Tag: writing

My Strategy For Not Letting Politics Turn You Into an Idiot (posted 8/28/25)

In the comments to my Wednesday column, David Michael DeLoach wondered whether, when I mentioned that “an extended family member [of mine] is a manager of a Cracker Barrel,” I may have been talking about JB Pritzker.  Even though I probably wouldn’t admit it if the Round Mound of Unsound Governance were related to me, I can promise that he isn’t.

But the idea did cause me to wonder what that might be like.  The first thing I thought of was a hypothetical Thanksgiving if Uncle Pritzker – D(irigible) came over for dinner.  I can picture how it would start: I bow my head to say grace.  “Lord, we thank you for this—”

And the prayer is interrupted by a horrific, cacophonous chomping/gnashing/slobbering/crunching sound that drives us all to instinctively crouch beneath the table, before we open our eyes and slowly peek out.

Annnndddd…there’s a stripped-clean turkey carcass that looks like a school of piranhas just swam over it and JB’s chair is empty.  And probably broken into kindling. 

And, scene.

Okay, having got that out of the way…

Regular readers often tell me that I’m a role model for them.  Well, maybe not “often.” 

Okay, one reader said that once.  He said that whenever he’s faced with a choice, he asks, “WWMD?” (What would Martacus do?) and then acts accordingly.   And who am I to contradict his wise plan?

So as a public service, I will now explain how I think we should behave when we’re confronted with bonehead mistakes by politicians on our side of the aisle.  And it’s a pretty simple plan:

Admit it.  Don’t lie about it, or try to spin it.  Call it a mistake, explain your reasoning, and then do whatever you can to persuade people to agree with you, and to persuade the politician to reverse course. 

Don’t be a spoiled narcissist and stomp away, pouting that your guy has betrayed you, and if you ever vote again, it won’t be for him!

After that, recognize that no politician will please you 100% of the time, and consider rating your guy with a batting average.  If he’s hitting over .500, that’s good.  Anything over .700 is great, and the best you’re likely to get in this fallen world.

Then move on with your life.

I’ll give you an example. I am a dedicated conservative, and pretty much no politician with a chance of winning national office is conservative enough for me.  So I’m generally hoping for the best, but expecting to be disappointed fairly often, without that thought crushing me.  (I might call this being “cautiously optimistic.”)

Right now I’d say that Trump is hitting around .750, and I’m loving a lot of what’s happening.  Closing down the border in 20 minutes, ramping up deportation efforts through various means (raids prioritizing the worst of the worst, encouraging self-deportation through the app and even cash payments, etc.), the BBB tax breaks, cracking down on antisemitism on campuses, cutting USAID and the Department of Education and PBS/NPR, some DOGE cuts, taking out Iran’s nuke facilities etc. and etc.

But he’s not a consistent and disciplined conservative, so he’s done things I don’t like.  I don’t like the “no taxes on tips” – not because I don’t like tax cuts, but because I don’t like the government picking winning and losers, and giving bennies to some blue collar workers (wait staff) over others (cooks, bus boys, etc.).  Just lower taxes across the board, and let the free market work.  

I don’t like the feds taking stakes in private companies (Intel, Nvidia, etc.), for the same reason.

I think his tariffs have been more chaotic and confusing than they’ve needed to be, and I don’t understand imposing them on our allies as much (or sometimes more than) on our enemies.

Speaking of the Chicoms, I also don’t like inexplicably playing nice with them, as when he has allowed them to keep TikTok going (breaking an earlier promise), and especially agreeing to allow 600,000 Chinese students to take up slots in our universities and gather intelligence for a brutal communist dictatorship. 

And as positive as Trump’s governing results have been, I think he’s giving up 10-15 points in approval – which becomes political capital in future battles – as a penalty for acting more like a jackass than he needs to.    

Still, all things considered, he’s doing a really good job, and considering the hellish possible Hillary and Que Mala administrations that he’s saved us from, he’s by far the best president since Reagan, IMHO.       

See?  Was that so hard?  I know that parts of it probably bugged some of you, but we’re all fine.  I might even be wrong about some of it.  (Spoiler alert: nope!)

Now let’s look at the other side of the aisle, to the smoking, clattering, rattling wreck that is the national Democrat party and their MSM remoras.  How have those elite Dems been reacting to Trump’s second term so far?  Are they admitting the mistakes their side has made, or some of the good moves that Trump has made, and doing a little self-reflection?  Are they trying to call balls and strikes, and trying not to look like they’ve gone bat-guano crazy?

Hoo-boy, they are NOT! 

Start with the border.  The Dems are obviously on the losing end of that issue, but they can’t just admit that Trump was right to close the border.  And when he deports a high-profile bad actor like Kilmar, the Dems can’t just say, “Okay, he’s a bum, but a lot of the illegals are good people just trying to make better lives for themselves.”

Nope, they’ve got to claim he’s an unjustly victimized Maryland father.  And when it comes out that his wife told the cops that he was beating her – twice! – they say, “Don’t believe all women!”  And when he has common MS-13 tattoos, and when video surfaces of him smuggling half a dozen Mexicans cross-country in another gang-member’s car? 

The Dems plug their ears and close their eyes and chant, “Mary-land fa-ther, Mary-land fa-ther” over and over again.

Or consider crime.  When Trump goes into DC and crime immediately drops, the Dems can’t just say, “Thanks for the help, and we now realize that we need to do more, so we’ve got it from here.”

Nope, they’ve got to scream about orange fascism, and show the country that they’d rather let their black constituents die than let them be protected by the Apricot Adolf.  Ken-Doll Newsom tried to troll Trump, pointing out cities in Red States with higher murder rates per capita than LA.  Annnnddd… all of those cities have been governed entirely by Democrats for decades.  D’oh!

When a smarter Democrat like (don’t laugh) Joe Scarborough tried to keep Chicago’s awful mayor “Let’s Go” Brandon Johnson from making the same mistake of denying his obvious crime problem, Johnson was too dimwitted to take the lifeline.

Scarborough first asked him if an extra 5,000 cops on the beat would help, but Johnson rambled about how money for more housing and education would help.  Joe tried again, suggesting that more cops would be useful, but Johnson Que-Mala-ed off into some word salad about how the question is too complex and multifaceted, and root causes, and infrastructure…

To his credit, Joe said, “That’s not what I asked,” and begged the dope to just say that more cops could be part of the solution.  But Let’s-Go was still muttering his previous answer. “…and systemic racism, and Jim Crow, and unequally distributed resources…”

When Joe finally threw up his hands and gave up, Johnson then had his bodyguards pop some smoke outside the studio, so that he could run serpentine to his limo amid chattering small arms fire, while he called back over his shoulder, “We don’t want Trump’s KKK storm troopers here, we’re doing fine!”    

The lefties have been doing the same thing about redistricting.  Rather than just admitting that they’ve gerrymandered in all the blue states but that it’s sleazy and everyone should stop it, they have to pretend that the GOP move to do it in red states is an unprecedent assault on democracy. 

David Brooks, the formerly reasonable person who sold his soul to become the token “conservative” at the NYT compared Texas redistricting to the use of mustard gas in war!  And he couldn’t even leave it at that, saying “I fully grant you that Trump started it,” when he knows perfectly well that the largest blue states are more lopsidedly gerrymandered than the red states will be after they redistrict.

Finally, the tragic shooting in Minneapolis, which is a story we’ve seen way too often: mentally unstable damned soul commits mass killing atrocity.

Decent people would feel the grief and hold their tongues and support the victims in any way they could.  Stupid politicians would jump in and start assigning blame without knowing the facts.  Evil morons would apply their political litmus test, playing the story up if the killer could be identified with their opponents, or trying to bury it if he’s associated with their side, and lying about the details either way. 

Does anyone have to guess which way the Dems and the MSM (but I repeat myself) played the Minneapolis story? 

Even after so many such stories have blown up in their faces in the past, the Dems can’t resist jumping on the rake again.

Mayor Jacob Frey – who you may remember as Mayor Wussy McPussington from several years ago, when he was surrendering his city to BLM rioters –sneered at those offering “thoughts and prayers,” and condemning anyone who noticed that the killer identified his own “trans” identity as one source of his misery as transphobic bigots.

A soporific NPR host, after an interview in which a Minneapolis official correctly called the male killer “he,” corrected the “error,” saying that we don’t know the killer’s identity or how “they” identify.”  Later on, the New York Times cleared up the confusion, calling the male killer “her.”  Because: journalism!

Talented writer/moron Stephen King – perhaps thinking that since inanimate objects in his fiction (e.g. the car Christine) kill people, inanimate guns must also kill people in the real world – shared his wisdom about the culprit.  “Whether he was transgender is beside the point.  The point is he had a gun.” 

(Um, do I have to admonish you about misgendering the obviously female killer, Stephen?  Shame on you!)

A gun “expert” on CNN agreed with King that semi-automatic weapons are the problem.  Then he immediately proved that he doesn’t know the most basic facts about guns, by saying that “these things [semi-auto weapons] can shoot dozens of bullets in just one trigger pull.”  (Of course, FULLY automatic weapons do that.  And in this context, they are the opposite of SEMI-automatic weapons, you numbskull.)  

Perhaps the best example of leftist lying about this newest story came from ABC News reporter Aaron Katersky who said that “the name of Donald Trump” was written on his guns.  Could this finally be the elusive, murderous Trump supporter whom the legacy media has been waiting for, lo these many years?

Nope!  It turns out the phrases, “Kill Donald Trump” and “Kill Trump Now!” appeared on the killer’s guns. 

If I didn’t know the killer is already dead, I’d phone in a tip to the cops that they might need to see if Tim Wolz, Gavin Newsom or most of the Democrat members of congress can account for their whereabouts at the time of the shooting. 

Because that sounds like something straight out of the DNC.  

