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Let’s play a word-association game.

Bing Crosby.

What did you think of? “White Christmas”? Bob Hope?

Chances are some of you thought “child beater,” especially Gen Xers too young to have seen Bing in his prime but old enough to remember the tell-all books and SNL jokes.

Richard Gere.

Be honest…how many of you thought “gerbil up the ass”? I’ll wager that as many of you thought of an ass-gerbil as thought of An Officer and a Gentleman.

Bill Clinton.

If you’re conservative, you likely thought “rapist.” Not welfare reform, perjury, Whitewater, or the Defense of Marriage Act. You thought rape.

Some public figures remain forever tarred by their worst moment (although to be fair to Gere, we can’t speak to whether the gerbil consented).

Let’s try one more…

Newt Gingrich.

How many of you thought “soft on crime”? How many of you thought “George Soros’ partner”? How many of you thought “the guy who suckered California into accepting Soros’ ‘progressive justice’ civilization-destroying bullshit”?

Probably not a lot of you. Maybe my small dedicated core of readers. But average conservatives? They likely don’t link Gingrich to Soros, decarceration, “progressive prosecution,” and sky-high crime.

That pisses me off…because it means I failed.

There are 10,000 assholes on Twitter right this moment who could tell you verbatim what I said about a room in Poland in 1992, but perhaps a scant hundred who can recall what I’ve written in recent years about the Gingrich-Soros partnership.

To be clear, I don’t take that personally. People just prefer to be pandered to. They retain what plays to their bias and reject what challenges it. In 1992 as a kid I made a legendarily pandering video-for-hire, and it’ll never die. It’ll outlive me, no doubt. But the stuff I write now? As my old drama teacher used to say when he’d critique a forgettable performance, “It has the staying power of a monkey fart in an avalanche.”

Here’s a 2020 piece about Gingrich and Soros; I don’t wanna spend too much time recapping it. Suffice to say that after repeatedly failing to enact his soft-on-crime agenda in California, in 2014 Soros enlisted Gingrich to act as the public face of his newest attack on law-abiding Californians. Proposition 47 knocked dozens of crimes down from felony to misdemeanor (theft, theft with priors, grand theft auto, most property and drug crimes—including meth). This not only exempted thieves and thugs from anything but a citation, it also exempted them from Three Strikes, a law enacted in 1994 specifically to catch career criminals before they move on to rape or murder (thug roughs up an old lady non-fatally during a robbery? Put him away for good because the next old lady might die). But Prop. 47 took discretion away from prosecutors. With a litany of offenses now misdemeanors, they couldn’t qualify for Three Strikes.

As I wrote in 2020 regarding Soros’ scheme, “If you can’t end ‘three strikes for three felonies,’ just stop making things felonies.” Which Gingrich gleefully did as he went on a statewide “support Prop. 47” tour with Van Jones (with Soros being their, as the L.A. Times put it, “sugar daddy”), Jones telling dumb blacks “dis here prupazishun will keeps you outta prison, brutha” and Gingrich telling dumb conservatives “the tax money we’ll save by decarcerating thieves and dealers can be used to support our troops! And buy FLAG PINS and BIBLES for EVERY SCHOOL!”

Stupidity won the day. Prop. 47 passed, and now you literally have to murder and rape a child to even be considered for a long prison sentence in this state. And shoplifting? Cops don’t respond to calls anymore because Prop. 47 took away their ability to arrest.

Oh, sure, conservatives grumble. They post videos on Twitter of California crime and they snort “blue state snorf snorf snorf…the commies caused this anarchy.” And they never hold Newt accountable.

I’m not a violent man, but I always smile when I think of how anarcho-libertarians handled Bob Black, a famous (in that circle) author who admitted to violating the anarcho-libertarian code by narcing to cops to get a drug-using fellow anarcho-libertarian arrested. At almost every speech Black gave after that, he’d get punched in the face by a furious peer. It got to the point that before he’d begin a speech, he’d be like, “Okay, get it over with,” and he’d take the blow, then proceed.

I’m not saying anyone should punch Newt Gingrich. I’m just saying the bastard should’ve spent the past ten years looking over his shoulder. Small justice for the Californians raped and murdered by felons spared Three Strikes because of Prop. 47.

Gingrich evades reputational damage because the extent to which he betrayed conservatives on crime is so humiliating, they’ve memory-holed it out of sheer embarrassment.

And no, we never did get flag pins or Bibles from the money saved by not imprisoning DeQuandrius. Though I’m sure there are a few boomer rightists in California’s red rural areas still checking the mail every day.

So this brings us to last week’s MAGA “victory” in the SCOTUS January 6 case. And I’ll start by saying that I’m always man enough to admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about Justice Jumanji Jackson. I’d initially dismissed her as a lightweight—which she is in terms of book smarts—but she has the instincts of a rat, and I mean that as a compliment. Rats have zero sentimentality and a laser focus on survival and propagation.

