are supposed to interpret the law, not react to political power – before he ends with what he wants to be an ominous warning about the electoral consequences of taking a supposedly unpopular position.  

Does he think SCOTUS judges are elected?  Because if so… yikes!

Thankfully, all of the justices gave him the stink eye – even the three far-left ones – and the awkwardness of insulting people who are restrained by decorum from punching back cannot have played well with anyone who’s not already a hateful far-left loon.

Especially since the Dems played to their stereotype throughout the night.  In a speech full of lies, they weren’t perturbed at all.  But the one time when Biden accidentally told the truth – calling Laken Riley’s murderer “an illegal” – they became outraged!

And then Biden, because his spine is made of melting ice cream, apologized for calling an illegal alien murderer “illegal.”

Also, is everybody else as confused as I am about his comments about “Lincoln” Riley? 

I don’t mean the part about how he couldn’t get her name right, even when he was surrounded by people with big buttons with her name on them.  

I mean what he said next: “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?” 

What?  That’s not a sentence, and it doesn’t make sense.

It could mean something like, “How about all the many others who are being killed by illegals? Why don’t we say their names?”  And if that’s what he meant, more power to him!  Let’s start publicizing the names and stories of ALL the innocent Americans robbed, raped or killed by the millions of unvetted illegals the left’s open border is responsible for.

Or it could mean, “There AREN’T thousands of others being killed by illegals.”  In which case, the entire sentient world cries, “Malarky!” And let’s loose the hounds of fact-checking. 

All that being said, I do see two positives that came out of the SOTU:

1. Biden missed a great chance to get his speech off on a good foot: a bunch of pro-Hamas protestors block his car on the way there and he didn’t run them over.  He should remember that at the end of your life (which for him came around 3 years ago), it’s not the things that you did that you regret, so much as the things you didn’t do. 

And he didn’t order his driver to run over those Hamas-holes.

That would have been such a win-win!  Every normal American would cheer as the hateful little narcissists went careening off (or under) the car. Plus, Biden couldn’t get in any trouble for any deaths or injuries, because his attorneys could use the precedent of the Hur defense: you can’t charge this guy, because he’s obviously out of his gourd!

2. The MSM and Dem hacks  (but I repeat myself) have been out touting his SOTU like crazy, pointing to a positive reaction to the speech in polls.  (Though as a columnist on RedState pointed out, it was the smallest positive rating of any SOTU since they started being rated.)  They’re able to do so because the bar had been set so low that Biden managed to trip and fall forward over the metaphorical sandbag of the super-low expectations.

Which is great for us, because as I’ve said before, our best hope is that Biden does just well enough to stay in the race, and not get swapped out for anyone with higher ratings than him.  (And there’s only one person in the solar system who is NOT in that category, and her name rhymes with Shamala Sharris.) 

On another topic, beleaguered California has at least gotten a little bit of good news this past week: two of the most egregious leftist pols in the country – and that is saying something – both lost primary contests this week.  Horrible whitey-hater Barbara Lee and staff-abusing dim bulb Katie Porter both went down to highly entertaining defeats on Tuesday.

Lee had left her long-time House seat to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.  You may remember Feinstein from the way she spent her last months on earth under her daughter’s conservatorship, because she was non compos mentis — and yet well enough to be a Democrat US Senator.

Great job, California voters! 

At 75, Lee was clearly too old to run again, and yet she did so anyway.

I’m sorry.  My crack staff is telling me that it’s not her age, but her IQ that is 75.  Sorry about that. 

Her age is 77.  So, yeah.  Too old to run for office.  (We’re making an exception for Trump, but only because he’s 27 years younger than his opponent.)

Katie Porter was running for the same Senate office.

You may remember her for sitting in front of a white board full of gibberish and speaking nonsense, or perhaps for abusing her staff the way Hillary did Bill, when behind closed doors and after the newest young secretary burst out of Bill’s office, running away at full speed and furiously rubbing her bottom.

Well, in a race in which the top two contenders go into a run-off, Babs Lee came in fourth, and Katie Porter came in third.  And in even better news, Republican Steve Garvey came in second.

The bad news is that he’s up against Adam Schiff, and it’s California.  So Pencil-Neck will almost certainly be the new Senator from CA, and Californians will continue to get what they’ve voted for, good and hard.    

Still, we need to take good news wherever we can find it in those big blue states, and at least we had the pleasure of watching two horrible leftists leave their House seats and then get humiliated in their attempt at the Senate.

Speaking of arrogant lefties getting what’s coming to them, even if you appreciate normalcy, you probably have heard of RuPaul, who is a famous drag queen.  You know, the same way Liz Warren is a famous drag Indian.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

On March 4th, RuPaul announced that he had launched an online bookstore called Allstora, which will NOT ban books, in protest against conservatives’ rabid desire to ban books.  Even though conservatives have not been trying to ban books, which would involve trying to stop a book from being published.

No, conservatives are just weirdos who don’t want taxpayer money being spent on gay – or straight! – porn for school libraries.  Unbelievably enough, they really don’t want their kids reading any books that include graphic details about how to sexually service creepy older people.

Even though, with all due respect, that describes the first several chapters of Que Mala’s political autobiography. 

Anyway, RuPaul tooted his own horn (and I don’t know gay slang, so if that’s a euphemism, I apologize) by saying that his fabulous new bookstore would be “a marketplace for all books and all stories.”    

Annnnndddd…  within one day of being opened, RuPaul’s bookstore started getting hit by an avalanche of protests and requests to “ban” books.  But break out your sad trombone – again, that sounds like it could be gay slang, so mea culpa? – because it turns out that all of those protests came from… wait for it… “progressive” book banners! 

Unexpectedly! 

And a few days later, RuPaul tucked his tail between his legs (sorry for that mental image) and caved, agreeing to put scary red warnings on books by conservatives, and even agreeing to remove some books by some firebrand conservatives such as Elon Musk. 

Who, as you might have noticed, is not even a conservative. 

So great job, self-styled “defenders of democratic values.”  You’ve made the point obviously clear: the intolerant people who want to dictate what others read are… leftists!

Hamas delenda est!

The SOTU Speech, & What We Should Do Between Now & November (posted 3/8/24)

Well, there’s an hour and twenty minutes that I’ll never get back.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I popped in and out of the SOTU for maybe a total of 10 minutes, my rule being that as soon as my gag reflex threatened to kick in and offload some of the bourbon (mmmm, brownest of the brown liquors) that I had been consuming – as fragments I have shored against my ruin – I tuned out until the urge to purge receded.   

(That’s right, trenchant references to Lionel Hutz and T.S. Eliot in the same sentence!  Suck it, other columnists who dare not attempt such a rhetorical stretch!) 

While I’m tooting my own horn, I posted a column on Wednesday featuring my imagining of Joe Biden preparing for a speaking engagement.  If you haven’t seen it, scroll back to Wednesday afternoon’s posts, and give it a quick read.  I’ll wait….

I know: it wasn’t super-hard to predict, but did I nail it or what?  The confusion, the slurring, the physical stiffness.  The ridiculous shrinkflation issue.  And I knew he’d be screwing up names – I had him calling Rocky Balboa “Rocky Road” and the Cookie Monster the “Cake Moose” – but I didn’t get the square on the Biden Bingo card for “Lincoln Riley.”

(Which is pretty funny.  One Republican whips the Dems and frees their slaves 160 years ago, and he’s still living in their heads rent-free!)

If I missed anything, it was by under-estimating the amount of sustained anger Biden was capable of; I expected a few bursts of “get off my lawn,” quickly trailing off into Cocaine Mitch-esque short-duration catatonia. 

But whatever drug cocktail they’re giving Brandon to keep him upright for 81 consecutive minutes must be some strong stuff.  So good for him.

I mentioned several years ago that I’d prefer that we get rid of the SOTU entirely.  It’s always an insufferable cavalcade of imbecility and phoniness: a laundry list of your stuff (which is all great!) and the other party’s stuff (they’re wrong about everything!), followed by ridiculous promises that no one thinks that you’ll keep. 

