Yes, I can hear my parents having sex by Superman

Note: This weekend, Dan Brooks was injured in a freak accident while throwing hammers at a trampoline, so today’s Combat! blog is a guest post by humanitarian and immigration rights activist Superman.

As a virtually indestructible alien given superhuman abilities by Earth’s yellow sun, I get a lot of questions about my powers. Yes, I can cook food with my vision. No, I do not need special scissors to get a haircut. My hair just grows this way, with the gel and everything. I don’t understand why—probably for the same reason I can hear Lois Lane say “Help me, Superglub!” as the room in which she is trapped slowly fills with water, even though she is underground and thousands of miles away. And yes, this same super hearing means that I can hear my parents every time they have sex.

Continue reading

Donald Trump embodies core conservative principle of winning

Donald Trump in Des Moines earlier this year

Donald Trump in Des Moines earlier this year

Back in 2010, newly-minted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Heritage Foundation, “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” It was a blunt statement of Republican principle. Lower taxes and deregulation are well and good, but the central plank in the modern GOP platform is winning. Maybe it started when John McCain mortgaged his reputation for Sarah Palin. Maybe it began with the election of Barack Obama and the party’s redefinition of itself as his negative image. But it ends like this. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination for president on the strength of saying whatever works. And between now and November, most of the people who called him an unqualified catastrophe—party leaders, conservative commentators, other Republican politicians—will get behind him.

Continue reading

Why won’t we let Rachel Dolezal be “trans-racial?”

Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s, respectively

Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s

By now you have either quit Twitter or heard about Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who identifies as black but whose parents insist she is white. It’s not my job to say what races people are, but Ma and Pa Dolezal sure seem to be right. A professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, Dolezal says in her faculty bio that she received an MFA from Howard and has been the victim of “at least eight documented hate crimes.” That’s a weird item to put in your CV. But everything about the Rachel Dolezal story is weird, from her parents’ estrangement from more than one of their children to her refusal to simply say she is black. Again, it looks like she isn’t. But who gets to decide?

Continue reading

What you get for $3.7 million

Lena Dunham, creator of Girls

As any Amish person will tell you, one of the best things about being alienated from popular culture is having something to define your values against. I do not like Ke$ha; ergo, when Ke$ha is materialistic and stupid, I am nuanced and wise. This phenomenon is made more versatile by ignorance. I am disconnected from radio and television, so by definition I don’t really know what’s on there. I can therefore impute to it any values I reject. It’s like the way the alien in Alien is really scary until you get a good look at it; your imagination makes it so. I have seen exactly one episode of Girls, and so Lena Dunham has come to embody everything I despise.

Continue reading

Dear Son: I just got the internet at home

From: djones1949@aol.com

Date: Feb 13 2010 08:48 CST

Subject: Big news!

Dear Son,

Big news today. Carol and I just got the internet at home, so I’m writing you this from our computer room! Now we can communicate electronically. Does the phone count as electronic? I guess it doesn’t matter, since we never talk on the phone anyway. I’m kidding! :) Things are good here. Ranger ate an entire box of Thin Mints and we had to tie a bag around him. He’s okay now, though. It’s been very warm—56 degrees yesterday, although it’s supposed to get down to 23 tonight. If you talk to your mother, can you tell her we need to work out the insurance thing from last year? She’ll know what I’m talking about.

Your father,

Dad

Continue reading