Tag: trump

More Debate Fallout, & 16 Nobel Economists are Full of It (posted 7/3/24)

I don’t want to beat the dead horse/prez of last weeks’ debate too much longer.  On the other hand, the fallout continues to amaze and amuse. 

I can’t believe that some lefties actually thought it would be helpful to Biden to point out that he’s pretty functional from 10:00 – 4:00 each day!  First because I don’t think “pretty functional” means what they think it means.

Second, the obvious: can we coordinate with China, Russia, Iran, Hamas etc. to make sure that they instigate any future crises between the hours of 10 and 4, Eastern Standard Time? 

In fact, if it’s convenient, can they please schedule any future attacks to take place no later than 3:00 p.m. Eastern?  That way, our intrepid leader will be able to devote a full hour to his response before he falls asleep in his soup.

Talk about lowering the bar!  Would you be happy with your cable company if you got a signal from 10-4 each day?  With your utility company if you had electricity from 10-4 each day?  Your plumber if he could only fix a toilet one fourth of the time?  Your paid protestor if she could only hold up a catastrophically stupid sign and chant idiotic slogans for a quarter of the day?

And yet that’s supposed to be a positive talking point for the “leader” of the free world? 

Biden’s biggest problem – other than what will happen if a cadaver dog gets within smelling distance of him, and an international incident ensues – is that to the extent there was some small way to mitigate perceptions of his physical and mental infirmity before last Thursday, that opportunity has now left the building.

I mean, when it became too difficult for him to make it up a normal set of airplane stairs, they shifted to a smaller set of airplane stairs.  But now we’ve seen “(Not a) Dr.” Jill guide him down three shallow steps after the debate, and he looked like a Wallenda trying to stay on a tightrope over an active volcano!

There is no airplane that sits close enough to the ground to require only three steps to get into it.  And for Brandon, three steps is two steps too many!

But I am glad to see that after five days of sturm und drang, the miserable Dems seem to be leaning toward keeping Joe in the race, just because the other options might be as perilous as trying to drag him across the finish line.  As ridiculously unlikely as that seems!

This is about as close as you can get to a truly lose-lose situation, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving party!

On a different note, one thing that we’ve learned over the last 7 years is that we should all be skeptical of experts.  Especially when they deliver their judgments in a pompous, self-righteous tone, we might want to consider mocking their pontifications until and unless they prove the merits of their arguments. 

Aristotle knew this, as one of his logical fallacies was the “appeal to authority” – don’t judge the merits of an argument, but the supposed merits of the people making it.  For example, this policy is obviously right because the king is advancing it, or this theological point is correct because the Pope says so. 

Or Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, because 51 respected, beyond-reproach former intelligence bigshots say so. 

Well, as CO mentioned last week, we now have another example that proves Aristotle right again.  (Seriously, that guy has been proven right as many times as I have, which is pretty impressive for a guy who never had a regular column on the Cautious Optimism site!)

Last week we learned that 16 top “economic experts” – they’ve all got Nobel prizes! – have definitively concluded that Trump’s economic plans will make inflation worse.  In fact, they released an open letter last Thursday, praising Joe Biden’s economic prowess, and endorsing him for president.

For those of you scoring at home, this happened just a few hours before Joey Gaffes stumbled onto the debate stage and did his eerily accurate impression of the Wicked Witch of the West.  (“My cognitive abilities are melting…melting…”)

Now you might think that a bunch of brainiacs like this could have noticed that Biden is a feeble old guy with a bunch of ideas that are even feebler.  (I hereby create a new word.)  Or that he’s been president for the longest 42 months in our nation’s history, during which he executed his policies, and took inflation from the 1.5% he inherited from Trump, to a high of 9%, and an average of around 5.5%.

(Even though I don’t have a Nobel in Economics – don’t get me started: the whole damned thing is just a popularity contest! – I just did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest that both 9% and 5.5% are in fact higher than 1.5%.  You can Google it.)

But that’s the past.  Maybe these whiz kids know something we don’t know about the future.

If only we had some empirical way to test their confident prognostication.  If only they had gone on record before, giving us inflation predictions against which we can judge their trustworthiness now.  If only—

Oh, wait.  They did that.  Thirteen of them did exactly that, by predicting the results of Biden’s policies on inflation, back when he first took office as a callow youth of 112.

Annnnnnndddddd… it turns out that they are about as accurate as AOC fulfilling a drink order. 

[[AOC (in a Boston pub, a few years back): “Okay, I’ve got one Margarita, one Harvey Wallbanger, two Old-fashioneds and an Irish car bomb.” 

Five confused customers: “Um, we ordered five beers.  If your booty wasn’t so juicy – your words, not ours – you would be getting zero tip.”]]

Those “experts” released a similar open letter in 2021 assuring us all that Brandon’s “Build Back Better” plan (he called it “Bilge Buck Badger,” according to a beleaguered transcriptionist at the time) would – and I am not making this quote up – “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.” 

Yes.  Spending an extra $3 trillion was just bound to ease inflation.  And so it did, “easing” it from a sky-high 1.5% alllllll the way down to… 9%.  Brilliant!

And now these geniuses, in a move that always worked at late-night camp-outs, have turned off the lights, turned on a flashlight under their double-chins, and warned about the eeevilllll Donald Trump! 

Speaking of which, did you notice that during Biden’s skirmish with the teleprompter about the latest SCOTUS ruling yesterday, the usual cadaverous pallor of his skin was suddenly transformed to orange?

It’s finally come to this: his handlers are desperate enough to figure that if they can’t out-perform Trump, maybe they should copy him.  And they tried to turn Dark Brandon into Orange Brandon.

Well it’s not going to work, buddy.  We’ve already got Orange Hitler.

But Orange Moe Howard is still available, and he seems like a lot better fit for you.

Hamas delenda est!

Three Political Requiems: Biden’s Campaign, His Gaza Pier, and Jamaal Bowman’s Comical Last Hurrah (posted 7/1/24)

We have gathered here, first, to mark what looks like the death of Biden’s campaign.

Watching the left’s reactions to his debate self-immolation has been as entertaining as you’d expect.  Just a few months ago, Joe Scarborough bloviated that, “This version of Biden – intellectually, analytically – is the best Biden ever!”  (And “F” you if you don’t agree!)

On Friday morning Scarborough looked like he had just watched the litter of cats that he’d raised and bottle-fed from birth get run over by a giant riding mower in front of his wife and children.  All he could do was mutter about how surprised he was by Biden’s performance, and how he needs to go.     

Lefty actor Michael Ian Black (Who?) from that one show you never saw, had this great quote: “What sucks is, if you listen to Biden’s WORDS, they’re great. But there’s not enough breath left in him for the words to reach your ears.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket!  His words were GREAT!  Words like “mumphlpanditurgg,” “shughelfup,” “zzzzz,” and “six handicap!” 

Good lord!

The transcript of everything he said at the debate would read like a movie scene we’ve all watched: The fourth male lead – stricken by dengue fever, German shrapnel, or an arrow shot by Liz Warren’s war party (#neverstopmocking) – writhes in a medium close-up and rambles incoherently as a nurse wipes a wet cloth over his brow, until he suddenly stiffens, opens his eyes wide and says, “Pa!  Is that you, Pa?  I did my best!  I did… my… gurgrlelelughhhhhhhh.”

And yes, Joe Biden actually said that last word, at minute 24, shortly after muttering that no soldiers died on his watch.

A few days before the debate, one MSM empty head said, “So Biden can’t walk so well.  Neither could FDR.”  Which is a good comparison… if you’re a thoroughly corrupt liar.  Say what you will about FDR, but at least he could conduct fireside chats until late in his presidency.

