Josh First's Blog

All hail John Fetterman and Chuck Norris

All hail US senator John Fetterman, and actor/ martial artist / patriot spokesman Chuck Norris, late of Planet Earth and now karate chopping endless pine boards in Heaven.

These two guys are (were) mavericks. Both started out as registered Democrats, and ended up as something else. More on this in a minute.

Nothing is more American than being an honest-to-goodness maverick; the one-off, independent spirit who charts his own path through tough times and obstacles. Maverick really is the heart and soul of American Yankee entrepreneurship, guys who think way outside the box. Whatever the box may be at that time in history.

Our own American Indians were impressively maverick, until they met the tough Scots-Irish frontiersmen, who largely founded the America we have known and loved lo, these past 250 years. They were even more maverick. The same Scots-Irish Over-Mountain Men who fought at Kings Mountain and won George Washington’s war of independence, and then got on their horses and rode back into rugged Kan-Tuck-Ee, and whose descendants then fought the British again at the bloodiest Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and whose descendants then became the iconic Rocky Mountains Mountain Men of the 1830s.

Mavericks, indeed. Generations of them. Generations of Us, the Americans, who are the mavericks of the world.

Chuck Norris said he left the Democrat Party because it had gone too far left, had become something unrecognizable, something not-American. Chuck Norris’ acting career was spent playing the same themes of American patriotism, the tough principled individual against mobs of loathesome no-goodnicks, the voice of the rational good guy against greedy bastards, and always, the maverick.

Lone Wolf McQuade, Delta Force, Texas Rangers, his TV shows were a consistently recognizable and reliably entertaining genre that summed up a great deal of American culture goodness, much as The Lone Ranger TV series had done for the previous generation.

Exit Chuck Norris stage right, and enter… stage left…?… a new maverick who almost died, who was only mostly dead, and who came back to the land of the living, and who yet still remains with us reborn, John Fetterman.

I well remember John Fetterman as the angry, defiant, politically anarchic state senator from western PA. That Cro Magnon beetle brow and large, sluggish frame made him easy to deride as a Frankenstein – like moron. But… Au contraire, mon ami!

Turned out, John Fetterman was one of the only people to graduate from Harvard University in recent decades who is not a moron. Fetterman says he is one of the only registered Democrats in his heavily Republican family, and for most of his career that showed. He was obviously trying to prove something to somebody with his ridiculous rhetoric and big doofus behavior as mayor of a East Succotash small town no one in that town had ever heard of, and then again in the Pennsylvania Senate chamber. With the satirical hoodie and no-no cargo shorts to boot. The guy was not a serious person, much less a serious representative of The People. He was all hat and no cattle.

And then, a couple years ago, the newly elected US Senator John Fetterman had a brain aneurysm, almost died, and suddenly returned to the US Senate as a maverick. This was bigger than any theater or movie; it was politically seismic, if also scientifically and cosmically weird.

Fetterman was not just dressed as a maverick, or doing boorish college student takeover-the-podium stuff, but also now thinking like a maverick. Communicating and acting outside the box he had been in, and had almost stayed in. Suddenly, the new John Fetterman was a calm voice of reason on thorny political issues. His staffers quit his office in droves, angry that the defiant far-left hysterics they had signed up for had grown up and put on a nice Oxford shirt under that hoodie.

For the past two years, post-aneurysm US Senator John Fetterman has been a calm voice of reason, not a politically partisan hack who just flows along with the partisan mob. He is a thinker, a divider of policies. I do not always agree with him, but enjoying more than finding some common ground with him, I really appreciate having a senator who carefully weighs stuff out before committing to a policy.

And the farther and harder crazy loon left his Democrat Party goes, the more John Fetterman stands like a rock of reason in a world where leftists have abandoned all reason.

Now, Fetterman is closing in on an upcoming primary race for the senate seat he occupies. This election is sure to bring out the angry far left Democrat voters who chased away Chuck Norris, Ronald Reagan, me, and a horde of other patriotic self-directed Americans from the “Party of Love.” US Senator John Fetterman surely must recognize that his maverick thinking, which bridges both political parties and unites most sane Americans, is a liability on the left, an admirable quality on the right, and puts him squarely in the middle.

One must wonder if US Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is about to declare himself as an Independent, and thereby hold this Senate seat for the rest of his life, or at least until his next and probably fatal aneurysm. All will hail Caeser Fetterman, the newly hatched butterfly, the Master of the Political Realm for pretty much as long as he wants, if he declares himself an Independent.

Americans always like honest mavericks, and I think Fetterman is about to show us another bigger-than-life iconic example of the how and what of that.