I’ve been busy, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. My conservative friend Joe even challenged me on Facebook:

It’s been a long time since we engaged in a just war, but we’re in one now. There are maniacs out there who think it’s a good thing to smash passenger jets into skyscrapers and to blow up trains filled with passengers and concert halls packed with rock fans and to behead 9-year-old girls and to crucify teenagers. And they very much need to be given a one-way ticket on the express train to dead.

This war figures to run into overtime, because the bad guys this time are an amorphous collection of 9th century wackos, not a country that can be made to surrender. But it has to be fought as long as we’re seeing news alerts like this:

And while I’m not particularly comfortable with the notion of Terminator-style killer robots in the sky, I can’t help but but feel downright happy when I see news alerts like these:

I like our way of life. I like baseball and the blues and bacon and beer. Those guys don’t. And we can’t be willing to live-and-let-live, because those guys are not content to let us live. They are hellbent on killing us, and they don’t appear to be open to negotiation. So I reckon we’re just going to have to kill them before they kill us.

I used to be able to walk into a ballpark without being patted down. There was a time when I could board an airplane without having to take my shoes off and walk through something that looked like Woody Allen’s orgasmatron (though, I must say, I’d probably object a lot less if it were a real orgasmatron). I miss sitting on a train without being constantly reminded to say something if I see something.

I don’t know if we can ever go back there, but we damn well have to try.

But that doesn’t mean we have to go strolling down the sidewalks of Crazyland, either. When presidential candidates talk about rejecting Muslim refugees and accepting only Christian refugees, I have to wonder just what the hell we are becoming. How the hell can anyone endorse such overt bigotry?

The same applies to this stupid wailing about how Obama and Clinton refuse to call the bad guys “Islamic terrorists.” If ISIS and Al Qaeda and Boko Haram are “Islamic terrorists,” then the Ku Klux Klan and Timothy McVeigh and Dylann Roof are “Christian terrorists.” If you really think you’re telling it like it is, then man up and tell it like it is.

Ditto for the clowns who trump up their nonsense about how Muslims in America want to impose Shariah Law. There’s a Republican candidate who says the Supreme Court can’t overrule God. Hey, Mikey . . . You’re the same as them.

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Take it from One Person …

I’m generally not a fan of One Person, who chimes in way too often on far too many stories, but he (or she) nonetheless offered a wonderful opinion in a Washington Post piece titled, Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win. Donning the uniform of a “Republican strategist” this time, One Person said:

We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job. It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?

If One Person is afraid, I reckon we all should be.

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Get your pearls here

How to write? Read Gail Collins. Repeat. Because Gail Collins can write.

Here are the first two grafs of the column she wrote last Saturday:

This weekend’s Democratic debate is going to be a tough sell. Two hours on a Saturday night, and not a single candidate who appears to be certifiably deranged.

There are only three Democrats left in the contest, and none of them has compared the competition to a child molester. None seems to have an unusually creative theory on why the pyramids were built. Yawn. CBS News, which is airing the debate, has promised to focus on the economy, so there probably won’t even be a pop quiz about which woman the candidates would like to see on the 10-dollar bill. Although I suspect they’d all have a better answer than Jeb Bush’s “Margaret Thatcher.”

Nuf said? Not nearly. Read the rest. Enjoy.

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Who needs Connecticut, anyway?

The New York Times reports that Ben Carson is having a tough time understanding foreign policy. At least, that’s what his advisers say.

Looks like he’s having some problems on the domestic front, too.

Geography. It isn’t brain surgery.

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The Daily Donald

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Who needs fiction?

And last but not least, the new mayor of Salt Lake City is a lesbian. That’s right, Salt Lake City. You can’t make this stuff up.

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