Hamas delenda est!

When it Comes to Crime, Many Democrat Chickens are Coming Home to Roost (posted 8/22/25)

I’ve been writing about crime a lot lately. 

And I’m not done, because as I’ve said in earlier columns, crime – what causes it, how to punish it, how we should balance the rights of criminals vs. law-abiding citizens – is one of several key issues (along with taxation and how the courts should view the Constitution, maybe?) that most clearly distinguishes conservatives from liberals.

While I think there are weighty, even philosophical issues at stake re: crime – to what extent does free will play a role when people are brought up in a debased criminal environment; in what circumstances can rehabilitation work for some criminals – the vast majority of crime raises much more basic questions.

Questions like, “How stupid is the average criminal?”  (Spoiler alert: Very, very stupid. Thankfully.)  or “Why are nationally elected politicians, and especially Democrats, so comically inept at it?” 

Taking the first question first, I can usually get some much-needed comic relief from the hilariously pathetic bungling of most criminals. 

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll remember stories about dip-Schiffs who crawl under a car on a sloping driveway and use a rusty, wobbly bottle-jack to lift it so they can steal its catalytic converter…only for it to fall on them and crush their dumb arses.

Unexpectedly!

Or the stories about rappers who confess to their crimes in their terrible “music” videos, or post social media pictures of them flashing a stolen pistol with a clearly visible serial number on it.

Or the story about the rapper 4XTRA, who recorded a video flaunting his possession of illegal M1000 fireworks, and shortly after a brilliant monologue about his plans for them – “You think I won’t blow schiff up wit’ dese, my narwhal?  Don’t friend with me, Imma blow a motherfriendin’ narwhal UP!” – that crazy narwhal blew two of his mother-friending fingers off. 

(I’d say, “Cue the sad trombone,” but no rappers play the trombone.  And I don’t think you can make a sad record-scratching sound on a turntable.)

In the movies, criminals are slick professionals.  They create elaborate distractions to draw away the police, and devise multiple pre-planned escape routes.  They wear disguises, and stash different clothing near the crime scene to change into.  They have multiple sets of identification papers in various aliases, and they stay off law enforcement’s radar.

In real life, criminals get prison tattoos that advertise their gang affiliations and their past crimes, so that cops can recognize them from a block away.  (“I’m a Gangster Disciple and I’ve killed 9 people, all of whose gang names I’ve inked on my body.”)  Even before they go to prison, they get a prominent tattoo on their face or neck, so that if they’re ever in a line-up – spoiler alert: they will be! – they can be easily identified.

And it’s always something memorable, like “Born to Lose,” or “No Regerts!”

Movie criminals drive non-descript panel vans with a magnetic business sign and multiple sets of plates that can be quickly switched out, or else fast cars that they drive up a ramp into the back of a semi-truck, or a hidden garage within a mile of the scene of the crime. 

Real criminals drive 100 pounds of meth and six illegals from the Texas border to New York in a car with two mis-matched doors, one working headlight and two broken taillights.  And a gaudy adhesive memorial stretching across the rear window that says, “RIP Chuy!  MS-13 Forever!”  And they don’t have insurance or registration, but they do have an expired Guatemalan driver’s license. 

And they speed and change lanes without signaling for the entire trip.

And their car is full of pot smoke, as if it were 1981 and they were Kilmar and Chong.  Or possibly Cheech and Kilmar.

Sure, those mouth-breathing low-life criminals provide us some easy laughs.  But what about the high-level masterminds, those who reach the peak of their profession, and should therefore have their criminal act together?

Nope!  I give you three quick examples: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and CA Senator Adam Schiff.

On the surface, Tish James might appear to be fairly smart.  She has three degrees, including a Master’s from Columbia and a JD, and she managed to get herself elected to multiple public offices, culminating in the top enforcer spot in New York state. 

Alas, degrees are often not worth the paper they’re printed on, and the majority of voters in New York state are imbeciles.  And Tish James is as dumb as a bag of hammers. 

Because she publicly went after Donald Trump on flimsy charges that he had committed mortgage fraud.  Other than wrongly listing a NYC penthouse of his as having 30,000 square feet when it was only 11,000 – an easily proven error on his part – her whole case came down to his valuation of Mar-A-Lago.  He said it was worth a ton of money, and Tish said it was worth $28 dollars and an expired bus pass. 

Yes, she managed to get a verdict against him from a transparently corrupt far-left judge, and a judgement for half a billion dollars, which was just thrown out by an appeals court as ridiculously excessive.  The judgment itself will almost certainly be overturned too, because James’ valuation of Mar-A-Lago was laughably low; Deutsche Bank assessed Trump’s properties and net worth to be sufficient collateral for his loan; and he paid that loan back with interest. 

But all of that is beside the point, because James made one of the most crucial blunders of morons: she falsely accused someone of doing what she was actually doing herself. 

She claimed that Trump was able to get lower interest rates on his loans by lying about the property he was borrowing against.  But she has a long history of doing exactly that, involving several mortgage applications and mortgages on which she perjured herself to receive preferable interest rates.  Most brazenly, in August 2023 – when she was going after Trump – she lied on a mortgage application in Virginia, claiming that house as her principal residence when it was not, and when NY law required her to live in NY to be AG.

Lisa Cook made the same corrupt move.  In the summer of 2021 she bought a home in Michigan by swearing on mortgage documents that it was her principal residence.   Two weeks later, she bought a condo in Atlanta, claiming that IT was her principal residence.  Unless it turns out that she has a third “principal residence” somewhere else, it looks like the Michigan place is her actual residence, since she is renting out her Atlanta condo. 

Again, the brazen stupidity of her fraud is hard to understand.  She’s a governor of the powerful Federal Reserve, which is charged with setting national interest rates that control mortgage rates, and she committed mortgage fraud?! 

A masked crack head who robs a convenience store and then immediately removes his mask in front of a security camera is not acting any dumber than a mortgage regulator cheating on her mortgages!   

Even better was her response when called on it.  Here’s what an honest and innocent person would say:

“These charges are false.  I did not lie on any mortgages, ever.  I’m immediately releasing both of the mortgages and applications in question, and they prove that I didn’t claim both properties as my principal residence, which would be fraud.  I demand an apology.”

Here’s her statement:

“I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet.  I take any legitimate inquiries about my financial background seriously and am compiling accurate information to address them.”

Really, Lisa?  You’re “compiling accurate information?”  That shouldn’t be hard, since all you’d have to do is hold up the second mortgage and application, and point to the many spots in the documents where you identified the Atlanta condo as NOT your principal residence, but a rental or a second home. 

What’s that?  That’s not what the documents show? 

Keep compiling, sweetheart.

Finally we come to Adam Schiff, one of the sleaziest corrupticrats in Washington, DC. 

Schiff did manage to avoid the temptation to get a tattoo of his nickname (“Pencil Neck”) inked onto…well, his pencil neck.  But sadly, he was unable to resist the siren song of fraudulently obtained lower interest rates, just like Cook and James.

In 2003 Schiff bought a house in Maryland that he declared as his principal residence.  In 2009, he bought a condo in CA, which he identified as his principal residence, and for which he took a homestead exemption on his CA state taxes.  In 2020, after falsely claiming two principal residences for over a decade, he finally declared his Maryland house as his second residence. 

Last month, a Fannie Mae financial crimes investigation concluded that Schiff had engaged in “a sustained pattern of possible occupancy misrepresentation” on five Fannie Mae loans over the years. 

I don’t know what that “possible” is doing in there, because you can’t have two “principal residences,” and he clearly claimed that he did. 

To top it off, the DOJ has now found that he’s been paying a 3% interest rate on both properties, well below any legitimate second home mortgage rate at any time when he financed or refinanced both properties. 

Did I mention that he also failed to disclose his mortgages on required annual financial disclosure forms until 2011?  Or that he’s now accused of wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to financial institutions? 

If I did, it’s only because it’s hard to make all of those points when you’re giggling uncontrollably. 

Looking back, Tish James ran for AG on a repeated promise to get Trump, and when she’d gotten her corrupt judgment against him, she gloated about how she was looking forward to foreclosing on Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago and everything else Trump owns.  And with the possible exception of James, nobody cut more ethical corners in pursuit of Trump than Schiff did.

I guess it’s true what they say – it’s always the ones you most suspect. 

Ironically, the one truthful thing that Pencil Neck and Tish James said over the last several years – and they said it a lot! – might now be coming back to haunt them:

“No one is above the law!” 

In the words of Nelson Muntz…

HA HA!

Hamas delenda est!

More Uncle Bob Stories (posted 8/11/25)

After the positive reaction to my column on Friday about our family reunion and Uncle Bob’s exploits, I decided that I’d tell a few more Uncle Bob stories today, and be back on Wednesday to celebrate some of the happy conservative wins and schadenfreude-drenched tales of Dem losses from the last 10 days.  

So after the tractor fire two Thursdays ago and before our family reunion that Saturday, my cousin Darryll and I went out to Uncle Bob’s on Friday afternoon.  When we got there we first saw the burned tractor and the burned Miata.  The tractor was totaled, and the Miata’s passenger-side taillight assembly looked to be fine…but the rest of it was burnt right down to the frame. 

Other than the two roasted front tires, the tractor Bob saved had no other damage.

We found Uncle Bob sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a huge, old oak tree, with his daughter Lisa’s good dog Lola sitting in the grass beside him.  (Yes, I have a cousin named Lisa Simpson.  And I swear I’m not making this up: she married a guy named Bart.  Fortunately, we live in a patriarchal society where wives take their husbands’ last names, so they were spared the burden of going through life as Bart and Lisa Simpson.) 

After Darryll and I put some treats for the reunion in the fridge in Bob’s shelter, we sat down and talked with him for a while.