The closest Biden could come would be a fireside shat!    (Boom!  Low-brow poop joke when you least expect it!)

One of the funniest news bites I came across was that Rob “Meathead” Reiner co-hosted a Hollywood “watch party” for the debate.  Then, after two days of what the Breitbart story called “conspicuous silence” – HA! – he finally tweeted about the debate, admitting that it had been “a disaster” for Biden.

But he still stuck to his guns – and yes, his guns are less reliable than the one Alec Baldwin used on that movie set, and no, it’s not “too soon” for that joke (Because: Alec Baldwin) – calling Biden “a good, decent man.”  Then he said a bunch of stuff about how Trump is orange Hitler and the world is coming to an end and blah blah blah.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying attention anymore, because I was savoring the image of Meathead and a bunch of rich Hollywood leftists – and no, they weren’t necessarily ALL addicts, trust-fund kids or pederasts; probably just a majority of them – sitting around a glitzy fundraiser, and slowly deflating as they watched their hero decomposing on stage. 

I picture Babs Streisand, DeNiro and Meathead, with party hats on their heads and noisemakers in their mouths, all hyped up for the big event.  And then Brandon staggers out and mumbles his way through his first several servings of word salad.  Cut back to the celebs, their jaws dropping in horror, and their noisemakers falling onto their laps.    

The schadenfreude cherry on top of that exploding poison sundae is that the “party” was supposed to be a Biden fundraiser!  Rumors that after “Dr.” Jill helped Joe painfully down the longest three stairs you’ve ever seen in your life at the end of the debacle, the Hollywood elite raised 4 dollars and an expired Blockbuster rental coupon, have not been confirmed.     

The general tone of the MSM aftermath was half Monty Python (“This president is no more.  He’s ceased to be.  He’s gone on to meet his Maker.  THIS… is a late president!”) and half Shakespeare (We come not to praise Joe Biden, but to bury him.)  And wholly delicious. 

By the way, I just re-watched that classic Python dead parrot sketch, and saw a detail that I’d forgotten, and which ties it in perfectly with the Biden debacle.  As the scene opens, John Cleese  (carrying the dead parrot in a cage) calls the clearly male store clerk “Miss.” 

When the guy says, “What do you mean, Miss?” Cleese looks at him in momentary confusion, and then says, “Oh I’m sorry, I have a cold.”

And just like that, a benevolent God has given me another moment of bliss.  Because I must have seen that clip a hundred times, but the experience of watching it today included two more tie-ins to our present, bizarre moment: gender confusion, and somebody making a blatant mistake and blaming it on a cold! 

If only Joey Gaffes had thought of that. 

Oh wait…

At some level, I do feel bad for Biden’s self-humiliation.  On the other hand, think how bad it would be for him if he had lived to see it!

But for the corrupt national Dems and the MSM stooges who have been foisting Biden on us like a bunch of mad-scientist taxidermists for four years, I have no pity.  You built this Frankenstein’s monster, you shot him full of amphetamines and kept re-starting his heart with the crash pads, and now you own him. 

However, I think we all need to do our part to try to keep Joe in the race.  In fact, I’m urging all of you to stop avoiding pollsters like the plague. (The natural reaction of all conservatives, and of most smart people generally.)  If anyone calls you or emails with a request to give political feedback, take the opportunity.

Tell them that you love what Biden’s doing, and you’re offended by those who would suggest that our great Democrat standard bearer should step down.  You’re behind him 100%, and he needs to keep fighting until he wins in November! 

Then hang up quickly, before you either burst out laughing, or begin audibly retching. 

My second requiem is for Biden’s Gaza Pier.  As I wrote last month, the pier was built – for only a third of a billion dollars! – to get desperately needed food into Hamas-istan.  It was open for about a week before moderate seas damaged it.  It was towed to Israel, fixed, then deployed again.

Annnnddddd… some breezy conditions and a bad weather forecast forced its removal.  When it was finally deployed again, another bad weather forecast meant that more American resources were spent on dismantling it.  Again!

News reports now suggest that it will likely not be put back in place.  Because it proved to be a stupid, stupid, stupid idea.  (I’m reading between the lines on that last part.) 

On the bright side, during the few days when it was in place, it did allow delivery of a few tons of food…which was immediately stolen by Hamas, then sold to desperate Gazans to raise money for more Jew-killing stuff.   

To recap: Biden spent almost $300 million – money which could have purchased huge packs of desperately needed flamethrowing robot dogs to release on the Democrat convention in Chicago! – on a boondoggle that lasted six weeks, and provided zero supplies to the alleged civilians it was intended to serve.

So let’s lower the Stars and Stripes to half staff for the passing of yet another brilliant Democrat foreign policy boondoggle.  Pointless pier, we hardly knew ye!

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mark the political passing of Jamaal Bowman, who got gloriously hammered in a Dem primary in the Bronx just last week.   You may remember Bowman as the token male member of the Squad, or as the rabid Jew-hater who denied the gang rapes that Hamas thugs recorded themselves committing, or as the moron who thinks you pull a fire alarm to open a door.

But he’s so much more than that!  In fact, if he’s not everything that’s wrong with the Democrat party, he’s emblematic of most of it: fraudulent credentials, racial arsonist, unimpressive and unserious and dishonest right down to the bone. 

He holds an Ed Doctorate – the same degree that notorious elder-abuser “Dr.” Jill Biden has.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather share a degree with Dr. Kevorkian or Dr. Mengele than with those two. (Okay, that was a bit much.  I retract the analogy.  But just barely.)

He put his degree (in his case, his “duh-gree”) to work by founding the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, where he curated a “Wall of Honor” that featured black people he thought students should look up to.  People like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury and Tim Scott.

HA!  I kid!  Bowman’s ideas of praiseworthy black people included loony anti-Semite congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (so dumb she lost her seat to Hank “Guam is capsizing!” Johnson), and the husband-and-wife team of radical murderers Mutulu and Assata Shakur (parents of Tupac, who died young of terrible parenting). 

Bowman was also a leading advocate against standardized testing.  When I looked into the quality of Bowman’s Cornerstone Academy, I found out that it was a mess.       

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Out of all New York schools – which are totally controlled by Dems, and thus pretty lousy – Bowman’s school ranked in the bottom 13%.  His students would likely be pretty dissatisfied with that.  Except that only 24% of them scored as minimally proficient in math, so they have no idea what that means. 

So it’s great to watch Bowman go.  But it was even better to watch the way he went out, with a hilariously cringy (and futile) get-out-the-vote rally featuring AOC, who bounced on stage to a vulgar Cardi B song, waving her fists and hollering like a hype man at a rap concert. 

Okay, I couldn’t decipher the lyrics of the Cardi B song – I’m not her target demographic, being an old Caucasian guy with great musical taste – but since all of her songs are vulgar, I’m sure this one was too.

Unfortunately for AOC, she chose to speak rather than twerk the whole time.  Because her juicy booty (her words, not mine) is her strong suit (yes, I’m too classy to say “her best asset”), and speaking logically is decidedly NOT, she missed that opportunity.

Then Bowman took the stage, and tried to out-stupid AOC, which is no mean feat.  But he might have succeeded, dancing around and screaming out some “F” bombs.  At one point he picked up a stool and shook it over his head for some reason, swearing and ranting like a black “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, only with less dignity.  (You’re welcome for the timely pro wrestling reference from 30 years ago.)

Then “professional useless person” Bernie Sanders (hat tip to Ben Shapiro) wandered up and did his commie schtick.   

It was telling that their big rally – with three “top draws” among the Democratic left (talk about damning with faint praise!) – in their deep-blue Bronx home, drew a pathetically small crowd. The MSM feeds were cropped just to show the first few rows of people in front of the stage… because a wider angle would have shown a lot of empty grass.