And ooh, there’s a couple of guys/gals/children/oldsters in the crowd whom I’d like to use as political props!  I’ll point to them and ask them to stand up, unless they’re in a wheelchair or paralyzed as a result of one of the other party’s stupid and destructive policies.  Then I’ll scold the other side for paralyzing their sorry arses.

Bah! 

As in most things, we should handle the SOTU the way the Founders did: write your message in a short document – we’ve bought a new batch of muskets, we’re accepting bids to build a few federal buildings, there’s a boll weevil problem in Mississippi, but the sorghum crop is coming along nicely – hand it to a guy on a horse, and slap the horse’s rear end to send him off to carry it to be read in the House.

Beyond that, I didn’t find a lot worth commenting on.  Of course Biden lied and dissembled and argued in bad faith, as I think most people expected him to.  I don’t think that anything he said will be remembered for long, as much as his affect, which was 100% angry old man. 

In that sense, it reminded me a lot of his Reichstag speech in September of 2022, minus the ominous red lighting and the two Marines flanking him, wishing they didn’t have to be there.

I don’t know how that behavior is not a huge political mistake for Biden.  His poll numbers are bad, and his best asset is Trump’s high negatives among independents and moderates.  So he should be trying to go all kinder and friendlier, to draw the moderates to him.   To the extent that he attacks Trump, his tone should be more in sorrow than in anger.

Instead, he’s scolding the nation, calling everybody who has ever considered voting for Trump unpatriotic fascist deplorables.  And he’s shaking his bony fist and hollering like Grandpa Simpson.  “In my day, we got 20 hectares to the hogshead, and that was good enough for us!  Also, we really fixed the Kaiser’s wagon!  No joke!”

If I had the Trump team’s ear, I would say that in the wake of this speech, I think we should do 4 things:

1. Set up a website with a daily updated count of crimes committed and costs imposed by illegals.  (Make it like the debt clock that some pols used to put up, when they pretended that either they or we were troubled by our rising national debt.)  

Keep a tally of the total number of crimes, along with highlighting the worst of the worst.   Also give numbers on how much we’ve been spending on their schooling, healthcare, prison, welfare benefits, etc.

We’d have to handle it carefully, with many statements about “not all illegals” (aggravating as those are), because we alienate winnable voters if we attack all immigrants, or defuse the blame and take it off the open border policies that are causing all this chaos. 

2. Try to get Trump to take as low a profile as possible, and keep the spotlight on Biden and his policies.

3. Focus on get-out-the-vote efforts, and stop telling people to NOT vote by mail and/or early!  (Dammit!) The Dems are great at that, and they will be again, and if we don’t fight fire with fire, we are going to under-perform in November.

4. Start preparing for Biden’s replacement nominee, because I’m increasingly certain that he will not be the nominee in November.  His poll numbers are too low already, and they’ve got nowhere to go but stagnant or down.  And his physical and mental deterioration are too obvious to be hidden, even by the dedicated gaslighting asshats – or yes, asslighting gas hats – in the MSM and Democrat party. 

The national Dem coven – er, brain trust – can see this just as well as we can.  If you and I are getting more confident that if Trump can manage to even minimally control himself, he’ll win against Biden in November, the Dems know that too.

So they’re going to switch him out, most likely in the summer or at the convention in August. And when that happens, Trump instantly goes from being the younger guy with the lower negatives in the race to the old guy with the highest negatives. 

Therefore, our best course is to keep hitting not only Biden, but the entire far-left Democrat establishment and their terrible policies.  (“It’s not just Biden’s open border, it’s the Dems’ open border; it’s not just Bidenflation and Bidenomics, it’s the economic results of Dem policies.”)

That way, when the Dems swap Biden out, we won’t be totally wrong-footed.  We can just slam the desperate, unprecedented, flop-sweat-infused decision to switch candidates at the 11th hour – and also slam the racist and sexist Dem party for pushing Que Mala aside too! – and quickly pivot to targeting the entire Dem party:

“Changing the frontman for your horrific policies won’t make any difference in the outcome.  Ken Doll Newsom is just Biden with a pulse.”  Or “Big Mike Obama is just Biden with linebacker shoulders.” Or “Hillary Clinton is just Biden with cankles and a terminal case of Resting Beeyotch Face.”

Etc.    

There you have it.  Please print this column out, hand it to a mounted GOP party official, and tell him to get it to Mar-A-Lago, stat.  Then slap the rear end of his horse to get him started.

But first, look carefully to be sure that no Dem congresswomen are around.  Because if the horse’s flanks look too juicy (not my words)… that might not be a horse.     

Finally, in my Wednesday column I suggested a Secret Service code name for Biden (“Flat Line”), because I often amuse myself by thinking up code names for various administration figures. For example:

Que Mala: “Word Salad”

Jill Biden: “Juco”

Liz Warren: “Edgar Winter”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Janet Yellen: “Keebler”

Merrick Garland: “Bullet Dodged”

So as we move into the weekend, let me invite all of you in CO Nation to share your secret service code names for prominent Dems, or Republicans, for that matter.

Hamas delenda est!

Schadenfreude Stories of the Week (posted 2/26/24)

Today I’ve got a lot of feel-good stories of leftists receiving their just desserts, but I want to start with a case study of how putting on ideological blinders can make you stupid.   It involves Bill Maher. 

If you’ve seen his HBO show or stand-up specials, you know that Maher can be an obnoxious and condescending leftist.  But he’s also a smart guy who often sees through woke idiocy and calls it out, willingly taking criticism for doing so.  His old show Politically Incorrect (1993-2002) often lived up to its name, when it wasn’t (ironically) being politically correct.

But even though I think he’s earned the incredibly rare description of “intermittently insightful leftist,” his politics cause him to have some shocking blind spots.  A while ago, for example, Dave Rubin was his guest when Maher was berating Trump for being an “election denier.”

When Rubin pointed out that Cankles Clinton had spent much of Trump’s term blaming various conspiracies for her loss and calling Trump an “illegitimate president,” Maher was shocked at the idea, and blatantly denied that she’d ever said that.  

How can you explain such a ridiculous statement from someone who has made his living by being hyper-aware of political bias, other than to call it an act of self-inflicted ignorance?

Last week he did it again.  He had Ann Colter on, and he started a discussion of the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ parade by saying, “We don’t know who did this shooting, by the way.”

Colter drily said, “We have some idea.” Maher said, “What?” and she said, “If it were a white man shooting, we’d know.”

Maher insisted, “We don’t know,” and when Colter gave recent examples of non-white shooters being underplayed, Maher was incredulous.  “You think they’re repressing that reporting?”

After a little more back and forth, Colter confidently said, “The longer they go without telling you, it’s not a white male.”

Maher responded by rolling his eyes and sarcastically saying, “We don’t know… [but] you know, because you have special powers.”

Annnnddddd… it turns out (after several more days of MSM obfuscation) that the shooters are black.

Unexpectedly!

If I’m reading Maher correctly, I think he could actually pass a lie detector test on that question: he authentically seems to be unaware of the obvious and consistent bias in virtually all MSM reporting on race, and especially on crime!

How can that be?  One of the oldest political jokes I know has to do with a typical MSM headline announcing an imminent extinction-level event: “World Ends Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”

Similarly, every crime story either becomes the object of obsessive focus and exaggeration or is ignored, depending on the race or politics of the perps and victims.  Jussie Smollett’s risible hoax about Trump fans in Chicago nearly lynching him is the biggest story in the country… until the truth becomes clear, and the media slinks away.

Violent thugs like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and George Floyd die in the process of committing more crimes, and they are transfigured from recidivist criminals into saints and martyrs. 

Meanwhile white kids like the Covington Catholic schoolboys are confronted at the Lincoln Memorial by an aggressive American Indian weirdo (rumors that he is Liz Warren’s brother have not been confirmed, but still, #wemustneverstopmockingher), and they stay calm. So the media smear them as entitled white aggressors harassing a morally pure “person of color.”

Or how about Kyle Rittenhouse, the racist vigilante who went on a killing spree against innocent black civil rights protestors?  Except that he’s not racist, and not a vigilante, and the guys he shot were all white sex offenders who attacked him, and deserved every bullet he fired in self-defense.   

