Rough Start

Well, we’re halfway through the first month of the first year of the new decade and it’s been a rough start for some. 

·        Soleimani and the Mullahs.  Tough start to the year for Soleimani, the head of the Quods force in Iran as he received a date with martyrdom via drone.   Pushing his luck while striding through Iraq, Soleimani was incinerated after years of wreaking havoc in the Middle East.  The hit was really a twofer.  In the aftermath, we learned that the regime garnered more sympathy from the Democratic party in the U.S. than Russia.   The regime painted flags of the U.S. and Israel for students to step on at Tehran University, and students respectfully stepped around them.  WWIII has not yet materialized.  The mullahs are off to a rough 2020.  Someone on Twitter set up a Soleimani parody account purporting to send messages from hell (@Qasam_Soleimani), which is darkly hilarious.  One entry:

“Me and Saddam were bored, so I suggested we play hangman. 

 He was not amused.”

·        CNN.  After framing the Covington kids as racists, CNN settled its libel lawsuit with Nick Sandmann, and rumor has it, the settlement was for $25 million.  So college is paid for.  He can even skip college if he wishes.  Then, CNN, ever a champion of the people and of the DNC, was forced to pay $76 million to former employees and contractors in the largest award ever meted out by the NLRB.  And if that wasn’t enough, many strongly suspect that CNN coordinated with the Warren campaign to leak out the charge that old Bernie had told her that a woman could not win the presidency, which he denied.  Given Warren’s allergy to the truth, it looked a lot like a coordinated smear.

·        Paul Krugman.  Paul Krugman tweeted out last week that someone had hijacked his IP address and downloaded child porn onto his laptop, blaming Qanon for the hack.  Now, Krugman, the lefty, Nobel Prize winning economist that has apparently given up economics for purely partisan journalism looked foolish first, for tweeting about it, then deleting his tweet, making it look like he was simply trying to get ahead of the story.   As much as I dislike Krugman, his views and his style, I felt badly for him.  His tweet was a fumble and the hack should have been handled quietly.  The disclosure triggered a tweetstorm of skeptical comments, “Sure, Paul,” and comparisons to Anthony Weiner.

·        Michael Avenatti and Hunter Biden. Michael Avenatti, former darling of CNN and the rest of media, who some supported for –gag—the presidency was once again arrested and jailed for scamming clients out of thousands of dollars and being prosecuted for fraud, embezzlement and lying to investigators.  That CNN (see above) gave him a platform says a lot about CNN.  Avenatti and Biden seem to be competing for first place in the “Most Like Something You Cleaned Out of Your Drain Trap Award.”

·        Pope Francis.  The vulgar term b—tch slap now has a sister term—Pope slap.  Francis’s slap of a woman that grabbed him generated a bit of controversy.  Although he later apologized, the incident affirmed a commonly held image of Francis as part of the global elite.