Tag: Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jump cut to the end of the speech]   

“…like nobody’s ever seen before. 

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

And, scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

One. Week. Layter.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

They Won’t Accept Success: Tucker and the Left’s Reaction to Taking Out Iran’s Nukes (posted 6/27/25)

It’s been interesting to watch the reactions to Trump’s bombing of Iran, especially since there are very few things that we agree on as a nation.  Our recent election results have all been within a handful of points of 50/50, and the job approval ceiling for the last several presidents appears to be right around 50%.

In that context, you’d think the 12 Day War in Iran – assuming that the fighting is now over –would seem to be an extreme outlier, since there has rarely been such a one-sided modern battle. 

Israel’s all-time record victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 will likely never be topped.  (One of my all-time favorite t-shirts is a white one with the blue Star of David on it, and the words, “Six Days, B*tch.”)  And even the first Gulf War took a little over a month. 

So the speed of this victory, along with the moral lopsidedness of the combatants – no one but Iran’s ruling theocratic dictatorship and their terrorist clients could side with them – is also unusual in most conflicts among states.  You would have to be a totally deranged lunatic to side with the mullahs over Israel and us.  (Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Keith Olbermann.)

I wrote in a previous column about Israel’s stunning successes against Iran before this war, and then during the lightning-strikes and coordinated strategic destruction of military targets, along with decapitating the cream of the Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists.  It’s amazing to think about how much they’ve accomplished in a year!

They decimated Hezbollah with the brilliant pager plot, along with targeted strikes on all of their top leaders, and did the same to Hamas with their relentless attacks on the terror forces of October 7th.  They contributed to the weakening of the Assad regime in Syria by eliminating much of their navy and air force, and when Assad fled, Israel wisely flew strikes that took out most of their remaining ships, planes, missiles and chemical weapons, so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of Assad’s successors.

They also took out much of Iran’s air force over the last year, and in the early hours of their attacks this month, they took out the rest, along with the leaders who would have organized a military response and possible counter strikes.  Their successes meant that our bombing run against Iran’s nuke sites posed fewer risks than it otherwise would have.

All of this put the Democrats in a very tough position, partly because too many elite Dems and their activist base really dislike America, and partly because successes of one party always make for bad politics for their competitors.  I mean, if Biden’s program – allowing millions of illegals into the country, spending like a meth addict with a trust fund, forcing dudes into girls’ sports and lockerrooms, imposing draconian covid mandates and lockdowns on healthy people – had succeeded, our election prospects last year would have been dismal.

Having said all that, it was so entertaining to watch all of the hysterical reactions from Never Trumpers and the left during the lead up to our bombing.  Particular favorites in a crowded field were the articles and speeches of David Frum and Chuck-you Schumer, which aged like milk left out in the summer sun.      

Frum published an article in the Atlantic (motto: Wrong About Everything Since 1857) entitled, “What Iran Knows About Trump: The Mullahs of Iran Join the Bet that Trump Always Chickens Out.”  I’m going to see if I can get the Atlantic to publish my companion piece to Frum’s.  I’m calling it, “What David Frum Knows About Trump… Could Fit in a Thimble.”  Frum also tweeted that, “’Two Weeks’ is what Trump says when he’s backing away from a commitment he did not mean.”

What makes those even funnier?  They both appeared on June 21st, the very day that Trump was rocking the Iranian Casbah (sing it with me, “Khameni don’t like it…”) instead of chickening out, as Frum-py knew he would. 

Schumer got in earlier, but just as stupidly.  He put out a video a few weeks ago warning that Trump was going to fold to the mullahs, and make a secret deal.   “If Taco Trump is already folding, the American public should know about it,” he croaked.   

He sneered that Trump was “gonna sound tough in public and then negotiate a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything.”  And give him credit, because he was half right:  Trump did sound tough in public. 

But then he dropped the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP.   

And before you can ask, I looked it up, and that is NOT gay slang, no matter how much it sounds like it.  (Still, the next time my wife asks me to get the mop, I’m going to chuckle and give her my Grouch Marx eyebrow wiggle, even though she won’t get it.) (I mean the comedic reference, not the…  Ahem.  Perhaps I’ve said too much.)

By the way, I assume that everyone has noticed Schumer’s obvious physical decline.  He was briefly taken to the hospital a day ago for a breathing scare, but he was losing it long before that.  He’s getting more and more hunched-over every time I see him; right now he’s got the posture of a jumbo shrimp, or possibly the letter “c,” and that gives him a creepy Nosferatu-ian vibe when he crouches over a podium and hollers at us while glaring from over the top of his glasses.

Do any politicians ever just retire anymore? 

Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson has continued his precipitous slide from being a smart and insightful guy into either a dumb hack, or a dishonest one.  Shortly before Trump gave the mullahs the MOP (stop snickering), Tucker was on Steve Bannon’s podcast raving about the apocalyptic consequences if Trump did anything to Iran.

He said it would signal “the end of the American Empire” and of Trump’s presidency, and predicted that we’d lose thousands of soldiers in another Iraq situation.  And he mocked the idea that the argument isn’t between those who want to use quick strikes to prevent Iran from getting nukes, and those who want to rely on drawn-out negotiations (which, spoiler alert have been tried and failed miserably for the last several decades). 

Nope.  For Tucker, “The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence and those who seek to prevent it – between warmongers and peacemakers.”  That sounds like something that could have been written by Bernie Sanders, AOC, or the ghost of Howard Zinn. 

Speaking of AOC (she of the juicy booty, according to her), she and half the Democrats in Congress ran to microphones or X and immediately started calling for the impeachment of Trump (again!) and decrying his horrific, unconstitutional act of bombing without getting congress’ permission first. 

Apparently no one has told them that every president since HW Bush has done that, or that Obama dropped thousands of bombs without congress’ permission in just the last several months of his reign of terro—I mean, administration.

But I didn’t need to study for years about geopolitics to support the bombing of Iran’s nuke sites.  Because I informed myself by reading an article on Twitchy about 20 actual laws in Iran, and that was enough. 

A small sampling of illegal activities in Iran: apostasy (leaving Islam), blasphemy, homosexuality and adultery can all get you the death penalty.  You can’t criticize the chief Weird Beard, or drink alcohol, or dissent online.  Women can’t sing or dance in public or go to stadiums, and they have to wear pup tents or beekeeper outfits. 

You can get up to 74 lashes for holding hands or kissing in public, and any same-sex relationships – even if, and I am quoting, they are “non-penetrative” – will get you “lashes, prison or worse.”  (I’m no relationship-ologist, but if your sexual relationships are non-penetrative, I’m pretty sure you’re doing something wrong.) (But hey, you do you.)

However, I didn’t even need to read about any of those laws, because they had me at # 19:  Dog ownership is banned, because dogs are “unclean.”   (Cassie the Wonder Dog is beside my desk as I write this, so I’m typing very quietly.)  Which is truly offensive, not to mention ridiculous.