Bob had a .22 pistol on his lap.  Because of course a guy who just drove a burning tractor out of a burning barn would have a pistol close at hand.  Maybe the tractor fire had been arson.  You can’t be too careful.  (And better to have a gun and not need it…)

After he told us the story about Illinois Bob and the Burning Tractor of Doom – he made it sound more like a Three Stooges short, because he’s modest that way – we then went on to other subjects.

He’s a good storyteller in his old age, which is strange, because he was famously taciturn as a young man.  I mentioned before that he and my dad were “Irish twins” – dad having been born in January of 1938, and Bob that December – so they were in the same year in school.  I remember dad telling me that when one of their teachers read the class roster the first day of high school, her face went pale at the prospect of two more Simpson boys in her class at the same time.

Their two older brothers, Ray and Bill, had done some hell raising in town, so teachers were apparently braced for the worst.  (Ray ended up joining the Army and going to the Korean War, apparently as a result of some alcohol-involved incidents that resulted in a “go to jail or join the army” choice.  Afterwards he moved out to California, so I didn’t get to know him very well.  When I asked my grandma what Ray was like – I was around 9 or 10 at the time – she said that he was a pretty good boy, but “Ray like to tussle.”  Which I think is the most grandmotherly way to say that.) 

(Fortunately, when Ray did some tussling with some North Koreans and Chicoms, he lived to tell the tale…although he never did much talking about it, as I understand.)

But the teachers had nothing to fear from my dad and Bob, who were thick as thieves, but caused no real trouble.  They had polar opposite personalities.  Dad was an extreme extrovert, and Bob an introvert, and there was no better proof of that than their senior year school yearbook. 

Their pictures were right next to each other, of course.  Beside dad’s picture was so much writing it could barely fit: 4-year letterman in track, basketball and football; captain of the football and basketball teams; senior class president; homecoming king; voted “most popular.”    

Beside Uncle Bob’s picture?  “Bob Simpson.” 

Somehow the subject of high school came up when we were talking to Uncle Bob and petting Lola under his oak tree.  And he told the story of his final English class, during the spring of his senior year.  What follows is as close as I can remember to his exact words.

“I already had enough credits after December to graduate, so I didn’t want to be in school, let alone in that English class.  And our teacher told me that everybody in class was going to have to give an oral report on some story we’d read.  I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I had to.  I said I’ve barely talked in four years of school, and I wasn’t going to get up in front of class and talk about some story.”

Here he added, “Why would I want to talk about a weird story about some old sailor with a bird tied around his neck?”

Darryll looked at me, because I’m the English professor, and I said, “You mean, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?’”  (It’s a once-widely-anthologized Coleridge poem, an archetypal Romantic piece filled with the kind of symbolism perfectly designed to be unappealing to a 17-year-old Uncle Bob.)

“That’s it,” he said, and shook his head.  “After I said I wouldn’t do it, she sent me to the principal’s office.  I asked him why I couldn’t just take shop again, and he said, ‘You can’t take four years of shop!’” 

(By then Bob was already a decent carpenter, and he ended up becoming a union carpenter, after stints as a barber – he built his own barber shop – and the proprietor of a small take-out restaurant.   When everybody “started growing long hair like a bunch of freaks in the ‘70s,” he quit cutting hair and converted his barber shop to “Fish ‘n’ Chicks,” and ran that for about 8 years.  All while he was also doing some carpentry on the side, too.)

A compromise was finally reached.  Bob would have to write a book report on any story he wanted, and he wouldn’t have to read it in class.  “So I saw a movie about a story where a young couple buy each other gifts that they can’t use, and I wrote about that, so I could graduate.” 

I said, “The O’Henry story, ‘The Gift of the Magi?’”  (The husband owns a pocket watch but no chain, and the wife has beautiful hair but no comb.  So he sells the watch to buy her some combs, and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain.  When I got back to Florida, I looked it up, and found the movie Bob watched: “O’Henry’s Full House,” a 1952 anthology of five stories, which serendipitously offered him a path to graduation in the form of a way to write a book report without reading the book!)  

And Uncle Bob looked at me and said, “How many stupid stories do you know?”

And I said, “All of them.” 

Afterwards, when Darryll I were heading to a local golf course, I asked him why Bob had a pistol with him.  He said that there were some moles in his yard, and on days when the weather is good, he likes to sit in the yard and look for movement, and then fire controlled bursts of two or three shots into the ground.

It won’t surprise you to hear that Bob has worked on other handyman projects over the years.  When he was in his mid-60s, he built a duplex that he kept as a rental for about 10 years before selling it.  My dad and two other uncles on my grandma’s side pitched in during part of the framing; I was in Florida by then, but I remember hearing how 4 men in their 60s struggled to lift lam beams into place.   

Probably to the consternation of the same women who took a dim view of Uncle Bob driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn in his mid-80s! 

(By the way, if Bob had talked about building that duplex last week, I would have made a reference to J.D. Salinger’s novella “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.”  And Uncle Bob would have just shaken his head at me.) 

His latest projects have involved working on a series of mobile homes in Bradenton, Florida.  He started coming down for the winters about 15 years ago.  He bought a trailer that was okay, but needed some work done.  He worked on it for two winters, got it perfect, and then got itchy and sold it, buying another fixer-upper.

He’s now on his fourth trailer, and he had just finished working on it when Hurricane Debby came through last August, taking off the carport and damaging the roof.  My cousin Darryll has a trailer about two blocks away, and he and Bob’s son Bobby came down after the storm and tarped the roof and cleaned up the lot.   

(Darryll and Bobby are the two cousins I’ve taken the May trips with in recent years, starting with driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in Darryll’s 1976 Caddy El Dorado in 2021.  New CO members can read my journal of that trip at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Just scroll down the right side until you see “Route 66 Road Trip.”)

When Darryll came down in November, Bob and Aunt Lilly were already in Florida.  Darryll called him the night he got in, and said that he’d be over to help Bob with the roof the next day.  Does anybody want to guess where Darryll found him when he got to Bob’s trailer?

That’s right.  On the roof. 

Fun fact: Uncle Bob is 4 years older than Joe Biden.  And Bob’s still climbing ladders, while Biden hasn’t climbed a staircase without falling since late last century. 

I miss my dad every day, but I’m glad that Uncle Bob is still here, and that he’s already dodged the two leading causes of death for octogenarians: falling off a roof you’re working on, and driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn.

Am I saying that America needs a lot more men like my dad and Uncle Bob, and a lot fewer Gavin Newsoms and Beta O’Rourkes?

That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.

Hamas delenda est!

Family Reunion: Mom Did Well, and Uncle Bob Saved a Flaming Tractor (posted 8/8/25)

I’m happy to be back home in the free state of Florida, after my trip up to Illinois for the family reunion.  I just saw CO’s post celebrating over 33,500 followers on this site, and after everybody’s generous responses to my column about the struggles of my friend’s wife, my mom, and Cassie the Wonder Dog, this growing group feels like a huge family right now. 

As it happens, this is my 700th Cautious Optimism column, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to write every one of them.  Especially since number 700 will be less somber than number 699 was. 

Starting with the best news from the trip, mom had a really good time, and everybody was glad to see her.  My sister arrived with her around 2:00 on Saturday, which gave us a chance to drive her around town for a couple of hours before the reunion dinner started. 

The weather was great, sunny and in the 70s, and we first drove past the house mom grew up in on Post Street.  The current owners have let some over-grown bushes and trees obscure part of the building, but mom recognized it right away, pointing out the porch before we drove around to an angle that let us see it. 

At this point her Alzheimer’s is like a fog that descends on her and then lifts for a while, following no particular pattern.  We never know when the mists will dissipate or for how long, but seeing her face light up when she recognized the house made the trip worthwhile all by itself. 

From there we drove down Ottawa’s main street, through a quintessential Midwestern downtown, past the leafy town square featuring a fountain and a statue of Lincoln and Douglas, commemorating their debate there.  Mom recognized the square and the courthouse, but enough of the old buildings have received face lifts over the years that she didn’t recognize a lot more.

We drove to the cemetery beside the Illinois River where her parents are buried, and while she didn’t recognize the cemetery, she recognized their headstone.  We wondered how she might react, because for the last several months she has gone back and forth between remembering that they are dead, and thinking that she just talked to Grandma on the phone, and is supposed to meet her at the Post Street house. 

But the fog seemed to have lifted for most of the weekend, and she seemed undisturbed, and contented to visit their graves.  From there we drove by grandpa and grandma’s last house, a tiny place on the other side of the river that she didn’t recognize.  We drove her over to Marseilles, the town where she and dad had started their married lives, and where I spent the first 10 years of my life.

As we crossed the river and drove up Main Street, she recognized the downtown, and a few familiar sights.  One of the two houses we lived in has been extensively remodeled, and all of us had a hard time figuring out which one it was.  But she recognized their first marital home, on Fillebrowne Street. 

I don’t think mom remembers the story of how they bought that house anymore, but she and dad told us so many times that Rhonda and I will never forget it.  Mom was going to a baby shower for a friend of hers, and dad wanted to go to a garage sale on Fillebrowne.  But because they were broke and he was impulsive, she made him promise not to buy a mower, or tools, or anything.

And he didn’t.  He bought the house!  For $4500.  Then they had to go to see her dad, to ask him to borrow the $450 down payment.

Over the years, every time that house has come up in conversation, or whenever we’ve been back in town and seen it, mom and dad would tell us that story.  On Saturday, for the first time, mom didn’t repeat it.  But she recognized the house, and that was good enough for us.

We all met for dinner at a local restaurant.  Dad had been one of nine kids – five boys and four girls – and eight of them survived past childhood, which was not something to take for granted in their generation.  (Dad’s brother Donnie got sick and died before he turned two, and nobody is even sure what he died from.)  Three of the nine siblings in dad’s generation are still alive, and two of them were able to make it, along with their spouses.  We had 27 people there, including 8 of my cousins and their assorted kids, and the food and the conversations were great. 