I could go on and on, but I don’t have to, because we all know the truth.

Except for Bill Maher, apparently. 

It’s really depressing to recognize how many of our fellow citizens – and voters! – really believe the propaganda the media has been feeding them.  But it’s especially so when a guy as smart as Maher, and who has a high profile job that entails obsessively following national politics, is totally blind to the most basic realities of American politics in 2024!

Ugh.  Enough with the bring-down stories.  Let’s take a quick look at a few stories of lefty follies from the past week.

First up is our Cadaver in Chief.  How bad has it gotten for Dems trying to find something positive to say about Joe Biden’s campaign?

This bad:  When Biden was doing a photo op at a Mexican restaurant in Cali, several people inexplicably wanted to take a selfie with him.  (My guess?  They were each hoping to get the last pic with a US president before he died, the creepy vultures.)

As he was posing, he pushed a button on a customer’s phone to switch it to selfie mode.  And the Biden campaign actually put this out as part of a statement: The customer was “surprised POTUS knew how to do that.” To which the Corn Pop Slayer responded, “After the last guy, the bar’s on the floor.”

I know: the campaign considered that shot at Trump a shining example of witty repartee.  But they buried the lede by sliding right past the telling, hilarious detail:  This is what it’s come to! When Joey gaffes manages to press the right button on a cell phone, a potential voter was surprised he could pull that off!

Look for the following puff-piece stories in coming days:

  • Voter in a public bathroom when Biden came in reports that Biden was able to use the urinal correctly.  Voter shocked! 
  • During a photo op at Denny’s, Biden ordered something close enough to barely be recognized as a “Grand Slam Breakfast.”  Waitress flabbergasted!
  • Physician arrived at the White House in the morning to do a routine check of Biden’s vital signs, discovered that Biden had continued to carry out such autonomic functions as respiration and a semi-steady heartbeat overnight.  Doctor stunned!

That’s our president, people.

Meanwhile, lefty media outlets continue to get blasted like Sonny Corleone at the toll booth in Godfather I.

I’ve already laughed about the closure of Jezebel and the Messenger, the firings of Brian Stelter, Fredo Cuomo and Don Lemon, and the job cuts at the LA Times, WAPO and CNN.  Now we can add Vice Media to the list.

Vice was valued at almost $6 billion in 2017 – I’m assuming by socialist accountants who dusted their peyote with crystal meth whenever they did an audit – before they filed for bankruptcy and were sold last year for $350 million. 

Now reports say that they’re trying to sell off a publishing business and fighting rumors that their entire site might disappear because they’re struggling to pay their monthly server bills.

Who would have thought that being dishonest partisan hacks and smearing half the country for years on end would end in tears?

Speaking of which, BuzzFeed is another media outlet that has been diligently searching for the alchemical recipe for turning malicious, dishonest socialism into profits.  It bought an entertainment media brand called Complex for $300 million shortly before going public in December of 2021, and for the next year, its stock price hovered around $10 a share. 

Its recent price is $21 dollars per share, which I would think is a good indicator of—

No, wait.  I misread that.  That’s supposed to be $.21 per share.  As in 21 cents. 

As in, you’re in the drive-through at McDonalds and they ask if you’d like to supersize your fries, and you say, “Yes, but I don’t have any more cash on me.  Would you take three shares of BuzzFeed stock to make that a large fry?”

And the teenager in the paper hat would say, “No.”

So BuzzFeed announced more layoffs, and it just sold Complex for $108 million.

Now I’m just a simple country English professor, so I don’t claim to understand the complex world of high finance.  But if our resident big financial brains – CO and Chris Silber – could help me out here…

Isn’t buying an asset for $300 million, and then selling it a few years late for $108 million what you’d call “buying high and selling low?”

And that’s not a good thing, right? 

It’s not just behind-the-scenes lefty media types who are getting hit with the reality stick.  Unfunny comedian Jimmy Kimmel has announced that he’ll likely be retiring at the end of his current contract. 

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that his ratings (and those of lefty scolds Colbert and the Daily Show et al) have crumbled, and ads on his show are bringing in 41% less than they were doing 4 years ago. 

Maybe I was a little hasty in calling Kimmel “unfunny.”  Because THAT is hilarious!

Finally, there are also some positive signs coming out of Gaza, where a Palestinian official is claiming that, “Hamas’ leadership is planning to remain in the besieged Gaza Strip and carry on their fight against Israel to the end.”

Sources suggest that three top Hamas leaders – one Mohammed (Deif), one Marwan (Issa), and top dog Yahya Sinwar, whom I am calling “Yahoo Serious” (look him up), because his name is equally stupid, and it amuses me – are all still in a part of Gaza that the IDF has not yet invaded. 

They are supposedly determined to stay there and fight to the death.

Which means that this situation presents the terrorists and the good guys with a rare opportunity for bipartisanship.  Since they want to die fighting, and we want them dead, this sounds like a win-win to me. 

So here’s hoping those three stooges have the life expectancy of BuzzFeed, Vice Media, and Joe Biden.  

Because as always…

Hamas delenda est!

I’ve Noticed a Strange Pattern Developing (posted 2/19/24)

If you were an alien who just arrived on Earth from Venus and watched several hours of national news, you would probably ask the question, “Why are so many high-profile black women in very high-powered jobs so laughably terrible at those jobs?”

Then you would be immediately surrounded by a gaggle of MSM “journalists.”   You’d probably expect them to pepper you with comments and questions such as, “Holy Schiff!  You’re actually a real, live alien, aren’t you?!” and, “How did you get here from Venus, and what is the life on your planet like?” and, “Do you come in peace?”

But you’d only expect that because you’re from Venus, and have no conception of what crapulent, leftist hacks our MSM “journalists” are.

They would certainly bum rush you and start screaming comments and questions.  But they’d blow right past the fact that an alien life form has appeared on earth, and get down to the really important stuff.

By which I mean they would turn red in the face (no offense Grandma Squanto) (#wemustneverstopmockingher), stamp their tiny feet, and scream accusations at you. Such as, “How dare you question any black female ever?”

or “Would you say that you’re more of a Venusian supremacist or a Venusian nationalist?”

or “Are you here to colonize earth?  Because that is the kind of bigoted question we’d expect from a Venusian colonizer!”

Then they would demand that you check your green privilege, and call you a racist, and spit on you. 

And if you then felt like pulling out a death ray weapon that I hope you have and blasting them all, I speak for most of us when I say, “Blast away.”

And after all that, while you and I were enjoying a bottle of bourbon while sitting beside a smoking pile of molecularly disassembled leftist hacks, I would explain how our country has succumbed to the folly of DEI and racial preferences in hiring.

Okay, perhaps I’ve already had a little bourbon, and that introduction might have gotten away from me a little bit.

So let me start again: identity politics and racial and gender preferences in hiring are terrible for everyone.  

They’re obviously bad for the people who get discriminated against, and for the public or customers who are supposed to be served by people who are hired for reasons other than merit. But they’re also bad for the individuals and groups who theoretically “benefit” from them.

Let’s look at a few recent examples:

You all remember Claudine Gay.  She was the history-making first black female president of Harvard.  Normally, any academic wanting a job like that would have to have published at least a few highly respected books, and a stellar record of achievements as an administrator.   

Gay had published zero books, and only 11 articles, all of which were boiler-plate, fashionably leftist takes on race. (Without reading them, any liberal arts prof could summarize the abstracts of all of them: “Black people good, white people bad.”) 

But as MLK always said, “Judge not by the content of their curriculum vitae, but by the color of their skin.”  So Claudine got the job.

Annnnddddd…

When asked whether blood-curdling calls for anti-Semitic genocide are bad in front of a national audience, she couldn’t figure out an answer.

Which made reasonable people scratch their heads, and wonder what kind of qualifications someone that dumb could possibly have to be president of Harvard.

Annnnndddd…

It turns out that her paper-thin publication record is littered with many, many instances of blatant plagiarism.