I’ve seen those mullahs’ lice-y looking beards, and I’ve read about their goat brides – not to mention the goat chlamydia outbreaks that routinely sweep through the Iranian leadership – so I don’t think they should be throwing any stones about cleanliness from inside their glass mosques.    

Am I saying that the Iranians deserved a devastating bombing campaign because of the way they treat dogs?

I’m saying we should have that conversation.

And I’m also saying yes.    

Hamas delenda est

Greta’s Great Adventure (posted 6/25/25)

This story is a couple of weeks old – which feels like years, in this media environment – but it contains too much hilarity and valuable lessons to not comment on it before it disappears from our memory completely.

This spring, an American organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) was formed, and it soon got the backing of the Trump administration and the Israeli government to start trucking food into Gaza and distributing it to the Palestinians.  Before then, the food distribution had been handled primarily by the UN, and through its usual honesty and competence…most of that food ended up in the hands of Hamas thugs, who then sold it at inflated prices to the Gazans.

The GHF quickly became much more successful, getting the food to the people it was intended for, while cutting out the Hamas creeps who had been preying on them.  Hamas’s response had the maximum Hamas-ness: they started beating and shooting people to keep them from getting the food, especially when the people had started to openly applaud and say, “Thank you, America.”

The MSM jumped right on the story, reporting that the scenes of grateful Gazans were AI deep fakes, and that the IDF had been shooting, and causing the recipients to panic and trample each other.  Because of course they did. 

When the AI story and the smears of the IDF were debunked, the MSM quickly melted away and started lying elsewhere.  Because: ditto.

Anyway, GHF’s performance demonstrated what a legitimate charitable food distribution plan looks like. 

Meanwhile, a boat was sailing from Sicily (and where were the mafia pirates when you needed them?) toward Gaza on a mission to provide an instructive counter-example of what a fraudulent, virtue-signaling PR circle jerk looks like.  And boy, did it!

The most prominent celebrity passenger on The Mental Minnow was Greta Thunberg, of “The climate will kill us all!” fame.   She’s known by many names: The Doom Pixie.  Sweden’s Shame.  Lil’ Miss “How Dare You!”  But she wanted the world to know that she’s moved on to another noble cause: Jew hating.

Greta and the other merry moronic mariners made videos to document their brave journey to, as she put it, “attempt to break the siege and open up the humanitarian corridor by delivering aid like food and medical supplies.”  She waxed eloquent about the “systematic starvation of 2 million people” and “a live-streamed genocide.” 

Of course, that Israeli genocide does not exist anywhere outside of her unnervingly square head.  But the Self-important Scandinavian was not going to be deterred by little things like facts and reality.  

“Hey Martin,” you are probably saying, “did she record those videos while dressed in the traditional garments of her people, i.e. the Sverigedräkten, or Swedish national dress?”

Yes, and no.  (And by the way, nice umlaut you’ve got there.)  She did wear the traditional garment of her people, but her real people aren’t the Swedes, but the anti-Semites.  And their traditional garment is the terrorist tablecloth, i.e. the keffiyeh. 

And yes, she was all keffiyeh-ed up! 

Naturally, the Israelis intercepted the boat, which gave the maritime martyrs the chance to preen and posture.  Greta recorded a video saying that she was being kidnapped, and appealing to the government of Sweden to use diplomatic pressure to get her released, so that she could complete her mission of taking what turned out to be a small cooler of assorted sandwiches and unpronounceable Swedish snacks to the Gazans. 

The Swedes, not usually noted for their sense of humor, managed to have a perfect, deadpan reaction.  As the Mail Online put it, “Sweden has rejected Greta’s plea for help.”  The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard (she sounds hot, but strict) said, “A great responsibility rests on those who choose to travel contrary to the advice given to a place.” 

Then she pursed her lips and gave a curt nod – which my Norwegian wife informs me is the Scandinavian equivalent of an Italian guy spitting on the ground and giving you both middle fingers – and walked back into Umlaut Hall, or whatever the Swedes call their White House.  

The Jews, on the other hand, are quite famous for their sense of humor.  (Which you would know if you’ve ever seen the Three Stooges, Albert Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, or Bernie Sanders.)  And they gave Greta the business in their press release, which I am not making up:

“The ‘selfie yacht’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel.  The passengers…were provided with sandwiches and water, and are expected to return to their home countries.  The tiny amount of aid that wasn’t consumed by the ‘celebrities’ will be transferred to Gaza through real humanitarian channels.” 

Perfect!  But after that squirt of seltzer in the eyes and pie in the face, the Israelis also caught Greta’s Groupies with a little Schindler’s List surprise, taking her and her companions into a room where they began to screen the horrific film of the October 7th massacre.  According to Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz – and I couldn’t make that name up if I tried – “when they saw what [the film] was about, they refused to continue watching.” 

Because of course they did. 

And within 24 hours, Israel deported the whole rotten lot of them. 

Many people cheered Greta’s failure, but not me.  Because I think she got what she wanted, which was to cosplay as a brave, compassionate do-gooder whose noble mission was thwarted by the dastardly Jews. 

I wish that the Israelis had wrong-footed her by waving her through at the border into the hands of Hamas.  With the help of my conical purple wizard hat, I know exactly how that would have gone:

IDF guy:  Here you go, you morally superior Europeans.  Welcome to Gaza.

Greta (nervously): W-w-what?  Aren’t you going to arrest me, to stop me from bringing aid and sustenance to my Muslim fellow-sufferers under the Zionist jackboot?

IDF guy:  No, no.  You can go right on in.  You see those angry-looking men standing with their arms crossed and sneering?  Those are your Hamas “handlers.”

Greta:  Were those verbal quotation marks around “handlers?”  What do you mean by “handlers?”

IDF: Oh nothing.  Just that they’re going to handle you.

Hamasnik 1 (H1):  Who is that infidel harlot?  She looks familiar.

Hamasnik 2 (H2): I’ve never seen her before.  She has a very square head.

H1: What?

H2: Her head is strange.  Very distinctive shape.  If I had ever seen her before, I would remember that head.

Achmed (just joining them):  What is going on? 

H1: The Jews are letting those infidels come in.

Achmed: Why?  And what’s with that woman’s head?  It’s perfectly square.

H2 (to H1): I told you!  And her eyes are small and beady.

Achmed (snapping his fingers): I know!  That’s Greta Thunberg.  That obnoxious infidel harlot who lectures everybody all the time.

H1:  That’s it!  I knew I recognized her.  (doing an impression in a high-pitched voice) “How dare you?”

Achmed (in a similar voice): “You have stolen my dreams with your empty words!”

H2: I’ve never heard of her.

H1: You’re lucky.  She is terrible.  She screamed at the infidel men, and no one even flogged her!  I can’t imagine having to listen to her.

Achmed: She needs a ball gag to shut her up.

H1 and H2 (looking at each other, then at Achmed): A what?

Achmed:  A ball gag.  (looks at them)  You know, like in the movies, when a woman is… making noise, and…  Perhaps I’ve said too much.

H1:  Perhaps you have, Achmed!