When AOC first jumped on stage, she did the ol’ “cup your hand behind your ear” routine to get the crowd to roar, saying, “I can’t hear you!”  To which someone nearby could have said conversationally (because there was no reason to shout), “That’s because there are very few of us here.”

The optics raised painful comparisons to Trump’s giant rally in the Bronx just a few weeks back.  Yes, that ultimately doesn’t mean much in the Bronx, which hasn’t voted Red since Imhotep Pelosi was a young girl in the Valley of the Kings.

Except that Trump shouldn’t be able to draw thousands of excited people in the Bronx, and AOC should be able to bring out at least a thousand, just from those who want to hear her brand of socialist crazy and get a glimpse of her juicy booty in person.  (Do I have to keep saying it?  “Her words, not mine.”)

To those who say it doesn’t matter that one Dem instead of another gets that seat, I offer a version of WF Buckley’s dictum: if there can only be a Dem representing a deep blue district, it should be the least insane Dem available.

Or as the Babylon Bee said, in the Bronx, “Hamas lost a House seat to the Dems.” 

Hamas delenda est!

Post-Debate: Dems & MSM Should Pay a Price for Lying about the Shape Biden was in (posted 6/28/24)

Wow.  What does one say after last night?

Over the last several days, I’d written up a few ideas for today’s column, figuring that I’d include them alongside some debate reaction.  But now I think I’ll save them for a future column, because I’m sure that this debate is going to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

Oxygen which Joe Biden desperately needed during the debate, apparently.  Because that guy came out more cadaverous than usual, which is truly saying something!    

What happened to the drug cocktail his team has had him on in previous outings?  I figured he’d start out a little hot and a little punchy, and then his energy level would drop off precipitously after 30 minutes or so.

But apparently the chemists and necromancers at the DNC mixed up the prescription bottles backstage.  Instead of filling Joe’s pre-debate syringe with cocaine-infused Red Bull — advertising tagline: “It puts the high OCTane in Octagenarian!” – they gave him 3 ml of “medically induced coma.”

After the first two minutes, I already couldn’t believe my eyes.  His voice was weak and wavering right out of the gate, and he made one mistake after another.  He tried to hit Trump on Afghanistan (!), which is Biden’s first glaring scandal that sent his poll numbers into a tailspin from which they’ve never recovered.

He said he “beat Medicare,” claimed that there are “a thousand trillionaires in America,” talked about women raping their sisters, and muttered his way to the end of one sentence about the border, giving Trump his best one-liner of the night, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence.  I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

I can’t believe that Biden even went back to the old lie that Trump had called Nazis at Charlottesville “very fine people.”  Especially since left-wing “fact-checking” site Snopes just published a high-profile admission (a few days ago!) that Trump was NOT talking about Nazis or white supremacists.  Meaning that everybody who pays even passing attention to politics knows that Biden was lying.

He even lied about small and insignificant things (as is his wont), claiming that as Vice President he had a golf handicap of 6.  Trump had fun with that, and for good reason.

For comparison, I am several decades younger than Joe Biden, and have been hacking my way around golf courses on and off for many years.  I average around 3-4 pars per round, and can drive the ball reasonably well, though my short game feels like a punishment from an angry Old Testament God.

And not to brag, but I can make a nearly full turn on the ball, I can walk on a fairway without wearing clown shoes to keep me from face-planting, and I have never soiled myself on a fairway or a green.  (What happens in the rough, stays in the rough.) And I never go off into a fugue state in which I stare blankly into the distance until a friend has to lead me back to the clubhouse.

And I’m around a 16 handicap! 

The idea that in his early 70s, Joe Biden was a 6 handicap is less believable than that he whipped Corn Pop with a candlestick in the conservatory, then finished at the top of his law school class, before having high tea with Nelson Mandela at Selma.

Trump made the same point (“I’ve seen your swing.”), before saying, “Let’s not be children.”

When you’ve allowed Donald Trump to take the high ground as the adult in the room, you have lost the debate!

It got so bad that halfway through, Biden mouthpieces claimed that Biden had a cold!  Which is as desperate as it gets, since any real illness would have been disclosed before the debate, even if only to lower expectations.

I’m sure that announcement created a clear mental picture for savvy viewers.  When your own flaks watch the first ten minutes of your “performance” and then leap up and rush to the nearest computers and microphones, you don’t want to hear them say, “He’s got a cold!  And long covid, and short ebola, and mid-range pleurisy!  And possibly mesothelioma!  Plus the studio lights have triggered his light sensitivity, and also his peanut allergy, for some reason.”  

The spin afterwards was even worse, if that’s possible.

Most post-debate spin rooms produce rote propaganda as predictable as the sunrise over Liz Warren’s tribal hunting grounds (#neverstopmocking): “Our candidate knocked it out of the park, especially when he made point 1, 2 or 3, and our opponent made one mistake after another.”

Last night, for the first time in modern political history, the main topic coming out of the DEMOCRAT press was, “Should we force him off the ticket immediately, or wait until Monday?”

Holy cats!   

If this was a fight, they’d have stopped it in the middle of the first round.  If Biden was a racehorse, they would have dispatched him with a merciful rifle shot after he fell in the first turn and snapped all four fetlocks.   

As glad as I am that Biden’s collapse is finally too obvious for the MSM to hide, the problem now is that the debate happened early enough that the Dems will likely be able to push Joe aside and bring in someone else. 

In a column posted on March 8th, (you can find it now on Martinsimpsonwriting.com) I predicted this result, and never has my prognosticating brilliance been more of a burden!   If this debate was the dam-break moment, and all of the polls turn decisively against Biden, I’m assuming the Dems will shortly begin the fraught process of finding another leftist for the top of their ticket.

I hope that we’ll respond in a few ways:

1. We should enjoy the sweet schadenfreude of watching leftist hacks squirming, panicking, and firing within their own tent.  Dumping Joe leaves them with Que Mala, who is the only human in this hemisphere with worse numbers than his.  So they can’t move her up to the top spot.

But she’s the VP because of her race and gender, and dumping her too should produce some angry black female leftists – a potent combination if ever there was one!  And if the Dems try to keep her as VP but move some pale, empty haircut (I’m looking at you, Ken-Doll Newsom) in front of her, that won’t help. 

Pass me the popcorn.

2. We should immediately start beefing up our oppo research files on whoever the likely replacements are.  The best thing the Dems have going for them is that many people still dislike Trump and are looking for an alternative, and if that alternative is not well known, they might be able to squeak through in November.  

3.  We have to hammer the obvious fact that the problem wasn’t Biden, but the national Dems who have been lying about him.  Last night he was terrible, but it was only a difference of degree, and not of kind, from his performances over his entire presidency beginning when they had him campaign from a basement four years ago.

They’ve insisted since 2020 that he’s mentally sharp and healthy as a horse.  When his infirmity has become even more obvious in recent months, they’ve taken one dishonest line after another:

  • Behind closed doors he’s sharp as a tack.
  • He just passed his physical with flying colors.
  • Hur’s report finding that Biden is not competent to stand trial was a lying slur!
  • He wasn’t wandering off at the G-7; he’s just fascinated by parachutes.
  • Every fund-raising video he’s made for months has at least a dozen jump cuts to try to hide that they need that many takes to be assemble 30 seconds of usable footage.
  • Those videos that factually show him doing and saying things are actually “cheap fakes!”
  • As recently as last week, Dem spokes-weasels were insisting that Obama didn’t help him off-stage because he was “frozen” and confused at that fund raiser.

Those lies were always obvious to us, but the MSM tried their hardest to help the Dems hide the truth, as they hoped to whistle past the graveyard – and never has that metaphor been more apt! – and drag Joe’s carcass across the finish line – ditto – in November. 

