Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

From some points of view, I probably have (at least) two bad habits. First, I have become a loyal Donald Trump partisan—everything the Donald and the culture and characters he has brought to American society have made me politically happy for the first time in my life.

Second, I probably watch too much FOX News—not uncritically, mind you. It has become a splendid and endless source of essays for me, just like Rush Limbaugh has always been. I agree with Rush a significant amount of the time, but I vehemently disagree with him on other occasions. Like the little girl who had the little curl, when he is wrong, he is very, very wrong. I feel exactly the same way about FOX News, despite its vast numbers of fabulous blonds. (Yes, he actually said that.)

My problem with FOX News (this time) is in the unsavory form of a would-be pundit named Chris Stirewalt, a master of thoroughly conventional, inside-the-box thinking. I don’t know if the man is a covert Democrat, a never-Trumper, or what. He’s what I’ve long called a “babyman” who puts up the facade of an experienced, slightly world-weary, wiser-than-thou political philosopher, but almost every guess he makes (and that’s all they are) is negative—and, fortunately, wrong. There’s never any good news with this guy. He reminds me of my favorite Don Martin cartoon from Mad Magazine in the 1960s. I profoundly urge you to look Don Martin up in Wikipedia; he was the best cartoonist of the twentieth century.

The cartoon in question is called “The Wonderful New Dart Set”. It’s young boy Fester Bestertester’s birthday or something. He’s strolling along happily through the park with a cardboard box under his arm. Along the way, he encounters Captain Bringdown.

“Have you seen my wonderful new dart set?” Fester asks the Captain innocently.

The Captain sneers, “What’s so wonderful about an old dart set?”

POIT! Suddenly, there’s a dart, standing out from the middle of the Captain’s forehead.

Fester replies, “It’s a poison dart set.”

My point is that there’s a Captain Bringdown on every street corner, eager to spoil whatever pleasure you may find in life, or to dash your fondest hopes, and this Stirewalt gink is one of them. He’s a “Yabbut”. You know the type.

You say, “Hey! Moses parted the Red Sea!”

He says, “Yabbut, think of the environmental damage he did.”

You say, “Wow! Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon!”

He says, “Yabbut, he left footprints all over it.”

I remember spending a surprisingly happy afternoon once, waiting in a bank downtown for somebody to turn down my loan application, and explaining to my cute little girlfriend—now my wife of thirty-five years—how Time Magazine does its evil work.

The current issue of the magazine was all about NASA and its most recent accomplishments. I don’t remember what they were. It looked, superficially, like one page after another of high praise for the space agency. However, there was a vicious “Yabbut” sting in the tail of every paragraph, that left the reader feeling slightly sick to his stomach about mankind’s greatest adventure. And that, Billy Joel, is what it means,

As I say, I like Donald Trump and his refreshing attitude toward mass media. Ronald Reagan was all bright lights and hot air by comparison, damn poor defense against underhanded tactics like that. There are Yabbuts and Captains Bringdown everywhere. Whenever this Stirewalt ass-clown comes on, I change the channel, even if he’s talking to Shannon Bream, who, on my one-to-ten Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend scale of feminine pulchritude, is an eleven. I do exactly the same thing with Juan Williams, an endless fount of desperate socialist lies Clearly, Williams is paid by the Murdochs to be the turd in the punchbowl.

It’s a lucky man who has found his proper calling in life.