The Cheerful Monkey Wrench

Readers- to give my hand (and psyche) a much-needed rest, I'm delighted to present a great guest column today from our own M. Mitchell Marmel! Take it away, Mitch...

THE CHEERFUL MONKEY WRENCH

Okay, we've had a day or two of mourning. Now it's time to get down to business.

The naysayers aside, all hope is not lost. To quote the old cliché, “Where there is life, there is hope”. You can step outside today and notice that the world has not actually ended. The sun is still rising and setting, the air is breathable (for the most part), the food producers are still delivering milk, bread and eggs, and Clan MacGregor may still be purchased by the pint, quart, gallon and barrel.

So you've had a setback? Not your first, won't be your last. “Man is born to toil and sorrow,” or words to that effect.

So what can you do?

1) Turn their words against them. “Think globally, act locally.” You can fulminate about the swamp dwellers in seats of power all you like, but the hard, cold facts are that you, as an individual, have little to no effect on what actions they take (unless you LIKE dressing up in buffalo horns and swiping lecterns, which isn't ending well for that chap). So, make a difference in your neighborhood. Even something as small as picking up a piece of litter improves your immediate environment. It might not make much difference to the world at large, but it'll make YOU feel better.

2) Comfort the afflicted. Nothing gives you a lift more than giving a helping hand to those worse off than you are. I do volunteer work at a railroad museum, as that happens to be one of my interests, and watching the folks' eyes light up when they see the electric trains rolling... well, that's why I spend my time and treasure doing it.

3) Afflict the comfortable. It's fun annoying libs, which is one reason my home page on Faecesbook features “Stilton's Place” and similar material. Wanna know the fun part? The angry comments. I get, “Mitch, why do you keep POSTING this shit?” They just don't seem to realize that they've answered their own question.

4) Do not respond to anger with anger, as that's what they want. Back in the pre-Internet days, some of the dialup bulletin boards I frequented had something called “P.I.S.S.”, which stood for “Passively Ignoring Silent Strike”. Even before the Net, we knew feeding the trolls only encouraged them, and if PISS was declared on a user, that user was effectively sent to Coventry, which tended to shut them up quite nicely.

5) If they're going to be childish, be an adult. One thing I've found is that many liberals are essentially insecure, craving attention and affirmation. Deny that to them and they shrivel up and vanish.

6) Be prepared to throw a monkey wrench into the works. This DOES NOT mean go around looking for trouble, but, if an opportunity presents itself to stick it to the opposition, grab it with both hands. If Antifa leaves a pallet of bricks around for throwing, steal it and build that garden wall you've been wanting. Use your imagination.

7) Never pass up a chance to help another if you can. A few weeks back, I was exiting a pawn shop (looking for a used web cam, but that's another story) and noted a middle-aged couple trying to stuff a large dorm refrigerator into a small Asian car and not having much success. Well, this sort of thing is why I drive a Ford station wagon. Within minutes, we had the fridge in the back of my car and on route to the couple's house. To this day, I have no idea of their name, race, creed or political beliefs. All I know is that they have their refrigerator home, and that's the important part.

The most important part?

8) Be of good cheer.

Remember how sweet liberal tears taste? Well, they find your tears equally tasty. 

Make the bastards die of thirst. 

Don't Fire Until You See The Whites

Well, here we are on the historically significant Last Day of Freedom in America, and gosh - hasn't it been fun? Seriously, we've had a great run and we'll all have some great memories. Memories only, though, because all of our written records and photos of the past will have to be turned over to the Bureau of Historical Accuracy for ecologically-sound destruction. 

It wasn't really our goal at Stilton's Place to present today's transition of power as apocalyptic, which is why we originally prepared this fairly innocent cartoon playfully jabbing the man we will never, ever personally call president...

But then we started hearing more and more things about the upcoming Biden administration's plans, seeing  extremely troubling things in the streets, and hearing from politicians, celebrities, and liberal mouth-breathers that the time is right for fascism and retribution against those low-life flyover Constitution-clutching deplorables and cult members who have seen the American Dream as something more than just a Marxist nightmare.

So we upgraded the cartoon to more accurately reflect our feelings about this unhappy day...

There's a long litany of reasons we're feeling so ramped up today. And rather than try to make a cohesive whole out of the entire mess, let us just share some random points:

• Our nation's capitol has been ringed with walls topped with razor wire, and 26,000 National Guard troops have been brought to Washington DC (from all 50 states - for the symbolism, don't you know) in order to shoot other Americans if they act like BLM or Antifa but are carrying American flags.

• Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, DC who didn't want National Guard troops to quell BLM/Antifa's violent acts of insurrection all summer, just recently requested that the troops now stationed in her city be issued machine guns so that they could mow down more Americans. The National Guard told her that this would be inappropriate, but the whole incident certainly tells you where these bloodthirsty fascists' heads are at. 

• Fun trivia note: do you recall that in 2017, there was rioting, looting, arson, and injuries in the streets of Washington DC as people "protested" Trump's inauguration?  And celebrities telling crowds that they should march right over to the White House and set it ablaze? But that, of course, wasn't insurrection - it was just the liberals' standard use of Freedom of Screech.

• We would never have thought that a picture of the American flag could make us sick to our stomach, but we were wrong. This is that picture...

This is the national mall, where 200,000 American flags have been planted to symbolically represent all of the people who would like to show up and kneel before the new king, but can't because A) no one really gives a flying crap about Biden's inauguration and if they did B) the National Guard might shoot them out of an abundance of caution.