Achmed (changing the subject):  Anyway, how about that head?  She’s the reason Allah made burkas, and told us to cover women with them.

H2: I’m not sure you could get a burka over that head! 

H1: If you did, it would look like you put a burka on a box! 

Achmed: And you’d still have to look at those weird beady eyes through the eye slot.

The three laughed, while Greta watched them, nervously.    

H1: I don’t know how those infidel men do it.

H2: Truly, they are very foolish. 

After a long moment of them staring, and Greta fidgeting…

H3:  Still, she can be my third wife.

H1: Isn’t your goat your third wife?

H3 (shrugging):  Then she can be my fourth wife. 

Greta (turning, dropping to the ground and grabbing the IDF guy’s legs):  Don’t leave me here.  Let me go back into Israel!

IDF guy: You want to come back into the nation of genocidal evildoers?

Greta: Yes, please.

IDF guy: What about the poor, oppressed Palestinians?   

H3 (calling and waving): Hello, infidel harlot?  Bring your square head over here, so I can smite you with the cane of instruction!

Greta (to H3):  No thank you.  But good luck with your intifada! (quietly, to the IDF guy, out of the corner of her mouth): Get…me…out of here.

And scene. 

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on LA, SCOTUS, and Joe Biden’s Autopen (posted 6/9/25)

Well, LA’s on fire.  Again. 

And this time, as in the past, the Woke Avengers team assembled.  Led by Gavin the Haircut and Karen “Absentee Woman” Bass – plus an assortment of anonymous, mediocre DEI hires who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives – they leapt into action. 

Annnddd… did nothing for 36 hours, at least.

Well, that’s not fair to the Big Mouth Bass, because she released an outraged statement saying, “We will not stand for this!” 

Unfortunately, by “this” she didn’t mean hordes of violent thugs rioting and attacking ICE agents enforcing our laws.  No, the “this” for which she won’t stand is…wait for it…ICE agents enforcing our laws.      

I’m not making that up.  Even though Bass tried to walk that idiotic statement back within about 12 hours, the damage had already been done. The Bass had taken the bait, and been hooked on her own stupidity.  And like another fish-faced far-left mayor (I’m looking at you, Lori Lightfoot…and that’s not easy), this might finally cause her to be reeled in.  Because she appears to have just been flipped to her dorsal side, and prepared for a political grilling that she probably won’t survive. 

But hey, it’s LA.  So maybe she’ll get a “catch and release” parole.   Angelenos sure seem to like doing that with violent illegals.

(They said, “Hey Martin, I bet you can’t come up with 8 juvenile fish-related insults in a story on riots in a Democrat city.” And I said, “Hold my bourbon and watch this.”)

Two bits of good news can come out of this debacle.  First, the pro-illegal-immigrant Left is showing who they are (again!), and that belies nearly everything they’ve said about illegal immigration for the last several decades.  It’s hard to make the case that the vast majority of illegals love America and just want to assimilate and contribute when thousands of them are attacking American law enforcement, burning American flags, and flying the Mexican flag.    

Second, Trump has learned from his past mistakes.  In 2020 he allowed antifa and BLM leftist mobs – and a school of a-political scavenging looters swimming in their wake (bonus fish reference!) – to run roughshod in dozens of leftist cities around the country.  He didn’t call out the National Guard, maybe because he figured that if leftist mayors and governors were content to let their cities burn and would fight any help he tried to give, they could reap what they’ve sown. 

But Trump 2.0 means bidness.  He’s firing as many swamp creatures as he can, blasting away at Ivy League Jew-haters like a truckload of explosive de-groining pagers, and hammering the left with EOs like Sonny Corleone tuning up Carlo with that garbage-can lid.  (If you haven’t watched the Godfather frequently enough to get that reference, begone!)

And this time around, the TWA (Triumvirate of Whoop Ass) – Trump, Hegseth and Hulk Homan™ (plus their chick sidekick in too much makeup and a too-tight costume, Kristi Noem, God bless her) – are going to make the violent radicals WISH the worst thing they had to deal with was some Rooftop Koreans!

Let the mass arrests begin, and the mass deportations accelerate!

Hey, speaking of fish out of water (boom!), I’ve got to give the most unexpected shout-out ever to – prepare to deploy your smelling salts – the three leftist SCOTUS justices!  Each of them wrote a clear and logical (i.e. conservative) UNANIMOUS ruling last Thursday, and I couldn’t be more shocked if I’d been flipping through the channels and came across AOC cogently explaining the Theory of Relativity!

Kagan wrote Smith & Wesson vs. Mexico, finding that of course S&W can’t be held responsible for what violent scumbags do with their product, so mind your business – along with your cartels and fentanyl – Mexico! 

Sotomayor wrote Catholic Charities vs. Wisconsin, finding that of course you can’t discriminate against a religious charity just because you’re a Christophobic bigot.

And perhaps most surprising of all, Ketanji Jeanne-Pierre (HA!) wrote Ames v. Ohio Youth Services, finding that of course discrimination is unconstitutional, even if it’s “reverse” discrimination against whitey or straight people. 

I’m flabbergasted, and don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt.  But just in case this is a sign of the End of Days – and how could it not be? – please get yourself right with Jesus, pronto!

Finally, going from the most unexpected story ever, to perhaps the most expected story ever, I give you the latest in the Joe Biden auto-pen controversy. 

Last week Biden refuted the contention that others had signed many official documents for him without his knowledge, due to his well-documented descent from low IQ hack to confused, to dementia-ridden, to full-blown, stage 4, cuckoo-fried-chicken status.

When his forthcoming statement was announced, many observers watched with bated breath, wondering whether his voice would be steady, his posture upright, and his delivery graceful.

Annnnddddd… he released a written statement instead.

Because obviously the best possible way to refute an accusation that you are too far gone to make a clear statement, so someone else had to produce writing on your behalf, is to…produce a statement written by someone else on your behalf.

Brilliant! 

How do I know for certain that Joe Biden didn’t write “his” statement? 

Because I am a professional student of the written word, with a mind like a steel trap and keen insight into all matters linguistic.

If you don’t believe me – and to quote St. Greta the Self-Righteous, “How dare you?!  You have stolen my dreams with your empty words!” – here is Biden’s laughably phony statement:   

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency.  I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”

And now, here is how that statement would have appeared, IF Brandon had actually written it himself:

“Let me be Claire.  I made the incisions in my presh-dentsy.  I made declensions about pardons, execrable borders, luhsshlation and presti… prestidigi…  Come on man!  Any digestion that I didn’t is raddish and face.  I mean…rhombus and pulse.  You know, you know the thing.   Ummm… uhhh……………………………………………………… We finally beat Medicare.”

And, scene.

Hamas delenda est!

A Little Political Taxonomy(posted 6/4/25)

Perceptive and regular readers of my columns may have noticed that I am periodically annoyed by our elite leftist leaders in DC, the MSM, and the Ivy League. 

If by “periodically” I mean “7 days a week, when I’m not asleep.”  And if by “annoyed” I mean “infuriated.”  And I do, in both cases, mean that. 

