Tag: Politics

On Lawfare, Rule of Law, and SCOTUS, Part 1 (posted 5/7/25)

If you missed my column on Monday, I mentioned that I’d be posting parts of a debate I’ve been having with a good old friend of mine who is a committed lefty.  I value his friendship – and that of a handful of other long-time leftist friends – in part because knowing him reminds me that everybody on the other side isn’t like the morally bankrupt dullards who make up the elite left, and run the national Democrat party!

There are good Democrats out there, and we shouldn’t be enemies, or let our differences end friendships.  (Unless they make that choice by demanding our agreement with, or submission to, their ideas.)  Their arguments can clarify issues, sharpen our thinking, and sometimes change our minds. 

And while life is too short to get upset over politics, a spirited debate with a good-faith interlocutor who is open to reasonable argument is one of the pleasures of a well-rounded life.  So I thought I’d post some excerpts in the hopes that at least some in CO nation will find this discussion interesting.

I’ve done some editing to remove some personal information and summarize some context, and my friend’s framing of the issues.  (So this won’t really be a debate, as much as my half of it, responding to the topics he raises.)    

This discussion started with him advancing the idea that Trump has repeatedly acted lawlessly, citing the many court cases against him in 2023-24, his conviction on so many counts in the Stormy Daniels case, and especially his defiance of SCOTUS and resistance to giving due process to many deportees, and especially Kilmar Garcia.  And he ended his email to me with a rhetorical challenge as to whether I think everyone should follow “the rule of law.”

I discussed the many flaws in the lawfare cases against Trump, but I agreed with him that Trump would have been better served just bringing Kilmar back – but only to a detention center, where he would get a quickie hearing confirming the original two judges’ decision that he was here illegally, and associated with MS-13.  Then he could be immediately re-deported, but just not to the CECOT prison.

What follows are my thoughts on the “rule of law” as national Democrats are using it, and then on the way Biden and Obama adhered (or didn’t) to the rule of law:   

“Moving on to something that I think we might only mostly agree on, but you can tell me: yes, we should abide by the rule of law.  But as a blanket statement, that hides several types of complications that I’m sure neither one of us would agree to.  To take the most glaring type of examples: If you and I were alive in 1858, the law of the land included the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857), which meant that blacks could never be citizens, and if an escaped slave made it to your farmhouse, you’d be required to hold him at gunpoint and give him back to his master.  A century later, we’d both have to accept segregated schools, because “separate but equal” was the law of the land until Brown v Board of Education changed it.  And Lincoln famously suspended one of the central legal concepts in our system, habeas corpus (for years, and in contravention of multiple specific rulings from the Taney SCOTUS that he had no authority to do so), when the alternative was to make it harder to fight the South.

So neither of us would accept “submit to the rule of law” as a universal statement.  I’m obviously not comparing any action of Trump or any of our courts now to Dred or Brown.  I’m just pointing out that the rhetorical question, “do you believe in rule of law or not?” creates a false binary that you would not accept 100% any more than I would.

But let me get to a relevant, real-world application of the rule of law idea.  Over 100 legal cases have been filed, and district court judges’ TRO’s have been put on practically every action Trump has taken (from hiring and firing in the executive branch, to enforcing our immigration laws, to stopping Harvard from allowing bullies to violate our civil rights laws in their attacks on Jews, to stopping biological males from going into women’s sports, showers and bathrooms) which is unprecedented.

By comparison, I think I remember that the first TRO ever filed by a district court judge in US history was in the mid-1960s, and the total injunctions against all presidents before this year is around 100.  (As I understand it, before then, nobody ever thought that a local judge – one of 677 nationwide – had the authority to dictate legal and political action in the entire country.  I’m not sure how or why that understanding, which seems like commonsense to me, has morphed into our current situation, in which we now have 677 unelected, de facto shadow presidents who can dictate nationwide policy and paralyze the executive branch, potentially for months or years on end.)  In other words, more have been filed in Trump’s first 90 days than were filed in all of prior US history.

The right-wing commentariat sees that as proof that the left is engaging in a defiant, lawless wave of “lawfare” and an assault on democracy, since it is meant to deny a legitimately elected president whom they hate the ability to carry out the constitutionally prescribed duties of the chief executive.

The left-wing commentariat sees that as proof of Trump’s lawlessness.  “Look at all of that smoke – there has to be a fire there!  These judges are only taking their constitutionally sanctioned jobs seriously, and checking an executive whom they believe is ignoring the rule of law.”  In fact, most of the legacy media lefties are treating the amount of judges ruling (temporarily) against Trump as prima facie evidence that he’s in the wrong.

I think that’s a fair summary of the two sides’ positions, and there are two ways to decide who is closer to right.  The one that we should all do as citizens is to look at the cases and the arguments, and use our God-given reason to evaluate the evidence to come to a conclusion.  (I expect that you and I will do a lot of this in the coming weeks or months, and I look forward to it!)

But the one way that matters most in the real world is obviously what happens when all of these cases are settled, either at the appellate level or the SCOTUS level. If the lawyers you cited a couple months ago are right, and Trump loses the vast majority of these cases on appeal or at SCOTUS, and he then defies those rulings, you’ll be able to say that he’s violating the rule of law, possibly even as much as Biden did.  (More on that below.) 

If, on the other hand, I’m right, and Trump wins the majority of these cases – either because an appellate court found for him and SCOTUS didn’t take it up on appeal, or because lower courts found against him and SCOTUS reversed them – will you then agree that “the rule of law” dictates that you and all of the progressives in the nation cannot legally prevent Trump from carrying out Obama-style deportations, streamlining executive agencies, protecting women from biological males in sports and bathrooms, forcing the Ivy League to either comply with federal civil rights laws or lose federal funds, etc.? 

I’m going to guess that’s a hard NO! 😊 If so, will you then be a proud conscientious objector to “the rule of law?”  And if that’s the case, are you sure that you’re as devoted to the rule of law as you’ve thought you were?  I’m not trying to irritate you, but I think that’s worth contemplating.

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Finally, I share some of your concerns about the role of SCOTUS, but I’d like to save that for my next email.  Instead, I’d like to end with 4 examples (not counting Biden’s systematic breaking of our immigration laws) of issues on which Biden and the Dems have openly violated and flouted SCOTUS rulings, and see how many of them you agree with me on.  I’m not bringing them up to make a tu quoque argument, but to explore your ideas about rule of law.

The four issues are: illegal student loan “forgiveness,” forced covid vaccine use, illegal eviction moratoria, and sanctuary city/state violations of the supremacy clause.  I’ve summarized them, but if you already know them well, you can just skim to the bottom.

1. The student loan “forgiveness” program.  This was obviously popular with a couple of groups who are (unexpectedly!) a big part of the Democrat support base: students who had school loans, and universities who would profit greatly from more students attending in the belief they would be able to stick the taxpayers with the bill.

If Biden wanted to do this legitimately, he could have tried to get a bill passed through congress and then sign it.  But he knew that he couldn’t do that, because the majority of Americans hated the idea. (That pesky democracy again!) So he acted unilaterally, and simply declared that many billions of dollars of school debt was no longer the responsibility of those who had borrowed it and benefited from it, but of the taxpayers.  He first attempted to do it in August of 2022, and even NPR admitted that “its warm reception by younger voters may have contributed to Democrats’ better than expected showing in the midterms.”

Of course Biden didn’t care that this cynical, illegal vote-buying scheme was clearly unconstitutional – it helped him stop a GOP “red wave.”  And by the time SCOTUS shot it down (duh!) in June of 2023, he’d unethically gotten the result he wanted.  But Biden still didn’t abide by the rule of law; instead, he pushed the work-around SAVE act, which tried to do the same thing, except by instituting an income-based repayment plan, with a shortened time until the remaining balance would be forgiven.  (The result was the same: billions of debt transferred from those who owed it to those who didn’t!)  

By August of 2024, that plan too had been stopped by appellate courts, and SCOTUS finally killed it on the same grounds as before: a president isn’t a king who can unilaterally stick a bunch of poor and working-class people with the debts voluntarily taken out by generally richer college graduates. 

And rather than accepting that the courts had gone against him, Biden demonized the GOP and the courts, accusing them of “literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives.  These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working class and middle class Americans.”

Ugh!  You can’t get more dishonest than telling people that the GOP wouldn’t let him “forgive their student debt,” when he knew damn well that he couldn’t legally do that.   If that wasn’t bad enough, he then bragged about defying the rule of law: “The Supreme Court blocked us.  But that didn’t stop us.  We continued to find ways to reduce student payments.”

2.  Biden and the Dems did the same thing with the covid vaccine mandates.  In 2022 – over a year after we knew for certain that the vax did not prevent you from getting it or spreading it, and after a lot of evidence of the danger of sometimes deadly and often lifetime-injury-causing heart damage (myocarditis and pericarditis) in young people, especially males – Biden rammed through a requirement forcing federal employees to take the experimental shot or lose their jobs.  (No more spouting off about “my body, my choice!”)  He also tried to force large private employers to coerce their employees to take the shot.  Even as he was doing that, he admitted that SCOTUS might say that it was unconstitutional…but he did it anyway.  Eventually SCOTUS slapped down those policies, but not until millions of healthy people had been strong-armed into submitting.

