It’s the end of January, Valentine’s Day just around the corner, and just about this time in 1998 the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinski sex scandal broke upon us, the titillating details keeping everyone amused for months.  Monica Lewinsky has recently resurfaced, now forty-one years old, and blames Drudge for ruining her life, evidently believing her actions had nothing to do with ruining her life, that being the nineteen year old mistress of President Clinton, servicing him orally while crouching under the desk in the Oval office had nothing to do with the resulting scandal. You would think that the scandal and headlines were close enough to Valentine’s Day for Bill to have sent her a valentine instead of insisting he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Had he done so it might have gone like this:

I handed you a pretty line
I told you that you looked so fine
We made my desk both yours and mine
So won’t you be my Valentine
Old Hillary will never know
Beneath my desk you’ll never show
This intern job is yours to blow
Oh Valentine I love you so

It is almost February, time for 2015 predictions, and I asked my late friend Waltradamus which of the many predictions for the coming year will come true, and he said none of them. Ever enigmatic, he ticked them off:

 Student loan crisis:

The student looks beyond the sky
Beyond the moonlit bay
To where her dreams will surely die
If not now, yesterday

Imminent Libyan ground war:

In Libya the imminent
Will surely not be found
No longer Daffy himintent
But safely underground

Saudi succession:

The mirror shows succession
Be he who lately led
As tribal high procession
Anoints the quickened dead

Deep trouble in Venezuela:

Hussein consults the wizards
Then pays no mind to words
Imparted by the gizzards
Of migratory birds

The Bill Clinton/Epstein and young girls scandal:

With Billy sex no scandal
The is is what it is
While Hillary can handle
The bubble not the fizz

Retaking Mosul from ISIS:

Like every second city
There’s always the proposal
Always the bridal pity
And at someone’s disposal

The Palestinian Authority may dissolve:

A universal solvent
Perhaps a secret bribe
A lightning strike involvement
By a fierce neighbor tribe

DC statehood:

The dream of world dominion
Two Senators! the cry
But says public opinion
Some dreams are meant to die

The Eurozone crisis:

Gods live on milk and honey
Olympus life was swell
But they’ve run out of money
And now they have to sell

Micro aggression:

A look, a word a glance is
The same as sticks and stones
Observers say the chance is
This leads to broken bones

A Russian financial default:

The gods align the savage stars
And destiny fulfills
The dreams of conquest by the Tsars
Or what the Putin wills

There you have it. The seer, the sage, has seen the future and there is nothing there.

I spoke to President Obama the other day, one of America’s best and brightest, and even while stoned and hung over he remained one of the best and brightest. I got him upright from time to time, and during his more lucid moments he explained how he got to be one of the best and brightest.

He closed his eyes and shook his head
The effort seemed intense
He paused a moment and then said
You see, it all makes sense
I went to all the finest schools
My politics was right
I learned that most were only fools
And certainly not bright
I got good grades on every test
Professors were amazed
I climbed the mountain, reached the crest
‘Twas then that I was dazed
To find that I was all alone
The world spread out below
And all of it was mine to own
I only had to show
My face to the adoring crowd
My words were sung in chants
The people cheered me long and loud
A two way sweet romance
Elected twice by margins great
To huzzahs and to cheers
The pilot of the ship of state
The first among my peers
And here he paused and closed his eyes
And with a trembling lip
He sobbed and said and then the prize
Began at last to slip
He cried and slumped down in his chair
As quietly I left
He looked so worn just lying there
So childlike, so bereft
The meteor had spent its force
It’s flaming tail dispersed
The Marxist era far off course
The brightest now the worst

I had given the lecture many times without incident, but today a feminist was in the audience and took umbrage at something I said and called me a loathsome nerd, then reported me to the Dean, telling him I had used hate speech so vile she had fainted. There is only so much a man can take. Sometimes he just has to take matters into his own hands and let them know he is not a nerd, but that he is, in his inner being, an action hero, a Zorro secretly righting wrongs or Zorro’s opposite, a demon, stalking the streets with sharpened teeth and raking nails.

I will confess I hate that word
I hate it when I’m called a nerd
I know that’s how I look to you
A PhD from Podunk U
I didn’t want to go to Yale
For like all nerds I knew I’d fail
That’s why I lived alone so long
Afraid of always being wrong
But come the night I join the moon
And make them sing a different tune
With sharpened teeth, on darkened street
I lurk in shadow till I meet
The feminist who called me dull
She’s frightened, yes, and in the lull
As she lay dying I explain
How all my life I’ve been in pain
In sympathy she nods her head
Her breathing stopped but still she said
Your whiteness is beyond the pale
But worst of all is being male
I’m glad I got your lectures nixed
But there’s still hope, you can be fixed
I left her there without a word
And slunk on home, still just a nerd

The United States, once a collection of individuals, is now an individual collective, thanks to eighty years of creeping and now metastasized socialism, for which all of us, whether we voted for socialism or not, are collectively guilty and thus are collectively punished.

