Posted on June 30,
2019
Cranial Tumbleweeds
Donald wobbles, But-I-Judge, soccer
sexes, etc.
by
Daniel
Clark
* Dismaying as President Trump’s eleventh-hour
reversals on deportations and strikes against Iran may have been, at least they
prove beyond all doubt that the infamous Trump Dossier is a fraud. After all, why bother paying others to wet
the bed when he’s perfectly capable of doing that himself?
* The president’s indecision aside, there’s certainly
a defensible argument to be made that a military strike against Iran wasn’t
necessary at this point. What’s really
alarming, though, is Trump’s continued willingness to make excuses for the
world’s worst villains. After two weeks
of Iranian assaults on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, how plausible is it
that they didn’t mean to shoot down our drone, as it was patrolling that same
area?
* Even more disturbing are reports that Trump has been
taking advice from Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a foreign policy libertarian
in the Ron Paul mold. Carlson is said to
have warned the president not to launch another unnecessary war in the Middle
East, referring of course to Iraq as the last one. When we finally all get ourselves blown up,
it will be because our leaders were deterred from taking action when necessary,
because of the willfully ignorant “what we know now about Iraq” narrative that
has become so widely accepted.
* Of the countless pieces of evidence refuting the “no
WMD” story line, one of the most compelling is a secret recording of Saddam
Hussein’s, in which his son-in-law brags about how thoroughly the weapons
inspectors had been fooled about Iraq’s chemical weapons program. “We did not reveal all that we have,” he
said. “Not the type of weapons, not the
volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told
them about, not the volume of use. None
of this was correct. They don’t know any
of this.” Did you catch that? The inspectors didn’t know about “the volume
of use” of Saddam’s chemical weapons? Let
that sink in for a minute.
* The truth be known, libertarian politicians and
pundits have come by their understanding of foreign policy by listening to
Warren Zevon albums in college.
* Libertarianism has quietly saturated our society
over the past decade. Not only is
mindless, dangerous peacenikkery all the rage, but so
are drugs, prostitution and gambling.
Yet almost nobody votes for Libertarian Party candidates. Perhaps that’s simply because, even compared
to other politicians, they’re dorks.
* All the officially serious people have by now
dismissed the idea of marijuana being a gateway drug. It must be entirely coincidental, then, that
the city of Denver has decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms.
* The more than two dozen candidates in the Democrat
presidential primary all agree that someone who enters our country illegally
not only deserves to stay, but also deserves a full complement of
taxpayer-funded benefits, whereas a baby in the womb, whose only crime is being
unwanted, deserves nothing short of the most grisly death imaginable. Oh, and they also agree that they demand
“justice.”
* South Bend mayor and somehow presidential candidate
Pete Buttigieg (which is ironically almost pronounced
“but I judge”) has asserted that God would not be welcome in the Republican
Party. Someone should remind him that
his own Democrats resoundingly voted against God at their 2012 convention. When President Obama was running for reelection,
he learned that his party had expunged all references to God from its platform. He tried to quietly reverse this decision by
revising one sentence to read, “We need a government that stands up for the
hopes, values and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to
work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.” Although a series of three voice votes among
the delegates clearly rejected this language, chairman Antonio Villaraigosa
declared, “The ayes have it.” The blizzard
of boos that followed told us otherwise.
* Along with that “God-given” reference, the voice
vote also covered a change that re-inserted a clause recognizing Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. Some liberals
argued that it was this recognition, and not that of God, that had been booed. No doubt, the delegates weren’t happy about
that, either, but it was clearly God that drew their visceral reaction. Otherwise, why did they bother stamping all
mentions of Him out of their platform in the first place?
* Interestingly, Buttigieg
himself supports Israel, and also supports President Trump’s decision to move
our embassy to Jerusalem. Between that
and his fondness of God talk, how does he think the convention will go if he
wins the nomination?
* Buttigieg, who says his
homosexuality has brought him closer to God, has the following message for Vice
President Mike Pence: “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not
with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my
Creator.” If Pence has any problem with Buttigieg, it’s only since the mayor has begun slandering
him in his stump speeches. And if either
of these men has a quarrel with our Creator, it’s the one who is a pro-abortion
absolutist. Buttigieg
condemns President Trump on behalf of God for “putting children in cages” at
the border, but putting children in the refrigerator of an abortion clinic is
okay, apparently.
* Since Buttigieg thinks
he’s qualified to speak for God, perhaps he can carry on that quarrel all by
himself. He’s probably even got a little
God puppet that he speaks through, kind of like Mel Gibson in The Beaver.