3. When he first came into office, Biden pushed a moratorium on tenants having to pay rent for a few months, and then he extended it for 3 more months.  At least he tried to use congress to pay for this, though he only secured $25 billion in aid, which was already $80 billion short of what was needed to cover the rent that tenants had stopped paying by late spring.  A responsible pol would have either gone back for more cash, or else told the public the free rent had to stop.  Instead, Biden extended his federal eviction moratorium that Congress had NOT authorized (and which was clearly unconstitutional on its face) and that he knew wouldn’t be paid for, forcing landlords to allow their tenants to squat in their properties for the foreseeable future.

As you can imagine, that was personal for me, since it threatened to bankrupt me.  I know some lefties loved the idea of poorer tenants getting to stick it to “rich” landlords, except that many small landlords like me rely on rents being paid to survive.  (Not to mention the fact that stealing is wrong, even if you empathize with the thief and hate his victim!)  And of course the Dems didn’t force the REALLY rich –  huge corporations like Deutsche Bank, Chase, Bank of America, etc. – to take it in the shorts.  Only guys like me.

So my tenants could tell me to suck it, and sit in my houses without paying.  But I didn’t get a “mortgage moratorium” – if I had stopped paying my mortgages to Chase for six months, they’d have taken my houses from me. 

SCOTUS finally ruled the obvious way in June of 2021, ordering the Dems to stop boning landlords.  So what did the “Rule of Law” party do?  (Can you tell this example gets me especially pissed? 😊)  They told SCOTUS to stick it, and kept screwing landlords for three more months, forcing them to apply for emergency relief, which SCOTUS finally gave them in a pointed opinion at the end of August, after 8 months of Biden-caused losses.  

(I didn’t have any losses, because I live in a state with a great governor who declared that squatting wasn’t going to work in Florida.  And because I’ve got good tenants.  And because any tenants who tried to stiff me would have seen the murder in my eyes, as well as the likelihood that I’d burn my own property down before I’d let some deadbeat squat in it.  Because: Appalachia!)

4. The sanctuary city/state policies that many progressive local governments have are also clearly illegal as well.  But when some GOP governors and pols (and now Trump) started talking about withholding federal funds to get compliance, the progressives said that the GOP was the law violator.  Because sanctuary cities should be able to break federal laws at will, while still being entitled to full funding from the government whose laws they are breaking, I guess?

This despite a lot of precedent from the 1970s and 80s, in which multiple SCOTUS rulings said that the federal government could withhold federal highway funds (for one example) to coerce states into following federal wishes (not even laws, but just things the feds wanted!), e.g. changing speed limits or drinking ages to ones the feds approved of. 

In all of the above cases, when SCOTUS – not a partisan lower court judge, but the highest court – ruled against lefty wishes, Biden and Dems showed no respect for the rule of law.  He defied one ruling after another, demonized SCOTUS on student loan “forgiveness,” said that the vax ruling was “a mistake,” and also smeared the obviously correct affirmative action/racial discrimination ruling against Harvard as evidence that “this is not a normal court.” 

And I don’t remember Chris Van Hollen or any other national Democrat excoriating Biden for flouting the rule of law! (In fact, Chuck Schumer directly threatened SCOTUS judges whose rulings he didn’t like: “You’ll never know what hit you, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, you’ll reap the whirlwind…”)”

Okay, this hasn’t been my usual snark-fest of a column, but I’m curious to hear CO nation’s thoughts. 

For those who are willing to persevere, I’ll post more tomorrow, this time on the likelihood of an actual “constitutional crisis” if this lawfare persists…

Hamas delenda est!

Tim Walz Thinks He Can Talk to Regular Guys, & a Greek Lady Blows Herself Up (Posted 5/5/25)

I’ve got a hodge podge of stories for you this Monday, starting with the results from Friday’s semi-final round of the April Moron of the Month competition.  This vote was the closest so far, with Chris Van Halen edging out the broke baristas and Grandma Squanto to move on from the southern division.

So the competition has come down to four finalists, in reverse chronological order: 

Chris Van Hollen in his role as a dim-witted Juliet with a school-girl crush on brooding, gang-banging wife-beater Kilmar “Romeo” Garcia

Michelle Obama for her performance as a narcissist, and also a bitter, angry, black woman upset by the stereotype of black women as angry and bitter  

Elie Mystal, a racist, public “intellectual” who apparently thinks the constitution was written after 1965, and

Jasmine “Lashes” Crockett, another thick-as-a-whale-omelette racist who thought she was taking the moral high ground by arguing that we should allow illegals to stay here because… wait for it… we need them to be our slaves! 

If you need to refresh your memory on the finalists, you can see their nominating write-ups in four of my April columns, available at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Get your votes in this week, and I’ll announce the winner on Friday.  

Among the many worthy contestants I could have written about as April MOM contestants was former VP candidate Tim Walz, who recently gave a speech at Harvard (because of course he did) that touched on why Que Mala chose him as her VP pick. 

You’ve all heard his explanation: “I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease.  I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can… vote for this.”

Or maybe we can’t.

I don’t claim to be King of the White Guys with pickup trucks who like football – though I am a member of the Ruling Council – but phony phrases like “code talking” are just the kind of idiotic language that we laugh at during our Council meetings. 

The word “code” implies some mysterious language, shared by a small in-group that is opaque to the larger world.  It calls to mind secret writing in invisible ink, Enigma machines, or Navajo code-talkers who outfoxed our enemies in WWII by using their obscure dialect that no outsiders could understand.

But men are almost half of the population, and we’re not particularly mysterious.  A thousand hack comics have done a thousand cliched bits about the limited set of interests – in addition to the aforementioned football and pickup trucks – that most men have: ancient Rome, World War II, action movies, women with a .7 waist-to-hip ratio and who like men, and 2-3 items from the following list: fishing, hunting, MMA, booze, cigars, and guns. 

Even when it comes to politics, we’re pretty predictable.  Give us lower taxes, law and order, free speech, merit-based rules, men kept out of women’s sports and spaces, and the right to shoot criminals who try to victimize us, and we’re good. 

Did you notice some of the stuff NOT on that list?

Jazz hands, crazy wives, tampons in men’s bathrooms, struggling to load a shotgun as if you’d never seen a shotgun before, and abandoning your National Guard unit right before you’re supposed to deploy with them to a war zone.  

Oh, and you know what NO pick-up driving, football-watching white guy would EVER seek from a theatre-kid, Temu Midwestern guy weirdo in a million years? 

“Permission” to vote the way we want to.

Which leaves only one thing we agree with Tim Walz about: he’s a knucklehead.

From Greece comes a new entry in the “Stupid Criminals” category:  

I have not kept up on a lot of current events in Greece, but apparently they’ve got a problem with crime, just like everywhere else.  Some of that problem comes from radical leftist groups who think that using violence to achieve their political ends is justified. 

Unexpectedly!

One such group calling itself Revolutionary Class Struggle – I hereby subtract 10 points for lack of originality – has recently decided to start bombing public buildings such as train stations.  One of their suspected members, a 38-year-old woman with a criminal record, carried out another bombing last Saturday morning.  

Her target was a bank building’s ATM.  She was apparently a firm believer in the old Greek saying, “Αν θέλετε κάτι να γίνει σωστά, κάντε το μόνοι σας.”  (“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”)

Because she took the bomb to the bank herself.  Unfortunately for her, just when she got to the site, she experienced the heartbreak of premature detonation.  She was carrying the bomb in her hands when it went off, and was so badly wounded that she was rushed to a nearby ancient amphitheater, where she died dramatically on stage.

Just kidding.  She was taken to a hospital and died there.  

No security video from the ATM has been released, but I’m guessing it sounded something like this:

“iii laos, enomenos, den mporei pote na ittithei – mpoum!”

Translation: “The people, united, can never be defeat—Boom!”

Followed by: “och!  ta car mou!  metaniono amesos gia tis apophases mou!”

Translation: “Ouch!  My hands!  I immediately regret my decisions!”

You may be wondering, “Martin, do you think your old Greek professor would be proud of you using English-to-Greek translation software to make fun of a leftist Greek terrorist getting blown up by her own bomb, instead of translating Aristotle, or the New Testament?”

Fine.  You got me.  I’m a complicated man, and though I love Greek philosophy and the New Testament, I’m also not above enjoying a little Three-Stooges-style illustration of the “you reap what you sow” verses.   

Especially when it comes at the expense of a would-be terrorist who apparently knew as little about bombs as Tim Walz knows about shotguns.

And just like the citizens of California, and New York, and Illinois, and other blue states and cities all over the world, that Greek gal learned a valuable, universal lesson: leftist plans tend to blow up in your face!

Okay, that’s it for my Monday column. 