So now we've got an imaginary crowd of "supporters," which is actually a beautifully ironic depiction of the imaginary voters who made this day possible. So yeah...looking at this picture makes us want to hurl.

• Hillary Clinton has made the news by demanding a "9/11-style commission" to investigate whether Donald Trump was actively on the phone with Vladimir Putin, doing a play-by-play report of the Russian-backed insurrectionist riot which, terrifyingly, allowed a whackjob wearing clown paint and a buffalo horn helmet to joke around with a police officer in a largely empty Senate chamber room. That guy, by the way, is looking at 25 years in the slammer because, while he didn't actually do much of anything other than looking photogenic, a judge has decided his distinctive appearance made him a symbol of the (ahem) "insurrection," and the culprit therefore needs a very harsh sentence as a warning to the rabble.

• Remember the good old days when you'd never heard of Wuhan? Well, today may be the last day you hadn't heard of the city of Manaus in Brazil. They're currently drowning in Covid cases which appear to be a new mutation of the virus currently kicking the world's ass. This one is thought to be more contagious, more deadly, and doesn't appear to be deterred by any of our current generation of Covid vaccines. Fortunately, Biden has been claiming forever that he could have handled a viral pandemic better than Trump - and it looks like he may get the chance to prove it. (Spoiler alert: lockdowns galore!)

• An NPR lawyer got the boot when it was revealed that he thought Trump voters should have their kids taken away from them, after which the children would be raised in government re-education camps "with a lot of Sesame Street" to cleanse the children of their parents' sick beliefs. And yes, this is the same NPR that actually fired Fox News' Juan Williams for being a racist. So that's a pretty good indication of what radical screwballs are in charge over there.

• Katie Couric (soon to be a temporary Jeopardy! host who we hope will be universally boycotted) is seriously calling for mandatory "deprogramming" of people in the Trump "cult." Hint: if you're reading this blog, you're considered a cult member.  

• There are serious calls to take Fox News off the air, and it's no secret that big tech is gutting other means for conservatives to get anything like accurate news or have conversations with each other.

• Because this blog post is already running long, we'll summarize the fact that Joe Biden has already pretty much promised that in his "first 100 days" (if he lasts that long), he'll use executive powers to destroy every accomplishment of President Trump's that made America a success in the last four years. Energy policies which will kill our energy independence and send energy costs soaring, getting back in bed with Iran to help them build their "Death to America" nuclear missiles, opening our borders to millions upon millions more illegal immigrants (all of whom - citizens or not - deserve governmental representation when drawing up new Democratic districts for House seats), killing the Keystone XL pipeline for no rational reason at all, rejoining the Paris Climate Accord so that we will be compelled to cut down on our efficient energy use while China is free to stink up the world's atmosphere while building cheap crap to finish off the American economy. And more, and more, and more.

This is a singularly unhappy day (even if nothing untoward and/or staged happens to make things worse) which quite possibly marks the end of a lot of things and institutions we took for granted. Free and fair elections? Nope. A Constitutional basis for laws and protection of freedoms? Not after the Dems pack a hand-picked Supreme Court with as many members as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

So drink 'em if you got 'em, folks, and remember to fly your American flags upside down until things get better...if ever. And should we ever find ourselves in re-education camps, here's the code phrase we can use to recognize each other: "What I miss most in this gulag is a good piece of cheese - like a Stilton!" To this, you must answer "Say, that's my friend MacGregor's favorite cheese!"

IMPORTANT NOTE: If a hot Red Cross nurse delivering care packages shows up, and if she looks like Busty Ross, be sure to use the code phrase. That way you'll get one of the "special" boxes with escape contraband and a tiny little bottle of bad scotch.

WE NEED HUMOR! STAT!

Since all of the above is pretty depressing, we thought it only fair to close today with a nice stupid joke which has nothing to do with politics. This gag popped into our head after a lovely grilled steak lunch, and once an idea like that happens it's easiest to just cobble the darn thing together with clip art so we can then move on with the rest of our life. Hey, it's a system...

MORE HUMOR! QUICK!

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY...

Got MLK?

Martin Luther King Jr once said that he had "been to the mountaintop." Were he still here today, we think he'd likely be thinking of jumping off of it.

We are within days of inaugurating a new whiter-than-white president who spent decades fighting against the kind of school integration which would create (in his words) a "racial jungle" for his children, hobnobbed with segregationists and KKK members, and still expresses slack-jawed wonder that a black man can be "articulate and clean."

And for good measure, we'll be swearing in (or at) a vice-president who not only called the next president a racist, but also said that the whole Democrat party was racist for not voting for her in the primaries. So the good news for Dr. King, we guess, is that in 2021 a lot of people have forgotten what the hell racism even is.

Of course, that's not all that people have forgotten. Joe Biden actually declared that Martin Luther King Jr's assassination wasn't as big a deal as George Floyd's death. Imagine the racial peace our nation could now be enjoying if only Dr. King had the foresight to knock himself off with a fentanyl overdose in 1968.

But maybe Joe Biden is right and Martin Luther King Jr's dream is no longer a good fit for today's world. After all, these days you damn well don't want to judge a person by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. And Dr. King's message of non-violence has been actively discarded by BLM, as evidenced by 28 "not so mostly-peaceful" rioters in Detroit who just had all their charges dismissed by a black judge because, well, because he could.

Sadly, at this point it seems that the most enduring legacy of Martin Luther King is that there will be no mail today. Although on the bright side, that will at least slow the tsunami of perfectly legitimate absentee ballots still pouring in for Joe Biden.