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It’s been said that if Frank Sinatra was at a restaurant and the scene was dead, he’d tell one of his goons to trip a waiter, just to create some amusement.

Well, this election season is dead. With the two main candidates chosen, there ain’t nothin’ goin’ on, and there won’t be until September.

Readers say to me, “Write more about local politics, Dave!”

Write about what? The DA race will get exciting, come late summer when Soros pumps billions into the contest and the billionaires on our side are like, “Instead of funding Gascon’s opponent, we’ll fund a movie that’ll change the culture, starring Nick Searcy, James Woods, and Gina Carano as a lanced boil.”

Yeah, sure, there’ll be lots to write about in five months. But now?

Kristi Noem bragging about killing a puppy is Sinatra tripping a waiter. “It’s too quiet around here. I think I’ll boast about shooting a pup in the head because it was hard to train.”

Distractions like Noem’s admission of serial-killer tendencies can entertain for a week or so. But just like a tripped waiter, soon enough the mess gets cleaned up and everyone’s bored again.

And the real victims of this malaise are the opinion journalists. We have to keep you entertained in a doldrum sea.

Every week, we have to trip a waiter for your amusement.

So, you have the mindless cheerleaders at Townhall (“Yay! We’re beating the woke libs! Two-four-six-eight, killing Serbian kids was really great! Schlichter! Schlichter! Goooooooooooooooooo, Schlichter!”) and the underbelly guys like Unz, who exploit the idle pleasures of these days by beckoning you to join the exciting field of Holocaust denial.

Me? I’ve taken to becoming a scold. And I’m genuinely sorry about that, because I fear I’m at risk of becoming a one-note pianist. Worse still, I’m becoming a cock-blocker. An opinion journalist can either encourage or discourage. Think of it like two pals in a nightclub. One sees a fine-looking babe who smiles coyly at him. So, you can be the buddy who says, “Go for it, dude! She likes you! She’s yours for the taking.”

Or you can be the buddy who says, “She’s got herpes and you’re married. Pay your tab and go home to your family.”

Nobody likes that kind of friend. Nobody likes a thrill-killer, a soggy scolder.

But my God, there’s so much worthy of scolding at the moment. And so much that “crosses the streams” in terms of my favorite fetishes: idiotic rightists and Holocaust history.

How can I not scold? I’m only human.

Last week, Candace Owens discovered the Dresden bombing. At age 35, lil’ Candy learned a new thing…that anyone who’d ever read a history book would’ve already known (oh, wait—Candace was too busy suing her high school for being raycist! Who had time for books?).

As much as I’ve no truck with mysticism and magic, there’s a part of me that genuinely believes Owens was a crackwhore who found an antique lamp, rubbed it, and the genie inside offered her a wish knowing that the one she made—to be a respected intellect—was beyond even his estimable powers, but he did the best he could.

After Owens “discovered” Dresden, she went on a multiday tweetstorm about how it was a “war crime” and a genocide against Christians.

It’s weird how when it comes to the Holocaust, deniers want to see a body and an autopsy report before they’ll believe a single Jew was murdered. But with Dresden, they’ll go with the highball figure with no skepticism at all. Also, I thought “bodies don’t burn”—that’s the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” of Holocaust denial—so it’s odd that 600,000 bodies supposedly burned in two nights at Dresden when deniers claim 700,000 couldn’t have been burned over a year and a half at Treblinka.

I used to get upset when the simpleminded would ignore politics for the trivial. I recall in the 1990s a white male “meat-’n’-potatoes” conservative friend of mine bitching about “Balkans? Bosniaks? Srebrenica? I can’t understand that shit,” only to then rattle off remarkably dense sports stats about “Benirschke, Esiason, Wisniewski, and Seau.” And I realized that while he had the ability to comprehend the dense and complex, he was wasting it on frivolity. And that pretentious outrage on my part only grew during peak Marvel movie mania when, again, dudes would appear to be wasting their gray matter obsessing over ridiculous superhero minutia (“That’s Hal Hopper the BLUE BALGOBIN except in the Bizarroverse where he’s Malachi Miffler the GREEN GAMORGAN but in the GOLDEN AGE ERA he was Fred Frindlingson who must unite the Negaverse to the Posiverse by collecting the fifteen GALUBRIOUS CUBES that were scattered throughout MICRONICAVERSE by the villainous THELANOSIUM MALDRAKE who was mesmerized by the BELADORIOUS SPELL of Doctor Emprimorian who in the Reversoverse is actually Brink Bastaritori, master of the ten AMPHIRONICAL STONES hidden in the GRISTOLUCRITUS GALAXY by the SILVER STRYKER aka Bamford Brigand”) at the expense of trying to comprehend real-world events.

And then at some point it hit me that bread and circuses is actually a good thing, that all humans enjoy learning and reciting ponderous detail, but for most of us it’s best that the desire is confined to the frivolous, because it allows politics to remain grounded in simplistic caveman-isms—“me not want to pay more for eggs, me not want to be mugged by negro, me want to live in town where everyone speak English”—and the far-right’s yearning for “intellectualism,” typified by the current drift toward pseudo-intellectual WWII revisionism and Holocaust denial, is literally the worst thing for the country.