Assuming that they sub him out, we should be ready with ads showing the voters that the problem wasn’t just Biden, or even primarily Biden, but the dishonest Dem hacks who have been perpetrating this “Weekend at Bernie’s” farce for four long years.

Just have an Eastwood-esque voice-over announcer say, “The Democrats have thrown Joe Biden under the bus, and are now saying that they’ve got a great new candidate for you.  They swear that s/he is fully capable of being the next president.

But that’s what they’ve been telling you about Joe Biden for the last four years.” 

Then play a montage of top Dems insisting that Joe is at the top of his game, interspersed with some of his “greatest hits” gaffe reel, ending with some of his worst flubs from the debate.

End with the Eastwood VO: “If they’ve been lying to you about Joe Biden, how can you trust what they’re saying about NEW CANDIDATE NAME now?”

Let’s enjoy their discomfort at being caught, but then pivot to make them pay over the next four months for their elder abuse and the Potemkin Presidency they’ve foisted on all of us! 

Hamas delenda est!

The Moral Confusions of the National Democrats (posted 6/5/24)

Today’s theme is moral inversion.

Not to be confused with cranial-rectal inversion, which is a common phenomenon on the left.  (See: “let’s defund the police so that crime will go down,” or “if a dude puts on a pair of ruby slippers and taps his heels together while saying, “I’m a girl,” he’s a girl.)

One example of moral inversion is the way national Democrats deal with the statute of limitations, which is the legal principle setting a time limit after a crime, during which charges must be brought.  It’s a reasonable rule, because as time goes by, evidence is lost, witnesses die and memories fade. 

Dems have provided several great examples of why a statute of limitations is necessary.  When the left wanted to stop Brett Kavanaugh from getting onto SCOTUS, activist/loon Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of raping her decades ago. 

Unfortunately for lovers of distorting the constitution, Ford was a little fuzzy on the details.  Details such as where it happened, and who else was there, and what town it was in, and what year it occurred. 

I’m not kidding.  She couldn’t remember the YEAR.  Which is all you needed to hear to know that she was full of (Adam) Schiff.  Because anyone who had any really bad experience in high school – never mind something as traumatic as being raped! – can tell you the year it happened. 

In fact, many people recall their teenage years mainly through the disasters: freshman year was when I broke my arm; sophomore year was when my folks got divorced and Beth broke up with me; junior year I totaled dad’s car and got chlamydia; senior year I voted for Bill Clinton.  Etc.

Of course, Kavanaugh wasn’t charged with a crime; the Dems were just trying to smear him to keep him off the court. 

But even though Ford turned out to be a lemon (ha!), the Dems were undeterred.  Last year the corrupt NY Dem party passed a law that temporarily got rid of the statue of limitations, specifically so that E. Jean Carrol ( I’m guessing that the “E” stands for either “eccentric” or “erratic”) – a fruitcake who makes Blasey Ford look almost high-functioning by comparison – could accuse Trump of sexually assaulting her almost 30 years ago.

Or maybe more than 30 years ago.  Because she too could not even pin down the year when the phony assault supposedly happened.  At one point she said that it was definitely a specific year in the 1990s because she remembers wearing a designer dress that came out that year.  Except that when someone looked it up, it turns out that the dress didn’t exist that year.  D’oh!

But never mind.  The Dems trashed the law, and got their false accusation turned into a civil conviction against Trump. 

And then last week, the Dems found a judge and DA so corrupt that they once again broke the law by charging Trump for mis-classifying business records – misdemeanors on which the statute ran out in 2019, if they had actually happened in the first place. 

But they zapped those dead charges back to life – much as they do with Joe Biden’s earthly remains before a public speech – and turned them into 34 transparently illegitimate felony convictions.

So the Dems are happy to trample the statute of limitations when it serves their purpose.  But how do they regard the statute when it can be useful to them?  As the most sacred of legal principles, of course.

Enter addict, dead-beat dad, and dead-brother’s-widow-jumper Hunter Biden.  Among his many apparent crimes are some serious actions of corruption and bribe-taking from foreign governments, most of which implicate his corrupt dad (and our current Cadaver-in-Chief).

Those crimes would be relatively easy to prove in court, partly because of the mountain of evidence against him, and partly because a jury would have to believe many patently unbelievable things to acquit him. 

Things such as that a shady Ukrainian energy company paid him $80K per month purely for his expertise in Ukrainian energy – even though he couldn’t find Ukraine on a map, and all he knows about energy is that snorting a bunch of cocaine off a hooker’s rump gives you A LOT of it.

“So Martin,” you are not asking, because you already know the answer, “when is Hunter’s devastating trial on those serious crimes going to start?  I thought he was only facing relatively paltry gun and tax evasion charges.”

You’re right, of course.  Because Merrick Garland – and say what you will about the Chinless Cartoon Turtle Mitch McConnell, but he kept that creep off SCOTUS! – Toobin-ed his way through the first three years of Biden’s term. 

And just when he got around to considering the slam-dunk case against Hunter, wouldn’t you know it?  That pesky statute of limitations had run out. 

To quote the mobster who whacked Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, reporting the news to DeNiro:  “That’s that.  And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” 

So when it’s one of their guys, they use the statute to evade the consequences of their crimes, and when it’s someone from the other side, they misuse the statute to convict on non-existent crimes.

THAT’s moral inversion.   

Media figures and “journalists” are especially skilled at moral inversion.  Stories about the rights of women and girls to be safe from disordered men using their showers and bathrooms are called stories about “trans rights.” Abortion is called “women’s health care.”  Jill Biden is called a “doctor.”

Another recent example – which also fits perfectly into my column category of “you don’t hate the media enough” – comes from Mannheim, where a cop was stabbed to death.  Two of the MSM headlines were as follows: “Officer dies after being repeatedly stabbed in attack at anti-Islam rally in Germany,” and “Officer Stabbed During Attack at Far-Right Rally Dies.”

Now if you had the miniscule IQ or the gullibility of an Ivy League grievance studies major – or of AOC, just to pick a random juicy booty (her words, not mine) out of a hat – you might jump to a conclusion.  You’d focus on the key words – Germany, Far-Right, anti-Islam rally, cop gets stabbed – and figure that the Germans were reverting to aggressive form, and menacing the adherents of the Religion of Peace™

But nope!  The stabber turned out to be a radical Muslim from Afghanistan.

UNEXPECTEDLY! 

Also, Yay, diversity!

Tragically, the deceased officer died largely because when some Germans jumped on the terrorist who had already stabbed people, the cop and others yanked the Germans off of the terrorist, to protect him. 

After which he turned on the cop – who was holding down an innocent German at the time – and fatally stabbed him in the back.     

Ugh. Rather than end on that dark note, I’ll give you one final example of moral inversion, along with an example of how to think clearly.

Before I left for Colorado, the Iranian president – a mass-murdering jihadi sadist named Ebrahim Raisi – died in a hilarious helicopter crash in the mountains, along with several of his weird-beard co-religionist co-conspirators. 

The guy was called “The Butcher of Tehran.”  And not because he cheerfully provided the kind of tomahawk pork chops and ribeye steaks which all good meat-eaters appreciate. 

So how did NBC describe him in the sub-head of their story on the crash?  As “a hard-line conservative cleric.”  Because of course they did.  Because they suck.

And how did the Biden administration respond?  By issuing a State Department statement offering its “official condolences” for the death. 

To see how a government official should actually respond to the much-deserved death of a smelly terrorist leader, I refer you to Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom our special forces – and military dogs! – raided and killed.