* Abortion advocates can stop pretending to be
“pro-woman” as long as they look the other way from clinics that operate under
Third World conditions. The embattled
Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis has been cited for using unsterile
equipment, keeping drugs and IV fluids for years past their expiration dates,
improperly disposing of medical waste, and employing unqualified personnel,
among other violations. Condemnation of
it ought to be one thing on which both sides of the issue can agree.
* The Democrats’ talking point that they “trust women”
on abortion is just another way to evade the central question of when a new
human life begins. If a human fetus is a
person, then the “trust” argument is moot, because we don’t live in a Utopian
society where we can simply trust people not to kill each other. That’s why we have a system of criminal
justice. If it’s not a person, then the
decision whether or not to abort is morally inconsequential, so there’s nothing
to trust women with, is there?
* Last month, increasingly daffy celebrity activist
Alyssa Milano declared a sex strike in protest of anti-abortion laws. If she’s
capable of going on a sex strike, does that not make her a sex worker?
* The movie industry is reportedly concerned by the
abysmal lack of success of comedies in recent years. Talk about whistling past the graveyard. For decades, they’ve been supporting the
political forces that have all but made funniness illegal, and now they’re
frustrated by their inability to amuse people?
* Now that there’s practically no limit on violence
and smut, comedy is the entertainment consumer’s new forbidden pleasure. If video stores still existed, you’d have to
go through a curtain into a secret back room in order to buy an unedited copy
of an early Mel Brooks movie, in a plain brown wrapper.
* One of the most sadly ironic lines in movie history
is in the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man on
the Moon, in which Jim Carrey, playing Kaufman, confides to a friend, “I
don’t even know what’s funny.” Have you
seen what Carrey’s up to these days? He
tweets terrible sketches he has drawn illustrating his dingbat political
beliefs, and seems to think that is funny in itself, even though he has not
seriously attempted a joke. Not that he
was ever really funny to begin with,
but today the poor guy wouldn’t know a punch line from a pound of liver.
* A little over a month ago, Carrey tweeted a sketch
of Alabama governor Kay Ivey as a fetus getting her brains sucked out, with the
caption, “I think if you’re going to terminate a pregnancy, it should be done
sometime before the fetus becomes governor of Alabama.” Finished laughing yet?
* Gee, it’s
almost as if Carrey thinks an abortion is a violent act committed against a
living human being, or something.
* During President Trump’s speech to kick off his
reelection campaign, he attributed much of our good economic news to his having
slain the evil NAFTA. One slight
problem: his replacement agreement has so far only been ratified by
Mexico. Until the U.S. and Canada ratify
it also, NAFTA remains the law. Does he
really not know this? Moreover, how lazy
are the liberal media that they’ll slime Trump with meaningless innuendo all
day long, but won’t call him out on something substantive like this?
* George W. Bush was famous for mangling the English
language, but now I miss his clarity.
The average quote from Barack Obama read like a paragraph poured out of
a Cuisinart, and now Donald Trump speaks and tweets in tiny sentence fragments
that require you to provide the parts that are missing. While tweeting his disapproval of a proposed
moon landing, Trump wrote, “They should be focused on the much bigger things we
are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and
Science!” Even publications openly
hostile to Trump explained that by “the Moon” he meant a mission to the moon,
which he’d only support as an incremental step toward a mission to Mars.
* If you think the media’s hatred of Trump is
unprecedented, just try to imagine Dubya, Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle referring
to “Mars, of which the moon is a part.”
It would now be the most infamously stupid remark ever made. No way would the liberal media charitably
explain what was really meant by it.
* Trump’s shorthand is difficult enough for English
speakers to understand. One must wonder what
kinds of things the Chinese, Mexicans and others think he has agreed to.
* Remember when Quayle was criticized as unqualified
for the vice presidency because he was only in only his second term in the
Senate, after serving two terms in the House?
How times and qualifications have changed. Among our past three presidents, we’ve had
one who was barely into his second term as Governor of Texas when he was
elected president, another who served only three years in the Senate, and now a
third who was a total political outsider, not having held office at all.
* This trend shows no signs of ending anytime soon, if
this Democrat primary field is any indication.
