As soon as I read this, I emailed my friend Wendy to see if she and her daughters had any Girl Scout cookies left. I don’t eat cookies, but I want to buy some because of this nitwit’s attack on the Scouts:

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) fired back at a conservative writer who called on people to boycott Girl Scout Cookies because of the freshman lawmaker’s past membership in the organization.

“Former sportscaster Jane Chastain, 76, also criticized the Girl Scouts for a partnership with International Women’s Day, which falls on Friday, in her column for fringe right-wing website WND ? titled “‘AOC Was A Girl Scout… Just Say No To The Cookies.’

“Chastain railed against the reported socialist origins of International Women’s Day as she lamented how ‘today’s Girl Scouts are a far cry from those of my youth, which trained us to put God and country before everything else.’

“‘It is little wonder the Girl Scouts have taken a sharp left turn and can be found marching for abortion rights, gun control and other radical feminist events like International Women’s Day’,” Chastain added.”

Yes, having a day for women is a radical feminist plot against … whom? Maybe Chastain could proclaim International Anti-Girl Scout Day.

Ah, the world is full of whackos. But thanks to this whacko, the Girl Scouts sold four extra boxes of cookies – I bought two at the Wilton Recycling Center and two from Scouts at Market Basket.

You go, girls.

• If you are a fan of Alan Drury’s “Advise and Consent” series of novels, you will recognize the Harley Hudson move that Donald Trump made by walking out of his talks with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Hudson was the totally disrespected vice president of the U.S. in the first book, “Advise and Consent” – for which Drury won a Pulitzer Prize – who ascended to the presidency when the president died.

All the members of the president’s party thought Hudson was a wimp but at the end of the book, he proved his mettle by casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to shoot down the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell for secretary of state. Shock. No awe, though.

Anyway, in one of the books, Good Ol’ Harley, as president, leads a delegation from the U.S. into talks with the Russians who, because this is a Drury book, were cast as evil-doers of the first order, bent upon world domination and convinced that Good Ol’ Harley was no match for even Ludmilla, a Russian tractor factory worker.

But they were wrong. They pushed Good Ol’ Harley too far and he stood up, gathered his things and, leading his delegation, walked out, got on Air Force One and went back to D.C.

Of course, this being Alan Drury, the Russians went ballistic and so did the American press. Drury, a former New York Times reporter, was not at all fond of the American press establishment and you have to remember that the “Advise and Consent” series was written starting in the late 1950s. Drury was a real conservative, not a fake like so many we have today.

Anyway, I thought about Harley Hudson when Donald Trump walked out on Kim Jong-un because I could see Good Ol’ Harley doing the same with one big difference: Good Ol’ Harley would not have been kissing Kim’s feet prior to and even after this meeting, nor would he have absolved Kim in the murder of Otto Warmbier, the American college student busted in North Korea for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel. The U.S. got him released from an NK prison but soon after he got home, he died.

Not Kim’s fault, said Donald Trump because “he didn’t know about it.” Right. Nobody sneezes in North Korea without Kim knowing about it, but because Donald Trump likes dictators, Kim got a pass until Warmbier’s parents raised holy hell and, quite rightly, hurled blame at Kim.

But leaping to Trump’s defense was John Bolton, naturally, who has no history of liking dictators, but likes Trump, so he said this, according to Allen Smith writing on the NBC News website:

“While President Donald Trump said he takes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his word that he didn’t know about the mistreatment of U.S. student Otto Warmbier, that doesn’t mean Trump accepted Kim’s word ‘as reality,’ national security adviser John Bolton said.

“When he says, ‘I’m going to take him at his word,’ it doesn’t mean that he accepted as reality; it means that he accepts that’s what Kim Jong Un said,” Bolton told ‘Fox News Sunday’ anchor Chris Wallace.”

Oh, well, that clears it up. He takes him at his word but he doesn’t believe him. Got it. So, I lend you some money and you give me your word you’ll pay it back and I take you at your word, but I’m also supposed to accept that you probably don’t mean that you’re going to pay me back and that’s OK because I know you didn’t mean it, I just took you at your word.

I have no idea what any of that means.

But I’ll tell you this: I don’t think Good Ol’ Harley would have stopped our military exercises with South Korea.

• OK, time to ban the word “well” from all news stories. I saw it again recently – because it’s endemic – in a James Pindell political column and as much as I respect James Pindell, I wanted to scream at him.

He was writing about the Great Chickadee Battle in Maine: What is the state bird of our neighbor state? Well, Maine says it’s the chickadee but which chickadee? Up in Northern Main, they like the northern chickadee but in the south, they claim it’s already the black-capped chickadee. The problem is, when they adopted the state bird in 1927, they just said “chickadee” which is like saying “dog” when you adopt a state dog.

My beef with Pindell comes because he wrote this:

“But they didn’t specify which cickadee. This struck Nick Lund, a birder who works at Maine Audubon, as, well, bird-brained.”

Friends, here’s what I want you to do: Count the number of times you read the word “well” in such a context in your local newspaper or online or anywhere. It’s used, as far as I can tell, as a pause to indicate that the writer is pondering for a second but of course the writer is doing no such thing. Pindell knew he was going to use “bird-brained,” but he stuck “well” in there because … because everybody does it now. It’s like “arguably,” as in Willie Mays was arguably the best outfielder in the history of baseball. What? You’re afraid to just say that? Afraid somebody might get angry with you, might contradict you? No, no, it was Mickey Mantle. Arguably? Oy.

Here’s the proper use of “well” from Bob Dylan’s first album:

“Well, well, well, so I can die easy, well, well, well. Well, well, well, so I can die easy, Jesus gonna make up my dyin’ bed.”

• The Boston Globe did a story about recently elected Democratic U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan and what appear to be problems with her primary campaign financial disclosers, to wit: Where did all that last-minute money come from?

I don’t care about that, although I think if she violated campaign finance laws she should be busted and made to promise never to do it again because that’s always the truth, ha, ha, ha.

But my favorite part of the story is this:

“Trahan, who made transparency a central them of her campaign, declined to be interviewed, answering questions about her campaign in writing.”

You might call that being transparent but I call that being afraid of the follow-up questions.

Then there’s this, when talking about loans Trahan said she got:

“The lack of specifics about the loans from Trahan make it impossible to say exactly how much money came from which acount, though a review of bank records would quickly reveal where the money came from. However, Tranah’s office declined to share bank records.”

You gotta love transparency. Maybe Rep. Trahan this “transparency” means “opaque.” (Notice I didn’t write “…means, well, opaque.” Take that, James Pindell.)

Does it strike you that politicians are all for transparency until somebody asks them to be transparent? Yeah, me too.

• My cat has a new annoying habit: Howling until I lay down on the couch to read, so she can get under the snuggy I use to keep little me warm after Kathy leaves for work and I turn down the heat.

But now she wants me to get onto the couch when I don’t want to. At first, I just ignored the howls – these are not meows, folks – but then I tried this: I got onto the couch, got under the snuggy, picked up my book and as soon as the cat got under the snuggy and got comfy, I got up and went about my business. She didn’t care. The other day, this occurred at 8 a.m. and we didn’t see her again until 7 p.m. Comfy kitty.