Over the next several days, I’m going to post a few columns that are unusual for me.  I’ve been corresponding with several lefty friends, and one of them challenged me on the question of rule of law, and what I think of Trump’s defying SCOTUS in getting Kilmar back from El Salvador.  I gave him my thoughts, but also pointed out the many ways that Biden (and Obama) have defied the rule of law and the courts.

I then got to thinking about the nature of SCOTUS, and the ways in which its past and recent actions could potentially lead to an actual “constitutional crisis” – unlike the faux ones that the left imagines every time Trump does something they don’t like.

The result is several columns’ worth of my more-sober-than-usual thoughts on the courts.  I’ll be interested in seeing what many in CO nation think of those, and especially what any lawyers here may add, in terms of corrections and explanations…

Hamas delenda est!

The Final April Moron of the Month Nominees (posted 5/2/25)

Now that May is here, it’s time to complete the April Moron of the Month nominations.  For this final round, we have three nominees from the southern division.  Next week I’ll put the four “winners” from all divisions up to a full vote of CO Nation.

Our first nominee today arose during the raging debate about whether Trump should be allowed to do what all presidents before him were allowed to do – i.e. deport people who came here illegally.  In their zeal to jump on a political grenade, and thus cling like grim death to the 5% side of a 95-5 political issue, the Dems scoured the countryside to find what I’ve called “a self-detonating hero.”

First they picked Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Hamas activist at Columbia.  But since he was here on a student visa, he wasn’t a good pawn for the Dems who were trying to scare Americans that American citizens could be deported next.  So they went looking for an innocent, sympathetic American citizen whom Trump’s Gestapo illegally deported…annnnnndddd… they couldn’t find one. 

Because they’re lying, and Trump isn’t deporting squeaky clean seminarians who are also American citizens. 

So they eventually landed on Kilmar Abrego Garcia and said, “Close enough.  He’s married to an American citizen and has a couple of citizen kids, so we’ll call him a ‘Maryland father’ and lean in on the pathos.”

This struck many elected Dems as a great idea, and one of them elbowed his way to the front of that low-IQ pack.  This man, and today’s first nominee, is Senator Chris Van Hollen, a man so bland that even a political junkie like me could not have recognized his face or his name a month ago.  (And I remember that Senator Flat-Top from Montana who just lost was named Jon Tester.)

If you had put a gun to my head in March and said, “Tell me who Chris Van Hollen is or I’ll blow your head off!” I would have immediately started flop-sweating and guessing. 

“Um, the black guy who’s reasonable about 10% of the time?” (No, that’s Van Jones.)

“Uh, the great Irish singer?” (That’s Van Morrison.)

“Okay… that space thing?” (You mean the Van Allen Belt?)

“The classical pianist?” (That’s Van Cliburn.)

“Just shoot me already!”

And, scene.

Anyway, this mediocre man took one look at Kilmar the tattooed wife beater (allegedly) (but c’mon!), and saw his big chance.  He ran in front of the cameras and began to pontificate.  “Donald Trump’s midnight kidnapping and subsequent illegal deportation of my constituent Kilmar cannot be allowed to stand!  I am going to go to El Salvador myself, and demand to see him!”

And the reporters all looked at each other.  Then one said, “And you are?”

And Van Hollen drew himself up to his full height – probably 5’5”, though I haven’t checked – and said, “Senator Chris Van Hollen!”

After a long moment of blank stares, one reporter pointed to him and said, “Ooh!  Were you the drummer, when Eddie was shredding on the guitar and Roth was the front man?!”

“Um, no.  That was Alex Van Halen.  I’m Chris Van Hollen.”

And the reporters gave a disappointed groan.  “Awwww.”

But they soon realized that they might be able to use what’s-his-name to hurt Trump, if it turned out that Kilmar had been tortured in El Salvador.  So they encouraged his delusions of relevance, and followed him south. 

You know the rest.  Van Hollen flew to El Salvador, bloviated for the cameras, and eventually got to go on a dream date with everyone’s favorite Maryland man.  

They stared deep into each other’s eyes, while Van Hollen stroked Kilmar’s hand — although that may have been to try to cover up the gang tattoos – while Kilmar whispered in a throaty Spanish accent, “My turn-ons are long walks on the beach, giving my wife a pop when she gets a little mouthy, and human trafficking.  My turn-offs are the rule of law and Hulk Homan™.”

It was a PR disaster.  (Unexpectedly!)

Within two weeks, Van Hollen went from total unknown, to vaguely recognizable opportunist, to political poison.  When several elected Dems with ten-cent heads followed in his footsteps and flew to El Salvador a few days later, the party leaders had a fit.  Hakeem Jeffries had to make a humiliating public statement: No more going to El Salvador, you morons.  

Our second nominee is an old favorite: the Pale Pawnee, the Translucent Tonkawa, the Land o’ Lakes Butter Maiden come to life… Grandma Squanto Warren!  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

She might have qualified based on one tweet alone, from April 21st.  She was responding to Trump’s announcement that student loan repayment was going to re-start, after 5 years of using covid as an excuse for embracing dead-beat borrower status. 

This was one of Trump’s most popular actions, and a smart politician would have kept her powder dry on this one.  Or I guess in her case, her arrows quivered?

But not “Ghost Dances with Entitlement.”  She fired off this tweet: “This decision is all about punishing student loan borrowers.  Instead of lowering costs, Trump wants to take money out of your grandma’s Social Security check.”

What can you even say about that?  Other than, “Shameless!” and “Feh!”  Insisting that borrowers pay what they owe is “punishing them?”  And why drag grandma and her social security check into this?

But that wasn’t Warren’s low-light of the month.  Because that came in the podcast interview she did with a guy named Sam Fragoso — and if you haven’t seen it, you should. 

Fragoso comes across as a non-threatening presence – he’s got the vibe of somebody who might be halfway through a transition, and I’m not sure which direction he’s going in.  But he has enough integrity to at least push back when Warren is obviously lying.

The topic was Biden’s mental condition, and when Fragoso asked if she regretted saying that “Biden had a mental acuity” and “a sharpness to him,” Lizzie tried.  After an awkward pause, she said, “I said what I believed to be true.”

When Fragoso gently followed up, “Do you think he was as sharp as you?” it caught her by surprise.  She let the mask slip for a moment, and almost laughed at that absurd idea, before salvaging a careful, “I…said that… I had not seen a decline.”

A few seconds later, she gave it the old war-path try: “The thing is… he… Look. He was sharp, he was on his feet, I saw him, live event—”

Fragoso once again showed more integrity than the MSM hacks she is used to dealing with, because he interrupted her with a little sarcasm: “Senator, ‘on his feet’ is not praise!  He can speak in sentences is not praise.”

And Liz visibly crumbled, shaking her head and grimacing guiltily.  “All right.  Fair enough, fair enough.” 

Her surrender couldn’t have been more clear if she had recited the last lines of her ancestor, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce’s famous surrender speech: “Hear me, my chiefs; my heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Of course, she’s a phony politician, and her interviewer is sympathetic to the leftist cause.  So when she followed with the lamest rhetorical escape attempt – saying, “The question is… what are we going to do now?” Fragoso said okay, and let her move on to talking about how the Dems are going to resist Trump. 

But for that brief, shining moment, she looked as dumb as she had when she proudly announced that her DNA test proved that she was Native American

.0000023 % Native American!

My final nominee is a departure, in that it is not an individual, but a group: the baristas who work at a small, upscale chain of Minnesota coffee shops called Café Ceres. 

Last fall, the coffee-slingers at all four locations voted to unionize, and then started a six-month negotiation.  Though they ended up earning in the range of $25-30 an hour with tips, plus 80% coverage of their insurance premiums, that was not enough.  They also demanded “a role in managing the business” including deciding where the chain sourced its milk, and the right to wear pro-Hamas pins at work. 

Annnnddddd…the owners said screw it, and closed the business.  (Unexpectedly!)

To which the only reasonable response is one firm blast from the sad trombone (Wah, wahhhh!), followed by a chorus of, “Ha! HA! HA HA!  HA HA HA!”

The denouement of this episode of “FAFO Comes to Breakfast” was a hilariously tone-deaf and delusional press release from the entitled workers, after they discovered that the real minimum wage is zero:

“We bargained with the company for 6 months, fighting them each step of the way to include immigration protections, fair wages, healthcare, and to secure DEI values…. We’re devastated…. We’re now faced with the harsh reality of finding new work and making last minute plans to stay secure.” 

You mean that your employer wasn’t eager to put up with your stupid DEI values, just for the privilege of trying to manage a group of surly employees who “fight them every step of the way?”   The hell you say!

They’ve got one thing right, though: they are now facing harsh reality. 

And if they can actually look in a mirror, and learn from this experience – throwing the pro-Hamas pin in the trash would also be a good move – it might not be too late for some of them to avoid that particular circle of Dante’s Inferno that they had been heading for.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Circle of the Bitter, Entitled, Leftist Cat Ladies.

Because as their former employers and boyfriends who dodged that bullet warn anyone willing to listen, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter there!”