Speaking of horrifically unqualified Harvard big shots, a few minutes after Gay resigned in disgrace (though her emotional pain was probably eased by being given a Harvard teaching job for $900K per year), some anonymous tipster suggested that Harvard look into the academic record of their chief diversity and inclusion office Sherri Ann Charleston.

Annnnndddd…

It turns out that she plagiarized at least 40 times.  Which is even more impressive when you consider that she crammed all of that fraudulence into just two documents: her dissertation, and  ONE published article. 

Which, it turns out was an article that her husband actually wrote, and that she just re-packaged and claimed as her own. 

And it’s not just academics.  You may remember Marilyn Mosby, a racial grifter who got herself elected State’s Attorney in Baltimore in 2015.  She immediately started blazing a path of leftist incompetence that only added to the travails of the masochistic black Democrat community in Baltimore, who continue to elect incompetent imbeciles who “look like [them].”

She announced that her office would stop prosecuting many “lower level” crimes.  You may be shocked to learn that crime in Baltimore then went up.  Unexpectedly!

She also made a national name for herself by charging and prosecuting 6 cops who were connected (mostly tangentially) to the death of career criminal Freddie Gray while he was in custody and being driven to jail. 

Despite several prisoners’ testimony that Gray had been intentionally banging himself around inside the police van, and no evidence that the cops had hurt him, Mosby threw the book at all 6 cops.

Annnndddddd… all 6 were acquitted.

She was tossed out in the next election, after investigators noticed that she had taken a “hardship” withdrawal from retirement funds (when she was making $250K per year), to buy multiple rental properties in Florida (each of which she claimed was going to be a second home), and lied about several issues on her loan application.

Annndddd…. last week she was convicted on three perjury and fraud charges.

Which brings us to Fani “what ‘chu talkin’ bout” Willis, who showed her fanny and got bitten on it in a glorious day of testimony this week. 

This bonehead wanted to make herself a star by prosecuting Trump and 19 others on a raft of ridiculous RICO charges, and never has there been a more hilarious illustration of the bromide, “be careful what you wish for.”  

Her testimony on Thursday turned into a glorious self-immolation by a race-card playing dunce who was in far over her head.  When searching for a top lawyer to take on the incredibly complicated and high-profile RICO case, she picked a guy who had prosecuted mostly traffic cases, and had zero RICO experience.  

And the fact that he and she were sleeping together had NOTHING to do with it.

The best argument she could make was that she started banging the attorney she hired – and over-paid – only AFTER she hired him.  Because that makes it all better.

She claimed that she reimbursed her boy toy for all of the money he spent on her for trips and gifts, but that she did so in cash only.  Sweet, conveniently untraceable cash.

When asked why she would do that, she said that it was “a black thing” to keep thick wads of cash around at all times.  And no, she couldn’t show any records of when she had withdrawn it from her bank, and you’re racist for asking.

In fact, she managed to dig a deeper hole when she said that some of that cash came from when she ran for office, and took campaign cash home for personal use.  Which is illegal.

D’oh!

To be clear, all of these black women in high-powered jobs are not transparently corrupt failures because they are black or female.  They were only in those high-powered jobs in the first place because they were black and female, and that is a result of the transparently corrupt system of DEI identity politics.

In that way, racial preferences worked for them the same way that nepotism works for rich or powerfully connected white folks. 

Ted Kennedy was no more qualified to be a senator than he was to run a shake machine at McDonalds.  Hunter Biden couldn’t find Ukraine on a map and knew nothing about the energy business, and my three-year-old daughter made more impressive art with finger paints. 

But both of those reprobates were able to fail spectacularly on a big stage purely because of their last names.

The people who should be most outraged at frauds like Fani Willis, Marilyn Mosby and Claudine Gay are black women who work their butts off and legitimately earn their way to a spot at the table, only to be met by a skepticism that they don’t deserve. 

And that is all on scammers like Willis, Mosby and Gay.

Hamas delenda est!

We Must Keep Joe Biden in This Race! (posted 2/12/24)

Even though I am wildly popular here in CO Nation, I don’t write columns to be popular.  I’ve got to call balls and strikes as I see them.  And that’s why I must deliver this sure-to-be unpopular message:

I think the MSM is treating Biden way too harshly and unfairly.  As patriotic Americans, we’ve got to do everything we can to defend him from these spurious attacks, and support keeping him in office and running for re-election!

I know.  But hear me out. 

Yes, the guy was never more than a glad-handing mediocrity, a fumbling, bumbling low-IQ gaffe machine. And that was back when he was young and at the height of his powers, finishing at the low end of his law school class and plagiarizing his way right out of two presidential runs!

Sidebar: Can you imagine what would happen if you had the misfortune to hire one of the attorneys who finished BELOW Joe Biden in law school?!  Good lord!

You’d pick him out of the phone book, then make an appointment with him to represent you in your divorce.  Then you’d meet him at his office, which would be the smallest space in an aging mini-mall in an iffy neighborhood, sandwiched in between a pawn shop and a Tai Kwan Do studio with no Asian instructors.

And you’d explain to him that you’ve got a solid pre-nup and you caught your wife cheating on you, plus she’s got two DUI’s and an open warrant for a Failure to Appear in a meth distribution case out of Abilene, Texas. 

And the guy would smooth out his comb-over and say, “No problem, this is a slam dunk case.  I went to law school with Joe Biden, you know.”

And three months later you’d stomp back into his office wearing only a pair of mis-matched flip-flops and your oldest, threadbare boxers, holding a cardboard box of VHS tapes and a third-place bowling trophy from junior high.  And you’d drop the box on his desk and say, “You did finish higher in your law school class than Joe Biden, right?”  

And he’d say, “Why do you ask?”

And you’d say, “Because my cheating, alcoholic meth-dealer of an ex-wife got the house and the cars and my 401K and the clothes off my back.  And now I’ve got to pay her alimony and child support.  And we don’t even have any kids!!”

And, scene.

Where was I? 

Oh yeah.

Now Biden’s just a shell of his former shell of a self, and is manifestly unworthy of being president. 

So yes, it would technically be better if he stepped down today. 

Except that then, Que Mala would be the president.  And yes, we all just threw up in the back of our mouths a little.  Or possibly a lot.  And some of you are dry heaving over a waste basket right now, just because I brought up that possibility.

Sorry about that.  But it’s too late for a trigger warning, so let’s just move on.

Here’s the situation: the three people on earth most likely to be our next president are Willie Brown’s former side piece (underwater by something like 19 points on approve/disapprove), the late Joe Biden (underwater by around 17 points, and falling like Jeffrey Toobin’s pants on a Zoom call), and Donald Trump (underwater by around 12, which is roughly 3 points better than he was a couple of months ago). 

I desperately want Trump to win, and it’s looking way better for him against both Biden and Que Mala than it did in recent months.  (Please God, I don’t ask for much, but this one time… Our country needs this!)

But if anybody else is up for the Dems in November – DeSantis took Ken Doll Newsom apart at the joint, so the most likely stand-in now appears to be Big Mike Obama – Trump is going to be at a comparative disadvantage. 

As ridiculous as that is!  I’m not saying it makes sense at all, or that it’s right.  But that’s my honest take on the situation.  Trump is more underwater with the independents and the mushy middle of persuadables outside of the right-wing base – which are frustratingly ALWAYS the ones who decide presidential elections – than any pol other than Brandon and the Cackle Queen.

Have you ever seen two exhausted boxers in a late round, when the guy who’s losing starts wrapping his arms around the other boxer and holding on for dear life whenever they get close?  It’s a good strategy to run out the clock, especially when you can’t afford to go toe-to-toe with your opponent, because even a single, glancing punch is going to turn out your lights.

That’s what Trump should do with Biden, but for the opposite reason.  He should close up with him and then go into a clinch, so that he can hold Biden up and keep him upright until the final bell.

Don’t go after him 24/7 for the next nine months.  Don’t get in his face and challenge him to a debate.  (You already gave him an out for that by skipping the GOP debates anyway, but now that can actually work for you.) 

