Kathy Shaidle

The Week’s Most Sodden, Throdden, and Downtrodden Headlines

NAZI PIANO CONCERTO, NUMBER TWO (SECOND MOVEMENT)
Third Reich? More like Turd Reich.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol protest and riot, reportage tended to focus on the big stories—the deaths, the violence, the property damage, and of course Trump. But the media will always eventually exhaust the big angles and go searching for new “exclusives” to misreport.

On Jan. 11, New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries (Brooklyn and Queens) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the Capitol stormers “marked their territory” while running wild through congressional offices. “Weapons were deployed. Mace and bear spray were utilized. Offices were ransacked. Feces and urine was left behind,” the morally outraged Democrat told Blitzer, who responded, “I have heard it from so many of your colleagues—some of these individuals, whether they were neo-Nazis, whether they were racists, they were walking around the U.S. Capitol in really sensitive areas urinating.”

Perhaps Blitzer is referring to such “sensitive areas” as the office where Katie Hill had her naked lesbian threesomes. One hates to think that such sacred ground was defiled.

“Nazis urinated in the offices of Members of Congress in the Capitol yesterday, according to Hakeem Jeffries (Congressman from New York),” tweeted Lisa Goldman, a “journalist” who excels in a more verbal type of defecation, as evidenced by the skidmarks she leaves on the pages of The New York Times, The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and The Conversationalist.

The defecating-Nazis story triggered Nadine van der Velde, a multiple Emmy and Annie award-winning actress, writer, producer, and leftist activist, who tweeted:

My dad, a Holocaust survivor, went home after the Germans were defeated. He found his house ransacked, stripped bare, except for the piano. Nazis couldn’t haul it off. Instead Nazis had urinated and defecated inside to make it unusable. Same hateful energy. #GOPFascists

“Nazis Shat in My Piano” was the original title of Elie Wiesel’s Night, until van der Velde’s father successfully sued, as he was in the process of making his own movie based on his tragic story, titled Life Is Pee-yew-tiful.

Ms. van der Velde is quite well-known for beginning almost every other tweet with “My dad, a Holocaust survivor…” so this was par for her course. Still, the piano attack by the Arms of Krapp is a new one. Putting aside the logistical questions (were the Poopenführers perched on the piano’s edge, or standing on chairs and ladders?), there’s the bigger problem that all abandoned Jewish possessions automatically became property of the Reich when a Jew fled, emigrated, or was sent to a camp. That was the law back then.

Ha ha, you dumb Nazis! You just crapped in your own piano.

Another tragic wartime evacuation.

Perhaps a more important question to ponder is how Democrats can now claim that public defecation is “Nazi” when they’ve fought so hard to make it a “human right” for all homeless people.

If Hakeem Jeffries is upset about the mess in his office, I hope he never looks at the sidewalks of his district.

HYGIENIC HAJI WANTS YOU TO PAY FOR HIS SHOWERS
Head, shoulders, knees and toes,
knees and toes
Head, shoulders, knees and toes,
knees and toes
And eyes and ears and mouth and nose
Head, shoulders, knees and toes,
knees and toes!

Yes, that’s a brief inventory of body parts blown off by convicted Boston Marathon bomber and teen heartthrob Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It’s also the little ditty he sings in the shower, to remind himself to wash thoroughly. See, Tsarnaev is a very clean terrorist. Not like those dirty terrorists who live in caves alongside stinky goats and sheep. No, Tsarnaev takes his hygiene quite seriously.

Which is why he’s suing the U.S. government for $250,000 over the fact that he’s limited to only three showers a week at the Colorado Supermax prison where he’s currently serving a life sentence (he’d initially been sentenced to death, but last fall an appeals judge reduced it to life, stating that Tsarnaev’s obsessive love of showering was vital to the nation’s struggling mass-murderer monogrammed-soap industry).

Along with suing for extra shower time, Tsarnaev is also demanding the right to wear a “baseball cap and bandanna” in his cell.

Because what’s the point of cleaning yourself up if you can’t slip into something sporty?

Tsarnaev states in his lawsuit that the lack of showers, caps, and bandannas is contributing to his “mental and physical decline.” Legal experts counter that it’s a bit more likely that said “decline” has more to do with being locked 24/7 in a 7-by-12-foot cell. That, and being an already mentally warped pathological killer.

Sadly for the moistened Muhammadan, his suit was rejected by a federal judge last week because dripping Dzhokhar had not included the $402 filing fee, apparently having spent his every last penny on donations to Bernie Sanders after the elderly (and almost certainly unwashed and malodorous) socialist promised to restore the mad bomber’s voting rights (and hell, considering how Democrats conduct their elections, Tsarnaev probably did have a vote cast in his name last November anyway).