Okay CO nation, place your votes…

…and Hamas delenda est!

My Report Card on Trump’s First 100 Days (posted 4/30/25)

Though I got too busy to respond to the comments on Monday’s column, it’s clear that Michelle Obama has advanced out of the semi-finals in the Moron of the Month competition.  And let me thank you all for your votes, and your kind comments.

However, when I mentioned that I am not going to succumb to the requests to post nude selfies on my website in a desperate attempt to boost my subscriber count, some of you – a hurtful number, to be honest – insisted that you wouldn’t want that anyway.

Jennifer England Land was typical, posting, “Here for the words not the nudes.”

Nice try, Jennifer, but I know all about reverse psychology, and I’m not going to fall for your sneaky ploy.  I’ve spoken with your husband, and we both agree that you need to take a cold shower and focus on the political humor. 

Now if I can just repeatedly snap my fingers and remind everyone in CO nation that my eyes are up here, I’ll continue with my report card on Trump’s First 100 Days.   

To celebrate the fact that the Cubs have not yet been mathematically eliminated from this year’s playoff race, I’m going to say that I think Trump is batting around .750 right now, which is the best since Reagan by a long shot, and roughly .749 better than Biden.   

(It’s hard to assess a comparable batting average for Reagan, because the political game was so different in the 1980s.  We weren’t the brokest nation in history, owing $36 trillion; there were only two genders, and a “tranny” was in your car, rather than in a library reading books to toddlers; and the national Democrats hadn’t completely taken leave of their senses.) 

I’ll break down the good Trump and the bad Trump, starting with the bad, in the spirit of following a little medicine with a whole lot of sugar.  If any of you are always-Trumpers, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs.  Or better yet, you might want to read them, and get some constructive criticism from an ally who really wants to see him succeed.  

I think that Trump has only made three wrong moves of any consequence so far.  The most important is his flawed tariff roll-out, because it has potentially the biggest impact, since perceptions of the economy tend to bleed over into overall perceptions of an administration.

In the past Trump has used the element of surprise to his benefit before, especially in a military context.   “Is he going to take out Soleimani, or the top guy in Iran, or Putin?  Who knows?  But maybe.  So they better mind their business.”  But economic unpredictability doesn’t work as well, and needlessly screws with the kind of free-market investors and businesses whose lives conservatives should be making easier rather than harder.  

It’s unsettling that Trump seems to regard trade deficits and non-reciprocal tariffs as equivalent –they aren’t – and that he has unnecessarily treated our allies as harshly as he has our enemies, by hitting everyone with tariffs, including those who have little or no tariffs against us.

Having said all that, I think he’ll adjust course, and we’ll end up with at least marginally better deals with almost all nations within a year or so.  But when we need to get so much done in a very short time, our speed and efficiency is hampered, and everything is made harder when markets are roiled and the public is more sour about the overall economy than they had to be.

I think his second mistake was his handling of Ukraine, though I see that as a quasi-push.  He’s way better than Biden, and we needed to put Zelensky in time out and stop shoveling mountains of cash into Ukraine with no accountability.  But saying that Ukraine started the war is a lie, and a dumb one. 

Zelensky has a lot of flaws, and the Ukraine is corrupt and flawed too.  But Putin is an evil, mass-murdering KGB thug, and he started the war.  Going softer on him than you do on Ukraine hurts the chances for peace.  And going from promising, “I’ll end the war on day 1,” to “If Putin doesn’t come to the table, we’re walking,” is not a good look – and it’s what Putin wants anyway!

Trump’s third mistake is a result of his first: he contributed to the election loss of the solid conservative Pierre Poilievre in the Canadian election on Monday.  I’ve seen some conservatives blast claims that Trump is responsible, but they are only partially right.  Ultimately, of course, Canadian voters are to blame if they reject a good conservative for a lousy leftist one.

But several months ago, Poilievre was up by 20 in the polls, and an almost certain winner.  Trudeau and the liberals had been in power for 10 years, and had produced terrible results.  (Unexpectedly!) Trump or no Trump, the liberals’ chances of victory were improved by Trudeau’s resignation, and the fact that Mark Carney came in and did the two things most likely to produce a leftist victory: he reversed an unpopular leftist policy (axing a “green” gas tax) and shamelessly lied about his agenda.

But it wasn’t just Trump’s tariff battle that hurt Poilievre; his bluster about making another country our 51st state would arouse a sense of patriotism and resentment in the citizens of any nation, and it did here.

I love having Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador, and it would have been great to have a third strong conservative running a country in this hemisphere, especially in the closest country to us, geographically and financially.   And while this will hurt Canada worse than us, it’s still a senselessly missed opportunity. 

Okay, assuming the always-Trump contingent of CO nation has restrained themselves from burning me in effigy… I don’t just LIKE everything else Trump has been doing – I LOVE it!

Closing the border and deporting Biden’s 10 million illegals was the most serious challenge facing him, and Trump has been knocking both of those out of the park.  Hulk Homan™ is a superhero, and Stephen Miller is a dead-eyed killer of would-be troll journalists.  And the Democrats are earning their record low ratings by spooning with the worst tattooed gangbanging thugs they can find. 

Government waste and corruption had come to seem like an inevitable fact of life, but DOGE is making great progress, and will hopefully continue to apply to it the most powerful antidote of all: public exposure.

As an academic, I’ve been tortured for years by the blatant bias and arrogance of the smug left that has dominated our universities since before I was born.  But in just a few short months, Trump has fired volley after volley at the Ivory Towers, and now he is rolling the most ominous of his siege engines into place: federal dollars and the tax exemptions without which the anti-Semitic and anti-American narcissists inside cannot hold out for long!

Trump’s biggest weakness in his first term was inexperience, especially when it came to picking good personnel, and understanding how deeply embedded the human ticks of the deep state were in every government agency.  Now he knows so much more about both, and has upped his game immeasurably.

Just about every cabinet member and appointee has been a clear improvement over those in his first term, and he’s made innovative use of the weapons that the Dems left for him.  Rather than having to create something like DOGE from scratch, he repurposed Obama’s “Department of Governmental Efficiency.”  What had been a lie and distraction in Obama’s hands is now a battle axe in Trump’s, and he’s been cleaving dead weight from the bureaucracy like Arnold in a Conan movie.  

He similarly repurposed Biden’s CBP One app, which was formerly used to facilitate illegal entry into our country, and is now being used to warn and encourage those illegals to self-deport.  He also transformed the forgotten Roosevelt Reservation – a narrow strip of land along our southern border from the Pacific to Texas, established by TR in 1907 – into a “national defense area.”   This had two fantastic effects: it allowed the use of our military to supplement civilian border control forces, and it added enhanced criminal penalties for those who cross it illegally.    

The good news is coming in so many areas that it’s hard to keep up with.  Bobby Kennedy’s MAHA is off to a good start; the pulling back on counter-productive solar and wind farms and the ramping up of oil, natural gas, nuclear power and even cleaner coal is all great.  Getting rid of DEI and corrupt NGOs won’t just save us money, it will prevent the damage that that money was doing. 

On so many fronts, the “FA” phase is over, and the glorious “FO” phase has begun!

I’m still frustrated by how many delays are being caused by the illegitimate lawfare going on all over the country. But as the Dems and their arrogant, far-left judges keep going farther and farther, they are (hopefully!) only speeding up the day when a maddeningly reluctant SCOTUS is forced to move.  And since I’m an optimist, I have to believe that we’re going to win most of the battles ahead of us: the president has to be the one in charge of the executive branch, and the supremacy clause has to mean that federal enforcement is going to trump illegal sanctuary city efforts, and civil rights and Title IX rules have to trump the Jew haters on campus and women haters in women’s sports and spaces.

During the 47 years of the Biden administration, I constantly had to limit my exposure to current events, because it was so depressing to see the damage the left was doing to my country.  But now I can’t wait to get to the computer in the morning, and start scrolling through the mostly good news of the day, and good omens for the future.

Because I really do expect that as we head into mid-summer or so, the good news stories are going to start cascading.  The first trade deals are going to start to be signed, which will settle and then encourage the markets.  New manufacturing will either ramp up or start – chip-making in AZ, car-making in IN, power plants to replace failing solar and wind and to meet demand everywhere.

The court rulings are also going to start to come out, and those should have an excellent snowball effect.  There are probably a dozen TROs stopping Trump from cutting spending and firing unnecessary employees in multiple executive departments, and another dozen saying he can’t withhold federal funds to enforce federal laws, and many dozens saying he can’t deport illegals without years-long trials-of-the-century for each illegal.   If and when SCOTUS finally rules correctly on one case in each area, each precedent will cause many lawfare dominoes to tumble. 

The principle of “pour encourager les autres” – for the encouragement of others – will magnify each win, and create more momentum.  The two radical judges now facing charges after committing pro-illegal felonies, the various morons who have gotten caught vandalizing Teslas, the jihadi-enthusiasts on student visas who have now been kicked out – all of those are cautionary tales to all but the dumbest of the troublemakers.