But there is another type of nationally prominent lefty who just frustrates me, because they demonstrate the ability to think clearly and call out problems on both sides…but then can’t sustain that and come to the right conclusion.

There are so many people of the first type from whom to choose, and their failings are so obvious as to need little explication.  So for today I’ll discuss just one, and his actions just this week, on just one issue. 

The Dem in question is Jamie Raskin, and the issue is the terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday. 

By now you all know the basic details: Muslim illegal immigrant named Muhamad (unexpectedly!) who hates Jews (unexpectedly!) uses a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to badly burn 8 Jews who were peacefully marching to plead for the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.  (The terrorist reportedly used fire in his attack because he had been unable to get a gun, due to his illegal status.)   At least two of his victims had to be airlifted to a hospital, and if they survive, will face a long and extremely painful recovery.

A few more details make the story even more infuriating.  At least one of the victims was an octogenarian Holocaust survivor.  A local police official – hours after video had widely circulated showing the terrorist screaming, “Free Palestine!” and, “I did it for Gaza!” – insisted that the scumbag’s motives were not known.

Then a genius named Juliette Kayyem got on CNN late that evening and blasted Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for having declared that the obviously targeted terror attack was a “targeted terror attack.”  Juliette was not buying that small step to a well-supported conclusion.

But soft! What ditz through yonder camera speaks?  Tis Juliette, and she’s a total moron: “It makes law enforcement look disorganized, and it makes the FBI look so juvenile, like why are you getting ahead of the police chief who says, ‘I don’t know what this is?’”

Did I mention that Juliette is a former DHS official in the Obama administration, and a former Harvard professor?  Because of course she is.

Anyway, Muhamad came to the US on a tourist visa in 2022.  When he broke our laws by overstaying that visa, the Biden administration demonstrated their “tough on crime” bona fides by… rewarding him with a work visa for two more years!  And then he illegally stayed again, when that visa expired.  (Please insert an all-caps “Unexpectedly” after each of the three previous sentences.)

So to recap: an anti-Semitic Muslim illegal immigrant carried out a horrific attack using fire.  From that set of circumstances, one might logically draw the conclusion that we have serious problems involving vicious anti-Semitism, mass illegal immigration, and even a statistically over-represented tendency to violence among some (not all) adherents to a certain Religion of Peace.  And possibly a “fire-control” problem.

But not if one is Jamie Raskin D-(‘oh!)- Maryland, who turned his awesome Sherlockian powers of deduction toward Boulder, and quickly arrived at the culprit: Guns! 

The poor dunce went on MSNBC, and said, “We are still in the midst of a gun violence epidemic…. This is why we are for a ban on military-style assault weapons in the country.  Our lax gun laws are a danger to everybody in America.”

I’m not making that up. He looked at a multi-faceted crime with zero guns involved, and decided that guns were the problem.

I thought about guns when I saw that news story, too.  But my thoughts were more along the lines of, “I wish that had happened in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, or some other free state where citizens exercise their 2nd amendment rights more vigorously.  Because if it had, that hateful creep would have been lucky to light up his first octogenarian before he was stitched with bullets from his tiny groin to his evil cranium.”

And THEN we would have all been spared that smoking bullet-magnet’s idiotic political slogans, and Juliette would have been justified in scratching her empty head and wondering what his motive had been.

So Juliette and Jamie are the type of leftists who drive me crazy, because they are propagandist hacks who wouldn’t tell an inconvenient truth or make a good-faith argument if their lives depended on it.

But the second type – and there aren’t a lot of them – are frustrating, because they often show that they are capable of clear thought and smart criticism, and yet continue to make common cause with those like Raskin, Schumer, et al.  

John Fetterman is one.  Since he recovered from his stroke, he’s frequently been a beacon of sanity in the Dem congress.  He’s called out the anti-Semitism on the left, praised Trump’s closing of the border, and criticized his party’s shameful coverup of Biden’s physical and mental infirmity.  But he still votes with them the vast majority of the time, even though he’s proven that he knows better.

The best example of this type is Bill Maher, who I think I’ve written about before.  He’s a condescending egotist who I wouldn’t want to hang out with, but he’s intelligent and often very funny, and he regularly takes a scalpel (and a machete) to woke errors and idiocies like nobody else on the left.  And yet, at the end of the day and after demonstrating that he’s got 20/20 political vision…he puts his leftist blinders back on and returns to rote conservative bashing.

Or, as one of my favorite Bible verses puts it, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”

I don’t watch Maher’s program, but I often watch clips of it that show up on my various political feeds, and his discussion of Harvard’s self-destructive arrogance this past weekend was a good example. 

He spends nearly 6 solid minutes tearing Ivy League education a new one, with insight and sarcasm.  He points out that students aren’t being educated but indoctrinated, and indicts woke intolerance, feckless administrators, and the hypocritical arrogance of gullible, entitled youth.  He points out that Harvard is “an assh*le factory.”

But then – so frustrating! – he puts on his pinko-colored glasses, and goes every kind of wrong.

The pivot comes when he grudgingly says that Harvard does turn out some decent people.  But his first example tells you all you need to know: “But for every Barack Obama, there are two Josh Hawleys.”  And he doesn’t mean the comparison as an insult to Obama – which it should be – or a compliment to Hawley.  Which it should be. 

For the next 3 minutes, he lobs evidence-less ad hominem attacks at Hawley, and then lists those on the right who have Ivy League degrees with an acid tone of disdain: Vivek, DeSantis, Cruz, SCOTUS members, etc. 

That’s it.  He just lists them.  He doesn’t cite any stupid or evil things they’ve done, or any of their flaws.  He just sneers their names, and his audience of trained seals applauds accordingly. 

I keep finding myself thinking of the Parable of the Talents, and how those who squander greater gifts are judged more harshly than the less gifted who don’t make much of themselves.  I look at dullards like Hank Johnson, AOC, or Eric Swalwell, and I’m not sure they even know how dumb or wrong they usually are. 

But then I look at someone like Maher, deftly dissecting the destructive foolishness of the Left, before immediately backsliding into juvenile, simple-minded smears of the Right.  I watch him proving that he knows better, and then acting like he doesn’t, and I shake my head.       

I don’t know which is worse. 

But I do know that I’d rather be on our side – even with all of our squishes and weasels! – than on theirs.         

Hamas delenda est!

It’s a New Month, but Harvard Has Little to be Proud About, & Hamas is Running Out of Sinwars (posted 6/2/25)

Well, it’s the beginning of another Haughty Spirit month, so if you’re super stoked about your sexuality, you do you.  But also, remember that everything doesn’t have to happen in public.  Because there’s a time and place—

Sorry.  My crack staff has just given me a correction, and here at the Simpsonian Institution we strive for accuracy.  It turns out that I’d mixed up my King James texts.  To wit, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

So it’s Pride month, not Haughty Spirit month.  My bad.  Though in past years when I wasn’t able to look away from some parade floats on tv soon enough, I noticed that there was quite a bit of haughty spirit exposed too.  Along with a disturbing amount of big bellies and bare arses.  So thanks for those visuals, you exhibitionist loons.