If you get on the same stage with him and start throwing rhetorical haymakers, he’s going to go down like Mike Tyson when Buster Douglas caught him with that flurry of jabs in the 10th round.  And then the Dems would discover (unexpectedly!) that’s Biden’s actually been dead for several years now, and sub in somebody with at least a 50/50 chance to beat you.

Fortunately for us, if Biden can retreat to his basement, the MSM will do everything they can to protect him.  The Dems believe that he can beat Trump (or at least they did), and their strategy to use sleazy lawfare to simultaneously help Trump get the GOP nomination and weaken him with the independents was probably their smartest course of action. 

I mean, if you accept that they have rejected their responsibility to behave as ethical and sane adults.  Which they have definitely done, for lo these many decades now.      

But now that they’re there, they just need to keep Biden away from microphones.  And cameras.  And any competent journalist who might somehow slip inside the White House cordon to yell a question at him when he’s concentrating on wobbling his way across the lawn without falling and shattering one of his bird-like hip or leg bones.  Or arm bones.  Or ribs.

The establishment and MSM have already been doing their level best to run cover for him.  And there’s no better sign of that than the DOJ’s kid-gloves decision to not go after him for his obviously illegitimate taking of classified documents and sprinkling them all over the eastern seaboard, from his beach house to his garage to his phony “Biden Center” at U Penn.

The investigation admitted that there’s plenty of evidence that Biden took docs he had no right to take… but basically says that they aren’t going to prosecute him because he’s mentally incompetent.

What?!

That’s what the lawyer for the guy who gets caught with the bodies of 5 murdered nurses half-buried in the dirt basement under his house argues!  “Sure, my guy went on a multi-state murder spree, but look at him.  The poor sap doesn’t know if he’s afoot or horseback.  You can’t convict him!”

But at the end of that story, his best-case scenario is for the authorities to put the mentally ill guy into a psych ward instead of a supermax prison. 

You know what the authorities DON’T do?  [begin Sam Kinison filter] THEY DON’T SEND HIM BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO LEAD THE FREE WORLD! OH! OHHHHHHH!  [end Kinison filter]

It’s even worse than that, because you know that Ben Hur was just feeling sorry for Biden, because he actually said, in his actual report, that Biden is “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

You don’t have to understand the Latin phrase “non compos mentis” to understand what Hur just said about Joe Biden.  Even my daughter and her friends, when she was in second grade, could understand what that meant: as they would say, he’s “cuckoo fried chicken!”

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations!  You never want to be in the position of explaining away the manifest flaws of a chief executive that way. “That’s just Joe.  He means well.”

If Ben Hur was a genteel Southerner, his report would be titled, “An Inquiry Into Joe Biden’s Handling of Classified Documents: Bless his heart.”

So kill him with kindness, Mr. Trump.

No, strike that!  Don’t kill him!  For the love of God, don’t kill him!

Treat him like he is a fragile porcelain mouse.  Compliment him. You probably can’t say, “The president is a formidable opponent,” with a straight face.  So go for something more believable, like, “I know that he’s doing the best he can to implement his policies.” 

Or, “I don’t think he’s lost a step since he took office.  He looks as healthy as ever to me, and even if something happened to him (unexpectedly!), Kamala is ready to step in and take over for him.  But that won’t be necessary, because Joe Biden is every bit as effective and on top of things as he was when he was Obama’s VP.  Even though he can’t remember when that was.  Or who Obama was.”

Whoo.  This is going to be tough, I know.  But cut those last two phrases.  Just discipline yourself, and stick to the compliments.

Please Mr. Trump, we need this!  You don’t need to go into attack mode, and you don’t need to get distracted.  Don’t say that E. Jean Carroll is a loony beeyatch.  (Even though she obiously is.) Or that the judges in all of your bogus trials are evil leftists, persecuting you for political reasons. (Ditto.)

Just hold some rallies, bask in the base’s love, and stay on friendly ground.  Talk for 5 minutes, saying things like, “How about that border crisis?” Or “Remember when gas was $2.15 a gallon?” Or, “Did you ever notice that Putin took Crimea under Obama and attacked Ukraine just a few years ago, but when I was president, Putin stayed on his chain?”

Then say, “Goodnight folks!  See you in November!”

So as painful as this may be for me to write…

Biden/Harris 2024!

Oh, and also…

Hamas delenda est!

Grandma Squanto, Woke Kindergarten Fails, & A Dem Accidentally Tells a Border Truth (posted 2/9/24)

I haven’t given Liz Warren enough attention lately, but she posted a short video this week that I can’t resist.  And you’ll never guess what Grandma Squanto is on the warpath about now.

Conestoga wagons leaving muddy tracks all over her sacred great plains homeland?

The high cost of teepee insurance?

Repeating rifles that allow toxic white males to get off three shots at her before she can even notch a single arrow?

Nope.  She’s got her buckskin dress over her head because – and I cannot stress enough how much I am not making this up – big corporations are screwing the American people out of oreos and Doritos.

Her video is only a minute long, and you really should watch it.  I think of it as a sequel to her famous kitchen video, in which she won worst actress in the role of a relatable, blue-collar woman.  As you’ll recall, she said, “I think I’m a gonna have me a beer.”  And then she asked her beta-WASP husband, “Do you want a beer?” 

And he looked at her like she was crazy, because they both know she hasn’t drunk anything but chardonnay during their entire marriage.

Anyway, she starts this video by looking into the camera and saying, “You ever go for the last chip in the Dorito bag and suddenly say, “Whoa! There shoulda been more chips in here!”  And then she goes on a rant about how big corporations have been shorting a helpless public by putting less junk food in their packages.

I would say her delivery is wooden, but I’m too mature to go for the obvious wooden Indian joke.  (Or am I?)  But nobody watching is going to believe that she’s ever bought or consumed a single Dorito, or washed it down with a single sip of beer in her life. 

Besides, isn’t she undercutting her brand with this example?  If she wanted us to believe her, she’d say, “You ever open a bag of pemmican, squash and maize and say, ‘Whoa!’ There’s suspiciously little pemmican in here.  And this isn’t enough squash and maize to feed my papooses!  I detect the greedy hand of Big Pemmican behind this!”

But she is on-brand about one thing: she’s a very convincing arrogant leftist, because she knows that regular people cannot possibly decide what packaged products are worth buying.  We need her superior wisdom to protect us from Big Snack and our own ignorance.

And yet she can’t correctly identify the mysterious force that has made all products more expensive in the last three years. 

Bidenomics!

#wemustneverstopmockingher

Next up, in what is turning into a recurring series of stories about lefties “unexpectedly!” reaping what they sow, some educrats running a San Francisco elementary school got their hands on $250K of federal funds to improve their school’s performance. 

Instead of consulting me on how to spend the money – I would start by purchasing a poop plow to clear a path to allow the children to get to the school’s front door every morning, and then firing and replacing every teacher who writes her pronouns on the board or has a hair color that’s not found in nature – they gave it to an organization called – I Schiff you not – “Woke Kindergarten.”

This brain trust got right to work, training teachers to “confront white supremacy” and “disrupt racism and oppression.” 

Annnnndddd… the students’ previously terrible test scores and attendance managed to get even worse.

Unexpectedly!   

And yes, the money they spent on that boondoggle were federal funds.  Which means that you and I paid Woke Kindergarten to make an underperforming school worse.

Great.

In other news, we finally learned the identity of the ghost whom Joe Biden has been regularly shaking hands with after his public appearances: the deceased French president Francois Mitterand!

Ugh! It’s not bad enough that Brandon has surrounded himself with leftist hacks in his administration; even when he wants to talk to (other) dead people, he picks dead socialists!

If we could just find a way to get him to start talking to the ghost of Ronald Reagan, maybe there would be a slim chance that he’d be a less terrible president.

Speaking of terrible governance, Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (thanks, Connecticut!) committed a perfect political gaffe this week, i.e. he accidentally told the truth. 

Luckily for him, not many people saw it, since he said it on the MSNBC show of Chris Hayes, whom I suspect is actually Rachel Maddow in whatever is the opposite of drag.

Chris/Rachel asked Murphy to comment on the collapse of the atrocious border bill, and Murphy admitted that “the Democrat strategy for 30 years… has failed for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.” 