Perhaps most importantly, when millions of illegals see the NGOs and sanctuary programs that used to support them ramping down, and ICE ramping up, and their countrymen getting caught and deported, they’ll start to self-deport. 

If we can settle some of the tariff uncertainty and continue the progress in so many areas, I think that although our House and Senate majorities are very thin, there’s even a decent chance we can avoid the historic pattern of a president losing the House and/or Senate in the midterms! 

If all of that happens, plus our wandering CO returns to us, our future will be bright indeed!

I leave you with two last thoughts:

No means no, Jennifer.

…and…

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they seem happy to you? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also: #wemustneverstopmockingher

Where was I? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

“Self-Detonating Heroes” are Plaguing the Dems (posted 4/21/25)

I hope everybody had a great Easter, or Passover, or regular spring weekend.

My theme today is the addition of a new category of stories for this and future columns: The “Democrats’ Backing the Wrong Horse” stories.  In some of these, the elite left chooses as “villains” those who are later vindicated or otherwise come out on top.  Examples would include Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny and the Covington school kids, as well as Trump himself, who overcame lawfare, the Russian hoax and two assassination attempts to win a second non-consecutive term.

But there’s another sub-category that is on my mind today – probably because I’ve spent much of this last week contemplating an actual Sinless Victim (He is risen! Best. Happy. Ending. Ever!) – and that’s the faux victim.  I’m calling these guys the Democrats’ “Self-Detonating Heroes.”  

These are typically chosen for their credentials as righteous sufferers at the hands of the left’s preferred bad guys (cops, conservatives, white people, Americans, etc.), and their stories usually fit the pattern known in journalism as “too good to check.” 

You’ll recognize the common tropes: honor student gunned down by cops for no reason.  Palestinian social worker blown up by genocidal IDF for no reason.  Peaceful protestor arrested for no reason.  Noble immigrant deported for no reason.

A very small number of these stories are valid, but those are the rare exceptions.  When most people hear the initial report, they’ve learned to start an internal countdown to the moment when the story blows up.

The honor student shot by cops… (3…2…1…)… had gotten out of jail (again!) 14 hours ago, was driving a stolen car, and fired at cops with a stolen gun.

The “Palestinian social worker”… (3…2…1…)…was a Hamas member who had murdered several Jewish hippie girls at a music festival, and was wearing a suicide vest.

The “peaceful protestor” … (3…2…1…) … recorded himself setting fire to a police station.

The “noble immigrant” … (3…2…1…) … had been deported twice before and was carrying a duffel bag full of fentanyl and burner phones.

The beauty of these stories is watching the whole rotten scheme blow up in the Dems’ faces, over and over again, without them learning the lesson.  No matter how unlikely the tale, and how often similar tales have left them with gunpowder-blackened faces and burnt-off eyebrows before, they take the bait again.

“Hey, a disgruntled black activist at a super-liberal university says someone spray painted the N word on her dorm room door?  Stop the presses!   Or refresh the website, or whatever.”

Annndddd… she sprayed the slur on her own door.

“Wow, some rednecks hung a noose on a black NASCAR driver’s garage?  Swarm!”

Annnddd… it’s a looped rope used to pull down a garage door.

“Listen to this: some evil nerd hacked into Joy Reid’s computer and posted a bunch of homophobic slurs to frame her!  Alert the FBI!”

Annnddd… Joy Reid posted a bunch of homophobic slurs, because she’s an evil, lying moron.

Perhaps the archetypal example of a leftist Self-Detonating Hero story is happening right now, and stars “Maryland father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

As usual, the Dems should have had their heads on a swivel with this guy.  But once again the bait was too tempting, and when the Trump administration admitted that he’d been “wrongly deported” to the Salvadoran Super Max prison, the left was all over the story like white on Liz Warren. 

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The first red flag should have been Kilmar’s name.  There’s an old Latin phrase – “nomen est omen” – which roughly means that a name can be a sign.  (Famous examples abound, e.g.  once you’ve heard “Anthony Weiner” and “Charles Blow” you know everything you need to know about those dudes.)

Sound out “Kilmar” and you’ve got “kill” and “mar” (meaning “to spoil, harm or injure something or someone.”)  So, yeah.  His best friends were probably “Stab-lacerate Gonzalez” and “Punch-injure Herrera.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect that some devious spy in Trump-world must have searched the records of thousands of illegal gangbangers, and then chose Kilmar as their trap for the Dems.  They looked over his bio, and then hustled him onto the plane to El Salvador, then disregarded President Boasberg’s direct order to turn the plane around.  They did all this knowing the left’s penchant for a sympathetic, underdog David figure, especially when he’s facing off against the orange Goliath!  

So the Dems ran to the cameras and bet big on their new Salvadoran thoroughbred.  “Kilmar is a loving husband to an American citizen, and a father to two American kids, and probably a devout Catholic, as far as you know.  And sure, he’s got a couple of tattoos, but one of them is probably Christ on the cross (it’s very blurry in pictures, so we’re not 100% sure about that).  And he had a judge’s order that he NOT be deported!”

“Ooh, look, his broken-hearted wife is stepping up to the microphone.  Listen as she speaks in a wavering voice about the saintly man whom the Trumpian stormtroopers kidnapped off the street and then sent to Auschwitz II, trampling all of the constitutional rights that he definitely has as practically an almost American citizen!  Oh, now she’s crying!  Are you proud of yourselves, conservative bullies who ripped this loving family man away from his family?  He has kids.  American citizen kids!  Won’t somebody think of the children?!”

And then the Mar-a-Lago Mata Hari (old timey spy reference for $100, Alex) began to release successive tranches of details about Kilmar… 

And now, I will put on my conical, purple wizard hat and magically take you into the conference room where the Democrat brain trust was gathered to discuss strategy in the middle of last week.  I’ll keep their identities secret, and refer to them only as Democrat Operatives (DO) 1-6.

DO 1: This is going great!  The walls are closing in on Trump now!  American voters are suckers for a clean-cut immigrant like Kilmar.  By the way, get somebody at MSNBC to double-check his name.  All of those Hispanics have a crazy long chain of names, and a lot of them have a “Jesus” somewhere in there. 

DO 2: Ooh, that would be great!  We could put the word out that all of our reporters should start calling him “Jesus” between now and Easter.  The Catholics would eat that stuff up!

DO 1: Good idea.  And somebody line up some soft-focus photo shoots and interviews with his American wife and kids.    

DO 3: I don’t know, Hakeem.  I’ve heard a story that he had some suspected gang affiliations in the past.  Maybe we shouldn’t over-play our hand on this.

DO 1: Come on.  “Suspected” means nothing. Just more anti-Hispanic racism from the right-wing fascists.  I mean, he hasn’t had any due process at all!  I’m sure that if they had any evidence, they would have put it before a court and-  (He sees DO 4 with his hand up.)  What?

DO 4: Actually, he had an immigration court hearing, and the judge found evidence that he was associated with MS-13.

DO 1: SCHIFF! 

DO 5: What?

DO 1: I’m not talking to you.  It’s just an expression.  Look, it was probably a crooked Trump judge, lying about Kilmar’s gang ties.  We need to insist that the case be appealed to another judge, so—

DO 6:  Actually, it was appealed to a different court.

DO 1 (pause): And?

DO 6: The appeals court agreed.

DO 1: SCHIFF!

DO 5:  Are you using my name as a swear word?

DO 2:  Get over it, Pencil-Neck.  The adults are talking.

DO 5: Adults?  Shouldn’t you be at the kid’s table, Hogg!

DO 1: Shut up.  Let’s not get hung up on those alleged gang ties.  The main thing is that another judge wrote an order saying that he can’t be deported.  So Trump broke the law.

DO 3: Actually, that order in 2019 said that he CAN be deported, but just not to El Salvador.

DO 1 (rubbing his temples): Fine.  But he was deported to El Salvador.  We’ll emphasize that. 

DO 6:  Yes!  He got that deportation hold in 2019.  I’m sure he’s kept his nose clean for the last 6 years, because the Feds would have deported him to somewhere else if he’d gotten in trouble.

DO 3:  Actually, he was stopped in 2022 for speeding and driving without a license.

DO 1: SCHIFF!  Did they take him to jail and tow the car?

DO 3: No. The cop gave him a warning for the expired DL.

DO 2:  Wow.  He must have been one of ours.

DO 1: Anyway, the main point is that he obviously didn’t have anything suspicious in the car with him.  Why don’t we just say he was profiled for “Driving While Brown?”  (He notices DO 3 making a face.)  What now?

DO 3:  He had 8 other guys in the car with him, and they’d been driving for three days, from Texas to Maryland.  And…they didn’t have any luggage.

DO 5: SCHIFF!  (Everyone looks at him.) Now you’ve got me doing it!

DO 1: Okay, let’s not panic.  Lots of poor people don’t have luggage.  They were probably going up north to rejoin their families, or maybe meet some church sponsors who vouched for them. 