I’m not going to ask why there’s no heterosexual pride month, because I think it’s weird to feel proud about sexuality.  After all, as Cole Porter pointed out, “Birds do it.  Bees do it.  Even educated fleas do it.”  And I’m not big on recorded sexuality parades of any type, anyway.  (Though if you insist on having one, spotting a “reverse-cowgirl” float as I’m going through the channels wouldn’t be as unsettling as a “dudes in arse-less chaps” float would.)

By the way, note to aspiring rappers out there: Re-read those lyrics.  They’re almost 100 years old and they’re about sex, but they’re still remembered, and they’re still goofy and fun.  And there isn’t a single “b*tch” or n-word in there.  (If you think anyone will be remembering “WAP” a century from now, you’re as dumb as your “songs” sound.)

Anyway, there’s no pride month for eccentric males like me, who prefer women, and I’m not asking for one.  Although again, if we must have some sort of sexuality-related public celebration, I suggest that a Great Beauties Hall of Fame would be a good alternative.  I am even willing to suggest some nominees for the first class of inductees, all of whom had an impact on an impressionable young Martacus: Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Nena (of “99 LuftBallons” fame). 

Loren and Welch were at the height of their powers before I reached puberty, but when I saw both of them on tv reruns – Loren as a sponge diver in a movie I have no other memory of, and Welch fighting off dinosaurs in a fur bikini (that one was based on a true story, I think)…  Well, let’s just say that I knew even then that I wouldn’t be going down the “Mayor Pete Path,” if you know what I mean.

Farrah is self-explanatory, and you wouldn’t think that a doe-eyed, one-named cutie singing in German would stick in one’s mind, but the heart wants what it wants.  And of course my smokeshow wife would be inducted as the first winner in the Lifetime Achievement category. 

Where was I? 

Oh yeah.  I’m hoping that since the cultural tide seems to have turned against some of the excesses of woke sexual foolishness (mandatory pronouns, kowtowing to those with autogynephilia or gender dysmorphia, 57 genders fantasies, etc.), Pride cheerleading might be less ubiquitous and annoying this year.  

Speaking of “even educated fleas do it,” I am loving Trump’s beat-down of Harvard!  As a former academic, I’ve always wondered exactly how much the Ivy League in general hates Jews, free speech, and academic freedom.  And now it looks like we might be getting an answer: way more than $3 billion dollars’ worth!

When Trump first fired a shot across Harvard’s bow – telling them to start abiding by civil rights laws and crack down on Jew-hating freaks who have been disrupting their educational mission, or forfeit some grant money – I figured that the bureaucrats would make a token show of resistance and then sheepishly comply.  I thought that the horrific optics of standing with obnoxious jihadi brats and their tent-ifada would be enough to make Harvard submit, even without financial pressure.

But no!  The arrogant snoots dug their jack-booted heels in for Jew hatred uber alles, even after Trump threatened to take away more federal funds.  So then he said he’d be challenging their tax exempt status, and trying to block them from enrolling foreign students, many of whom are a coveted source of both bundles of cash and hatred of America and the West – two coveted resources for the extremist partisans running Harvard. 

Harvard got their noses even higher in the air – who would have thought that was even possible? – and filed suit against the president, rather than submit.  Of course, partisan left judges are coming out of the woodwork to block Trump (unexpectedly!), but it’s hard to see how they can win this one. 

American taxpayers can’t be forced to fund any university who defies federal laws in ways various and sundry, and no university is entitled to billions in funding automatically.  As a schadenfreude-tastic beneficial side effect, this case is fortuitously exposing the dark underbelly of academe, not just in its anti-Semitism, but in the way it has been decreasing admissions for  American students in favor of unvetted and often anti-American foreign students, and also systematically discriminating against conservative/traditional/pro-Western beliefs in faculty hiring and student admissions. 

Over the weekend CO reposted a tweet from Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) (whoever that is), pointing out that within 20 minutes of Harvard President Alan Garber sanctimoniously proclaiming that, “Harvard is not Harvard without its international students,” Garber awarded an honorary Harvard degree (I’m guessing in “Anti-Semitism Studies?”) to Elaine Kim, who supports efforts to “ban Israeli students from all universities.”

Ugh.  Kestenbaum summarizes the situation perfectly: “Israel is an American ally.  Harvard is not.” 

Yep.

I think Trump’s next move was a stroke of genius: he threatened to send $3 billion in grant money away from Harvard and to trade schools instead.  It’s probably an empty threat, but I like the idea, and it reinforces Trump’s appeal to working class voters: The Dems are for the rich elites getting grievance studies degrees at Harvard, and he’s for blue collar folks learning a trade.   

I’m hoping that if all else fails, and courts stop Trump from letting Harvard admit thousands of foreign students, he can at least give the leftists a taste of their own medicine, and deploy the “due process” gambit.  The State Department can say, “Okay, we’re prepared to admit foreign students.  But we have to give them very thorough, due-process vetting before giving them a student visa. And if that takes 4 or 5 semesters to get done, so be it.”

I feel bad for some innocent foreign students who get caught up in that process, but that’s the price that Harvard is imposing on them by defying the laws (and the taxpaying citizens) of the United States.  Because Ivy League administrators and faculty need to learn the real meaning of something they’ve been chanting for years: no one is above the law!

Finally, speaking of jihad enthusiasts, Hamas might be running out of Sinwars. 

You might remember that Yahya Sinwar was the leader of Hamas, until the IDF caught up with him last October.  He ran into an apartment building in Gaza, where an IDF drone filmed him throwing a stick at it (rumors that he threw like a girl are confirmed, and hilarious) before they assisted him in assuming rubble temperature. 

Well Yahya had a younger brother, and his name was Muhammad.  (Unexpectedly!)  He had helped plan the October 7th massacre, and he had taken his brother’s place as a Hamas leader.  And on Saturday, Israel announced that earlier in May, they had struck an underground compound near a hospital in southern Gaza, thus sending Muhammad to his eternal reward.

Which, if I understand justice in the afterlife correctly, involves an eternity of rectal pitch-forking. 

The Israeli defense minister with the most Israeli name ever (Israel Katz!) named the two most likely senior Hamas successors to the unlamented Sinwar brothers as Izz al-Din al-Haddad and Khalil al-Hayya, and warned them, “You are next in line.”

So if you’re keeping score at home, two Sinwars have been retired, the Katz is out of the bag, and the hyphenated Izz and Khalil are on deck.  If you want to see their near future, open Duckduckgo.com and search “MLB Pitcher Randy Johnson hits a bird.” 

And then picture a flying keffiyeh, instead of a cloud of feathers.

Hamas delenda est!

Three Biden Cover-Up Stories (posted 5/30/25)

Today I need to start by thanking you for all the very nice birthday wishes and funny, warm comments.  I love this online family that CO created, and for nine birthdays now, you all have made it much more fun to fight my creeping senescence.  I haven’t been this happy since I saw Ras Baraka open for Bob Marley at Reggae-Fest ’79!

