Catching Up on 10 Infuriating Things in the Past Month’s News

Lots of readers have written me offline to solicit my views. So, having been deterred by such life tasks as attempting to live, and having been unable to sit and write much during the past six weeks, please indulge me a moment more, as I summarize thoughts.

You have heard of the game of “20 Questions”? Herewith, the first 10 of “20 Answers”:

1. Too much Taylor Swift. My friend, standup comedian Marvin Silbermintz, describes a “Jewish Mother Doll”: You pull the string, and it talks, saying, “Enough with the string already!” Same with Swift and her adoring media: Enough already. If more people would be told by their pulmonologists that they will die later that same day, when they fall asleep, unless they admit themselves immediately into the hospital transplant ward, they would understand that, for the brief time G-d has given us life, we can do better with our minutes and seconds than devoting more than a few minutes to being apprised — one and only one time — as to who she is. Suddenly, she would no longer matter. Rather, time would matter. G-d would matter. Spouses, parents, and offspring would matter. Let her mug for TV cameras. Let her chug for TV cameras. Let her hug Kelce for TV cameras. Mug, chug, hug. Yeah, yeah, I can hear the TikTok crowd: “But isn’t their love beautiful?” Yes, breathtaking — like A-Rod and JLo, Brangelina, Johnny Depp and Amber Herd, Jennifer Aniston and pre-Brangelina Brad, Bruce Jenner and Kris, Heidi Klum and Seal, Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, Sean Penn and Robin Wright, and all the others. May all those “stars” imagining they light a “galaxy” someday find the happiness that everyday people of faith and humility experience as they mark their 4oth, 50th, and beyond wedding anniversaries while watching their children and grandchildren mature with the core values that make them proud.

2. The judge who hit former President Donald Trump with that $350 million verdict and another $100 million in interest really is an embodiment of Evil. A snake. When there is no justice, a society collapses in on itself. That is happening here. I hope we leverage law to stop it in time. What did the old 1950s black-and-white Superman TV series teach us as kids? It hammered into our sweet little crania not that we are boys in girls’ bodies or vice versa, and not that Americans formally should divide based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity. Rather, it taught that the “American Way” is built on truth and justice. Such a simple mantra that my wife and I found ourselves softly mouthing it the other night while, as something totally random, we streamed an old episode: “[A]nd who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way!” That is worth more than three years of most American inner-city school curricula. This prejudiced, biased “judge” does not embody truth. He absolutely reflects the opposite of justice. And may G-d protect us if he reflects a new “American Way.” That is not America; that is Putin, Hugo Chávez, and Fidel Castro. You go after the rich you dislike by convicting them with barely any witnesses, testimony, or trial. Then you fine them all and take their money and their property without just compensation. That is not America. It is not justice when a lifelong leftist, going back to anti–Vietnam War protests, gets elected by a leftist electorate in a deep-blue Democrat community, then confiscates wealth and property without adherence to due process. I am not just a rabbi and columnist but also a recently retired law professor of 20 years, and a recipient of the American Jurisprudence Award in Legal Ethics. This guy is the opposite of what the law books teach. Under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, he simply is not allowed to impose confiscatory penalties. The 14th Amendment extends that rule to the states. Here, those who lent to Trump on his properties did not lose but made money off him, and they gladly would lend to him again. Meanwhile, Letitia James explicitly ran on a campaign promising to destroy Trump. This is evil. And all this in a state where actual violent criminals, stabbers, rapists, shooters, and worse get off without prison time, even without bail. Five illegals beat the living daylights out of a cop in Times Square, and four were released without bail. A justice system corrupted by rot at its highest echelons destroys the foundations of society. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court felt it must rectify biased, anti-liberal, anti–New York justice in Alabama when a legal system determined to put the New York Times out of business in New York Times v. Sullivan. Now it devolves onto SCOTUS to rescue Trump and America from the rot of corruption in New York’s “justice” system that already is driving out business while importing more illegal residents than can be housed.

3. More injustice: the Fani Willis soap opera in Georgia. She fools around with a married man. They connect in her law office. CellHawk analytics cell phone data indicate 2,000 voice calls and 12,000 interactions between Nathan Wade and Willis. He — or at least his personal phone — visits her home 35 times, denying it but contradicted by a tattling cell phone. They go on luxury trips overseas. Belize. $400 cash to taste two wine bottles in Napa Valley. Then she opens a cash cow for him, selecting him for a role that allows him a bounty of $650,000 in billable legal hours for litigating a case she fabricates against Trump and for which this guy has limited professional experience in navigating. Then, when she is asked by a lawyer about “hordes of cash,” she asks what he said because it sounds to her as though he said a word other than “hordes.” In my circles, “hordes” is “hordes.” “Prostitutes” is “prostitutes.” I don’t know what law she practices or with whom she consorts, but “hordes of cash” sounds like “hordes of cash.” She and Wade both belong in prison if they perjured themselves. If they did not, they should be law professors at Harvard. In a world where plagiarist Claudine Gay retains a $900,000 salary after being publicly humiliated into resigning, Willis and Wade would fit in perfectly.