Yikes!

In the annals of dishonest leftist verbiage – right up there with saying “pro choice” when they mean “pro abortion,” and “gender affirming” when they mean “gender denying” – the switch from “illegal aliens” to “undocumented” was a master stroke. 

“Illegal” and “alien” are both accurate, and clear.  “Undocumented” sounds like a guy left his wallet in his other pair of pants. 

“Undocumented immigrants” at least admitted that the people in question are immigrants.  “Undocumented Americans” is an outrageously blatant lie, and in a healthy political system, calling illegals “the people we care most about,” would be an act of political suicide.  

But we don’t have a healthy political system anymore, so Chris Murphy won’t suffer any consequences for his self-damning, inadvertent honesty.

So I guess we’ll have to settle for at least knowing that he’s got Murphy’s Law named after him.

On an “all’s well that ends well” note, in the best-governed state in the nation – although Abbott’s performance on border issues is giving DeSantis some stiff competition for the best governor title – a career criminal with the colorful name of Sterling Alavache attempted to rob a bank.  He took a hostage, claimed to have a bomb, and definitely had a knife – which he put to the hostage’s throat while holding him in a headlock and demanding cash.

If he tried this in a blue state, the mayor and governor would have offered him all the money in the bank, one free hostage stabbing, and a key to the city. 

But he was in Florida.  So the authorities decided to pound Sterling.  (Boom! Unexpected British currency pun!)

A SWAT team was called, and when Sterling refused orders to drop the knife and let the hostage go, a SWAT sniper dropped him with one shot.

Rumors that Democrat Senator Chris Murphy then ran to the nearest camera in DC and said, “In a stunning act of reprehensible gun violence, the state of Florida has failed the people we care about most: armed, recidivist criminals!” have not been confirmed.

After another week of political ugliness in our country, let me leave you with an enjoyable, escapist YouTube page that I’ve been following for the last year or so.  It belongs to Jonna Jinton, and features stunning video of the far northern Swedish landscape where she and her husband live.

As a Floridian who misses the snowy winters of his youth in Illinois, I can’t get enough of the  gorgeous video of winter scenery, the adorable Swedish accents (don’t tell my Norwegian-descent wife, to whom the devious Swedes are not to be trusted), and perhaps best of all, an amazing Aussie-shepherd-looking dog named Nanook, who is the spitting image of Cassie the Wonder Dog.

If you’re interested, the episode called “Winter is Here/Life in the Swedish Woods” is a good one to introduce you to her site. 

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!   

A Few Thoughts About How Far Left the Dems Appear to be Moving (posted 2/5/24)

With every passing week, I’m increasingly struck by how fast the gap is growing between red and blue states, and how wide that gap is getting.  And also by what seems like the single factor that explains it: while the political right has more or less maintained its position on the political spectrum, the left has moved far, far to the left. 

Elon Musk made the point back when he was thinking about buying Twitter.  He shared someone’s simple drawings of his political position.  The drawings featured three horizontal lines, labeled “2008,” “2012,” and “2021,” and three stick figures, labeled “conservative,” “me,” and a leftist.

In all three drawings, the conservative stick figure was on the right side, and the stick figure labelled “me” was in the same spot, roughly in the middle of the line.  But in 2008, the leftist figure was labeled “my fellow liberal,” and the “me” character was a little left of center, and close to the liberal.

In 2012, the leftist was shown racing to the left, and was labeled “my fellow liberal?” and the “me” character was now just barely left of center.

In 2021, the leftist was standing to the far, far left, labeled “woke ‘progressive’,” and the center line had shifted so far that the “me” character was now about 1/3 of the way right of center.

That drawing sums up our national politics pretty well.  It seems like an ideological bookend to Reagan’s old statement, “I didn’t leave the Democrat party; the Democrat party left me.”  Musk has the same message to all the lefties who worshipped him 10 years ago and excoriate him as far-right now: he didn’t move, but they went so far left that they lost their minds.

We all see this in just about every big political issue of the day.

On abortion, Dems as recently as Bill and Cankles McPantsuit used to chant the mantra that abortion should be, “safe, legal and rare.”  That never made much sense.  (What other constitutional “rights” could you apply that to?  Would you say that people should exercise their freedom of speech safely, legally and only rarely?  Should they use their freedom of religion that way?) But it was at least a nod to the inherent tragedy of abortion.

Dems were also queasy about late-term abortion, insisting that it basically never happens, and trying their best to avoid the subject.

Now the activist left is super abortion-positive!  They urge each other to “shout your abortion,” and vacuous actresses give acceptance speeches in which they say how glad they are that they were able to get abortions so that they could increase their career success. 

The same goes for gay and trans issues.  Obama ran in 2008 as anti-gay marriage, citing his “Christian faith!”  (This at a time when many people across the spectrum supported “civil unions” as a compromise that would allow gay couples the civil rights of married couples while maintaining traditional marriage.)

Of course he was lying, which he tacitly admitted when he flipped his position the minute public opinion shifted enough to allow it.  But as the old saying goes, “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue,” and our society could still tell the difference between the two just a few years ago.

The trans craziness is an even starker example.  Even a short time ago, if a crazed doctor started chopping off children’s healthy sex organs and chemically castrating them because they were “really” the opposite sex, that doctor would have been jailed or committed to a psych ward.

And if men demanded access to women’s and girls’ showers and athletic competitions, or seriously injured females in physical sports, they would have been jailed immediately.  Assuming they survived the community-sanctioned beatings they would have gotten from those girls’ fathers.

Leftists used to tacitly welcome illegal immigration, since they knew most illegals would become future Democrat voters.  But they weren’t crazy enough to completely open the borders, and ship the illegals all over the country, and give them cash and prizes to come in.

And while Dems were never exactly “tough on crime” or fans of the 2nd amendment, they would at least jail repeat offenders, and require high pre-trial bail before letting them out. 

When I was a wee lad in Illinois, Chicago was run by Democrats, just as it is today.

But in 1968, when crowds of mostly young leftist dopes caused trouble in Chicago, Mayor Daley sent cops wading into the crowds with tear gas and billy clubs, and carted them off to jail, even if only for a short time.  And those were protestors who actually had some legitimate complaints (being drafted into an increasingly unpopular war), and who were being obnoxiously disruptive, but not burning down entire city blocks and injuring hundreds of cops for months on end. 

And now violent criminal aliens are allowed into the country, shipped up to NYC, and allowed to physically beat NY cops, and not only are they not jailed and deported, they are released immediately, without even having to post bail?!

I know you all know this, and I do too, but I’m still regularly shocked by how far our blue cities have fallen, and how fast!           

Ugh!  The only cold comfort I can get from many of these stories is that so many Democrats are now receiving the karmic arse-whipping that they deserve, providing me with a refreshing spring of schadenfreude, and the ongoing opportunity to mock them.

Speaking of which, have you heard that Stacy “A-1” Abrams has just laid off most of the staff of her “voting rights” (i.e. voting fraud) group, the ironically named “Fair Fight?”  It seems the rotund, race-baiting election denier raised around $100 million between 2018-2021.

Annnnndddddd… they’re bankrupt! 

She’s gone 0-2 in GA governor elections, and 0-for-three years in legal battles to advance the cause of stealing elections.  After her group lost their most recent legal challenge against the conservative group “True the Vote,” they are now $600K in the hole, with nothing to show for it. 

Also in Georgia, Fani Willis’ multiplying problems continue to entertain and delight.  Just like most of Trump’s pursuers in the bogus lawfare cases against him, she is finding out how stupid it was to throw rocks at Trump when she was living in a glass house.

Or in her case, a glass house of ill repute. 

Yes, it’s extra funny when someone embroiled in a sex scandal has a name like “Fani.”  (Remember how much fun we had with Anthony Weiner?) 

Just as it was extra funny when an old video resurfaced from when Fani was running for DA in April of 2020.  In an interview with local television, she laughingly asserted, “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me (sic).”  

So she’s definitely made a 180-degree turn on that issue.  In fact, if I wasn’t such a refined and classy gentleman, I might even say that she went from cowgirl to reverse cowgirl on that issue.