Unless it was when I saw Creeping Senescence open for Metallica at the Rosemont Horizon in ’86.  I’ve still got a little tinnitus from that one.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of a road trip is being cut off from most of the news of the day, and I feel like I should enjoy that more often. But by the same token, one of the satisfactions of being back home is that you can catch up on what you missed when you were gone.  (And realizing how much you are happy to have missed!)  

I’ve been able to zip through 10 days’ worth of podcasts on high speed this week, and it sounds like some of the biggest stories were a trifecta of revelations about Joe Biden: the audio tapes of Hur’s Biden interview were released, Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis was revealed, and Jake Tapper’s book came out, outlining the shocking discovery that Biden was out of his gourd for his entire presidency.

Unexpectedly!    

I’ve read a bunch of excerpts of the book and listened to Megyn Kelly’s solid interview of Tapper and his co-author, and it’s both fascinating and ridiculous.

The behind-the-scene details were the fascinating parts: Biden’s staff planned to put him in a wheelchair after he won re-election, but had to keep him tottering around in those waffle-stomper shoes until then.  During debate prep, ol’ Joe would just get up and wander out and sit by the pool.  He once waved around an ice cream cone to show Joe Scarborough the sword fighting moves he used to defeat Corn Pop in a duel.

Okay, I made that last one up.  But it was still believable, right?

Everything else about the book is ridiculous.  A bunch of professional politicians, media figures and “journalists” sat for interviews in which they beclowned themselves by either pretending that they had no idea that Biden was cuckoo fried chicken, or admitting that they gaslighted everyone about his dementia. 

Sam Harris, a famous atheist with an undeserved reputation for being super smart, managed to combine the worst of both gambits on a recent podcast. 

He started by playing dumb: “[Biden] clearly understands the issue as well as he ever did.  He’s just not a fluid speaker, and less and less fluid by the hour.  Right.  That is what I assumed was true.  Because of how effective this cover up was, I no longer believe that to have been true.  I think it’s quite possible that he was just checked out to a degree that I did not suspect at the time.” 

Got that?  Sherlock Harris is just now beginning to suspect what all of the millions of us PWFE (People With Functioning Eyes) knew in 2019, if not before. 

We assembled such data points as: shook hands with a ghost; mixed up his wife and sister; tripped over a sandbag; mangled the “all men are created equal” quote; tripped over a sandwich; went straight from hollering Grandpa Simpson to Creepy Whispering Guy; tripped over a grain of sand; pooped on the Pope. 

And we connected those dots. And they formed a flat line on an EEG.   Which Sam Harris could not decode.

But a few minutes later he gave the game away by admitting that he would prefer a diminished Biden if the alternative was Trump.  Or as the Breitbart headlined summed up his argument, “Harris: Would Rather Have Biden ‘In a Coma’ than ‘Evil’ Trump.”

Well, we got four years of Biden in a coma, and that was more than enough, Sammy.

The story of Biden’s metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis only adds more incriminating evidence to the Biden cover-up scandal.  At first the MSM tried to act like this was a surprising new development, but many cancer doctors almost immediately came forward to say that it takes at least 5 years – and more likely 7 to 10 – for slow-growing prostate cancer to spread to the bones.

Then some poor hack suggested that many men are no longer screened for prostate cancer after they turn 75, since they’re more likely to die of other causes before their prostate kills them.  So Biden probably wasn’t even aware he had it. 

Annnnddddd… then PWFBs (People With Functioning Brains) all pointed out that sure, maybe Gus, the retiree on the local HOA board, might not get PSA tests after 75.  But you know who Gus isn’t?

<engage Kinison filter> THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD!! OH!! OHHHH!!!!  <end Kinison filter>       

Nobody is going to believe that Biden has had cancer since at least age 74, and that he “served” as “president” from age 78 to 82, and nobody on the White House medical staff knew it.  Especially after it came out that the most prominent side effects of the drug commonly used to treat prostate cancer are problems with balance/heightened risk of falling, and mental fogginess.  

(If you look up “heightened risk of falling” and “mental fogginess” in a dictionary, you’ll find Joe Biden’s picture beside both entries.)

Finally, where does Robert Hur go to get his reputation back?   After he interviewed Biden as part of the investigation of Biden’s illegally keeping classified documents, he got flak from all sides, because his conclusion – Biden was guilty, but a jury wouldn’t convict him because he was an elderly man with a bad memory – satisfied no one.

The GOP rightly said that if Biden was too mentally incompetent to stand trial, he was too mentally incompetent to be president.  But that logical point was drowned out in an epic Schiff-storm of Democrats and MSM empty heads screaming that Hur was dishonest, incompetent and corrupt.  

They said that it was gratuitous and unprofessional to even bring up Biden’s memory, ignoring what everybody knew: Biden had kept records that he never had any right to take, and he kept them in at least three different locations, one of which is a super-safe and secure location.  I.e. in a limp cardboard box partially closed with duct tape, beside a Corvette in an unlocked garage through which Hunter’s parades of hookers would regularly wobble, on precariously high heels.

So if Hur couldn’t give a reason why he wasn’t going to prosecute Brandon, he would have had to prosecute Brandon. 

But last week, after over a year of the Democrats smearing Hur, the recordings of the Biden interview were released, and they were even worse than Biden’s debate performance.  Among other revelations, it turns out that Biden DID forget when his son Beau died – a fact he repeatedly denied.

Biden had also ranted to the press about Hur bringing up Beau, barking, “Who the hell does he think he is?!”  But the tapes show that it was not Hur but Biden who brought up Beau, in a vain attempt to figure out when he had taken some of the documents.

In other words, it was a “they said/Hur said” situation, and they were lying.  (Unexpectedly!)

If the Republicans are smart, they will investigate and archive all the details of the outrageous, gaslighting coverup the Dems orchestrated.  Because when any Dems who were anywhere around Biden try to run in 2028, the ads will write themselves:

Cut from the Dem in question praising Biden (“Behind the scenes he’s sharp as a tack.  He’s the best Biden ever!”) to any random video of Biden slurring, falling up stairs, or losing his train of thought.  Then cut from a clip of that Dem attacking Hur’s report for lying that Biden is too old or has a bad memory, to a painful excerpt of his halting fumbling for an answer.

Then fade to black, and the Voice-Over tag line:

“They lied to you then.  They’re lying to you now.”         

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think Sun Tzu said that.

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

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

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

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

I mean the Biblical David. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.  Here it goes. 

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

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

Please, let me explain! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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On Lawfare, Rule of Law and SCOTUS, Part 2 (posted 5/8/25)

I appreciate the many thoughtful comments on the first part of my debate responses to my lefty friend.  Here’s the second (and final part), though I’ve got a few thoughts to post on Friday, asking what many of you asked yesterday: Have any lefty acquaintances of yours ever become conservatives, and if so, did debates with conservatives influence their decision?

“I hadn’t really thought about this until the last 6 or 7 years or so, but there is only one part of our entire federal government which has no explicit checks on it, and that is SCOTUS.   