Afterwards we went to my Uncle Bob’s homestead north of town, for more visiting and stories.  Bob’s got about 60 acres, some of it cornfield, but a lot of timber and a huge, shady yard with old oak trees.  He’s got a big, old barn and several smaller and newer ones, and he built a nice shelter between his house and the treeline years ago.  It has a fireplace, and enough tables to hold 35 to 40 people, and several of the attendees brought possessions that had belonged to their parents or our grandparents.

Everybody did a show-and-tell, and there was a lot of laughter, and some tears.  A lot of people brought pictures that most of us haven’t seen in years, if ever.  My cousin had an old trunk full of grandpa and grandma’s stuff.  There was a wooden high-chair that all 9 kids had used at one time or another, and an old, red onesie and a metal toy car of Donnie’s, which choked everybody up.  There was also a pair of his baby shoes, though there was some joking that, as poor as the Simpsons were, every boy and a few of the girls probably wore those shoes before they were handed down to Donnie.

Mom recognized everybody from her generation and most of the cousins, and she had a great time.  There were a lot of stories about dad and Uncle Bob, who were “Irish cousins,” and very close.  (Dad was born in January of 1938, and Bob in December of that same year.)  Mom soaked it all in, and was happy but tired by the time Rhonda and Jimmy took her back to their hotel. 

The fog descended on her again the next day.  A little while after they got back on the road for Tennessee, she became worried that they’d left dad behind in Ottawa.  Rhonda reminded her that he passed away ten years ago, but mom was certain that she’d seen him the night before, apparently thinking that dad had been there with the rest of the family at Uncle Bob’s.  To be fair to her, a lot of us felt that way.  

When they got home that evening, mom went to bed early, and by the next day she didn’t remember the trip at all.  But for that one night, she was in her old hometown and surrounded by family.  And when she wakes up from this life and the fog has lifted for good, she’ll remember it all.

One more story from the weekend.  I got up to Illinois on Thursday night, planning to pitch in with some preparations, including cleaning up and stocking the shelter for the reunion.  But as I was driving up on Thursday, Uncle Bob couldn’t wait for the kids to get there and help. So that morning he took one of his two tractors out and mowed the ginormous yard, before returning the tractor to the newer barn, and going back in the house.  

A little while later he smelled smoke, and ran out to the barn to find that the tractor that he’d put away hot was on fire.  He ran back to the house and told his wife to call the fire department, and then ran back to the barn.  The burning tractor was parked between his bigger tractor and their Miata; the Miata had a full tank of gas, and it was on fire, and the other tractor’s front tires were on fire.  And Bob is going to turn 87 in a few months.

So naturally, he ran into the barn and jumped onto the big tractor to try to drive it out of the barn and save it.  The metal he grabbed to get up into the seat was hot, and the seat was hot, and the gear shift was hot.  But it started up, and he drove it out of the barn – both front tires fully engulfed – and drove it into the closest grass that was still damp from dew, and drove in a serpentine pattern to put the tires out. 

His daughter and her husband had gotten there that morning from Minnesota, and she came out of the house to see her octogenarian dad come barreling out of a burning barn on a smoking tractor, twisting the steering wheel from side to side as he tried to extinguish the flaming front tires. 

THAT is an Ameri-CAN, people!

Afterwards, he felt a little shaky about what he had done, and his wife and daughter were mad at him for doing it.  But he got a lot of furtive fist-bumps from the Simpson men and cousins at the reunion.  And Saturday night, when all but six of us had gone home, and we were sitting around a fire under a clear night sky, my cousin Darryll told Uncle Bob that he was his hero, and that he hoped he’d be able to pull stupid stunts like that when he’s 86. 

Because: toxic (or at least reckless) masculinity.

I just wish that my uncle had a ring camera on the door of his house, because that video – possibly with a little Indiana Jones theme music as the soundtrack – would be great for a show-and-tell 20 years from now, with our kids and grandkids. 

Next week I’ll be back on the politics beat – there is so much great stuff going on! 

But tonight I’m just appreciating the afterglow from the trip.  Cassie is asleep beside my desk, where she’s been while I’ve written all 700 columns, except for the small number I’ve written when I was traveling.  And we’ve made some new memories with mom, and the rest of the family.

Thank you all for being part of CO Nation, and have a great weekend!

Throw-Back Friday (posted 8/1/25)

I’m up in Illinois with the cousins now, and looking forward to the reunion on Saturday.  I was overwhelmed with the warmth and number of your responses to my bittersweet column on Wednesday.  Thank you, one and all!

When I checked my computer last night before hitting the sack, one of my old columns came up in my feed.  I don’t know how that works, but it felt like a sign, since it was as goofy and lighthearted as my Wednesday column was somber. 

So I thought I’d re-post it here, for those of you who might have missed it the first time around.  I posted it 5 years ago in May (as you might be able to tell from the fact that I was still half-accepting the “covid came from Chinese bats” cover story).

I don’t know if it’s a “Best of,” but I hope it will be a little palate cleanser for you as you start your weekend!

New Entry in the “Stupidest Article of the Year” competition (posted 5/1/20)

Bill Weir has a newborn son, born during the quarantine.  That’s a cause for celebration, maybe even more than usual, against the backdrop of this time of disruption and social isolation.  After spending part of the lockdown watching hours of You Tube videos of surprise pregnancy and twins and even triplets announcements – with all of the accompanying shouts and cheers and tears and joyful shock – I’m even more attuned than usual to appreciation of new life.

But there are some red flags for the newborn Weir boy.

First, his dad named him “River.”  And no, it’s not a “Boy Named Sue” situation, in which you stick a kid with a name guaranteed to toughen him up via all of the expected abuse he’ll suffer because of it.  He’s just the kind of dad who names his kid “River.”  Strike one.

Second, Bill Weir works as the Chief Climate Correspondent for CNN.  Strike two.

Third, he wrote a ridiculous letter to his son, and published it for all the world to see.  And it is long, and tiresome, and packs more wrong-headed leftist tropes into one column than I would have thought possible.  (And I’m known for packing lots of tiresome and wrong-headed political tropes into over-long columns myself!) (By people who are wrong about everything, I mean.)  Strike three.

I won’t put you through the whole thing, but I think it’s worth sharing a few lowlights.

The letter starts,  “My dearest River,  Against all odds you were conceived in a lighthouse, born during a pandemic and will taste just enough of Life as We Knew It to resent us when it’s gone.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry we broke your sea and your sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.  I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon™ more than the Amazon and that the waterfront neighborhood where you burble in my arms could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough for a mortgage.”

Yikes!  There’s so much wrong with that, I don’t know where to start.

No, wait a minute: I do know where to start.

Don’t tell your kids where and how they were conceived!  The letter starts and ends with references to a vacation that he and his wife took to Croatia, and the Dubrovnik lighthouse they stayed in.  Where – he wants River and the world to know – they “did it.”

Ugh.  First, I can’t think of anything more gross for this young kid to read as he gets older than the details of his parent’s love life. 

Second, what an erotic narcissist: “You plebes probably conceived your normally-named kids in a bland 3 bedroom tract house, in the missionary position.  Yuck.  Meanwhile, my lover and I (and you know this is the kind of gag-inducing male who calls his wife his “lover,” just to stick you with  a mental image that you do NOT want) hiked up a wind-swept cliff-face in a romantic foreign land during a thunderstorm to break into a century-old lighthouse, where we alarmed the livestock with our creative lovemaking and exotic outfits.”

As you regular readers know, one of the best life strategies you can follow is to ask WWMD (What Would Martacus Do?), and then act accordingly.  So what have I told my children about their conception, I know you are wondering.

Did I tell them, for instance, that their mother and I – having grown bored after romping our way through a series of sexual escapades that made the Kama Sutra look like a spring 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post – decided to try something different, when the Ringling Brother’s Circus came to town?  So we broke into the big tent at 2 in the morning, and after spending a half hour getting the hang of the trapeze, managed an aerial encounter involving several flips, hanging onto a bar upside down with just my knees, and finishing in a fall into a giant net, and 9 months later our oldest was born?

Or that four years later, we came up with the idea for an assignation on the back of a 2-year old Palomino that incorporated the kind of horsemanship worthy of a young Crazy Horse at the height of his powers, in a little trick I like to call the ol’ “canter-canter-trot-TROT-GALLOP!”  And that 9 months later, our youngest was born?

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

The point is that of course I haven’t told them that!  All they know is that when a man and woman love each other very much, the man carries the woman through a bedroom doorway that is in black and white for some reason, and then the door shuts and the credits roll (“Gregory Peck as Martacus,” “Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Simpson.” “Nancy Pelosi as the Mummy,” “Elizabeth Warren as the Cigar Store Indian.”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  And nine months later, one of them is born.

And nobody is named “River.”

Weir moves from erotic narcissism to climate narcissism: “I’m so sorry that we broke your sea and your sky?”  I’m pretty sure that the sea is still there, and I was just looking at the sky this afternoon. Doesn’t seem broken.

And because he’s apparently learned all his science from Al Gore and Captain Planet, he thinks that his house is going to be underwater in 20 years or so.  And just like with my old lefty buddies who were sure that the oceans would be dead by now, and acid rain would have wiped out half of our population, and a new global ice age would have wiped out the other half, I’d like to call Weir and remind him of his hysteria and laugh at him, as he sits in his un-condemned and totally dry house.

Weir goes on:  “See, for decades, scientists told us that if we weren’t careful, humans would unleash an invisible enemy out of the jungle and into our lungs. But that was a story few wanted to believe.  So we kept cutting down jungles — and prairies and mangroves and the last few the places where the wild things are — to pave and plow, develop and devour everything inside.”