I’ll boil down the SCOTUS J6 case to its core element (I encourage you to read the full decision for yourself). Several hundred J6 defendants had been charged with “obstruction of an official proceeding” because by their own admission they were trying to obstruct an official proceeding (stop a vote count).

Norm Macdonald once said that the perfect joke is one in which the setup is also the punchline. That goes for real-life political jokes, too.

“Why were you charged with attempting to obstruct an official proceeding?”

“I was attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.”

The specific petitioner in the case, defendant Joseph Fischer, is on camera inside the Capitol during the J6 riot beating cops. During the siege he texted a friend that he was going to “take democratic congress to the gallows” because congresspeople “can’t vote if they can’t breathe.”

Oh, you’re saying “he only threatened to obstruct the proceeding; he didn’t actually get to do it!”

Good for you; you’re thinking like a Newt! “JaMarcus only wanted to kill that girl, but he was stopped by cops before he could. A misdemeanor for sure!”

Here’s the statute under which Fischer and other J6ers were charged with obstruction:

Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

As you can see, the statute applies to attempts, not just successful acts.

For SCOTUS, the entire case rested on two words: “or otherwise.”

Webster’s defines “or otherwise” as “used to refer to something that is different from something already mentioned.”

In other words, “or otherwise” in the statute refers to means of obstruction other than altering/destroying/mutilating/concealing a record, document, or other object.

But that ain’t how Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts saw it. No, they said the “or otherwise” must refer only to the things already mentioned (altering/destroying/mutilating/concealing a record, document, or other object). It’s a baffling, frankly idiotic interpretation. They completely reversed the definition of “or otherwise,” changing it from “referring to something different from something already mentioned” to “referring to something already mentioned.”

“The ‘otherwise’ provision is limited by the list of specific criminal violations that precede it,” the majority held. The “or otherwise,” they asserted, can only apply to things done to “records, documents, or objects,” but not to people. Fischer attempted to attack and intimidate people, not pieces of paper, so therefore it’s not obstruction! Had he punched a document, slam-dunk conviction. But his targets were humans, and, according to the court, that can’t count as obstruction.

I doubt I’ve ever seen a worse example of bad thought purposely employed in the service of bad outcome.

Interestingly, the argument that words in the second half of a statute must only apply to the words that precede them would suggest that the “shall not be infringed” part of the Second Amendment must only apply to the “well-regulated militia” part, and not to any broader rights. That’s what leftists have been arguing for decades, and the conservative justices wanted so badly to free the J6 thugs, they adopted that view.

But here’s the duppy in the details: It wasn’t only the conservative justices. Jumanji Jackson joined Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Roberts. Meanwhile, Barrett joined Kagan and Sotomayor in dissenting. Barrett’s surprisingly sharp dissent painstakingly explains why the dictionary is correct about the meaning of “or otherwise.” Using ironclad reasoning and multiple examples for comparison, Barrett decimates the majority’s (as she put it) “textual backflips.”

Okay, Kagan I understand. Love her or hate her, she’s a smart and experienced jurist. But Barrett? She’s another one I’d written off as a lightweight. Maybe raising seven kids gives Barrett special insight into little con artists who try to find loopholes in simple commands. “‘Clean up your room’ means put your toys away. It doesn’t mean kick them into a pile in the corner.”

But let’s look closer at Jumanji’s concurrence with the conservative majority, and my previous claim about her instincts. I’m quite certain she understands the value to “her people” of limiting the obstruction statute so that it doesn’t include physical violence toward humans. As former assistant United States Attorney Elie Honig explained on CNN following the decision, “what the court has said today is, that statute does not apply to physical efforts to interfere with Congress.”

Documents? Don’t dare mutilate ’em. But people? Mutilate away; you’re immune from obstruction charges.

So now several hundred J6ers will get to appeal their conviction, and those not-yet convicted may never be.

Oh, you guys are celebrating. A victory for patriots!

But wait…aren’t you also the people whose response to J6 prosecutions was “blacks and Antifa are worse obstructors!” Haven’t you spent the past three and a half years whatabouting how “BLM and Antifa are always violently obstructing! Storming rotundas, physically preventing officials from carrying out their duties! Yet they get away with it.”

Well, congrats, folks. SCOTUS just gave BLM and Antifa and all leftist orgs complete immunity from obstruction charges no matter how violent they get. Oh, they might be slapped with a simple trespass or misdemeanor assault. But that “20-year imprisonment for obstruction” thing?

No longer on the table if the violence is against humans.

You’ve been suckered again.

Newtered.

Will rightists ever learn?