If you haven’t seen it before, you must watch Shane Gillis’ hilarious four-minute recounting of Trump’s epic, trash-talking speech that night.  The most famous line from it is that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog.”  But my favorite moment is one that Gillis highlights.

Trump acknowledged that Baghdadi likely had a suicide vest on, and talked about the way our special forces guys went in through a wall with a robot and military dogs.  “They used dogs… beautiful dogs.”

And then he mocked Baghdadi, praised our troops and our dogs, and then mocked Baghdadi some more.

THAT’s how you announce the death of a terrorist!   

On a related note, I can only hope that the IDF is deploying dogs in Rafah right now.

Beautiful, Jewish dogs.     

Hamas delenda est!

Our Colorado Trip, Trump’s Show Trial, and DeNiro’s Sad Decline (posted 6/3/24)

Let me start by saying that I’ll make this a three-column week, because I miss you all after having spent another week on the road, and not writing anything. 

We all had a great week in Colorado, and crammed a lot into it.  We set my daughter up in Boulder, and she was actually giddy about the natural beauty of the area, the much cooler temps and drier air, and the university, her roommates, and her mentoring professors. 

We left her there on Sunday, and then met up with my two cousins, and took a whirlwind tour of national parks and beautiful scenery.  We saw Pike’s Peak, the Great Sand Dunes, Royal Gorge, Canyon Lands, Mesa Verde and Arches.  We drove the Million Dollar Highway and saw the picturesque towns of Durango, Silverton, and Ouray. 

In Glenwood Springs we drank in the saloon beneath the room where Doc Holliday died, reportedly of TB, but possibly of Covid.  (He wasn’t vaccinated, and cute little guy Rachel Maddow tells me that that’s a death sentence.)

We didn’t have time to stop by Leadville.  Which was disappointing, because I was hoping to meet Kenny Koch’s brother Tim and his wife Vicki at their High Mountain Pies pizza place there.  Next time, I hope.

But I did get to see a cigar store Indian at one of the mountain towns we went through, which reminded me of Lizzie Warren, and that #wemustneverstopmockingher.

As I am on most vacations, I was pretty much cut off from the news, and in the day and a half I’ve been home, I’ve tried to get caught up. 

One odd thought occurred to me, as I skimmed through the coverage of the end of the Trump  show trial: in recent years I’ve often imagined going back in time and showing my younger self what has become of people I used to look up to and admire, especially those who have taken shockingly horrific turns in their lives.    

The all-time leader in that category is (of course) Bruce Jenner. 

If I could visit 14-year-old me in my small Illinois farm town in 1976 – as I sat in front of a Wheaties box with his picture on it, reading a Sports Illustrated account of his Olympic exploits – and try to explain “Caitlyn” Jenner today, I don’t know which one of us would be more discombobulated.

(Young Martin:  He cut off his WHAT?!  And he’s calling himself WHO?)

But last week, another former hero is giving Bruce a run for his money in the “how far have they fallen” derby: Robert DeNiro.

DeNiro has always been one of my favorite actors.  He was amazing in Godfather II, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.  He was in some great, iconic scenes: playing Russian roulette with Walken in The Deer Hunter; his slow burn as a small-time hood before shooting Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown; as Capone with the baseball bat in The Untouchables.  Even his under-rated comic turn with Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. 

I know that like so many other celebrities, he’s been an irrational lefty for a long time.  He’s engaged in obscenity-filled screeds about Trump at award ceremonies, and ranted ridiculous warnings about the hellscape that Trump would create if he ever becomes president. 

As if Trump was not the president in the recent past, during the least hell-scapey administration of the last 30 years.

But his disgraceful performance at the Trump trial is a further sad step on a downward spiral.  Jenner’s penectomy was less disgusting than DeNiro’s apparent lobotomy.  I can’t remember the last great movie he was in, or the last time he was great in a movie.  It’s all “Meet the Fockers” lately, and as the late Joe Biden used to say, “Not a joke.”

When I heard the news of Trump’s “conviction” on Thursday, it made me madder than I thought it would.  In view of all of the corruption and reversible errors during the trial, I thought that I’d been prepared for that verdict.

The case was ridiculous in the first place, and not moving it to a jurisdiction where you had some chance of finding a non-Trump-hating jury pool was a bad sign.  Then it came out that “Judge” Merchan’s daughter has raised millions for Dems, and he himself had donated three small amounts to Biden’s campaign and other leftist activist groups dedicated to stopping Trump. 

Then the trial starts, and the star witnesses are a porn star who admits she hates Trump, and will never pay the $500K a court has ordered her to pay him, and a convicted perjurer who admits to committing a much more serious robbery against Trump than Trump was charged with in this case.

The charges are misdemeanors on which the statute of limitations has run out, the predicate crime (necessary to allow revising the old misdemeanors) is not even named until the defense has closed (!), and Trump is not allowed to call a former head of the FEC who would testify that even the original misdemeanor charges are illegitimate because Trump didn’t violate campaign finance laws.

But I keep coming back to the judge.  I did a little research, and the guy earns over $200K per year and is worth an estimated $10 million, but when he decided to contribute to partisan leftist causes, he only ponied up a total of $35! 

The man sold out even the appearance of his professional objectivity for less than the price for one pair of the special shoes that Joe Biden has taken to wearing in an effort to keep him from face-planting every time he walks across the White House lawn! 

You can’t make this up.  Our opponents are cartoonishly corrupt, and I’m just praying that most voters are half as outraged by this travesty as I am.  Even though I was a DeSantis supporter, I have already been willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump in November.

Now you could put that glass into a moat full of napalm and rabid piranhas and set the whole mess on fire, and it wouldn’t keep me from the ballot box.  All I have to do is think about Biden, Bragg, Cohen, Stormy, “Judge Merchan” and the whole rotten lot of them, and my mind immediately goes to DeNiro’s Capone when he found out that Elliot Ness had captured one of his shipments of booze. 

I paraphrase his great rant, hand gestures and all:

“I want you to find these guys and I want them DEAD!  I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burnt to the GROUND!  I want to go there in the middle of the night and p*ss on their ashes!”

I know.  It’s a movie.  And I’m not actually advocating violence.

But I would like to see all of those little Fockers get what they’ve got coming to them.

Stephanopoulos Shames Himself, A Criminal Brings a Hammer to a Gunfight, and Bibi Tells Biden to Stick It (posted 3/25/24)

The ridiculous stories are coming at us so fast that I might have to make this another three-column week.  No promises, but I’ll do my best.

We Don’t Hate the Media Enough

This story is already two weeks old, but I have to mention it: George Stephanopoulos put on a truly shameless display when he interviewed Nancy Mace on his sleazy Sunday morning show. 

He opened with a clip of Mace talking about her rape when she was a teenager, and then attacked her for supporting Trump, whom GS dishonestly said – 10 times! – had been found “liable of rape” against the crackpot E. Jean Carroll.

Mace fought back and repeatedly played the victim card – rare as it may be, she was actually justified in this case for doing so!  But I wish she had really attacked GS directly, because he certainly deserves it.  I wanted to hear her say something like this:

“George, are you telling me that I shouldn’t support a candidate just because he’s been accused of rape?” (Wait for him to give a smug, self-righteous reply.)  “Well didn’t you coordinate the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton’s numerous sex assault victims, including Juanita Broaddrick, who credibly accused him of raping her?  And didn’t you call those victims “nuts and sluts?”  And didn’t you refer to their true accusations as “bimbo eruptions?” 

“And by the way George, you know very well that Tara Reade has credibly accused Joe Biden of doing to her exactly what Jean Carroll said Trump did to her, except that Reade knows the year it happened, as well as the day and the place and the details.  Since her charge is so much more credible than Carroll’s, will you agree to denounce Joe Biden right now, and urge your dozens of viewers to refuse to vote for him, since you strongly disapprove of rapists?”