Does this guy think that the Flu Manchu came from humans cutting down jungles?  Has nobody told him about the Chinese boneheads eating the bats, or the Chicom boneheads and their fifth-rate lab safety procedures, or the progressive slave-state bureaucrats in Beijing who lied about everything (as commies are wont to do) until it was too late to stop a pandemic?  Apparently not.

“As you get older, this will be hard to understand. But we were under the spell of Genesis 1:28: to take dominion over every living thing.”

Good lord!  I love when non-Christians who wouldn’t know Saint Paul from Minneapolis-St.Paul expound on how the evil Bible teaches that we should destroy the environment.  “And God said, go forth and cut down the jungles, and pile up the wood and make a great fire, upon which thou must roasteth the bat, notwithstanding that it is the least delicious of all the fowl that flieth through the air. Then shalt thou cough on thy neighbors, who must thenceforth flee to the airports and disperse throughout the globe, spreading the pestilence while your vile and indolent government lieth about it all, and keepeth on with the intellectual property theft and the exporting of lead-based toys and contaminated drywall.”

I’m no theologian, but you don’t have to be Aquinas to understand that the Biblical mandate is for humanity to be stewards of the environment, not destroyers of it.

Weir isn’t done:  “We had the strange urge to carve straight lines out of nature’s curves and were under the spell of a uniquely human force called “profit motive.”

You mean like the profit motive that has allowed you to get a six-figure job writing terrible “journalism,” and allowed you to afford a house to take River home to?

The article goes on and on, but it’s too painful to spend any more time on.  I just find myself feeling sorry for his son, because he’s less than a month old and his dad is already filling his mind with alarmist doom and gloom.  “We’ve killed the planet, we’re all cursed, you’ll never know how things used to be so great, but now they’re terrible, and getting worse every day.  Sorry about that.  By the way, did I ever tell you the story about the time I absolutely wrecked your mother doing downward-facing dog on a faux bearskin rug on the flagstone floors of a Dubrovnik lighthouse?”

Not since the Cuyahoga was so filled with chemicals that it caught fire has any River been so badly treated.

To get the bad taste of this article out of my mouth, I’ve written a letter to my oldest daughter, to cosmically balance Weir’s toxic letter:

Dear Katie,

First, aren’t you glad to have a great name like “Katherine,” which is classic, timeless and versatile, and not something ridiculous like “Conifer” or “Aquifer” or “Saguaro Cactus Simpson?”  You’re welcome.

Second, never mind how your mom and I made you.  You’re here now, and you’ve been nurtured and educated and equipped to make your own way in the best nation ever.  You’re welcome again.

Third, we used to be much worse stewards of the environment that God has given us responsibility for, but because we have free markets, we have gotten wealthier, and our wealth has allowed us to innovate and improve our treatment of nature.  We’ve found ways to grow more food on less land, and our modes of building and transportation are becoming cleaner and less destructive with each passing year.  If we can just not watch CNN, elect less leftists, and get the Chicoms to stop eating the freaking bats, your future is going to be brighter than for any other generation in history.

Now get out there and be an Ameri-CAN!”

Avenatti/River Weir 2020!

Our Lefties Are Loopy, but the Finns and Germans Have Lost It! (posted 7/14/25)

To start your week off on an upbeat note, I’ll recount how two girls under the age of 14 have applied the Simpson Gender Confirming Protocol™ to a surprised volunteer on the Fourth of July.  The girls were swimming at the Little Platte Swim Beach in Missouri and waiting for the fireworks to start when a strange man swam up to them.

After asking them inappropriate questions, he allegedly groped them and tried to remove part of their swimming suits.  They administered a SGCP™ maneuver to him (i.e. kicked him in the groin), then got out of the water and alerted their parents.  The groper had apparently been identified by the SGCP™ as an intact male, because the police were able to catch him as he limped toward the parking lot a short time later.     

The miscreant – one Carlos Climaco-Garcia – only had identification from Guatemala, and was found with someone with an ICE detainer.  So the police reported that “the suspect’s citizenship status is unknown.”

Because of course they did.  (I’m sure that his great-great-great-great abuelo and abuela came over on the Mayflower.)

Sure, technically this creep wasn’t claiming to be a female trapped in a male body when he underwent the procedure – the primary test subjects for which I’d invented the SGCP™.  But the salutary effect the procedure had in this case is a testament to the incredible versatility of the SGCP™.  Is there anything it can’t do?

It slices, it dices, it determines gender, it dissuades descendants of pilgrims who celebrate Independence Day by groping pre-teen girls. 

It’s going to be tough to work that into my Nobel prize acceptance speech, but I accept the challenge.  

Speaking of immigration-related foolishness, I’m beginning to suspect that Trump has planted a bunch of undercover agents in the leftist “peaceful riots” movement to discredit all leftist efforts to fight deportation.  The only alternative is that that movement is littered with poor souls with  Crockettian levels of intelligence.  (Yes, I have turned Jasmine Crockett’s name into an adjective indicating barely detectable levels of brain activity.)

In every anti-ICE protest story, MSM and Democrat commenters describe ICE acting like the  Gestapo, terrorizing blameless citizens, and arresting Gandhi-esque peaceful protestors for no reason at all. 

And then video comes out, and it shows that the ICE officers were arresting a bunch of illegals and showing great restraint while violent mobs of protestors screamed and interfered and attacked them.   

To pick just one example, we can look at the case of Jonathan Caravello.  He is a Cal State Channel Islands (?) professor and a member of “an anti-racism, social justice union” which is now claiming that he was “kidnapped” for no reason by federal agents last Thursday, during a peaceful protest of an illegal raid by fascists. 

Alternatively, he was “protesting” at the raid on the Glass House pot farm, where a lot of illegals were found.  A US Attorney says that Caravello “was arrested for throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement” and is charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers or employees.”   

Customs and Border Protection officials said that 10 of the illegals found there were juveniles, and 8 of those were unaccompanied minors.  Oddly enough, the Glass House corporation has been “hit with multiple wage and labor law complaints in recent years,” and the president and co-founder has donated many thousands of dollars to Democrats in CA, including $10K to Ken-Doll Newsom. 

Unexpectedly! 

While we’ve all been told that you can’t judge a book by its cover, we’ve all also noticed that you can very often judge a book by its cover.  And if you’ll look up Caravello’s faculty photo – the official one, that he posed for, knowing it would go on the university’s website! – you’ll see what looks like the cover of a book entitled, “Nightmare Journals: What if Charles Manson and A Crazy Karen from Libs of Tik-Tok Had a Baby?”

He’s got the wildly unbrushed long hair, the sad attempt at a beard.  And the eyes.  Always the crazy eyes.  And again, this was an official photo!  You just know that the photographer had to say something like, “Hey Jon, would you like to borrow a comb before I take this professional picture?”

And Caravello said, “No, no, I’m good.  I’m going for the Jim Ignatowski from Taxi look.”  And damned if he didn’t nail it!

He also has a pic on a CSU-associated Instagram page, a self-dramatizing shot of him posing with a fist upraised and a somber expression.  (By the way, in that photo he’s got a SFPI™ [Simpson Face Punchability Index] rating of 93 out of 100.)

But before you conclude that the US of A is the most screwed up country when it comes to dealing with immigration, I’ve got to stop you right there.  Because the nations of Finland and Germany exist, and they have been making complete fools of themselves on this subject. 

I can’t say that I’ve thought a lot about the Finns during my life – around here, when you discuss the Finns, you’re talking about the Miami Dolphins – but what thoughts I’ve had have been positive.  I like Scandinavian types, and I love the fact that plucky little Finland kicked some Soviet arse in the Winter War. 

And I find a lot to like about Germany too, despite their…oh, let’s call it “uneven performance” in the 20th century.  But both Germany and Finland have in recent years decided that it would be a great idea to welcome a large group of Islamic immigrants into their countries.  And things have not gone swimmingly. 

Unexpectedly!

Finland’s population is one of the oldest in Europe, and whiter than Liz Warren. #wemustneverstopmockingher  (The white part is irrelevant; I just couldn’t pass up a chance to mock the Albino Apache.)  The majority (70%) of Islamic asylum seekers in Finland, on the other hand, are male and under 35, and they come from cultures who believe that foreign women who reveal more than their eyes are infidel harlots who are there for the taking. 

Thus, a story in the liberal Helsinki Times that tried to downplay migrant crime, had to admit that “Certain nationalities…have been disproportionately represented in specific crime categories.  Iraqi and Somali men, for example, appear more frequently as suspects in sexual and drug-related offenses.” 

Odottamatta!  (That’s Finnish for “Unexpectedly!”) (Research!)

So what have the Finns done to combat the (migrant) sex assault crisis?  The town of Oulu spent 2.5 million euros to make the strangest video you’ve ever seen.  As soon as you’re done reading this column, look it up – search for “Finland no-no video” – because I’m not sure I can do it justice with a verbal description. 

But I’ll try. 

Five Finns stand in what looks like a hallway – three women in front, and two men behind – and they gyrate and gesture to what sounds like a $4 synthesizer.  They have grimly serious looks on their faces and never open their mouths, but a voice-over song repeats these lyrics, which I swear to you I am not making up: “Stop, don’t touch me there/This is my no-no square.”

It’s tough to pick which element of the video is more amateurish.  The music is terrible, the lyrics are a joke, and I could “dance” as well as these people do.  (And that comparison is not even damning with faint praise.  It’s just damning!) 

But the choreography.  Good lord, the choreography!  When they say, “Stop,” they hold a hand up to the camera, palm out.  When they say, “Don’t touch me there,” they cross their arms in an “X.”  When they say, “This is,” they point at their hips, and then they gesture vaguely at their thorax as they say, “my no-no square.”  Then they hold both arms out to their sides, bent at the elbow with their forearms hanging down, and gyrate back at forth. 