I work with my collective friends
We earn collective pay
No time to follow all the trends
We work so hard all day
We live in a collective State
We are collective stats
Collected by, without debate
Collective bureaucrats
We live under collective laws
And share collective guilts
While bureaus issue without pause
The Shall Nots and Shall Wilts
But men once free are soon to find
The nearest handsome tree
And with tormentors all aligned
Hang them collectively

We live in a time when deadly peril is described as debt crisis, plummeting oil prices and various other temporary and historically almost meaningless random motions of the financial and political systems. Consider the year end outlook of the people of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Muslim corsairs and Ottoman fleets sailed their galleys with impunity, taking coastal villages and killing all the elderly, selling the women and children into slavery and chaining the men to the benches of their galleys. The effect of plummeting oil prices on the global banking system is laughable compared to what people endured in the good old days.

The galleys silent run up on the beach
The torch and sword for everyone in reach
While further north the rains had failed again
And coming death was not an if but when
Religious faith meant death to infidels
Depending if ‘twere minarets or bells
Disease endemic took the young away
The question but tomorrow or today
We live today without a thought for those
Who lived through winters where the cattle froze
Whose blood runs through the generations yet
To wonder why we think a crisis debt
Or falling prices hurting global banks
Instead of on our knees and giving thanks

There are those who believe in the force of destiny, that what is to be will be, that what is shown in destiny’s mirror is inevitable. And so it may be. The mirror of destiny shows a darkness blotting the sun, coming nearer and darker with each passing day, and no one, not God nor man, able to stop its relentless inevitability.

The Ottoman is on the march
Vienna is in sight
The sun is setting in the West
And soon will come the night
The mirror in the White House shows
That all is going well
Yet in the mirror sounds unheard
The tolling of the bell
Our destinies are darkly shown
If we would do but look
Yet many seem content to see
The closing of the book
The death of Western majesty
Of science and of art
Will all be dead without the rise
Of men with fighting heart
The darkness closes in as we
Drift off in dreamless sleep
Assassins creeping to our beds
To leave no one to weep
Our destiny is in our hands
The mirror does not lie
The darkness closes in and we
Must fight or we shall die

It has been suggested that we drop movies over North Korea to show the average North Korean what the West really looks like. It is believed that doing so may make the people of North Korea rise up and depose the Kims. My choice for movie dropped into North Korea would be Dr. Strangelove. Not only is it a great movie, but maybe the ordinary North Korean will believe that if they only got rid of the Kims they could, in just two or three generations, build a replica B-52. They would have to import the balsa wood, of course, but the IMF would probably advance them the money. On the other hand it might just be easier to drop a bomb on the presidential palace outhouse while Kim is in it. Just a thought.

The presidential outhouse
To where the flagstones led
Sits silent in the moonlight
Awaiting Kim Un’s tread
As he upon his bedtime
His nightly sortie made
To sit alone and ponder
The morrow’s plans he laid
Unseen the drones had loitered
Above the outhouse roof
And when the door had fastened
A missile’s silent poof
Left nothing but the wreckage
Piled high on flagstone path
Upon which all the mourners
Had placed this epitaph
Somewhere here lies Dear Leader
We know not where he went
Know only he is part of
This handsome excrement

Governor Cuomo, Democrat, New York, has ruled that New York State will not permit drilling for oil on State lands, despite all the evidence that fracking is not harmful to the environment and creates jobs and wealth. A Leftist knows what he is for and what he is against, and so Governor Cuomo has decided to stand at the shore line and defy the tide to rise. Obama, who also once promised that he would stop the seas from rising, is outraged that his attempts to stop the fracking have failed, while at the same time taking credit for its success. The Left never gives up, and neither does it ever learn.

If it walks like a duck and it’s quacking
It’s a Dem who’s outraged about fracking
How dare they defy the Obama
Whose face, now a threatening comma
Dreams that he will shut down the drilling
And show all the world that he’s willing
To sell the US down the river
To show to the Left he’ll deliver
Mad Putin’s Potemkin is cracking
Because of American fracking
Sad faces are on every Saudi
When hearing a big Texas “Howdy!”

There are always those, like the New York Times, who lament the genius of American capitalism to improve the lives of people throughout the world by making things cheaper, better and more plentiful. They worry that fracking and cheaper oil will cause pain to those autocratic regimes who depend on high oil prices to stay in power. On the other hand it probably doesn’t matter what they say. Does anyone read the New York Times any more?

Global oil markets are cracking
All because some guys are fracking
And the gushing oil is likely not to stop
Old John D he must be smilin’
Though he has been gone a while’n
The technology’s improved since Spindletop
Russian derricks will be rusting
And the Saudis, who were trusting
That the Democrats would keep the money tree
Standing upright, money falling
Like green leaves at Saudis’ calling
Are now threatening to make the darn stuff free
But they won’t destroy the fracking
Even with the Times’s backing
And Obama says that pipeline will not pass
They shed tears for silent derricks
And the business run by clerics
While the roughnecks smile and say you kiss my ass