But I definitely would NOT say that “working under her” is exactly the right phrase to describe boy toy Nathan Wade, whom she hired for an unreasonably high salary to go after Trump.  Nor would I say that Wade’s previous inexperience – having worked only with low-level criminal cases, and not a single felony trial – makes him a perfect example of the Peter principle.

Because I am obviously far too mature for that.   

However, at least one sexually compromised leftist is going unpunished.  (Which probably disappoints the little weirdo.) 

I’m talking about the legislative aide who was depraved and stupid enough to record himself in a Senate hearing room engaging in a squalid display that, even though it wasn’t baseball-related, involved a great deal of pitching and catching.  And then he was stupid enough to post that video online.

When that behavior caused a scandal – unexpectedly! – the little creep insisted that, “I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace.”

Yes, everybody can see that you loved your job.  Some might say you loved it too much.

And if you don’t think that making a gay porn video in your office is disrespecting the workplace, what more do you think you’d have to add to achieve that?  Scented candles and circus animals?

Don’t answer that!   

Anyway, the creep was allowed to resign, and the Capitol police have just announced that they won’t be pressing any charges.

On an entirely unrelated note, remember when the MSM and the Dems (but I repeat myself) got the vapors because the J6ers walked through the capitol building – fully clothed, and most of them with police escort? 

That was a horrific “defilement of the sacred seat of government” that sent them all to their fainting couches in shock.  

And yes, please feel free to make your own “defiling the seat of government” joke here.  Because as I may have mentioned, I’m way too refined and classy for that.

Hamas delenda est!  

Blue States Continue to “Unexpectedly” Fail, but Florida Abides (posted 2/2/24)

A couple of columns ago, I pointed out the comedic use of the word “unexpectedly” in MSM stories that recount the completely expected and predictable results of idiotic leftist policies. 

Examples would be stories like, “University Allows Dudes to Play Women’s Sports; Actual Females Unexpectedly Get Badly Beaten in Sports,” or “Ultra-White Lady Thinks She’s a Chippewa Princess; Hilarious Genius Unexpectedly Mocks Her.”  

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

I’m realizing now that I could write about those stories seven days a week.  For example…

California politicians have burned a lot of calories making criminals’ lives easier and cops’ lives harder for many years now.  (Just as CA has spent a lot of energy on making taxpayers’ and homeowners’ lives harder, and the lives of open-air pooping practitioners and meth enthusiasts easier.) 

And now – unexpectedly! – California is experiencing a severe shortage of cops. 

The town of Alameda has recently been offering starting salaries over $113K and a signing bonus of $75K to anyone who would be a cop there… and there are still too few takers! 

Because no one has ever said the words, “I would never want to live in Ken-Doll Newsom’s California, but it sounds like a great place to be a cop!”

Speaking of unexpected developments in California, for the first time since the company opened in 1948, an In-N-Out Burger is closing a location, this one in Oakland. 

Even though the company COO says that the location is “busy and profitable,” – which tells you how good their burgers must be, since that is hard to believe about a business in California! – he also says that their employees and customers have been hard hit by theft, property damage and armed robberies. 

On the same block, a Starbucks closed last year (unexpectedly!), and another fast-food restaurant is still open, but only using its drive-thru lane. 

Which tells you everything you need to know: the Biden voters roaming the area have made it so unsafe that if you can stay in your locked car with its engine running, you just might be able to grab a meal without getting robbed or killed. 

And you know what’s that’s called, don’t you?

Bidenomics!

But it’s not just California suffering the consequences of progressive a-holery.  It’s everywhere that the Dems control.

Take Boston, for example.  There are a lot of Walgreens stores in Boston.  But there are three less than there were in November of 2022.  And there’s about to be four less, since Walgreens announced that it will be permanently closing its location on Warren Street in Roxbury, which is “one of the most dangerous areas” in the city, according to local media.

(Also according to local media, that’s probably because Roxbury is home to roving bands of MAGA-hatted white nationalist thugs.)

Now if you are the kind of weirdo who is into things like logic, facts and statistics, you might guess that the latest Walgreens closing might be somehow connected to Roxbury’s violent crime rate (214% higher than the national average), or property crime rate (48% higher), or the region’s overall crime rating of “F.” 

(As in, “What the ‘F’ is going on in Boston?”)

But if you are the kind of weirdo who gets elected to Dem congressional seats – and are therefore allergic to things like logic, facts and statistics – you know why Walgreens would REALLY be pulling out of a high crime neighborhood…

Bidenomics!

No, sorry.  That should read…

Racism!

I give you Ayanna “chrome dome” Pressley, in a recent speech on the house floor which I am not making up: “Walgreens’ closures [in black and brown neighborhoods] are not arbitrary or innocent.  They are disruptive, life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”

She went on to say that she intends to “demand answers from the Walgreens CEO.  Why was there no community input? … Shame on you Walgreens!”

I wish the Walgreens CEO had been in the room, so he could jump up and say, “I’ve got some answers for you!  The problem wasn’t too little community input, it was too much community out-take.  As in, much of the community kept taking out a ton of merch without paying for it.  Which is why by the end of 2022 we had to lock up everything in the store from toothpaste to toilet paper like it was oxycontin-flavored heroin.  Shame on us?  Shame on you, ya’ low-IQ, black Lex Luthor!”   

But he never would have said that.  Because on Walgreen’s main website, they devote a lot of pixels to bragging about their devotion to diversity uber alles.  They literally say, “DEI is in our DNA.” 

(It’s also BS, and explains why your former stores in Boston were FUBAR.)

In case you’re wondering what a white guy thumping his chest about diversity looks like, go to Walgreens’ diversity page and get a look at CEO Tim Wentworth. 

The guy has the same unnerving, bug-eyed stare of Adam “Pencil-Neck” Schiff.  Seriously.  He’s a rich boss of a huge company, so you know that professional photographers took an entire portfolio of portrait shots of him, and this is the best one they could come up with.

He looks like he’s got a stand-up freezer in his basement at home that holds a half-finished skin suit that he’s making out of his female victims. 

And by the way, guess who else joined Pressley in writing an angry letter to Wentworth?  MA senator Liz Warren.  And you can tell by reading that letter that she is really on the warpath on this issue.

(Boom!  That’s a #neverstopmocking, Tomahawk Two-fer™ in this column!)

But I don’t want to give you the impression that our entire nation is imploding.  On the contrary, the conservative policies of Ron DeSantis continue to provide more reasons for the long-suffering residents of blue states to flee to our free state.  (Provided, of course, that they leave their old states’ dysfunctional politics behind.)

One example can be found in an American Thinker story titled, “Florida Leads the Way on Fighting Voter Fraud,” which documents the successes of the Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS) since it was formed in 2022. 

From arresting individuals for election fraud to exposing and fining shady, third-party registration organizations (some of them Soros-funded, shockingly enough) who broke laws to increase illegal voting, the OECS has made our elections more transparent and trustworthy. 

Here’s hoping that other states and the Trump campaign will take our template nationwide, before November’s elections!

A second example was Disney’s “last-gasp lawsuit” against DeSantis failing in federal court on Wednesday.  For those keeping score at home, that means that the woke groomers at Disney – once the Mouse House, more recently Mao’s House™ — are winless against RDS.

Disney lost their corrupt and crony-capitalistic fiefdom in the Reedy Creek Development District, and now they’ve got to pay the same taxes as other Florida businesses.  After their attempt to thwart the will of Florida voters went down in flames, their arrogant CEO had to resign in disgrace.  And when the Reedy Creek sweetheart deal was about to expire, their last-minute attempt to appoint a bunch of new board members at the 11th hour was also rebuffed.

And now their latest legal challenge has been unceremoniously dismissed by a federal judge.  More please!

But lest I suggest that everything is perfect in Florida, I have to acknowledge that we’re still living in a fallen world, and Florida Man is still alive and well.

Or in this case, Florida Woman. To wit, this week 35-year-old Celia Barrett was featured in this headlined story: “Naked Florida Woman Barges into Gas Station, Threatens to Kill Staff with Apple Peeler.”