If you haven’t seen the great South Park’s parody of this very type of misguided liberal insanity, you have to find and watch the episode where the school has a mascot come to visit the children and sing a song to teach them about sexual harassment.

Search “Sexual Harassment Panda song,” and behold some satirists putting the Finns to shame.  But trigger warning: that stupid song is an earworm, and you may find yourself humming it to yourself for several days.  

I’ll try to paint the picture:  A guy in a panda suit stands in class and does a minimalist jig, while singing in a voice muffled by a panda costume head, accompanied by what sounds like a middle-school quartet recording of a circus merry-go-round soundtrack.

The immortal lyrics:

“Who lives in the east ‘neath a willow tree?  Sexual harassment… panda

Who explains sexual harassment to you and me? Sexual harassment… panda

Don’t say that! Don’t touch there!

Don’t be nasty says the silly bear.

He’s come to tell you what’s right and wrong. Sexual harassment… panda.”

The Finns could have saved themselves 2.5 million euros and had a better product if they’d just dubbed over those lyrics in Finnish.  If they wanted to make it a little more relatable to their Finnish audience, they could have used AI to sub-in a native Finnish animal, producing the same video about the “Sexual Harassment… Reindeer.”

Germany has the same problem – an increasing rate of sexual crimes, and a rate of violent crimes committed by foreigners that is 400% higher than that of native Germans – but they’ve reacted even more stupidly than the Finns, if that is possible.

The Germans have created a series of cartoon “Don’t touch me there” educational posters depicting gropers at public swimming pools, an environment that has proved problematic for interactions between Islamic males and scantily clad German women and girls.

It’s sad enough that a country would even have to create a campaign to explain to people that sexual assault is bad.  But it’s infuriating that the German posters actually cast the Germans as the villains and the foreign immigrants as the victims!

I’m not making that up.  One poster shows two white boys shoving a brown girl into a pool.  Another shows a white boy grabbing the butt of a brown girl as they’re both floating in the pool.  A third shows a white guy in swim trunks going into a women’s locker room to peep at a brown woman in a towel. 

And best of all, a fourth poster shows a large white woman with red hair floating in a pool behind a brown male, who is for some reason missing his lower leg!  He’s got a peg leg there, presumably from being blown off in a peaceful suicide bombing or by an IED, I guess? 

And the redhead is grabbing his butt with both hands! 

So it’s not just male Germans who are vile, groping offenders.  Female Europeans also cannot be trusted around Muslim males, who are apparently stereotypically known for being sexually preyed upon by infidel women!  (Oh, won’t someone think of the Muslim males?!  Where is their “Me Too” campaign?)

Bah! The slow-motion suicide of much of the European West should be a powerful warning to us.  Our elite leftists are as reflexively dishonest as the Europeans – they refer to illegal immigrants as “immigrants” or “undocumented migrants;” they call legal arrests “kidnapping” or “disappearing innocent people;” they call men “women,” and gender-denying mutilations “gender-affirming treatment.”

But most Americans see through those lies, and reject them. 

Not the Europeans.  Throughout much of the EU, members of groups who disproportionately prey on European women are not only not chastised, they are cast as victims.  And a public “education” campaign that is supposed to decrease sexual harassment cannot even honestly identify the source of the problem.    

One bit of good news: after sustained backlash and public pressure, the idiotic German posters were removed and an apology issued.  So maybe there’s hope for Europe yet.

Speaking of how we can often judge books by their covers, I found a picture of the German woman who created the public service posters in Germany, and she looks exactly as you would expect her to:

Large very white lady, wearing a childish black-and-green horizontally striped sweatshirt (and those stripes are NOT slimming).  Round, large glasses, unhinged smile.  And her dark hair is dyed bright green. 

Because of course it is. 

Rumors that she is the white lefty lady who would have had carnal knowledge of Charlie Manson and produced California kidnapping victim Professor Jonathan Caravello have not been confirmed.

Hamas delenda est!

The BBB, U Penn Bends the Knee, + The Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol is Born (posted 7/9/25)

I’m trying to make this a five-column week, so I didn’t have time to respond to all of your kind words about yesterday’s column, but thank you all.   I was especially glad that the narwhal references went over well.

A little bourbon had been consumed before that word popped into my mind, and sometimes the brownest of the brown liquors can cause me to over-estimate how well a running joke is going to play.  But now I’m toying with the idea of starting every column with, “Where my narwhals at?”  

Anyway, this is my third column in three days, and still I’m running like Tom Cruise across the roof of a skyscraper in Mission Impossible 17.  Because lately there is both too much winning, and too much news.

So I still need to circle back – like Jen Psaki, only intelligently – to some recent stories.

Even though Trump blasting the Iranian nukes feels like it happened years ago, I’m still reveling in it.  Israel’s accomplishment of taking out or crippling Iran’s proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad, and the Houthis) and then destroying their air defenses and systematically launching surprise attacks that decapitated their military leaders and scientists and heavily damaged their nuke sites was really amazing. 

Then Trump’s surprise, bloodless strike to take out the rest of their nukes was another masterstroke.  In a sane world, Bibi and Trump would be sharing a Nobel Peace prize.  In this world, they’ll probably both be lucky if they aren’t impeached!

I saw a couple of good, funny posts about the Iranian mission shortly after it happened.  One said, “Democrats are okay with Iran having a nuke.  But they won’t let you have a gun.”

And the other said, “Now that Iran is out of business, there are only 3 Islamic countries with nukes left:  Pakistan, France and the UK.”

Both, sadly, receive the designation of “Fact Check: true.”

The passage of the Big Beautiful Bill was necessary, and mostly a blessing, though it is still hard to tolerate how fiendishly difficult it is to pass an actually fiscally conservative bill that will cut our bloated federal government’s spending!   (Sadly, the BBB isn’t that, though it does nibble at the edges at least.)  

On the plus side, the extra funds for border enforcement are much needed and will pay big dividends, and the extension of the tax cuts will fend off economic damage that would likely have screwed us in the mid-terms.  Enforcing work requirements for Medicaid and denying it to  illegals are beneficial as well.

One other great aspect of the BBB passing: watching the impotent rage and pointless theatrics of the leftists, inside and outside of congress.  Hakeem Jeffries’ marathon speech was probably the most Democrat thing to happen that week.  It didn’t even rise to the level of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It was basically empty talking points and hypocrisy, signifying less than nothing.

The word coming out of Democrat circles was that Jeffries hadn’t let the other Dems know he was going to blather on for so long, so the smarter Dems were not happy.   But that just provided an added bonus: watching Marcy Kaptur (D-Who Cares?) falling asleep behind him.  (Which was also my strategy after Biden got elected: take a bunch of Benadryl and hope that when I wake up, Biden’s term will be over.)

The Dems had to get her out of there, so they replaced her with – I swear I’m not making this up – a male who thinks he’s a female, Tim/Sara McBride (D-‘oh!).  Thus the lefties created a visual tableau that perfectly illustrated the bankruptcy of their party: an old woman put to sleep by their pointlessly droning leadership, followed by the walking embodiment of their gender lunacy. 

Great optics, geniuses!  If that little psychodrama doesn’t make it into a GOP ad for the mid-terms, we’re leaving money on the table.

Other Democrats continued to take the path most traveled, and unfortunately for them, it was strewn with rakes, which they kept jumping on with both feet.  Because they have not learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf.  (Or as Tim McBride calls it, “the boy who’s really a girl who cried wolf.”)  They could not just say that this is a bad bill, or point to its flaws.

They had to insist that it was the most cruel and evil bill they’d ever seen.  AOC fought back tears and said that this “was one of the saddest days in modern American history.”  Many warned that “millions will die because of this bill.” 

Can they not anticipate this backfiring in a year or two, when nobody has died and the world didn’t end?  As CO pointed out a few days ago, the predictions that Trump’s original tax cuts in 2017 would surely usher in another great depression are still accessible, and they have not aged well.

Speaking of not aging well, how about everybody’s favorite Nosferatu with scoliosis, Chuck Schumer, and his brilliant idea to scuttle the BBB?  He insisted that the entire bill be read on the floor of the Senate, giving an impassioned speech about how it’s a crime against humanity to vote on a bill that no one has even been able to read. 

Cut to Imhotep Pelosi, rising from her tomb and marching slowing out from beneath her pyramid, trailing burial wrappings all the way to Schumer’s senate office, where she broke the canopic jar containing her heart over his liver-spotted old head, while yelling at him about how he set her up.  “Don’t you know that the most famous thing I ever said was telling the Senate that they’d have to pass the [Obamacare] bill so that you can find out what’s in it?”

One other good news story that I loved was U Penn’s bending the knee and admitting their defeat in the transgender wars, by stripping male athletes of the trophies they won in women’s competitions, and apologizing to the women and correcting their records. 

It’s amazing to see how quickly the cultural dominance of the transgender fever has broken.  Just a year or two ago, our universities, corporations and federal government were on a deranged jihad to cancel everybody who dared to say that biology exists.  You couldn’t swing a dead, nonbinary cat in public without hitting a pride flag, and when our least qualified SCOTUS nominee confessed that she didn’t know what a woman is, everybody just laughed and gave her a lifetime appointment.  (And how’s that working out for us?)  

But now the shoe is on the other foot, and the genitalia are back in the proper locker rooms.  SCOTUS has given “gender affirming” mutilations and chemical poisonings the kibosh, even as Ketanji Jean-Pierre yells from the men’s room, “I dissent!  And why are these strange toilets on the wall?”        

Even though sane gender rules have returned to our society, I anticipate a rough transitional period ahead, during which many of our young people – along with university administrators and leftist politicians – will need to re-learn how to distinguish between males and females.  And because I am both a doctor (PhDs count!) and an Ameri-can, I have turned my considerable brainpower toward solving this vexing problem. 