DO 3 (looking down):  They all gave Kilmar’s address as their own.  And DOJ just announced that he was picked up for questioning at Home Depot with other MS-13 members.  And Trump just showed a picture of his hands, and he’s got…

DO 1: Don’t say tattoos!

DO 3 (hesitates):  Tattoos.   

DO 2 and 4: SCHIFF!

DO 1: Tell me that they’re at least of his kid’s birthdays, or his wife or his mom’s names.

DO 3: They’re MS-13 tattoos.

DO 1,2,4 and 6: SCHIFF!

DO 2: Okay, forget all that.  We’ve still got his wife.  She’s crying her eyes out on tv.  And since she says that he’s a good man and husband, and since we must believe all women, he has to be a good man and husband. That’s the transitive property, I think.

DO 5: No, the transitive property is when a dude decides that he wants to be a woman, so he spins around and clicks the heels of his ruby slippers together, and says, I’m really a woman, I’m really a woman.

DO 2:  No, that’s the trans property.  I’m talking about the math thing, the transitive property.  It’s from algebra, I think, and –

DO 5: Who are you trying to kid, Davy?  You look like you’re still taking algebra!

DO 2: Pencil neck!

DO 5: Toddler!

DO 1: Everybody shut up!  (He notices an aid come in and hand a piece of paper to DO 3, then step back out.)  We’ve got the loyal, crying wife, and she’s vouching for him.  Our women voters will eat that up, and… (Noticing DO 3 looking extra pale.)  What is it, Liz?

DO 3: DOJ just released a domestic abuse claim the wife filed against Kilmar in 2021.

DO 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6: SCHIFF!

DO 1:  Okay, anybody can have a bad day.  They had an argument, things got a little heated.  We’ve all been there.  But they talked it through and worked it out, and it never happened agai—

DO 3: She filed again six months later.

DOs (all): SCHIFF! 

DO 1 puts his head on the table in front of him.

DO 1 (after a long pause): So we’ve got a bad-driving, human-smuggling, wife-beating, gang-banging illegal alien.  Is that about it?  (Nobody will meet his eyes.)  Okay, so we’ve got to say that it’s not about Kilmar, it’s about due process, or something.

DO 2:  So we shouldn’t call him “Jesus” now?

DO 1: Shut up, Hogg.  Nancy, get Van Hollen on the line.  We’ve gotta stop him from flying down there and making us all look like idiots. 

DO 3: He’s already there.

DO 1 (too defeated to even swear):  Can we at least stop him from meeting with Kilmar?  He’ll be giving Trump a photo-op to hang around our necks for the mid-terms.

DO 3: He’s already met with Kilmar.

DO 1 (mumbling): Of course he has.

DO 2:  Wait, this might still work.  Kilmar is going to look haggard and starved from being in that concentration camp prison.  Maybe he’ll even have some bruises or broken bones! 

DO 1 (perking up):  Yeah!  We can have Spielberg make an ad for us, interspersing shots of Kilmar with shots from Schindler’s List.

DO 2 (excited):  And we can CGI Trump’s head onto that Nazi commander, shooting at Jews down in the camp below him!  We can call the ad, “CECOT’s List.”

DO 1 (seeing DO 3 looking at her phone, and shaking her head): What is it?

DO 3 (holding her phone out so everyone else can see it): Trump just released this video of Van Hollen and Kilmar.  It looks like they’re meeting on a gay speed-date at a high-end hotel. 

DO 1 (moaning): Kilmar looks great!  He looks like he’s gained 5 pounds.

Everybody in the room: SCHIFF!!!

And, scene.

Tune in next week, when Hulk Homan™ releases documents proving that Kilmar helped plan 9/11, before driving across country to shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Said the woman who is impersonating a man.

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

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

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

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D’oh!   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

Here’s a Tariff Column You Might Not Like (posted 4/10/25)

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: I swear that I wrote this yesterday (Wednesday) over my lunch hour, before the partial tariff pause was announced.  Does that make me look like someone who can put on a conical purple wizard’s hat and see the future, like a modern-day Nostra-martacus?  I’m too modest to say that.  But on the other hand, who am I to fly in the face of public opinion?)

This is going to be a rare, four-column week for me, since I posted columns on Monday and yesterday, and will be posting again tomorrow.

Before CO Nation gets too happy about that, I’ve got to warn you about this one.  I’ve been gratified that many readers have lately been posting responses that my most recent column “is your best one yet,” or “my favorite column you’ve ever written.” 

And that always makes my day to hear!  However, trigger warning, I expect that many readers will say of today’s column, “This is your worst column ever,” or “Who are you, and what have you done with our beloved hilarious genius who is always right about everything, and makes our lives worth living?  Because this column sucked!”

Or words to that effect.

But I’m forging ahead anyway: this is my column in which I tell you what’s wrong with Trump’s tariff roll-out.

First off, I’m an English professor with a black belt in mockery, and trophies for “Best Out-Kicking His Coverage in Landing a Great Wife,” and “Owner of the best Wonder Dog ever.”  But I’m not known for my brilliance on all things financial (hence my decision to spend 10 years getting a PhD in English!), and I’m the farthest thing from an expert tariff-ologist.  So you wouldn’t normally want to pay any attention to my thoughts on the subject.

But I’ve been reading and informing myself on the topic, and when I initially read that Victor Davis Hanson was very pro-Trump-tariffs, that carried a lot of weight with me.  Because as a general rule, I’ve found that if you’re on the opposite side of an argument from VDH, you better check your premises, and then slowly back out of the debate.

But then I read the reasons why Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell and the great and powerful CO were all tariff skeptics.  And I’ve also learned that if you find yourself disagreeing with those three, there’s a dangerously high probability that you’re on the same side of the argument with AOC, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.  And as Jasmine “fake lashes” Crockett has probably said, “Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat!”

So I went back and listened to VDH’s entire take on tariffs, and found that he’s basically where I was, which is that using reciprocal tariffs to negotiate deals that results in fewer tariffs and freer trade is a good thing, but that Trump’s messaging on the topic – including his lumping trade deficits and many other financial issues in with tariffs – is confusing and counter-productive, and should be dropped in favor of a clear, uncomplicated message solely about tariffs, and his goals behind his tariff policy.

1. Trump’s messaging on tariffs has been all over the map, and wildly inconsistent.  Trump (and administration officials) has said many times that tariffs are great in general, and that they should be regular, long-term features of our economic strategy, because they produce huge piles of cash to the US.  He’s also said many times that tariffs are a temporary means of achieving a negotiated dropping of tariffs, and the resulting explosion of free trade.

Those can’t both be true, because they contradict each other.  If tariffs are great and produce a financial windfall for the US, we should keep them in place forever.  If they are a temporarily necessary, rough-elbowed negotiation tactic which we want to get rid of ASAP (i.e. as soon as they produce a new deal), then they can’t be a great long-term windfall producer. 

I’m guessing that he means that they are useful in some circumstances (e.g. as a means to punish our enemies and reward our allies, or to protect specific industries that have national defense implications, etc.) and counter-productive in others. 

But I’m GUESSING that.  And so are the markets, many of his own supporters, and even VDH, who wants him to drop the chaotic vagueness.  Trump is the clearest communicator since Reagan, so there’s no reason for him to be hampering his own policy through this mish-mash of self-contradictory messaging.  

2. Trade deficits are very different from tariffs, but Trump sometimes seems to not admit – or even recognize – that difference.  When his chart says “tariffs” (and then below that, includes smaller print that says “including currency manipulations and trade barriers”) he’s lumping together apples and oranges, especially since his numbers only make sense if he’s primarily counting trade deficits rather than tariffs.

For example, South Korea’s overall tariff rate on American imports is 0.8% (not 8%, eight-tenths  of 1%), and Viet Nam’s is around 10%.  But his chart labeled “Tariffs” says that Viet Nam’s tariffs are 90%, and South Korea’s are 50%.  Which is ridiculously wrong, and unnecessarily gives his critics a weapon to bash him with.

I’m not saying that trade deficits aren’t sometimes created in part by protectionist policies like tariffs, currency manipulation, bogus “safety concerns,” etc.  And in those cases, I’m all for tariffs to address that.  But that’s certainly not the case for all trade deficits; in fact, many of them largely or even totally exist only because of the lopsided relative population and wealth of two trading countries.

There are over 300 million people in the US, and according to Federal Reserve stats, the per capita income of Americans was $73,529 in 2024.  In that same year, Somalia’s population was 19 million, and their per capita income was around $900.  Viet Nam’s population was 101 million, and their per capita income was 114 million Vietnamese dong.  Which sounds pretty good, until you realize that that is roughly $4700 US dollars.

(Sidebar, because I am basically a grade school child: The great Clint Eastwood western “A Fistful of Dollars,” if it were translated and closed-captioned to be shown in Viet Nam, would have an absolutely hilarious title.  And the Vietnamese Stormy Daniels would somehow star in it.)

Given those facts, how many American products do you think the average Somalian earning $900 per year or the average Vietnamese earning $4700 could buy, versus how many Somalian or Vietnamese products the average American earning $73,000 could buy? 