Since the story was behind a Fox News paywall, I was only able to read the headline and first few sentences.  But that’s still enough info to allow me to make three insightful comments. 

Because I’m just that good.

Here goes:

1. Death by apple peeler would have to be one of the slowest, most painful (and yet easily avoidable) deaths I can imagine. 

2. Obviously, we need a huge, annoying and time-wasting effort directed at universal apple-peeler control.  Especially when it comes to those scary-looking “assault peelers.”  (As for me, you can have my apple peeler when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!)

3. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but the First Rule of Naked Women is that, “Any woman who shows up naked in a gas station wielding a kitchen implement in a threatening manner NEVER looks like a woman you’d like to see naked in public.” Hamas delenda est!

I Wish DeSantis Well, and Hope Trump Beats Biden like a Rented Mule (posted 1/21/24)

I’ve got mixed feelings about DeSantis quitting the race, as you might imagine.  But after the Iowa caucus results confirmed the polling over the previous months, Trump’s nomination was a fait accompli, and DeSantis made the only logical choice.  I was glad to see him endorse Trump as the winning nominee, as he’d pledged to do at the beginning of the campaign.

I was also encouraged to read the responses to CO’s Sunday night thread on RDS’ dropping out, in terms of how little vitriol people expressed toward him.  Many wished him well, and said they’d consider voting for him in a future race, which is what I’m hoping for. 

The most frustrating part of the race for me has been seeing so many self-described conservatives doing the opposite: attacking him in the most dishonest ways, and taking such glee in the most petty smears.  Unfortunately, they were following the lead of the far left, and of Trump, who praised him to the skies (“one of the best governors,” “doing a great job in Florida,” “he did a terrific job with covid”) before flip-flopping completely (terrible on covid, worse than Cuomo, etc.) when he became a competitor.  

I understand that politics is a rough business, and I generally have a low enough opinion of politicians that I don’t mind seeing them knocked around some.  But I think RDS is an unusually good man for a politician: scandal-free in his personal life; apparently good husband and father to his wife and kids; does what he says he’ll do, relentless in pushing conservative policies, and the most consistent and successful governor in the country.

When he got a history degree from Yale and a JD from Harvard (back when both of those degrees still meant something), he could have walked into a high-paying job and written his own ticket.  But instead he joined the Navy while still in school, and spent time as a JAG officer in Gitmo and Iraq, sacrificing a ton of income to serve his country, before starting his political career. 

I don’t want to over-do it on the praise, because he’s still a politician, and a human.  He definitely has his flaws (lack of charisma, stiffness of style) as a campaigner.   And he wants to be president, which always makes me at least a little suspicious.  (A reliable Book counsels me to, “put not your faith in princes.”  And I’m Martin Simpson, and I endorse that message!)

I just hope that the smears against him haven’t precluded him from a future presidential run.  Not least because I don’t see a ton of Republican alternatives out there with strong records of consistent conservatism.  (For every Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, Ted Cruz and DeSantis, there are a hundred Romneys (Ronna and Mitt) and other RINOs.) 

If the Schiff-storm of slander against RDS has made him toxic for 2028, I think some of his “conservative” bashers are going to come to a hard realization when they are complaining next time, “Why are we surrounded by RINOs?  Why aren’t there any trustworthy conservative Republicans for us to support?”   

Because you had a great one as an option, and instead of just saying that you preferred Trump and acting like gentlemen, you took up a bunch of leftist lies (“He’s death-Santis!”) to try to destroy him. 

This is why we can’t have nice things, or decent politicians.

Okay, I had to get that off of my chest!  But having said that, I’m pulling for Trump now, and I don’t think the amount of pessimism about his chances expressed in Sunday’s thread is justified. Especially if Joe Biden continues to lie in state as his opponent.          

I know it sounds like I’m really down on Trump’s candidacy, but that’s only because I’ve come to mostly dislike him as a person.

I know that sounds weird, but let me explain:  I am much more concerned with the policies and results of a pol’s governing than I am with his/her personality.  To me, one of the most irritating tropes in politics is the idiotic cliché, “People vote for the guy they’d most like to have a beer with.” 

Ugh.  I have beers with guys I’d like to have a beer with, usually because they have a good sense of humor, are politically rational, and demonstrate good judgment when talking about books, movies, football and music. 

To me, politicians are a lot like lawyers: they have their purposes, but a life well-lived is usually one in which you spend the absolute least amount of time dealing with either of them as possible. 

I think that’s generally true of most conservatives: our philosophy is, “that government is best which governs least.”  We want law and order, strong borders, a military that will deter attacks, and defense of our constitution.  Beyond that, leave us alone, because we are free people, and we’ve got this.

That’s not the case with lefties.  Politics is their religion, and government is their jealous god, and they tend to try to make heroes of their leaders, even if that means futilely trying to hammer a dead peg into a round hole.

Sorry, that’s “square.”  A square peg.  

The left deifies their leaders.  Lenin’s corpse in Red Square, the cults of Stalin and Mao.  JFK is King Arthur in Camelot, instead of the philanderer who botched the Bay of Pigs.  Bill Clinton is a feminist hero, instead of the groper in chief and Juanita Broaddrick’s rapist.  Obama is a historic Light-Bringer rather than a spendthrift racial grifter who lied that we could keep our doctors and health plans.  

Brandon is presenting a special challenge for them, but the Dems are still praising him (“We can’t keep up with him!  Bidenomics is tickety boo!”), and are doing their best to beat a dead president across the finish line in November.

Sorry, that’s “horse.”  They are trying to beat a dead horse across the finish line.  I don’t know why I keep making that mistake.    

Anyway, my point is that I’m not looking for a drinking buddy when I vote for a president.  In fact, sometimes the very qualities that I wouldn’t want in a friend are the ones I appreciate in a president, if they produce good political results. 

For example, many said that Trump was impulsive and volatile, and he might fly off the handle and bomb another country if that country’s leaders p*ssed him off.  Not a great quality in a best friend, in a bar. 

But we all know how that worked during Trump’s presidency: Putin didn’t make a peep.  The weird beards in Iran and Gaza and Lebanon didn’t instigate a mass murder of Jews.  The Chicoms didn’t move on Taiwan, like they’re about to.  A bunch of rag-tag Houthi pirates minded both their “Ps” and their “Qs,” rather than rampaging through the Red Sea.

That’s good presidential foreign policy.  I’d like more of that.  Also affordable gas and interest rates, millions fewer illegals pouring across the border, and more strict constructionist judges.    

Don’t get me wrong: all things being equal, I’d still prefer good personal qualities in a president.  (Sobriety, honesty, self-control, no intern-banging, etc.)  But the main thing I want is disciplined, successful, conservative governance. 

If I can get that – whether from a man or a woman, or a straight person or a gay person, or a black person or a white person or an orange person, or an old guy or a young gal, or an extrovert or an introvert, or a boring guy, or a nerd, or a braggart, or a skirt-chaser, or a guy in a Stephen Hawking wheelchair who speaks with an electronic, robot voice – I don’t care! 

So yes, while I recognize and admire some of Trump’s good qualities, I don’t like him much as a person, and that’s a shame.  At my age, I’m still looking forward to voting for a president whom I think can do the job AND whom I can look up to as a person.  (I got to do that in the last several governor’s races, and it felt GREAT!)

But as I understand it, conservatism and MAGA have a lot in common.  In fact, if you drew up a Venn diagram of conservatism and MAGA (the sound you just heard is Que Mala perking up her ears), you’d have around 90% of overlap. 

The only MAGA stuff outside the conservative circle seems like personal loyalty to Trump, and a requirement to side with him when he’s doing something anti-conservative. 

And while I’m going to give that one a big ol’, Dr. Evil-style, “How about no!” I’m happy with the other 90%.  In fact, that’s more than I’ve had with any president over the last 4 decades.

Now I hope we can all do as much as possible to support Trump for the next 10 months, and call attention to the myriad of reasons why Biden and the Dems need to be swept from power, so we can start undoing the damage of the last 3 years. 

Hamas delenda est!