And my deep (some might even say heroic) modesty cannot prevent me from admitting that I’ve done it.  I’ve come up with a test that I hope will one day be as famous as the Heimlich Maneuver, thus immortalizing my name in medical history.  Like the Heimlich, my method is low-tech, simple and effective.  And it doesn’t require expensive lab work, invasive cheek swabs, or embarrassing physical examinations.

I call it the SGCP™ – the Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ — and I plan to give a presentation about it to the College of Medicine at Johns Hopkins this fall.

Here’s how it works:  Before an Olympic event – or a sanctioned grade school, high school, college or professional athletic competition – all of the contestants who want to compete in the women’s division will line up in front of a SGCP™-certified test administrator. 

Each administrator will be accompanied by an assistant who qualifies as a PWFE – Person With Functioning Eyes.

The PWFE will separate the would-be competitors who are obviously males into a separate line.  Then the administrator will grab a clipboard and stand in front of each person in line.  After recording each competitor’s name and date of birth on the clipboard, he will carry out the Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ by administering a swift kick to the groin.

If the candidate falls to the ground and writhes around, praying for the sweet release of death for the longest, most agonizing minutes of his life, the administrator will check the box marked “physically intact.”  If, on the other hand, the candidate just grunts, and continues staring at the administrator with crazy Dylan Mulvaney eyes, the administrator will check the box marked “previous bottom surgery.”

Either way, the candidates will be sent to intensive psychiatric treatment, and will be banned from women’s sports and women’s spaces.  Problem solved, and you’re welcome.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to work on my acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

So far all I’ve got is the last line (“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”) and a partial opening:

“We’ve all heard the cliché that you should never meet your heroes.

(Here I’ll dramatically pause while I look around the auditorium at the assembled dignitaries, picturing them in their underwear so I don’t get nervous.) 

Nevertheless, the faculty at the Johns Hopkins College of Medicine met me in the fall of 2025…” 

Hamas delenda est!

AOC’s Troubles, and a Rapper Learns a Valuable Fireworks Lesson (posted 7/8/25)

Okay, there’s no time for small talk.  It’s July 8th, and I’m somehow already two weeks behind on July stories, and that’s not to mention the stories I didn’t get to in June.  So here we go. 

AOC has had a rough couple of weeks.  Besides the big things going wrong – the BBB passing despite the fact that she and the other Dems in congress fell on the floor and kicked their feet and held their breath; the Iranian leadership failing to start WWIII after Trump pulled out the MOP (not gay slang) – she’s made some missteps that have hurt her own personal brand. 

She’s tied herself to Mamdani in his bid to become NYC’s worst-ever mayor.  (And DuhBlasio and David Dinkins were NYC mayors, so the bar has been set high.  Or should that be low?)  Aligning herself with an extremist train-wreck like Mandami is playing well with the dead-end leftists in NYC, but it will become a big liability if she eventually wants to run for president, God help us all.

The bad news is that Mamdani is a phony.  He’s a trust fund baby pretending to be a poor Third Worlder; he’s used more phony accents than Cankles McPantsuit and Que Mala combined; he’s claimed to be black to get affirmative action preference when both of his parents are Indian.  (Dot, not Warren.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The worse news is that the things he’s NOT phony about are his worst beliefs.  He’s an authentic Jew-hater, and an authentic communist.  So…great.

But AOC has also done more to expose her own phoniness, too.  Just like Mandami, she’s long pretended to have a much more hard-scrabble, blue-collar background than she actually does.   Her motive is obvious – being from an intact, financially successful family and earning good money yourself is a huge handicap for Democrats.  Which tells you a lot about the dysfunctionality of the Democrat party.

AOC has always tried to portray herself as a tough Latina “Rosa from the block,” and she’s leaned into her Bronx roots nearly as hard as she’s leaned into the rolling “r” and “s” sounds of her exaggeratedly Spanish pronunciation of “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”   Unfortunately for her, the people who knew her in grade school and high school are only in their mid-30s, and were not all killed by either global warming, net neutrality, or Covid.  Also, high school yearbooks from 17 years ago exist.

So the truth is out there.  AOC lived in the Bronx until she was 5, after which her family moved to tony Yorktown, in suburban Westchester County.  And though records are murky, she apparently caught a case of “WASP nickname syndrome” that may have resulted in a subsequent “Ocasio-ectomy.”  Because in high school she was not a chola from the Bronx, but sweet little Sandy Cortez from the ‘burbs. 

Not that she didn’t have some hardships in her life.  Her dad was an architect who started his own firm, but he died from lung cancer when she was only 19, and her mom did work some blue-collar jobs.  So there are some sympathetic aspects to her life story, if only she didn’t exaggerate to give her some non-existent street cred.

For example, in 2018 she said, “My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here and I grew up seeing how the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity.”  Except that her own story demonstrates the opposite, since her birth on the mean streets of the Bronx didn’t stop her family from moving to the suburbs before she started school.

Also, “the scrubbing toilets” reference is a nice rhetorical flourish, and sounds much more downtrodden and noble than “cleaning houses.”  I don’t want to be a one-upper, but as a landlord for the last 29 years, I’ve unclogged and snaked out more than my fair share of tenants’ toilets, and I know how to remove and re-set one with a new wax ring, too.    

And don’t get me started on that time I had to crawl underneath a house to extract a decomposing possum.  (Did only part of his body come with me when I pulled on his creepy tail?  Do I still re-live that PTSD-inducing experience – including hearing the sounds and smelling the smells – on nights when I can’t sleep?  I don’t want to talk about it.)

So I guess I could steer into that skid, and call myself Martino from the barrio, and whine about how Bruce Springsteen hasn’t written a working-class anthem about my heroic rise from flannel-shirt-wearing hillbilly to Dr. Hilarious Genius who wears a full tuxedo around the house most weekdays. 

But I have too much stoic dignity for that.

Anyway, AOC has been catching more heat for her fabulist tales of her rough teen years lately, as many Yorktown residents are posting messages saying, “You’re from here!” 

One such guy – who I am sure I would love to hang out with – is a retired FDNY firefighter from the Bronx who now lives near Yorktown.  He told a reporter, “You can tell right out of the gate that she isn’t from the Bronx.  Listen to her!  [Then] listen to us!  We’ve been out of the Bronx for years but we still sound like idiots!  It doesn’t just go away.” 

But so far, AOC has not been dissuaded.  She recently made things worse for herself when she tried to engage Trump in an insult battle.  To be fair, Trump started it, by referring to her as “one of the dumbest people in Congress,” which as a president he shouldn’t do. 

On the other hand…Fact Check: true. 

(In fact, the quote I’m about to share with you isn’t even the dumbest part of her tweet.  That was her accusation that his taking out the Iranian nukes was “betray[ing] the American people… by illegally bombing Iran and dragging us into war.”  Annnndddd…the “war” was over before she could spell-check and post her tweet.)

But AOC had to take a closing shot at Trump’s roots in Queens: “Also, I’m a Bronx girl.  You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast.”

Now you may remember that Que Mala kept using the line, “I eat ‘No’ for breakfast!” until she was mocked out of it, on account of how stupid it sounds.  But you’ve got to give the Cackler this: at least it didn’t sound uncomfortably sexual.

Regular readers will know that I’m not up on gay slang.  And at my age, and after nearly four decades out of the dating game since I conned a Norwegian smoke-show goddess into becoming my smoke-show wife, I don’t even know much straight slang anymore.

But I know enough to recognize that a female boasting that she can eat Queens boys for breakfast is not coming across like she wants it to come across.  (Phrasing!)  Because here’s the bottom line (phrasing!):  If a guy from Queens is about to go on a date with a young lady from Yorktown, and he hears that she recently bragged about Yorktown gals being able to eat Queens boys for breakfast, he’s going to be…how can I put this?… NOT offended.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.  So let’s move on.

If you’re like me, you’ve been following rapper 4XTRA for years now.

What’s that?  You’ve never heard of him?  Really?  So you’ve never seen his “No Jumper” podcast, or heard any of his hit “songs,” such as “Gang Slide,” “Off the Bacc,” or “Who Imma Call?”  (I think that last one is a Sinatra cover.)       

Okay, let me fill you in.  He’s a large African-American fellow (unexpectedly) who is a rapper and “influencer” in LA.  He’s had a few run-ins with the law, but who hasn’t?  (I first met CO, Alan Paterson, and Jamie Galioto when we were all in the same cell block, and had to jump in and help Mark Teufel and Christopher Silber out of a jam.  My “thug life” knuckles didn’t tattoo themselves, people.) His last arrest came in April, only a few days after he’d gotten out after a previous arrest.

But he’s a patriotic guy, so naturally, he was excited about the Fourth last weekend.  He even recorded a short video for his fans, during which he was showing off a couple of impressive-looking M1000 fireworks.  In what I’m sure was just some light-hearted joking, he said he was going to use those against some of his rivals, in a 20-second video which featured around a hundred uses of the “N” word.  And I don’t mean “narwhal.” 

But let’s pretend for a minute that I do.

Saith 4X: “Imma ‘bout ta blow a narwhal up.  Friend all the narwhals…. I’m blowin’ a narwhal up!  See these, narwhal?  I’m throwin’ em in yo house.  I’m throwin’ em atchya, narwhal!” 

Annnndddd… a few hours later he blew two of his fingers off.  Unexpectedly!

Reports that his last words before the premature detonation were, “I AM bein’ careful!  Narwhal, please!  Hold my blunt and watch this, narwh—YOWCH!”  have not been confirmed.      

On the bright side, he can now use his influencer experience in a campaign to influence youngsters to not blow their fingers off with powerful fireworks.

On the downside, he is allegedly a member of the Rollin 40s Crips street gang.  I know even less about gang signs than I do about gay or straight slang, but I’m hoping for his sake that the gang signs for the Rollin 40s don’t involve the use of the two fingers he no longer has. 