Ugh.  If our MSM weren’t thoroughly corrupt, they’d never hire someone like GS, and if he had a conscience and even a scintilla of self-awareness, he’d never be able to attack a rape victim on air, after he’s spent decades pimping for Clinton and Biden.

To follow that story up with a little schadenfreude chaser: Trump has filed suit against ABC News and GS for defamation.  Those suits don’t usually succeed, but Trump’s might have a chance, since GS repeatedly said that a jury found Trump “liable for rape.”

Unfortunately for him and ABC News, and even though the Carroll jury were biased hacks who bent over backwards to pretend to believe her, even THEY couldn’t go as far as GS claimed.

They answered 10 charging questions in their verdict.  The first one read, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.”

Their answer, and I quote, was “No.”

So here’s hoping that Trump beats George like he’s going to beat Fani’s fanny.

Stupid Criminals

Today’s Stupid Criminals story has a little mystery to it, because I found two media stories about it, but one says that it happened in Trenton NJ, and the other in Muskegon County, MI.  So let’s just look at what the stories agree on:

At 2:00 a.m., Citizen-of-the-Year candidate Andray Ingram, 34, used a hammer to break into an apartment and assaulted the resident there. Then he tried to enter the main home that apartment was attached to.  He broke the ring camera with the hammer and made it inside, before the owner greeted him with a pistol.

Shortly after that, cops arrived to find Andray with a brand new hole in his chest.  He was taken to a local hospital, where he joined the choir invisible. 

The moral may at first seem obvious: Moron Brings Hammer to Gunfight, Goes Down Swinging.

But I think the lesson is more complicated:

Hammer vs. Unarmed resident; Hammer Wins.

Hammer vs. Ring Camera: Hammer Wins.  But…

Hammer vs. Pistol; Armed Homeowner Wins.  

In other good news, the Israelis ignored Tony Blinken, Que Mala and the Biden administration’s strongly worded letters telling them to leave Hamas alone now that they are trapped and one the edge of defeat in Northern Gaza.  (You know, like the allies left Hitler alone once we had him trapped in Berlin, or the way we left the Japanese alone once they had pulled back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Instead, the IDF raided the al-Shifa hospital over the weekend, killing 170 terrorists and capturing 480 more.  They also “located weapons and terrorist infrastructure in the hospital.”  (You know, the way your local hospital will also be a staging place for jihadi lunatics, RPGs and AK-47s.)

Israel also said that it killed Fa’aq Mabhouh – a guy whose name sounds like a verb followed by a direct object – whom it identified as Hamas’ “head of internal security.” 

According to NPR, though, “The Government Media Office in Gaza said Mabhouh was in charge of the coordination between tribes and UNRWA to bring humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.” 

They say “tomato,” I say “tomahto.”  And by now, I think we all know what Hamas calls “humanitarian aid,” don’t we? 

Anyway, I’ll always remember Fa’aq as the guy whose name I will NOT spell out phonetically, because I’m a gentleman.  If I weren’t so gentlemanly, I’d be tempted to speak for all of us when I say to the “Government Media Office in Gaza” (which, oddly enough, is Arabic for “NPR”), “Fa’aq Mabhouh, and the horse you rode in on!”

But I am a gentleman, and I know that hearing about the deaths of so many terrorists can hurt the tender feelings of many of our leftist brethren and cistern, let me rephrase what happened in a way that will ease their minds:

“Women’s health care in Gaza was defended by IDF medical personnel who surgically removed 170 tissue masses at the al-Shifa hospital.  These “parts of a woman’s body” ranged in age from 57 to 165 trimesters.  You are now free to shout these abortions.”    

Sorry.  My crack staff tells me that “cistern” was the wrong word to use in the last sentence, and that I should have used “sistren.”  I apologize for the mistake, and will happily amend my last paragraph to replace “cistern” with “septic tank.”   Mea culpa.

Celebration of Excellence

Finally, I highly recommend to you the Daily Wire’s new 8-part video series by Bill Whittle on the history of the Soviet Union, called “An Empire of Terror.”  I’ve only watched the first episode and the first five minutes of the second, and it is stellar.  The production values are high, and it provides a great re-cap for people who already know the outlines of the story.

It really brings alive the heartbreaking cruelty and malice at the heart of all top-down central control schemes (99% of them leftist), and the shocking extent to which those evil forces worked in Russia.  And for those who have only learned about the story in public school – i.e. those who have barely heard of it – it will be a gut-wrenching revelation.

Whittle knows how to tell a story by starting with some intriguing details, and then providing a Paul Harvey-esque “the rest of the story” payoff. 

For example, the second episode begins with the story of a train carrying a devastating biological secret weapon that left Switzerland for Germany and then on to Russia in November of 1917.  Whittle reveals that Lenin was on that train, then cites a haunting 1929 quote from Churchill: “The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons.  They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus…”    

Whittle hammers home the point: “Lenin was not carrying the weapon. Lenin WAS the weapon.”  

The comparison of communist ideology to a plague bacillus is chilling, but it might even be understating its destructiveness!  In the 14th century, the Black Plague killed no more than 30 million people at the most, while communism killed 100 million people in just the last 87 years of the 20th century.  (And the actual plague never imprisoned, tortured and immiserated tens of millions more, the way the commies did!)

You need to subscribe to the Daily Wire to see the entire series now, but I think most conservatives would benefit from supporting the Daily Wire.  They have some great writers/speakers (Andrew Klavan, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro among them), and they make docs (What is a Woman?) and comedies (Lady Ballers) that Hollywood wouldn’t touch.

They are even making wholesome cartoons for kids to counter the agenda-driven, grooming weirdos at Disney and elsewhere.  

So check out “An Empire of Terror,” if for no other reason than to say, “Fa’aq Mabhouh!” to Disney and the MSM.

Hamas delenda est!

Dems Create a Bloodbath, a Racist Movie Bombs, Planet Fitness Implodes, & Tim Tebow Rules (posted 3/22/24)

We’ve got a full line-up of stories, so let’s start with a new category, with a hat tip to Red State for the title:

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough

One of the most despicable traits of our mainstream media is the bad faith way that they take a quote wildly out of context, and then pull their dresses over their heads and launch into a performance art piece of faux outrage. 

One example would be when Sarah Palin referred to “targeting” vulnerable Democrat candidates for House and Senate seats, and the MSM pretended to believe that she was soliciting hitmen to kill Dem candidates, or something.  

Maybe the most famous example was when Trump joked in a 2016 speech that maybe the Russians could find and turn over Hillary’s lost emails.  It is still hard to believe that the Democrats were mendacious enough to pretend that he was collaborating with the Russians, and to use that obviously humorous quip as the basis for a presidential impeachment!

They were at it again this week, this time pretending that when Trump used the word “bloodbath,” he wasn’t discussing dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.  Even though the quote came from the middle of a speech about… wait for it… the dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.

No, the Dems cried havoc, and let slip the whores of war. 

Wait, that’s not right.  I meant the dogs of war.  Or was it the dog-faced pony soldiers of the presstitues of the MSM?

Anyway, everyone from Imhotep Pelosi (Aiiii! The mummy walks among us!) to every Dem pol and media talking head in sight started ranting about how Trump was calling for a genocide, or something.

Of course multiple conservative web sites immediately cited Merriam Webster’s definition of “bloodbath,” one meaning of which is “a major economic disaster.”

(Like, for example, the dire ramifications of allowing Chicoms to attack our car market.)

And they also quickly produced a series of news clips featuring dozens of Democrats and MSM “journalists” (but I repeat myself) using the word in exactly the same way Trump did.