Pete But-I-Judge is Mayor of South Bend, a town with a smaller
population than Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Julian Castro (no relation) is a former HUD Secretary, and Mayor of San
Antonio. John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Eric Swalwell and Tim Ryan have each served only three terms in
the House. Seth Moulton has served only
two terms in the House. Beto O’Rourke is a three-term House member who lost his
recent campaign for the Senate. Joe
Sestak has served two terms in the House and twice failed to get elected to the
Senate. Mike Gravel left the Senate in
1981, and has not held office for the past 38 of his 89 years. Wayne Messam is the
Mayor of Miramar, Florida, whose population is actually slightly greater than
that of South Bend. Marianne Williamson
has lost her only political campaign, for the House in 2014. It’s as if being unqualified has itself become
a qualification.
* When Quayle argued that his congressional experience
was roughly the same as John Kennedy’s, he was right. Lloyd Bentsen’s response, “Senator, you’re no
Jack Kennedy,” was no kind of a rebuttal at all.
* Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate who was
a two-term governor pointing out that he had comparable experience to Ronald
Reagan. If his Republican opponent said,
“Governor, you’re no Ronald Reagan” and started guffawing, there’d be no chance
of that person being declared the winner of the debate, let alone the
originator of the wittiest zinger in political history.
* Wasn’t that a brilliant quip when Trump called
Hillary Clinton a nasty woman? Well, why
not? He took a personal jab at his
opponent, who had no response. That
makes it brilliant, right? If that
rule’s good enough for Bentsen, it’s good enough for Trump.
* Of course, everyone knows that the greatest debate
one-liner of all time was when Walter Mondale said to Gary Hart, “Where’s the
beef.” Who needs wit when you have
tee-shirts?
* Quayle really is no Jack Kennedy, you know. When reporters tried to fabricate a scandal
by claiming Quayle was using his golf outings as a cover for secret trysts, his
wife Marilyn told them that anyone who knows her husband knows he would rather
be golfing. Here endeth
the scandal.
* Bentsen would not have wanted a piece of Marilyn.
* It defeats the purpose of having a women’s national
soccer team if the team captain does not even like our country. We can guess at the aggravating, politically
correct reasons why Team USA allows Megan Rapinoe to continue to disgrace the
uniform, but why does she want to do it?
The obvious reason is that if she didn’t, nobody would know who she was.
* If Rapinoe really wanted to protest, she could have
held a press conference long ago, explained exactly what her problem with
America is, and announced that she’d rather quit the team than continue wearing
a USA jersey. Just because she’s a
vulgar, disloyal, irrationally hostile, self-made monument to faux martyrdom,
that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be one of those with a modicum of integrity.
* The greatest thing about the U.S. women’s soccer
team is that the players are such wonderful role models for young girls all
over the country. Isn’t that right, Megan? “@^#*%&!”
Oh … never mind.
* The USA women say they’re badly underpaid, and
they’re right. The U.S. Soccer
Federation’s antiquated pay scale probably hasn’t been adjusted since the
women’s game first started generating fan interest. Recognizing this isn’t good enough for the
liberal sports media, who have taken to belittling the men’s team by insisting
that the women are “better,” as if they’d actually win if the two teams played
each other. Meanwhile, the men have been
entirely supportive of the women’s campaign for better pay. Why alienate them, other than for the sheer
feminist joy of being obnoxious?
* Everybody who’s gone on TV bragging that our women’s
team has won multiple World Cups while the men have won none is a
nincompoop. The Women’s World Cup is a
quality event, but it’s not the World Cup, nor is it remotely comparable. Saying the women are better because they’ve
won their World Cup is like saying
the Vanderbilt University baseball team is better than the Los Angeles Dodgers
because Vandy won its
World Series.
* One of the things that makes winning the World Cup
such a difficult accomplishment is that about half the countries in the world
field competent men’s soccer teams. How
many countries are really any good at women’s soccer? Ten?
Maybe?
* Buttressing the women’s case for more pay is a
recent news story claiming that the women’s team generated more revenue than
the men did from 2016-18. Naturally,
this has been passed along without skepticism, even though the numbers don’t come
close to adding up. The story recognizes
that TV revenue is inseparable between the teams because their contracts are
bundled together. Therefore, the
conclusion is that the women have pulled in more money at the gate. But wait a minute. As poorly as the men have fared in recent
years, they still draw about 10,000 more fans a game than the women do, and
their tickets cost almost twice as much.
Then there are beer sales to factor in.
Where can the women’s team possibly be making up the difference? Don’t ask.
Just report as you’re told.
* In case you’re a feminist and you’re reading this,
“buttress” is a legitimate word. It’s
not a sexist term to describe female butter, and I really don’t care if it
“triggers” you.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press