The legislative checks the executive, by passing legislation and over-riding presidential vetoes.  The executive checks the legislative through the veto, and the president controls foreign policy and the executive branch (though dozens of partisan leftist judges have said that that’s over now, if they have their way). 

The judicial branch checks the legislative and executive branches, and appellate courts check district courts, and SCOTUS can check appellate courts.  But as it stands, there is no means by which anybody – not the legislative, the executive, or lower courts – can check SCOTUS.  It is the highest court, and by definition it dictates what “the rule of law” means, based solely on how it interprets the constitution.  

That was not always the case.  In fact, SCOTUS first introduced that idea (by inference from the constitution) giving themselves that power in 1803 (in Marbury v Madison), and since the executive and legislative didn’t object or stop them, that never-voted-on arrangement hardened into the law of the land.  

Theoretically, the legislative can check SCOTUS by passing constitutional amendments.  But since post-Marbury, SCOTUS is the final authority on the constitution, in reality, it could just declare that a recent, legitimately passed amendment is actually unconstitutional, thus nullifying it.  (That’s basically what SCOTUS does every time it overturns a precedent.)

But in the real world, we know that that’s not completely true.  Because if it were, any 5 SCOTUS judges would be de facto dictators over us all.  I’ll give you two quick examples to illustrate the concept through absurd analogies.  Say you’ve got a SCOTUS with 5 far-right justices, and they say that by proposing a unitary executive, the constitution meant that the president has all the powers of a dictator.  So Trump IS a dictator from this day forward, and can declare himself president for life, abolish the right of leftists to vote, etc.

(I know: that’s actually very close to what some on the far-left believe right now, in their TDS fever dreams!)

Or consider the opposite: a SCOTUS with 5 far-left judges declares that hidden in the “emanations and penumbras” of the constitution is the never-heretofore-detected entitlement of all Americans to a utopian socialist scheme of free food, shelter, health care and education from the cradle to the grave.   (That’s actually pretty much how we got abortion as a “constitutional right.”  The Warren court “discovered” a right to privacy in 1965 in Griswold, and then eight years later, the Burger court piggy-backed – citing only “emanations and penumbra” – on that ruling to “discover” a right to abortion in Roe that no Founder or American citizen had ever found in two centuries of reading the constitution.) 

And since those entitlements would require a quasi- or fully totalitarian government to declare farmers, construction workers, doctors etc. to be indentured servants, and coerce them into growing the crops, building the housing and giving the medical care that those new “entitlements” demand – which is what happened in every socialist/communist state to a greater or lesser degree – SCOTUS could declare that we are henceforth a communist country, and personal freedom has been abolished.

What those absurd examples tell us is that the only real check on SCOTUS’s power is the large-scale consent of the voters.  Because while SCOTUS has no theoretical checks on its power, it also has no enforcement mechanisms for its rulings.  The executive and legislative have police, courts and military power to enforce their laws on people, and they do so regularly.  SCOTUS has nothing, unless the executive and legislative voluntarily subject themselves to its rulings, and then force them on the people.

This has happened multiple times, the most famous being when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for four years during the Civil War.  The Taney court said he couldn’t legally do that, and told him to stop it. And he said, “I’m a Republican president, and I’m going to defeat the Democrats and free their slaves, and I’m not going to let your rulings stop me, so suck it, Trebek.”  Or words to that effect.

The concept underlying this idea was probably best stated by Andrew Jackson, when he forced the movement of Indians on the Trail of Tears, despite the Marshall SCOTUS ruling that that action was unconstitutional.  Jackson allegedly (and it appears, likely apocryphally) said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”  Whether Jackson actually said that or not, those words did capture his attitude – and what actually happened – when nobody enforced the SCOTUS ruling, and the Indians got screwed. 

Many commentators on both sides regularly accuse presidents on the other side of blatantly defying the court.  Many conservatives and independents said that Obama’s DACA and DAPA actions, for example – unilaterally changing immigration law without legitimate legislation from congress – were blatantly unconstitutional.  And Obama agreed, admitting dozens of times in public that he couldn’t legally do that without action from congress…right up until he did it!  (I don’t like that guy!)  SCOTUS eventually allowed a 5th circuit ruling saying DACA and DAPA were both unconstitutional to stand – which again, Obama and everybody else knew had always been the case.

But Obama – and Biden after him, on all the examples I gave you in my last email – both defiantly said, “The constitution says X, but let somebody enforce it.”  In all those cases, SCOTUS eventually did slap them down, and they only then stopped defying the law.  But by then, they’d gotten what they’d wanted, and nobody was able to reverse their illegally gotten gains: Biden won the midterms (in part) by illegally pushing student debt transfer to the taxpayers, and he forced millions to take an experimental vaccine against their will, and he forced landlords to take losses and give free rent to tenants for 8 months before he belatedly stopped.  And over a decade since Obama knowingly defied the constitution to keep illegals here through DACA and DAPA, many millions of them are STILL here.

And like psycho kids who kill their parents and then ask for mercy from the court because they are now orphans (!), the Democrats are now insisting that the DACA and DAPA illegals must be allowed to stay, since they’ve been here so long, and have now established roots in America.  (That takes some balls!) 

Which brings us to today, and the hundred-plus legal actions against Trump, and the troubling possible outcomes of them.  The lefties are saying that every action that Trump takes is creating a “constitutional crisis.”  Conservatives and some independents are saying that the lawfare being waged against every presidential action is essentially giving 677 local judges the power to totally paralyze the executive branch – a result that has never happened before, and was never contemplated in the constitution – and is what’s causing a “constitutional crisis.”

I think there’s a chance that these will become self-fulfilling prophecies.  I’m hoping that SCOTUS rules correctly, and allows Trump to do what all presidents before him have done: control budget and personnel in the executive branch; enforce immigration and civil rights laws as written, etc. 

But if SCOTUS doesn’t do that, I think Trump – or most presidents, really – could possibly follow the examples of Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, and say, “Roberts has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”  And then that would REALLY be a constitutional crisis. 

The reason I think that could happen is the crucial difference between now and the earlier examples: Trump would have the consent of the majority of the governed.   It’s true that Biden and Obama both eventually did submit to the SCOTUS rulings.  But they only violated the law in the first place because they knew that they couldn’t have gotten what they wanted legitimately, because the majority of the public was against what they wanted to do.  And they only belatedly submitted in the end because they’d gotten what they wanted, and because public outrage would have produced the crisis that their continuing lawlessness would have justly brought down on them.

Trump, on the other hand – and I know you hate his guts, and think he’s wrong about everything – is doing everything he ran on, and that the majority of the voters want.  (In fact, even though he’s always been a divisive figure personally – because of his tendency toward assholery! – achieving personal approval ratings of 50/50ish at best, his major campaign promises all received majority polling approval.) 

During the campaign, he clearly laid out the agenda that the dozens of leftist mini-president judges are now thwarting.  He said he would close the border and build a wall; deport the illegals, fight DEI, etc.

