Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Fun House

If you were hoping that the lunacy would have loosened its iron grip on the West last week, you’d be sorely disappointed.  If I had to come up with a theme for last week, it would be “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Justin Trudeau.  Truly comical.  Conservatives smugly tweeted out their schadenfreude as the uber progressive Canadian prime minister twisted in the wind when photos of him appeared with a darkened face in a turban at a party.   Trudeau, who paid damages to an Islamic terrorist and admonished a girl for using the term “mankind” instead of “peoplekind” and who is fond of labeling Trump a racist got hoisted on his woke petard, to the pleasure of many.  While I question whether this is truly racist (a subject of another post), I admit it was fun to see him squirm.  Trudeau’s  response was predictable:  Let’s talk about gun control.

Newberry Library.  Last week the august Newberry Library morphed from a research library to a wokeness center.  The old, stuffy icon of Chicago over the past few years has successfully transformed itself into an intellectual center, engaging the community with such delights as the 100th Anniversary celebration of Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago and a special exhibit of Herman Melville with a 26 hour Moby-Dick read-a-thon (which I participated in).  But alas, wokeness has infected the stately old lady.  Last weekend, the library hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour, targeted specifically at children ages 3 to 8, in which drag queens would read aloud to them.  The purpose?  Incredibly on the Newberry website, it says it “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood” (I was playing with trucks, tanks and little green army men)  and “gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” (I’m not sure those are the role models I would want for my little boy).  This looks suspiciously like grooming.  Borrowing from Pink Floyd, my reaction is, “Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone.”  Newberry promises to hold a second installment on November 2.   

Climate Protests.  Continuing with one of the major themes of child exploitation this week was the Climate Protests.  The protests were led by wunderkind, the autistic Greta Thunberg, who somehow has gained sufficient status to be nominated for a Nobel Prize, testify before Congress, and gain a meeting with former president Obama.   It’s simply stunning to watch people enthralled by an autistic little girl whose qualifications don’t even include a ribbon at a school science fair.  Her performance at the Climate Summit was so overdone as to lose credibility.  At least David Hogg was on site during the Parkland shooting, and that, I suppose granted him a sort of license.  Little Greta has no such qualification that conveys any authority whatsoever.

Kavanaugh.  The new Kavanaugh allegations are almost comical.  He allegedly went to some party with his winkie hanging out and a friend grabbed it and put it in some woman’s hand.  There are a number of credibility problems with this assertion.  First, it was being made by  Clinton lawyer Max Stier. Cough. Cough.  Second, the woman in question has no memory of the incident.  Third, is a practical one.  If a man grabs another man’s winkie, this is not how the story usually ends.  Fourth, as an Irish friend relayed to me, “This presumes a winkie of certain size.  The Irish are not known for that.  Faced with a choice of a large organ, we chose liver.”  This outlandish attempt to delegitimize Kavanaugh will fade from the news cycle quickly.

Trump and the Ukraine.  There allegations that Trump pressured the Ukraine government to investigate the corruption of Joe Biden’s son (of course, on hearsay evidence).  But Joe himself is on record stating that he threatened to withhold aid from the Ukrainian government if it did not fire the prosecutor that was looking into the corruption of his son and the company his son was involved with.  Of course, Hillary has been weighing in, no stranger to using foreign political influence to fill the family coffers.  If Trump asked a foreign leader to look into the corruption of a political family, so what?  Here, companies must comply with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  It looks like the Bidens and the Clintons think they’ve been granted an exemption. 

It all seemed like Theatre of the Absurd.  Yet, there were glimmers of hope and normalcy.  Baseball legend Carl Yastrzemski was on hand at Fenway to see his grandson hit a home run in his first major league game at Fenway Park.  Billionaire Robert Smith followed through on his pledge to make a gift to pay off students’ student loans at Morehouse College and expanded it to $34 million.  And the Chicago Cubs spied a young boy with a homemade Cubs jersey and enlisted Twitter’s help to identify him and graced him with a new, authentic jersey.

Even amongst the madness, we see glimpses of the greatness of our heritage.


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