With Sanders soon to become a major power player in the new Senate, the Biden Administration might just decide to settle Tsarnaev’s suit out of court.

Now, it’s unclear what a man locked in a 7-by-12-foot box would be able to do with a quarter-million dollars, but perhaps Tsarnaev can set up a dark-money PAC for Rashida Tlaib, and cycle the money back to his biggest fangirl.

After all, money, just like an imprisoned terrorist, is best when fully laundered.

HOW MIDAIR YOU!
These days, “global warming” hucksters might be feeling the need to play catch-up. After all, “climate change” flimflammery is known for two things: hypocrisy and illogic.

Hypocrisy in that climate-change apocalyptics swear that the world will explode if you don’t give up the things you’re doing that are hastening the end-times—relying on fossil fuels, flying in planes, driving cars, using air-conditioning, eating meat, etc. If you don’t surrender those luxuries, the planet will die and it’ll all be your fault. But weirdly, the doomsayers never seem to follow those rules themselves. They fly, drive, eat meat, and generally expel enough pollution to make Mexico City’s air seem breathable by comparison.

And illogic? Well, how logical is it to say that asthma inhalers and plastic bags are polluting the atmosphere but private jets and luxury yachts the size of the Nimitz aren’t?

If there was one thing climate-change charlatans could always boast about, it’s that they were the absolute best at making ordinary folks suffer under inconsistent rules that they themselves didn’t follow.

But then came Covid. And in the space of less than a year, the achievements of the climate scammers became meaningless and forgotten. Hypocrisy and illogic? Nobody does that better than Covid con artists. All last year, millions of people were locked in their homes by politicians who freely and guiltlessly did all the things they prevented their suffering subjects from doing, as “scientists” came up with countless new ways to not make any sense via the “science-based” rules they advocated (six-foot distancing in the line to enter an aircraft where you then sit inches apart from those same people; “outdoor” dining that occurs inside covered structures but is still considered “outside” because the tables were outside before the building was erected around them; outdoor weddings and concerts are “superspreader events,” but outdoor protests are not; etc.).

Clearly, the pressure is now on the global-warming hustlers to up their game. And who better to meet the challenge than the man with his feet planted firmly in both camps, the guy who became a billionaire so long ago that most folks don’t even remember how he did it, and when they’re reminded, they’re like, “Explorer? Really?… Explorer?”

In February, Bill Gates will release his latest book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. It promises to contain many “solutions” and “breakthroughs” that involve you being forced to no longer do or own something you currently do or own. As a preview, in a recent blog post Gates condemned Americans for using too much gasoline.

But there’s something he left out of that post: Last week it was revealed that Gates has put in a bid to buy Signature Aviation, the world’s largest private jet operator.

Yes, Gates, who already owns four private jets (he likes to match them to his outfits), will now own the world’s largest fleet of them.

According to the Daily Mail, “the average person produces around 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year,” whereas Gates’ private flights alone “produce a staggering 1,600 tonnes” annually.

But you’re the one who needs to stop driving.

Gates, who has often admitted that private jets are his “guilty pleasure,” is likely enjoying his newly reclaimed status as top hypocrite as he dines with Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and AOC maskless at an indoor restaurant sitting inches apart and eating steaks made from only the fartiest cows.

MUSK OF DESPERATION
Those “democracy dies in darkness” arbiters of truth in the mainstream media are getting rather desperate in their attempts to dismantle free speech online. Not content with the plethora of recent victories the forces of speech suppression have won—Twitter banning Trump and liquidating millions of rightist accounts, Facebook banning Trump and most “right-wing” groups, YouTube silencing the official White House account, and Google, Apple, and Amazon banning Parler from the Internet—the intrepid journos in legacy media want to push for even more censorship, and they’ve decided to enlist Elon Musk to help them.

The problem is, Elon Musk isn’t helping them. But never doubt that the people who stretched a phony dossier and a made-up rumor about a micturated president into four years of headlines can stretch a single tweeted meme into “Elon Musk wants Facebook silenced!”

On Jan. 6, Musk tweeted an image that he captioned “the domino effect.” It showed a line of progressively larger dominoes, with the smallest one labeled “a website to rate women on campus,” and the largest one showing a tweet by New York Times chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich stating “The Capitol seems to be under the control of a man in a viking hat.”