And Owens, being literally the worst thing for the country (that fucking genie…if I ever find that lamp it’s goin’ in a smelter), who Ralph Wiggum-style learnded something new and can’t resist reciting it, has launched a Dresden mania that I’d like to—what else—cock-block.

The bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, like the firebombing of Tokyo and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was regrettable in that the people incinerated were high-IQ, good-quality humans who might’ve gone on to invent things or cure things or compose things. That said, Germany shouldn’t have declared war on America and Japan shouldn’t have bombed Pearl Harbor. That America concluded those wars the correct way is not debatable. Yes, terror bombings are nasty. And yes, they work. The Germans and Japs saw a future of continued incineration had they not surrendered and capitulated, so, with no other options, they surrendered and capitulated, and everything turned out great (for Japan, 100 percent. For Germany, I’m referring only to West Germany).

The retards playing at being intellectuals about WWII don’t get the point that the pacification stage of a war is as important as the fighting stage. Terror bombings pacified the Germans and Japs. Was it moral? Ask your priest. It worked. Good or bad, it worked.

But thanks to the Dresden sentimentality of “intellectuals” left and right, we can’t do that shit anymore. In October 2001 I wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times (under my favorite pseudonym, Cal Tinbergen—“a true genius…one of the few”) arguing that the best response to 9/11 was to go full Dresden on Afghanistan. Bomb from above. Don’t get into a ground war. Where there are al-Qaeda bases, now we’ll put up a parking lot. Joni Mitchell the entire place; don’t think twice about civilians. Air superiority is a good thing; it spares your soldiers. If you have it, use it. Especially against savages for whom, unlike the highly civilized Germans and Japs, nation-building is pointless.

Flatten from above every part of Afghanistan where our satellites and ground intelligence indicate there’s al-Qaeda. And tell the Taliban that if al-Qaeda comes back, so do our planes.

Twenty-three years later, with thousands of American soldiers dead and the Taliban back in charge, the entire nation-building “moral war” exercise having been for nothing, tell me, smart-asses, was I wrong? Was my suggestion not better?

Oh, but no, because aerial bombing is, as Owens says, a “war crime.” Better to prove your moral superiority, as opposed to your aerial superiority, by sending young people to die in “honorable” combat against goat-fuckers who curb-stomp women for learning basic math.

Proud of the outcome of your “honorable war,” moralist pricks? C’mon, debate me. Come to my Substack and debate me if you think my 2001 op-ed was misguided.

Pounding a place flat wins wars, against the civilized and the savage. But holy Spicoli, did my 2001 op-ed get attacked…by leftists (as Owens was at the time). Indeed, the Times dedicated an entire page to those who opposed my op-ed. San Francisco State’s Dr. Margo Kasdan wrote that only the “world court,” not aerial bombing, could end al-Qaeda. Leftist activist Ron Litman wrote that it was monstrous to think that “bombing from high altitude without seeing the destruction you sow is a good thing.”

Yes, because defeating a foe must be a learning experience for the victors. “You won, but did you up-close see the life ebb from your enemy’s face? No? Then you gained nothing (except, you know, an actual victory).”

Renowned physician Yossef Aelony wrote, “Tinbergen’s arguments that the ends justify the means can only lead to general immorality on all sides. Then it is only our superior military that makes us ‘superior’ instead of our dedication to liberty, freedom and the highest principles of mankind.”

In 2001, that was a leftist talking point. But then Owens found that fucking lamp…

Software “genius” Patrick Lubow called WWII aerial bombing “a strategic failure.” Yeah, West Germany was such an anarchic shithole.

Neville Raymond, a leftist author who today would be an Alex Jones rightist because he thinks the polio vaccine was “genocide,” wrote that “to give in to our rage-blinded desire to ‘defeat’ al-Qaeda” by aerial bombing them “is to hand them a moral victory.”

Yep, deprive yourself of a real victory because you’re petrified that your dead foes might win a moral one.

The Times published only one comment supporting my op-ed, by local artist Stacie Latreille (damnedest thing when the artist is the smartest one in the room): “Finally, someone with some sense of reality is commenting on the surgical strikes. How can we sway countries like Yemen or Iraq with our delicate definition of war? I hope Tinbergen forwards his piece to our president and every member of Congress.”

Well, Congress didn’t listen, and we got the Afghan mess rightists are now bitching about (“fuckin’ Biden!”) while also, thanks to Owens, bitching about aerial bombing (“fuckin’ rage-blinded desire for vengeance!”).

Please, most of you…watch Marvel films. Collect sports stats. My loyal readers, the finest, smartest, and best-looking folks in the world (buy me a beer), you guys get these nuanced points. But the rest of you?

The girl has herpes and you’re married. Pay your tab and go home.

And if you find an antique lamp along the way? Don’t rub it.