4. Cori Bush demands we “defund the police.” Meanwhile, she has spent over $627,000 in campaign funds on her own private security. Most Americans do not have the public covering their private police. One security guy, whom she paid $62,000, now is her husband. Nice that her husband is employed. All reminiscent of Ilhan Omar paying her publicity consultant over $600,000 from public funds and engaging with him in an affair, then his divorcing his wife and marrying the now-much-wealthier Omar. Omar wears a hair covering because she is very religious Muslim. So we have adultery. And her prior marriage to her brother. “The Squad”? A more apt name might more closely parallel the title of the old TV series Racket Squad.

5. More Ilhan Omar: She arrives on the scene, an unknown loudmouth out of Minnesota, previously married to her brother, questioning the loyalties of American Jews. In due time, she gets caught on video telling a group of Minnesota Somalians in their native tongue that she is the representative of Somalia in Congress and won’t let Ethiopia touch Somalia’s territorial waters.

6. Colorado, Maine, and Chicago have no legal basis or right to bar Trump from their ballots based on the 14th Amendment. He never even was charged with “insurrection,” much less tried or convicted for it. His appeal is a slam-dunk 9–0 Supreme Court case for reversal of crookedness on steroids. I believe Elena Kagan is a deeply wrong-headed leftist, but I also believe she retains a modicum of decency. Therefore, because this is such a legal no-brainer, she surely will ally with Chief Justice John Roberts and the five conservatives to make up seven solid votes reversing the three corrupt lower courts. The fascinating question to be answered: How will Sotomayor and She-Who-Cannot-Define-“Woman” rule? This will help define whether those two have any measure of decency and fairness in them at all. I am curious.

7. If you let in 10 million illegals, you are going to import into America thugs, pederasts, rapists, and murderers whom you cannot monitor or control. G-d knows who else Biden and Mayorkas have allowed in. We now have illegals ganging together to beat New York police on the sidewalks of Times Square, then being released immediately by Alvin Bragg, who, nevertheless, is working full throttle to detour and perhaps imprison Trump on a charge whose limitations period has expired and so is being crudely attached to a federal statute that has no application. The illegals predictably flee the jurisdiction and get caught next door to Manhattan in Phoenix, Arizona, where local law enforcement refuse to extradite them back to Bragg because they know he won’t prosecute them. So they’ll deal with the dirtbags in Arizona.

8. It was long overdue that Mayorkas be impeached. He is a criminal and has lied publicly to Congress in sworn testimony about the border. Now he must be tried by the Senate. The razor-thin Democrat majority in the Upper House will protect Mayorkas from conviction and perhaps even from trial. That is OK because it will put three U.S. senators on record only months before the November elections: Jon Tester of Montana, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. It also will be fun to watch how Manchin of West Virginia casts one of his final Senate votes.

9. Mitch McConnell’s medical situation left him no choice but to announce he is stepping down. Notwithstanding any number of criticisms that may be levied against him, he deserves America’s everlasting gratitude for almost singularly saving us from Merrick Garland sitting on the Supreme Court for a lifetime while also helping Trump secure a 5–3 conservative majority, with Roberts usually siding where he should. That was McConnell’s finest hour.

10. Lots of Israel–Gaza thoughts, for now in terse truths: Israel has knocked out 18 of the 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza. It dares not stop its war until it has utterly destroyed Hamas, even if it needs to keep bombing Gaza for another year. It has made great progress through northern Gaza, then Gaza City, then Khan Yunis, and soon Rafah (Rafiach). The “International Court of Justice” (ICJ) is a joke and should be disregarded. UNRWA is a corrupt United Nations agency that consciously has perpetuated a bad situation in Gaza to an ever worse one for 75 years. UNRWA has prevented Arabs in Gaza from becoming truly free and independent, as was their opportunity when Israel — wrongly — handed Gaza to them, free and clear, in 2005. Instead, UNRWA now claims it has 5.9 million “refugees” to feed. Ten percent of UNRWA are Hamas affiliated, and at least 12 of them directly participated in the murders, rapes, and beheadings of Oct. 7. UNRWA should be closed down along with Hamas. Israel should just blow off the ICJ, UNRWA, U.N., European Union, and the rest of them. That’s how she became an independent country and how she won the 1967 Six-Day War. Every time she blows off the Jew haters, G-d blesses her with miracles. Every time Israeli leaders instead follow “common sense” and “realpolitik,” they get their just desserts for fearing those who themselves should be cowering. It won’t be long before France, England, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Germany are begging Israel to save them from “two-state solutions” creating Arab Muslim autonomous cantons up and down Europe. Just you wait, ’enry ’iggins, just you wait.

Ten more in the queue.