Ugh!  As this category suggests, whenever we think we might really hate the lying media, we must remember that we STILL don’t hate them enough.

But I’m not a hater.

A mocker and a sarcastic critic, sure.  Guilty as charged.  But I’m no hater.

Therefore, I’m going to give our leftist opposition a fantastic tip to make their “journalism” less pathetic:  If you’re going to insist that the word “bloodbath” be taken literally – which is incredibly stupid, but hey, you do you – then it must be used only when there is literally blood involved. 

Here are a couple of examples:

“Democrats defund police; bloodbaths ensue in major blue cities.”

“Democrats open our borders to hordes of foreign criminals; bloodbaths ensue.”

“Taxpayer money is used to fund Planned Parenthood abortuaries all over the country; it’s a bloodbath every day!”

You’re welcome, Democrats.  Now please re-think your life choices.

Today in Schadenfreude Corner, I’ve got a quick bit of movie news.

If you’re not a low-down whitey-hating racist – and I know that you aren’t – you probably missed the promotional push leading up to the opening last Friday of the movie, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”

And your mental health is better for it.  Unfortunately for me, part of my heroic role here at Cautious Optimism is to subject myself to various political assaults on the American project so that you don’t have to. 

I won’t lie though: I did not watch this movie.  But I did read two reviews, and then I watched the trailer. (On an unrelated note, if there are any opthalmologists in CO Nation, can you tell me how long the burning and blurred vision that comes after splashing bleach in one’s eyes usually lasts?  Asking for a friend.)

The premise is that white people are so maliciously racist that they are a constant threat to innocent black people, requiring blacks to condescend to their white fragility.  The mentor to the protagonist sets the table in the first minute of the trailer, when he asks his protégé, “What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”

Just as the kid starts to answer, “Sharks,” the mentor interrupts him with, “White people…when they feel uncomfortable.”

Get it?  It’s not a racist screed played ironically as a horror film, or an acerbic social critique. 

It’s a comedy!

(I’m reminded of an old Gilbert Gottfried routine in which he imagined the pitch meeting to persuade tv executives to greenlight “Hogan’s Heroes”: “It’s about a bunch of allied prisoners in a concentration camp during the holocaust.  And it’s a comedy!”)

So this insulting mess of a film opened in 1,146 theaters nationwide on March 15th… annnddd… it bombed!  It brought in a pathetic $1.3 million on its opening weekend, and that total included a huge drop from its first day to its second.    

Even more shockingly, it only got 31% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, even though the critics famously give virtue-signaling extra points for woke themes in movies.  Any film focusing on a transgender handi-capable person of color fighting the patriarchal forces of white, straight America is usually spotted 60% right off the bat (10 points for each of those checked boxes). 

So for even lefty critics to only give this mess 31% speaks to what a horrible abomination it is.  (For comparison, the critics gave Rob “Meathead” Reiner’s Christophobic “documentary” “God and Country” 88%!)    

To put it another way, if you added the earnings from the Meathead movie and this racist trash together, you wouldn’t even have enough cash to hire renowned Ukrainian energy expert Hunter Biden to lobby his dear departed daddy for one single month!  

Speaking of financially disastrous decision-making, I’ve got a new entry in the “Unexpectedly” category:

The Planet Fitness chain of gyms recently started coercing their employees and customers to cater to the desires of sexually confused “transgender” people. 

The business produced an operational manual that required employees to use “names, titles and pronouns” of strange sexual narcissists, and threatened to fire them if they wouldn’t do so. 

The manual also acknowledged that some customers might “feel uncomfortable” with people of the opposite sex sharing showers and bathrooms with them, but insisted that, “This discomfort is not a reason to deny access to a transgender member.” 

And just to demonstrate the company’s Orwellian bona fides, the manual said that this deranged coercion was meant “to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the Judgement Free character of Planet Fitness.”

Got that?  “Judgment Free.” 

But if a normal woman and her teenage daughter undress and head for the showers after a workout, and they notice some naked dude with heavy mascara and a beehive hairdo sitting in the locker room staring at them while he’s trying to make balloon animals with his phallus? 

If they object, you know that the “understanding” commissars at Planet Fitness are going to judge the hell out of them for being transphobic bigots!

Anyway, late last week the Planet Fitness manual hit social media.

Annnndddd… their stock price plummeted 8% immediately, shaving $400 million off the company’s value.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  (Also: more please.)

In Stupid Criminal news, I’ll take you to the big open space where our southern border used to be for the story of a guy who might be the dumbest criminal I’ve ever written about.  (And I’ve written about the Biden crime family!)

This charmer is a 22-year old Lebanese named Basel Bassel Ebbadi.  (He’s the terrorist so nice, they named him twice!) He was caught by the US Border Patrol in Texas on March 9th. 

And even though I’m wary of disclosing sensitive tactics involving our national security, I’m going to disclose one clever forensic technique our border agents used to trip up ol’ double-Basel:  They asked him – and this is a quote – “What are you doing in the US?”

And he said, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.”

(Rumors that he then slapped his forehead, said “D’oh!  I mean, I’m here to seek political asylum,” have not been confirmed.)

Further fiendishly ingenious questioning tricked Basel-squared into admitting that he had “trained with Hezbollah for seven years… and guarded weapons locations for another four years.”  And also that he planned to set off his bomb in New York City. 

So a Hezbollah terrorist came through our porous border with plans to blow up part of New York, and the only reason he was caught was that he was dumb enough to confess when he was asked one question.  (This guy is so dumb that he’s been called “the AOC of Jihadis.”) (By me, just now.)

And ABC and CBS did not even mention this story on their flagship morning and evening news shows on Sunday and Monday, while NBC did give it 45 seconds on Monday night.  (Remember: we don’t hate them enough!)

Let’s end with a new and inspiring example of the Celebration of Excellence.

Thirty-seven years ago, a married missionary couple serving in the Philippines were pregnant with their fifth child when the mother suffered a life-threatening infection that required strong drugs which threatened her pregnancy. Doctors advised her to abort the baby because he likely had birth defects because of her severe illness, but she chose to have the child.

That baby was Tim Tebow, who would grow up to become the greatest college football quarterback ever, in my unbiased opinion (Go Gators!), winning two national championships and a Heisman trophy. 

But as good of a player as he was (did I mention he went 4-0 against FSU?), he’s a better man.  He’s been a fine example of Christian faith, raising money for various charities, including the pediatric cancer center at our home-town hospital where my daughter got her first nursing job.

(“Hey Martin,” you might be asking, “was she nominated last week for a state-wide nursing award in Colorado?”  Yes she was, in fact.  Thanks for asking.)  

Ten years ago Tebow started a foundation that puts on an annual “Night to Shine,” a coordinated

series of world-wide “proms” for kids with Down Syndrome and a variety of other disabilities.  (Watch a few of their videos online if you don’t mind getting choked up.)

In the cynical and debased world we live in, it’s hard for me to watch even Tebow without wondering in the back of my mind whether he’s too good to be true and authentic.  But I was glad to see him speak in front of our congress earlier this month (I know: talk about “pearls before swine!”) in support of a bill to fund rescue teams to identify and rescue child sexual abuse victims.

I know that the government can screw up everything it touches, but this is a truly good cause, and I’m going to look into this bill, and I hope that it does what its sponsors want it to.

And I’m glad that his parents brought Tim Tebow into this world.             

Hamas delenda est!

Hur Wrecks Biden, Fani & a Subway Criminal Wreck Themselves, & I Celebrate My Anniversary (posted 3/18/24)

I’m tempted to open today with some comments on Hur’s testimony last week about Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.  And if I were to do so, I’d mention how many of the Democrats made complete fools out of themselves during the hearings, blatantly lying about what Hur said in his report… while he was sitting right there to refute them!