The meme can be read several ways, including as a joke, or a satire of the notion that there’s a direct line between something as trivial as Facebook’s earliest incarnation and something as surreal as Leibovich’s tweet. Keep in mind, Musk is a guy who once tweeted that Vernon Unsworth, the heroic British diver who was instrumental in the underwater rescue of twelve Thai boys from a cave in 2018, was a “pedo,” only to respond when sued, “hey, I was just having a larf! My tweets aren’t meant to be taken literally. I was just insulting the guy because I don’t like him.”

Similarly, Musk has recently been in a personal feud with Mark Zuckerberg, so it’s probably best not to make broad assumptions about one tweet.

But what is the MSM if not a giant mentally challenged assumption-making machine?

“Elon Musk Blames Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg For Capitol Riot!” screeched a headline in The Observer. Musk “holds the social network at least partly responsible for the U.S. Capitol riot,” wailed Newsweek. And Fox announced that Musk “appears to blame the founding of Facebook for the violence that ensued at the U.S. Capitol.” At least a dozen other news sites echoed those themes.

All based solely on that one tweeted meme.

Most of the articles tried to spin the tweet to make it appear as though Musk was implicitly advocating censorship of online speech…even though Musk has repeatedly gone on record opposing exactly that. In fact, just days after the “domino” tweet, Musk made his position crystal clear regarding Twitter’s Trump ban: “A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech.”

So much for basing an entire day’s worth of news on one jokey tweet by the “hey pedo, I wuz just foolin’ around!” guy.

Still, it’s a little frightening how eager the press is to push the pro-censorship line, even to the extent of misrepresenting memes. Perhaps next week, The Observer will trot out its new star advocate of speech suppression: the “Ermahgerd Books” girl.

KATHY SHAIDLE: AN APPRECIATION
Kathy Shaidle, the pioneering blogger, essayist, poet, copywriter, political pundit, and former Takimag columnist, passed away last weekend at the age of 56 after losing her battle with ovarian cancer. Kathy wrote for Takimag from 2011 through 2017, and her columns were always hugely popular, engaging, and, most significantly, unpredictable. Because part of what defined Kathy was her versatility as a writer and thinker. This was a person who could write serious poetry, scathing political commentary, deeply personal essays, and the satirical and hard-edged “Ed Anger” column for the Weekly World News. Regardless of the subject or style, her writing was consistently sharp, and on a dime she could be alternately funny, angry, light, or blistering.

Kathy was also that rarest of rightist thinkers—she appreciated movies as movies, not as politics. Sure, she could write about movies from a political angle better than anyone. But she was a film lover first and foremost, as knowledgeable of the history of cinema as anybody writing on the topic today, or possibly ever. It can be difficult for conservatives—obsessed as they are with viewing Hollywood as “enemy territory”—to critique movies strictly from an artistic perspective. But Kathy’s love of the medium went far beyond politics, and her always-active Facebook page was host to hundreds of fascinating film-centered discussions that transcended the usual pap one gets when people on the right try to broach the topic.

Indeed, Kathy’s regular movie column on Mark Steyn’s site was a must-read for all film aficionados regardless of ideological bent.

Speaking of Facebook, even after she retired from Takimag due to time-constraint issues, she remained a steadfast champion of the site and its authors, posting each piece daily for her many Facebook friends and followers to read and dissect. The resulting threads would bring to mind what comments sections should always ideally be—vigorous but reasoned and well-argued debates among opinionated but civil participants.

As a Hamilton, Ontario-born Canadian, it cannot be overstated how courageous Kathy was. Short in stature and a self-described “agoraphobic homebody,” Kathy nevertheless stood up fearlessly to her country’s politically correct commissars. In a nation where one “offensive” tweet can lead to actual criminal charges as opposed to mere “cancellation,” Kathy Shaidle took risks every day that Americans rarely need to chance.

Shaidle’s 2008 book The Tyranny of Nice (coauthored with Pete Vere) is a must-read regarding the perils of being a Great White North dissident thinker.

A scribe to the very end, Kathy went out writing, continuing to post on Facebook Jan. 7, even as she somberly had to admit that her “eyesight (is) failing a bit and it is hard to type.”

She entered hospice the next day. She passed away on the 9th.

After her death, her wry, self-penned obituary gave her friends and fans something to smile about through the grief as they mourned her passing. It was a quintessentially Kathy Shaidle finale: Words were her life and livelihood, and she wanted to share just a few more of them with her readers, even if she wouldn’t be around to take part in the discussion that followed.

To anyone who similarly loves words, and movies, and political commentary, the loss of Kathy Shaidle is a terribly profound one.

Everyone at Takimag extends their sincerest condolences to her beloved husband, Arnie. Kathy was one of a kind, and the world of letters will never be the same without her.