I’m not saying that popular approval means everything, and that the majority should get everything it wants.  (At one time, majorities in the south wanted slavery, majorities approved of mistreating Indians, and of FDR penning up Japanese Americans, etc.)

But I think the far left of the Democrat party – and their partisan judges – are effectively arguing that majority will means NOTHING, if it goes against their own political preferences.  The people may have voted to enforce the border, protect women, cut bureaucracy, and all the rest, but they can pound sand, because a few dozen local judges know better. 

And that’s NOT the way our system is supposed to work, or has ever worked!

It’s not about Trump, man!  It’s about us, and what we voted for.  (And by we, I don’t mean just conservatives, but also the independents who won him the election, and the higher number of blacks, Hispanics, married women, and young people than any Republican president has won in over 40 years!)  Those of us who loathed Biden – and those who gave him a chance, but quickly soured on his nasty, incompetent governing and obvious mental deficiencies – weren’t happy, but we didn’t riot for months like antifa and BLM, and we didn’t try to assassinate him.  Most of us thought the election had been rigged, but we couldn’t prove that it had been stolen, so that’s the way it goes.  He won a narrow victory, so he got to set the agenda, and we had to live to fight another day. 

Well, now it’s another day, and we played by the rules, and we won.  Convincingly, if narrowly in the popular vote.  But now we’re told that we can’t get what he ran on, because it makes the other side mad?   To quote Dr. Evil, “How about NO!” 

I think that defying the will of the majority of the people in that way is dangerous, and I think that what Schumer illegally threatened to do to judges who defied his will could eventually happen to the far left: they’re sowing the wind, and they might end up reaping the whirlwind. 

I REALLY don’t want that to happen, and because I’m fundamentally an optimist, I don’t think that it will.  But the Boasberg-types on the district courts are playing with fire.

To wrap up (finally! 😊), I think a healthy fear of the kinds of tensions I’ve just summarized is part of what underlies the conservative/originalist view of the constitution and SCOTUS: judges should be humble, and do their best to rule based on what the constitution says, regardless of their own political preferences.   (Thus conservative judges often vote against their own politics, as when Scalia upheld flag burning, even though he repeatedly said that he’d love to see it outlawed, etc.) 

The progressive judicial view, on the other hand, is “the living constitution” theory, which holds that since society is always evolving, SCOTUS should be willing to change our laws to reflect that evolution.  (Sarcastic jerks like me call this the “just make shit up” approach. 😊) And they don’t mean to do that through constitutional amendments, the way the mostly conservative, genius Founders set things up – which is very difficult to do, b/c it involves that pesky “respecting democracy” stuff — but through fiat, by the diktat of 5 legislators in robes.

Two quick examples of that: Before Roe, the entire nation was working through the issue of abortion on a traditional, consent-of-the-governed, federalist basis: conservative states were passing laws to make abortions harder to get, and liberal ones were making them easier.  But then SCOTUS stepped in and short-circuited the democratic process, and dictated a poorly reasoned and controversial new “law of the land,” forcing it down on all 50 states.

The Obergefell decision in 2015 did the same thing with gay marriage.  Laws on that issue were being proposed, debated and voted on in many states. (And, infuriatingly to progressives, usually being voted down, even in deep-blue CA.)  Then SCOTUS stepped in, “discovered” that the Founders and the constitution had always wanted gay marriage everywhere, and forced that decision on all 50 states. 

Interestingly, I think the intervening years have proven that even though both of those decisions were arrived at in an unconstitutional and wrong way, one of them has the democratic approval of the voters, and the other does not.  Obergefell is the former: society was evolving toward more tolerance of gay marriage, and many if not most states would likely have approved it by now anyway.

(In fact, even in 2015, a reasonable, democratic compromise was being worked out.  “Civil union” laws were being passed that stopped discrimination against gays in relationships – not recognizing their marital rights in divorce or inheritance, or their right to ‘next of kin/spousal privileges’ in health care situations, etc. – without coercing the majority into calling that “marriage,” when marriage had never meant that before.  That seems like a reasonable, compassionate way to work out some differences without screwing with people you disagree with.  And it was interrupted by an arrogant court who acted like a legislature – a fundamental breach of our Founding and constitutional law – and created a new law.)

How do I know that Obergefell has democratic approval, despite the legally illegitimate way it was forced on us?  Because even though it’s only 10 years old, and many millions of Americans still don’t accept the validity of calling gay unions “marriage,” there have been no serious challenges or widespread social unrest over it.  The country has accepted it and moved on.

The Roe court did the same thing – legislating from the bench in a way that invalidated the many state legislative debates about abortion that were going on, and dictating to the entire nation by making up a new, foundational law that had never existed before.  But the reaction was the opposite of that to Obergefell: that law was fought over and challenged constantly for 50 years, with no signs of passions diminishing.  Every January, millions of Americans protested in frigid temps in DC in the March for Life, which mourned the anniversary of the Roe decision.  And finally, after half a century, a quasi-originalist/conservative court undid the Roe mistake (IMHO), in Dobbs.

I know that most progressives are still outraged because they think that Dobbs “banned abortion.”  But of course it did nothing of the sort!  It just sent abortion back to the states, where it belonged.  And the enthusiasm for abortion rights in most blue states has given Dems a lot of electoral victories over the GOP in the last 3 years, and by some counts, there are more abortions happening now that there were before Dobbs.  (Which I find depressing, as democratic outcomes often are.)

The result of Dobbs can best be summarized in a political cartoon I saw in its aftermath: an  angry pro-choice crowd is confronting the SCOTUS justices.  Their screams are in a speech bubble: “5 judges should not be allowed to dictate abortion law!”  And a thought bubble over the 5 quasi-originalist judges says, “That’s exactly what we just said!” 

So I think Dobbs resulted in a just outcome: conservative states in which voters believe that abortion after viability – or 15 weeks, or 6 weeks, or whatever the voters decide – is infanticide-adjacent have banned later term abortions, with the big 3 exceptions.  Progressive states, in which voters believe that a baby is part of the mother’s body rather than a separate entity, or at least that a mother’s choice supersedes those of a fetus/zygote/tissue mass/baby (?), have passed laws that allow abortion – in 9 states plus DC, right up until the moment of birth!  (I almost can’t believe that that is true, but in AK, OR, CO, NM, MN, MI, MD, NJ and VT, if a doctor can get a scalpel into a baby’s skull before it crowns out of the birth canal, that killing is totally legal!)

As a conservative, and a sinful, flawed follower of Uncle Jesus, I appreciate our federalist system, which allows me to not violate my conscience on this issue.  I am free to (and will) never live in a blue state that would force me to tolerate (and pay for) abortions after viability, which I believe is murder. 

Similarly, progressives are free to never live in a red state governed by laws passed by troglodyte, evil, patriarchal fascists like me (in their view 😊) who would prevent them from aborting their babies at will.

In this fallen world, I think that is the best possible outcome we’re likely to ever get.  Especially when the alternative is to allow arrogant judges to force everyone to violate their consciences based on those judges’ whims, and/or whoever controls the White House and congress on any given day.”