Great.  I used over 1600 words, and I only got to two stories.  Just between you and me, I thought I’d knock AOC around (phrasing!) for 3-4 paragraphs – I’m way too immature to pass up that “eating Queens boys for breakfast” line – and then I’d be on to more stories. 

But I got on a roll, and Ocasio-ectomy popped into my head, and what’s a fella to do?  When God sends you a big wave and you’re on a verbal surfboard up on the crest, you ride that baby all the way into shore.

In other words, this looks like it might have to be a five-column week.   

Stay frosty, my narwhals.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jump cut to the end of the speech]   

“…like nobody’s ever seen before. 

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

And, scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

One. Week. Layter.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

Whoopi is Strange, Chase Strangio is Stranger, and Hank Johnson defiles Jimi Hendrix (posted 6/23/25)

Note: I drafted this column on Saturday afternoon, before we bombed the Iranian nuke sites, and I’ve got nothing to add to that great story. 

Except to say that it is really refreshing to see a military that is giving zero attention to understanding white rage, or figuring out how we can make helmets that fit over a male drag-queen pilot’s beehive wig, or establishing call-signs that aren’t ethnically offensive, and is focusing instead on putting warheads on targets.

I was going to say “putting warheads on foreheads,” but the Israelis seem to have already turned the correct foreheads into a thick goulash, served with a side of (General) salami on finger sandwiches.  Made of actual fingers!

So thank you for your service, American military bad asses!

Also, on Friday I teased my take on Greta Thunberg’s comedy of errors on the high seas, but this column went so long that I had to bump Greta back to Wednesday.  (But I still snuck a little Greta into this column, and I know you’ll recognize it when you hear it.)

I now return you to your regularly scheduled column…

To start today, how about some praise for our beloved CO, who has been making some AI graphics for my recent columns?  My favorite part of the cartoon version of me is the CORCA fedora, and if CO is reading this (and doesn’t He see all and know all?), the one he made with me drinking the “medicinal bourbon” is my favorite.  I’ve got a little firmer jawline in that one, and there’s a little Archer vibe to it. 

In fact, if I can request my own edits – and word on the street is that I’m a bit of a show pony (in an adorable, not off-putting sort of way) – how about a cross between Archer and me… and go a little heavy on the Archer? 

On The View last week, racist goblin Whoopi Goldberg said that it’s worse to be black in America today than to be a woman in Iran.  Obviously – just like Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro – Whoopi Goldberg is an idiot.  But you could already tell that just from that Predator haircut of hers.  (For a moment, when I heard that Arnold was going on The View last week, I wished for a re-match of the Arnold-Predator battle at the end of the movie.) 

Her hatred of America (reliably echoed by Hostin and Navarro) typifies the worst of the left’s hostility that has driven away so many working class and minority citizens who used to be reliably blue voters.  Bill Maher summed it up best when he said that liberals “have to do something about The View.”

Because I’m an optimist and like to try to find something good to say about people when I can, I’ll say this for Whoopi: she was much better in Ghost than she was in Predator.

You may remember Chase Strangio because of her on-the-nose “nom de delusion,” or from her appearance in my nominees for Moron on the Month back in April.  She’s the wacky gal who underwent what had to have been a brutal regimen of hormone injections to transform herself from a confused little twig of a girl into a heavily tattooed, sad, older twig of a girl, with a boy’s haircut and the rugged masculinity and patchy beard of effete Lil’ Davy Hogg.  (I miss that demi-guy!)

Then she went to law school.  And because the legal bar ironically doesn’t have a mental stability bar that those who want to practice law must clear, she became a lawyer. 

And last December, she became the first gender-dysmorphia sufferer to appear before the Supreme Court, where she argued against states’ rights to ban surgical mutilation and injecting chemicals that do life-long damage into children in pursuit of the fantasy that humans can change genders. 

Or, in the left’s words, “gender-affirming health care.” 

The professional left: PhDs in Euphemisms, held back for five years in grade-school Reality 101 class.    

“How did that argument in front of SCOTUS go, Martin?” you are not asking.  Because: Duh! 

By the way, a couple of years ago I started reading some complete SCOTUS rulings, and I’ve been disappointed by the total absence of the word “duh” in any rulings, even those written by the clearest writers and thinkers on the court – Alito and Thomas, IMHO. 

I’d argue that some rulings should have consisted of nothing BUT that word.  When a case went up to settle the question of whether Americans have the right to own guns, or whether lefties really can’t racially or sexually discriminate against their fellow citizens, even if those citizens are creepy straight people or evil whites, I would have liked the shortest rulings ever.

Just the date, the case name (“Whiney Wusses vs. the 2nd Amendment” or “Racists who hate Whitey vs. Whitey”) and then: “Duh!”

Possibly with a few short concurrences (Thomas: “Get outta here with that nonsense.”  Alito: “Ya think?!”  Kavanaugh: “C’mon man!”).  And of course some cogent dissents from Kagan, Sotomayor and Ketanji Jeanne-Pierre: “Waahh!  Why can’t our political preferences trump the dusty old constitution?  How dare you?  You have stolen our dreams with your empty words!  Waaaahhh!”

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Miss Strange-io

Here are some excerpts from a Slate article in which she summed up her argument, which I swear to you I am not making up: “There is no such thing as the ‘male body.’  A penis is not a male body part.  It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

I’ll say!  In fact, if even one woman has one, that’s not unusual enough!  One solitary woman with a penis would make that situation far too common, and would threaten to tear what we call “reality” asunder. 

Not to mention ruining your Saturday night when you’d thought you were making good progress… right up until the worst reveal since enough mail-in ballots postmarked “Sorosville” came in to declare Joe Biden the winner in 2020.

But move over, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Cato the Elder, because C-Strange has the floor: “Of course the phrase [“born male”] is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman.  But it is precisely these views that we must change.” 

Yes.  “Deeply entrenched.”  (And before anyone can object, I’ve said before that I’m not up on gay slang.  So if that phrase is offensive, mea culpa.) And good luck changing precisely THOSE views, Strange-y.               

Well, SCOTUS finally ruled on the case last week.  They found that Ms. “A-Penis-is-not-a-Male-Body-Part” is out of her non-binary gourd, and of course states can outlaw child mutilation performed to facilitate mental illness.

Unexpectedly!

Columnist T. Becket Adams put it best: “The obvious lesson here is: don’t send crazy people to argue your case before the Supreme Court.” 

I would add two corollaries:  Don’t argue a crazy position before the Supreme Court.

And if no conservative troll was there at the Court to play Chase into the room with the Doors’ “People are Strange,” (“People are strange, when you’re even stranger…”) we left money on the table. 

And on that musical transition, I’m going to end with one of the oddest bits of theatre from a theatre-kid congressman that you’ve ever seen. 

If you know who Hank Johnson is, it’s probably because he’s the special human who asked, totally seriously, in a congressional Armed Services committee hearing about a proposed increase to the size of a base on Guam, whether “the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

YAY, democracy! 

So how does one follow up that assault on basic logic?  With an assault on some great music, in this case Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”

Trigger warning: If you decide you want to watch it, and insist on doing so with the sound on, you can find the video online. But PLEASE follow these instructions first:

1. Wash two Extra-Strength Tylenol down with a heavy-pour shot of Knob Creek 9 bourbon (thank you God, for inventing Kentucky!) first.

2. Find Stevie Ray Vaughn’s live cover of “Voodoo Child” (from Austin City Limits) – the one with the reverb so thick you could brush your teeth with it, if you don’t mind some bleeding gums afterwards – and cue it up so that you can watch it immediately after you watch Hank Johnson’s abominable war crime of a cover.  Because you don’t want that thing bouncing around in your frontal lobes for too long afterward.

Johnson added his own lyrics to the song – and if his singing and off-tune guitar playing were like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa (and they were), his lyrics were the equivalent of spray painting a big ol’ phallus on her.  Those lyrics are as awful as you’d guess, if you had the imagination of Stephen King on a toxic combination of mushrooms and meth. 

To wit: “Hey Trump, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?  I’m going down the street to shoot down democracy.”

Ugh! 

Here’s my quick response – please listen with the melody in your head – in this rap battle between two talentless song writers:

“Hey Hank, where you goin’ with no brain in yo’ head?

Hey Hank, I said, where you goin’ with no brain in yo’ head?

I’m goin’ down to Congress,

‘Cause I’m worried that Guam’s ‘bout to capsize.

Yeah, we’re addin’ to our base there,

And I’m ‘fraid that Guam’ll capsize.

And that ain’t cool!

[begin surprise Kinison sampling filter]  Hey Hank, you’ve gotta be sh*tting me, right?

Hey Hank, I said you can’t actually think that Guam’s gonna capsize, right?

‘Cause you know what, Hank?

ISLANDS DON’T TIP OVER!!  

THEY’RE NOT BOATS, HANK!  THEY DON’T FLOAT!  THEY’RE ISLANDS! 

OH!  OHHHHHHH! THIS MORON CAN’T BE AN ELECTED OFFICIAL!

YOU HEAR THAT, HANK?  THAT’S JIMI HENDRIX SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE!!

OH!  OHHHHHHHHH!” [end Kinison sampling filter]

And, scene. 

My apologies to the Hendrix estate for even bringing this up.

By the way, regular readers know that I’m a Christian, but if I ever have moments of doubting God, it’s because of things like the fact that Stevie Ray Vaughn died in his mid-30s in a plane crash, and Sam Kinison died in his 30s because he was hit by a drunk driver. 

But Barbra Streisand is still alive in her late hundreds, and Madonna will be flogging her wrinkly old arse around on stage until she’s in her 90s. 

In the words of the great Oliver Anthony, “That math don’t seem right.”

Hamas delenda est!