InstaPunk Returns

One of these installed in at least five different cities You probably think this is going to be a screed or a lecture. It isn’t. It’s an honest question, asked out of curiosity: WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF ALL THIS? Almost no one comments here, so I’m not expecting answers. I’m asking you to think about the question for yourselves, with some specificity. To wit: Has the amount of emotion you’ve invested in hating Trump for 10 years made you happier? Is your marriage better, your sex life more satisfying, your circle of friends wider, your career more prosperous, your state of mind more equable and fulfilling? How has your perspective on life changed during the last 10 years? Are you more or less optimistic, diversified in your leisure-time pursuits, content with the personal choices you’ve been making on a day-to-day basis, balanced between the frequently opposing pulls of intellect and emotion? How has your self image (your amour-propre, as the French would say) evolved during this p...

  The Facebook version of me read a post this morning by a smart man named Michael Smith. He was talking about third parties. I read his ‘Essay Part 1’ and was disposed to make a comment, which got thrown out for being too long. So here it is. Smith’s post is first. Robert Laird’s response is second. MICHAEL SMITH.    Essay 1: The Case Against a Third Party My granddaddy, Baker T. Goodwin, when faced with something with which he disagreed, used to say, “I’m agin’ it,” and when it comes to this “America Party” nonsense floating around - like Ross Perot’s old Reform Party - I’m mostly still “agin’ it.” But I’ll toss in one caveat: if we’re talking a third party, it better be a complete replacement party for the GOP and whatever scraps of the Democrat Party still respect the Constitution - if any exist – but if there are any left, they’re hidden better than a moonshine still in the Ozarks. Conservatives need to learn to play the long game, or we’re doomed to a future of Demo...

Thomas Jefferson in a tracksui t   In the last couple of weeks I’ve been witness to a couple of monomaniacs holding forth from their petty thrones on Facebook. Thomas Lipscomb has been making an ass of himself with thinly veiled “anti-Zionist” screeds against the corrupt Jew leadership of Israel. Commenters aplenty have taken the bait and swarmed in to denounce his denunciations and brand him as the antisemite he is (or has, in his dotage, become). I made a comment or two trying to expose the provocation game he was playing, but it fell on deaf ears. I managed to overcome the obstacles associated with using Messenger to remind Lipscomb that as an op-ed ‘journalist,’ his obligation was to persuade, not inflame. I sent him a link to my post about Scarecrows , but he did not reply. After that I left them all to it without looking, but my wife had a morbid fascination with the ongoing ritual dance until I think I convinced her to let it drop while it continued on. That’s where I stood ...

Did Senator John Kennedy humiliate Robert De Niro at a public event? No. He didn’t. A lot of other celebrity confrontations and grudges didn’t happen either. Some entity or entities at Youtube is posting faked videos based on various related premises. The sponsoring organizations in many cases are seeking paid subscriptions, but not always. The lure in individual cases may be the obligatory ad(s) that must be watched prior to the title being sought. I’ve been tracking this for some time, casually at first but with more concern as the number of such videos seems to be proliferating. My wife and I watched one the other day that finally included confirmation of what I’d been concluding for some time. The video was a voiceover account of a bitter argument on ‘The View’ between Harrison Ford and Joy Behar. It was similar to one I’d seen months ago about an interview with Melania Trump in which a gotcha-guy host wanted to embarrass her by asking if she ever regretted marrying Donald Trump. S...

  Sometime this month, Instapunk Returns will probably reach the milestone of 300,000 visits. That’s for content including almost 650 posts since 2019 and, at a conservative guesstimate, over a million words and thousands of visuals. I get stats of which posts have been getting the most traffic in timeframes as small as seven days and 24 hours. Usually, these aren’t surprising to me. They’re mostly the recent posts and sometimes posts I’ve linked in responses at other people’s sites on Facebook and Instagram. It’s the oddball ones that attract my attention, including older posts I haven’t referenced in a long time or, more surprising still, have forgotten I even wrote. Today I found three oddball hits on the Top Ten list, two of them from the ‘I didn’t remember them myself’ category. Thought I’d share.  Where Have All the Little Boys Gone? A Man Called Ove Homework That’s Fun Rereading them myself, I thought they were fun or funny. But then I probably would, wouldn’t I? See w...

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is the Executive Branch which enforces the laws of the land, not the Judicial Branch, the deportations the 2024 electorate voted for can proceed with fewer skirmishes between paper airplanes. The protests in individual locations will occur in their customary way, with sticks and rocks and Molotov cocktails and looting and arson. You know. In the most popular liberal way. In light of today’s events I went looking for my own coverage of the earliest liberal protests against the proposal to build a Wall along the entire southern border to prevent illegals from mounting some kind of absurd mass invasion. This was way back in 2006, when Bush was President and proposing something called Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which usually means lots of amnesties and thousands more illegals. When talk about a Wall got serious for the first time.  Naturally, the liberals immediately identified this as a quasi-Nazi insurrectionist-type movement to enf...

I’ve only done this once or twice in the past. That is, I haven’t made an habit of running the same IPR post again at a later date because it’s become relevant again in a new context. This time obviously, the context is the 12-Day War and its aftermath, which has also surfaced some truly striking examples of antisemitism on the Democrat side. I’m dealing with the linked example elsewhere, but I was reminded that it’s time for some accountability by various constituencies within the now fractured and crumbling liberal coalition of the past. The original post was written almost two years ago and appears here unchanged. These are not new issues we’re dealing with… October 27, 2023 This is a complicated subject studded with land mines that can only exacerbate the potential for a devastating earthquake. The new and unanticipated war in Israel has exposed a weird schism in Democrat ranks nobody has ever wanted to address in print but me. There  is  a Jewish Problem. It’s not t...