The answer is somewhere between “jack” and “squat.”  In other words, if Vietnam and Somalia trade with the United States at all, there is no planet on which there would EVER be a non-lopsided trade deficit with both of those countries.  Because it is impossible.

And if I haven’t already pissed you off, consider this, which is a variation of something I read from Thomas Sowell (peace be upon him) many years ago: in many cases, a trade deficit is not a bad thing at all, but the beneficial result of voluntary exchanges made in a free market. 

For example, every year I run a 100% trade deficit with Publix and my local bookstore: I buy groceries and books from them, but they buy nothing from me.  By the same token, I have a 100% trade surplus with all of my tenants, because they give me many thousands of dollars while I give them zero money, providing only a great place to live in a great neighborhood.  And everyone is happy.      

The good news is that the current tariff impacts on the stock market are both (IMHO) less catastrophic and less long-lasting than our most panicked commentators (and all congressional Dems) are screaming.

That’s not to say that they’re not bad.  American investors can’t lose $6-7 trillion of value without that hurting, and I’m just barely smart enough to know that such losses don’t only hurt fat cats and rich investors. (Because I’m not a commie class-warrior!) Small investors and entrepreneurs, people with 401Ks and pension plans, and everybody working for large or small employers who have debt or require foreign parts, materials or customers (i.e. a large proportion of large and small employers) will be hurt by this, if it lasts for very long.

By the same token, as I write this, the DOW is right around 40,000.  Which indicates a disastrous plunge down to the last time it closed below 40K, during the height of the calamity of that long-ago trauma happening…wait for it…three years ago!  And the NASDAQ – even after the bloodbath of the last several weeks – is still up 3% over a year ago, according to the market stats scrolling across my computer screen right now.

Look, I don’t want to mock anybody who’s worried about the slide.  I’m retired and my wife is about to retire, and our retirement nest egg is down by around six figures, which isn’t fun.  On the other hand, the market goes up and down all the time, and if a 10-15% drop is unbearable for you, you probably shouldn’t be in the stock market. You can (and maybe should) get a not-great but safe return of around 5% (I think) in a fixed annuity or a long-term CD.

And my gut tells me (but again, don’t trust financial advice from an English professor!) that the current turmoil is likely to be pretty short-lived.  My evidence is the history of the market over the last 50 years, and also recent history.  For example, earlier this week, when a false rumor that Trump was pausing the tariffs for 90 days, the market gained something like $2 trillion (which then disappeared again when the rumor was debunked).  And on Monday, spurred by the news that the Trump administration and the Japanese were negotiating a lowered-tariffs deal, the Nikkei jumped by around by 6.5%.

I don’t see any reason why – once Trump actually does start signing new tariff agreements with Japan and many other countries – the market won’t shoot up, the same way it did on these rumors in the last 15 minutes.

In conclusion, I’m a pani-can’t, not a panican, and I think that this current trade sturm und drang too will pass.  But I wish that Trump would take advice from VDH, Thomas Sowell, CO (and even me), and clean up his needlessly confusing and contradictory messaging.

By the way, did you notice how smart I just sounded when I reported the Nikkei’s reaction to the newest tariff news? 

Well, until an hour ago, I thought the “Nikkei” were those old-timey Japanese warriors with the cool armor, or possibly the loons who dove their Zeros into our ships in 1945.  (Hey, idiots, let us introduce you to our little friends, Fat Man and Little Boy!) But I did a minute’s worth of research online, and you foolishly trusted me (even though this time I was right). 

Let that be a lesson to you the next time some “expert” assures you that Trump’s tariffs are the end of the world as we know it. 

Because that “expert” might just be a clueless liberal arts professor posing as a smart guy, even though he might not know Adam Schiff from a hole in the ground!

Hamas delenda est!

Why Has America Volunteered to be Weak? (posted 4/7/25)

Well, this is going to be at least a three- or four-column week, because addled lefties are still creating entertaining and educational stories faster than I can mock them.  I’ve got the third in a three-part series of columns on immigration etiquette coming in the next day or two.

But first, on a related note, something else is stuck in my craw.  Because the anomaly that has most aggravated me about our country’s struggles in recent years is that it’s been so VOLUNTARY on our part. 

For most of human history, when nations struggled or faced the kind of systemic problems that our society has had, the problems have been forced on those nations.   For example, late-stage Rome was beset on all sides by strong barbarian tribes; Poland tried to stave off Nazi mechanized and air forces with cavalry; a weakened czarist system was caught off guard by the demonic frenzy of a communist revolution.

By contrast, consider our recent struggles, in foreign policy and at home: 

Foreign policy example 1: Iran’s despotic mullahs are developing nuclear weapons, which we could easily stop.  We wouldn’t even have to do anything ourselves. 

Our president could just get on a Zoom call with Netanyahu and some serious-looking IDF or Mossad guys. (Think: the modern equivalent of Ariel Sharon and eye-patch-wearing bad arse Moshe Dayan.  And you know that Israel has some of those guys on staff at all times, Jehovah bless ‘em.)    

Trump: The weird beards in Tehran are getting froggy with their nukes.  What do you know about that?

Netanyahu: Little bit.

Trump:  Is that DeNiro?  Are you doing DeNiro?

Netanyahu: Are you looking at me? Because I don’t see anyone else here.

Trump: Ah!  I love this guy!  Anyway, if you happened to know where those nukes were being built, and the United States suggested that we have an interest in them prematurely detonating, how long would that take?

Netanyahu: From right now?

Trump: For example.

Netanyahu glances at a guy in a dark suit and sunglasses standing behind him, looking like a non-goy Jason Statham.  The guy steps forward and whispers something to Netanyahu, then steps back. 

Netanyahu: 47 minutes.

Trump: Sweet! I’ll call Jeffrey Goldberg and tell him I’ve got an exclusive story for him.  (Netanyahu’s eyes widen, and he blinks rapidly.)  AH!  Got ya, Bibi! 

Netanyahu relaxes, then crinkles the corner of his eyes and bobs a finger at Trump.  “You!  You got a gift!” 

Trump (pointing a finger back at Netanyahu):  DeNiro again, from “Analyze This!” I love that one.  Anyway, make some Persian rubble bounce, and no tariffs for you.”

And, scene.

Example 2: The Houthis.  

They’re a Third-World militia with souped-up bass boats and a handful of Iranian missiles, and drones you could get from Dick’s Sporting Goods.  And they’ve been holding up world-wide shipping for a couple of years!  All while Anthony Blinken racked up frequent flier miles in rounds of pointless meetings with a bunch of useless UN types and some Islamic “diplomats” who could barely keep a straight face. 

Then Trump gets in, and comes into a WH briefing room after a round of golf, and watches a Houthi “stronghold” get lit up like Michael Moore’s eyes when he spots an unattended ham sandwich.  Then, a couple of days ago, he releases another video, this time of a bunch of Houthis standing around in a rectangular grouping, planning a new attack.

Annndddd…missile strike!  And suddenly the sand is littered with diced Houthis encrusted in sea salt and seasoned with RPG accelerant.   [Begin Homer Simpson filter: “Mmmm, diced Houthis.”]

Trump posted the video with the Trumpiest of all possible descriptions: “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.  Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!  They will never sink our ships again!”

And predictably, our legacy media – whom we don’t hate nearly enough – immediately tried to claim that the Houthi terrorists were just a bunch of peaceful Yemenis in a tribal gathering. Their evidence?  Undated photos of other Yemenis in other rectangular groupings during other tribal gatherings.

Got that?  Yemenis often get together in rectangles, and this group was arranged in a rectangle.  Therefore, we put the warheads on the wrong foreheads.  Yada yada yada, genocidal war crime!

Ugh!  If these media hacks were around during WWII, you know they’d be showing Nuremburg rallies with Nazis all lined up in rows, with self-righteous voice-over narration saying, “You know who else liked to line up in rows? [Cut to pictures of a Lutheran worship service.]  See?  Germans, all in rows!  The allies are bombing pacificist Lutherans!  Won’t somebody please think of the Lutherans?!”

One fact that the MSM hacks don’t point out?  If the Houthi gathering we just blew up had been a peaceful assembly of Yemeni civilians, the Houthi militia spokes-jihadis would have immediately released a full-run down of the names and ages of the sainted dead.  Which they have not done.

Unexpectedly!

The same trend of voluntarily choosing weakness has been happening on the domestic front too.  Was there any reason for bunches of cops to stand around watching as hordes of antifa and BLM rioters toppled statues, burned police stations, looted stores and did literally billions of dollars of damage to cities all over the country for months on end?

Was there any reason to watch mediocre male athletes pretending to be females, beating the hell out of actual female athletes, when the nation is full of dads of daughters who would have happily tagged in and beaten the third-rate male athletes like rented mules, if only the relevant authorities would have given them a wink and a nod? 

Was there any reason for the nation to stand by and watch as millions of illegals streamed across our border, picking up free cell phones and voter registration forms before fanning out across the country, after which crime rates and welfare spending skyrocketed? (UNEXPECTEDLY!)