I might hypothetically call special attention to Pramila Jayapal (and not just because an anagram of her name is “liar pajama play,” because that is obvious to everyone) who read from a prepared stack of lies.  When she said that Hur’s “investigation resulted in a complete exoneration” of the late Joe Biden, Hur interrupted to contradict her. 

She immediately started talking over him, repeating that, “I’m going to continue with my questions.” (Of course, she wasn’t asking any questions.)  Irritated when Hur insisted on making his point, Jayapal repeated, “You exonerated him.”

And Hur corrected her, mid-lie, again: “I did not exonerate him.”

That’s when Jayapal gave the most obnoxious smirking glare and insisted, “Mr. Hur, it’s my time. Thank you.

If I were commenting on the hearing, I would have to momentarily return to a fixture of my past columns – the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI) – to note that normally Jayapal has a SFPI of 78 (in the middle of the “resting Hillary-face” zone), but during her pathetic “it’s my time” comment, her SFPI spiked to 94. 

Which equates, as regular readers may remember, to a situation in which even Mother Theresa would be unable to stop herself from instinctively slapping the dishonest smirk off her face.  

And I would probably – if I were to comment on the hearing – point out that my favorite part of Hur’s interviews was when Biden went off on a long, rambling tangent about his Corvette (I swear I am not making this up) and – in the words of an actual, official document of the United States – “made car noises.” 

But I’ve decided not to comment on those hearings.  Because we need to do everything we can to be sure that Biden remains on the ticket until election day.  So I think he’s doing a great job!

And by the way, I missed the Hur testimony, which I’m sure was not worth watching.  Instead, because it’s pollen season in north Florida, I washed our cars that afternoon. 

And you should have seen the strange look my wife gave me when she came out and caught me in the driver’s seat of her car, yanking the steering wheel back and forth and going, “Vroom!  Vroom!  Look at me, I’m the leader of the free world!”  

I will instead start my column with a few observations about the judge’s bizarre ruling in the Fani Willis case on Friday. 

The judge read his findings, pointing out the long list of damning facts proving that Willis and Nathan Wade broke every legal rule except coveting thy neighbor’s oxen… before explaining that if Wade left the case, Fani could remain!

Lots of people are already pointing out the logical inconsistency of finding that Willis and Wade both behaved unethically, but then ousting Wade and allowing Willis to stay.  (And by the way, where is the old-school, oppressive patriarchy when you need it?  Shouldn’t the system have condemned the adulteress and let the dimwitted man-wh*re stay on the case?  It’s almost like we don’t live under the yoke of misogynistic oppression after all.)

This decision fits a troubling pattern of bias, in which judges admit to finding clear evidence of guilt and misconduct – as when Comer basically said that Hillary was guilty in the illegal server and secret documents case, or when Hur found that Biden clearly stole and mishandled secret docs for decades – but still allows the leftist in question to escape consequences. 

But this might be one of those “God works in mysterious ways” situations.  Obviously, if the outcome had been that Willis got tossed out on her Fani and no other corrupt leftist prosecutors could have been found to take up the case, that would have been better.

But if the case is to go forward, the best-case scenario is that Fani stays in the seat (HA!), since she is so thoroughly discredited.  And judging from her terrible performance so far, I’m sure that she’ll be be-clowning herself even more.  She has already shown the emotional stability and maturity of a conceited junior-high girl, and that was BEFORE she got publicly and rightly humiliated for a solid month. 

There’s no one more angry and incapable of rational behavior than a mean girl who got pantsed in front of the whole school.  So her future mis-steps should provide plenty of entertainment.

In today’s Stupid Criminal Story, I give you the tragic tale of Dajuan Robinson, 36, who got onto the NYC subway last week with a bad attitude and a gun in his backpack.  (I don’t watch MSNBC, but I’m assuming that they’ve already reported that “Dajuan” is a very common name among White Christian nationalists.) 

Anyway, Dajuan goaded a 32-year-old man to fight, and then lunged at him, pushing him down and punching him several times.  When a woman on the train pulled out a knife and stabbed Dujuan twice in the back, he interrupted his attack to pull a gun from his backpack.  Then the other guy fought with him, got the gun away from him, and shot him with it.   

This is obviously a happy-ending story, but not just because a violent creep got shot with his own gun.  How about the average New Yorker who jumped in and stabbed the guy first?  Most observers in such situations usually either cower, or pull out their cell phones and narrate the action like low-IQ ghouls. 

Even better, a Brooklyn DA has said that the shooter won’t face charges!  I know: pick up your jaw and read that again.  A DA in Brooklyn said that somebody who defended himself against a violent perp won’t be prosecuted!  Now if someone can just tell that DA about the Daniel Penny case! 

In fact, the great Babylon Bee had a hilarious Penny story on 3/6, with the headline “With Daniel Penny Arrested, NYC Forced to Deploy National Guard to Protect Subway.”  The best lines in the story are faux-attributed to Governor Hochul: “We desperately need the Guard to come do exactly what we arrested Daniel Penny for doing.  Civilians have become too afraid to confront violence on the subway, for reasons we cannot determine.”

Unfortunately for Dajuan Robinson, that might be changing.

In other news, I’ve considered adding a few new categories to some of my future columns, one on stories about our horrific mainstream media (I’m thinking of a title phrase I saw on another conservative website: “No matter how much you think you hate the MSM, it’s not enough.”)

The other new category will be offering nominees for “Jackass of the Month.” And because I love you all, I’m going to write a short column on Wednesday with my first nominee for that award.

I know: I spoil you.  And you’re welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a self-indulgent choice for my latest “celebration of excellence” category.  And the subject for this one is… drumroll please…

Me!

Because 38 years ago I sold my motorcycle and my shirt, and moved to Florida to get a PhD in English.  A week later, I met a blonde smoke-show of a Norwegian goddess who was so out of my league it was ridiculous.  She was charming and witty and kind… and did I mention her incandescent hotness?  

I mean, I couldn’t even look directly at her.  I had to poke a hole in a shoebox and look at her through that, like an eclipse!

That night I went home and took a self-inventory. 

I look like I look (i.e. nothing to write home about), and my net worth was a used black Mazda GLC with no AC (in Florida!), a “Most Improved Player” high school football trophy, and a couple of particle-board bookcases full of cheap paperbacks.  Not only that, I was starting a degree that within 5 years’ time offered the possibility of earning well in excess of $18,000 a year!   

Sure, I had a razor-sharp wit and the strength of ten men (because my heart was pure), but most people were not overly impressed by that. 

I cannot describe the unlikeliness of me landing her!  “Drawing to an inside straight” doesn’t begin to touch it.  “Outkicking my coverage,” is inadequate.  Winning the lottery is closer.

As it happened, 30 years later Randy Newman wrote a lovely song that describes my situation perfectly.  It’s called “She Chose Me,” and you should go listen to it right now. 

It’s got strings and a piano and a French horn, and it starts with these lines: “I’m not much to talk to, and I know how I look/ What I know about life, comes out of a book/ But of all of the people, there are in the world/ She chose me.” 

And 35 years ago today, in the First Lutheran Church in Gainesville, FL, in perhaps the greatest feat of marrying-up in human history, I got Karen Ludwigsen to be my wife. 

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!

Also, as always, Hamas delenda est

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bah! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Etc.    

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

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

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

Que Mala: “Word Salad”

Jill Biden: “Juco”

Liz Warren: “Edgar Winter”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Janet Yellen: “Keebler”

Merrick Garland: “Bullet Dodged”

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except for Bill Maher, apparently. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s our president, people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s not a good thing, right? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because as always…

Hamas delenda est!