There was not.  We volunteered to act weak and be victimized.   And now, post January 20th, we’ve volunteered to be strong, and commence with the legal and tactical arse-whippings. 

And suddenly TDA members are living like rats (with forcibly-shaved rat heads) in El Salvadoran cages, and Tesla-vandalizing incels are trembling in their mom’s basements as they await the cops’ arrival.  (Maybe you’re not as smart as Elon, kids, because he built cars with a dozen cameras in them, and you keyed and set fire to cars with a dozen cameras in them.)   

And illegals who proudly paraded six months ago with signs proclaiming, “Pay me to hate America!” and, “Cuyo calles?  Nuestras calles!” are now huddled in public-housing apartments from which they’ve displaced American veterans, ingesting the last of their fentanyl stash to try to chase away the nightmares of Hulk Homan™ busting through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man with a New York accent and a phalanx of ICE agents right behind him.           

And Hamas-sympathizers at Ivy League colleges who were recently stomping around in their terrorist tablecloth headgear attacking Jewish Americans are cowering in their dorm rooms trying to avoid authorities, like smelly Yahya Sinwar when he fled to that half-demolished building in Rafah, trying to hide from the IDF drone that moments later gave him the ol’ kosher KABOOM!

Speaking of America-hating terrorist sympathizers on campus, you may not have heard about the case of Iranian “legal scholar” Helyeh Doutaghi, who was fired by Yale a week ago, after being linked to the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (PPSN), which both the Biden administration and Canada had designated as a terrorist-linked group.

Doutaghi has a long history of spewing the usual Islamist anti-Semitic poison, describing as “Zionist barbarity” Israel’s non-genocidal and non-barbarous response to Hamas’ genocidal and barbarous attacks. 

In addition to the religious bigotry angle, she also has the hateful Marxist lingo down pat, blathering on about how Western democracy is “a system built to serve capitalist property…born in genocide and enslavement…and [intended to deny] freedom and sovereignty to the colonized.” She has also promised to “use everything at my disposal to fight the fascist dictatorship of the United States.”

She seems nice, doesn’t she?

This innocent little dove – she’s got a kind of an Islamic AOC vibe going on – was given a visa to allow her into first Canada and then the US, before she eventually got her teaching gig at Yale. In a March interview after Yale first tried to question her about her connection to the PPSN, she said, “I had been very loud and proud about my [organizing] work…in the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and the anti-colonialist movements,” and “[Yale] never raised any concerns” about her “activities.”

Because of course they didn’t.

Anyway, when Yale notified Doutaghi that she was suspended until they could investigate her possible terrorist ties, she refused to cooperate with the investigation, and then was fired. 

When her supporters heard about her suspension and then firing, many of them were especially outraged that this horrific injustice happened during the “holy month of Ramadan.”

To which most normal Americans replied, “Oh NO!  Not the holy month of Ramadan!  Anyway…”   

Because we’re done volunteering to be weak, and to appease the enemies of our country and our culture abroad, and to harbor them here at home. 

Hopefully Helyeh Doutaghi is going through our deportation process as we speak, if she isn’t gone already.

Because I think I speak for most Americans when I say, “Deport Helyeh?” 

Hell yeah!

And also…

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on Immigration, Part 2 (posted 4/4/25)

In my column on Wednesday I covered a little bit of the history of our immigration laws, and discussed the long-standing legal and common-sense concept that we have every right to decide who to allow to come into our country, and under what circumstances.  And however much our rules about immigration have developed and evolved, they’ve always included one central idea: we should allow people in who can improve and benefit America.

Hence the five categories that I quoted from the 1891 Immigration Act.  If you’re a foreigner who wants to come here, and you’re stupid, or mentally or physically ill, why would we want you here?  If you’re a criminal, why would we want to be your victims?  If you can’t or won’t support yourself financially, why would we want to work harder and tax ourselves more, just to take care of you? 

On the one hand, it’s weird to even have to say all that, because rational self-interest seems so self-evident and obvious.  If Americans don’t have the right to decide who comes into America, who does?  And if you will predictably make us dumber, sicker, poorer and more preyed-upon, why would we allow you in?

On the other hand, over the last half-century or more, we’ve developed almost a sense of shame – at the very least, embarrassment – about our strength, successes, and wealth.  It hits our ears wrong to say, to the millions who would want to immigrate to America, “What’s in it for us?”  Many schools of thought have added to this unease, some of them good, and some very bad.

I’d include the Judeo-Christian world view that is entwined in our national DNA – and which formed the ethical and political architecture of our Founders’ minds, and the scaffolding of the constitution and democratic republic they built – as the most important factor on the good side.  We were raised on stories of the Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan, and our duty to care for the widow and the orphan, and for the poor.  We’re a generous and a compassionate people, in no small part because of a wide-ranging body of teaching from Uncle Jesus and his predecessors that, “As you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done it unto Me.”

On the bad side, we shouldn’t underestimate how much damage has been done by leftist schools of thought, and the multitude of ways they have taught our children to hate our country and themselves. 

Multiculturalism tells us that all cultures are equally valid, except that ours is somehow worse than the primitive and the non-capitalist ones.  Socialism tells us that the wealthy are evil exploiters, rather than the creators of rising tides that can lift all boats.  Critical race theory and post-colonial studies tell us that successful first-world countries and the lighter skinned are eternal victimizers, and the rest of the world their rightly aggrieved victims.    

Put that all together and disseminate it through an insular and propagandizing educational system, and you get the modern West – wildly successful, and while flawed, the best available model for the world to follow – yet without the civilizational self-confidence to vigorously defend itself, let alone its borders.  

Which brings us to today, with tens of millions of people here illegally.  They’ve come here for good reasons and bad – some to work hard and make better lives for themselves, some to prey on a wealthy and vulnerable populace, some to take advantage of our idiotically generous and unpoliced welfare benefits.

This has been incredibly frustrating for most Americans.  Clear majorities in all polls say they want less LEGAL immigration, and giant majorities want illegal immigration stopped, and illegals deported.  And yet there have been a network of groups who have been able to engineer the recent waves of illegals coming in.

Self-interested businesses want cheaper labor.  Foreign governments and cartels and their American partners want to enrich themselves through remittances, as well as smuggling and organized crime.  Gullible and naïve church and “charitable” groups have allowed their misplaced compassion (and IMHO, often an intoxicating sense of their own virtue) to blind themselves to the damage they are doing to their own country.    

But most of those people and groups have always been here, and together have always accounted for some illegal immigration into this country.  But the driving force behind the recent flood of illegals has been the Democrat party.  Dem politicians see illegals as an army of future voters who will secure their national political majority for many decades, thus allowing them to achieve their political goals of a more leftist/socialist, and less traditionally American, country.

And the fact that an entrenched network of NGOs and other Dem organizations (which DOGE is just beginning to uncover) can enrich themselves in the process is just icing on the cake for them.

To me, the best thing about the new Trump administration so far has been the way they’ve closed the border and started deportations.  All of my usual hyperbolic mockery aside, I’ve been giddy watching the American people regain their self-confidence, to the point where they will openly support deporting illegals, unswayed by the usual accusations of racism and xenophobia. 

I love watching the elite Left – lulled into an arrogant complacency by years of hectoring us, unopposed – get completely wrong-footed when their usual attacks no longer work.  When AOC lectured Hulk Homan™ that “being in the country illegally isn’t a crime,” he rhetorically pantsed her (it’s not my fault that she has placed her juicy booty – her words, not mine – front and center in the public’s mind) by reciting from memory the relevant portions of US law that proved her wrong. 

All she could do was pull up her pants, stammer, and change the subject.  (Rumors that her panties were red, with a hammer and sickle on the seat have not been confirmed.)

The top Dems don’t know if they’re afoot or horseback on immigration, and it’s glorious to see!   After they insisted for a full year that Biden couldn’t close the border without new legislation, Trump closed it 15 minutes after being inaugurated, and everyone started glaring at those Dems, while they looked at their feet or checked their watches.

When some immigration raids began catching run-of-the-mill illegals along with the violent TDA gangbangers who were being targeted, lefty talking heads got excited.  They actually  thought that it would turn the public against deportations!  But every time they did some kind of “man on the street” interviews, the citizens said something like, “But the untargeted ones are here illegally too?” 

And before the “journalist” could say, “Well yeah, but-“ the citizen would say, “Vamanos!” or “Adios!”      

Hysterical Jamie Raskin actually gave a speech calling for the plane full of gang-bangers to be flown back here so they can have taxpayer-funded lawyers and years-long hearings to see if they get to stay! 

Keep it up, Dems, and let us know how that works for you.

I’ve got a few more thoughts on how likely it is that we’ll be able to deport the vast majority of illegal immigrants, and also on the related controversies over deporting students who were here legally on student visas or green cards.  But this column is long enough, so I’ll save those for next week.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a joke I saw last week…

How badly has Snow Woke bombed? (Unexpectedly.)

Someone posted a pic from the opening night’s 8 o’clock showing… and labeled it “Snow White and the Seven Audience Members.”

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!