The Daily Gouge Archive, Monday, March 20th, 2023

On March 21, 2023, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, March 20th, 2023…but before we begin, even as a patently partisan, unprovable prosecution is apparently proceeding against Trump in what Rich Lowry describes as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg preparing to torch his credibility for a mug shot…

Hey, when you’ve got Keith Olbermann in your corner…

…you know you’re on the wrong side of history.  Andy McCarthy highlights why the odds of a dream Trump likely shares with Olbermann being realized are remote in the extreme. 

And as Jonathan Turley relates, though it certainly should be, what the Biden cartel has done is as much an actual crime under existing law…

…as anything The Donald did.  But this isn’t about Alvin Bragg’s credibility, or anything else connected to Stormygate.  Neither is it about preventing Trump from running.

Here’s the juice: As Matt Walsh notes…

If Trump’s indicted, they’re hoping for another January 6th; And, knowing the charges won’t stick, using any dismissal as a means to energize their base in the run-up to 2024.

Here’s a second shot of the juice: The indictment and arrest of an ex-President on…if you’ll forgive the phrase…trumped-up charges is as great a threat to the Constitution as was the January 6th riot, meaning none whatsoever…unlike the conspicuous corruption of the Biden crime family.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at NRO, Becket Adams details how…

Right on Schedule, the Media Decide DeSantis Is ‘Worse’ Than Trump

That wouldn’t have anything to do with his growing popularity among conservatives, would it?

 

“One of the funnier quirks of the Trump era is how closely the former president and his critics in the press mirror one another. From indulging in absolute gutter rhetoric to embracing rank illiberalism to promoting unhinged conspiracy theories, Trump and his press critics tend to have more in common than not.

And right now, Trump and his media counterparts agree (albeit for slightly different reasons): Ron DeSantis is the worst.

Amusingly enough, the shared animosity for Florida’s Republican governor has become increasingly deranged in proportion to DeSantis’s growing popularity with the conservative base. Curious! Another especially amusing aspect of the press’s growing anti-DeSantis chorus is this simple fact: They are trying in earnest — in the Year of Our Lord 2023 — to convince the public that the Florida executive poses a greater threat to our core democracy than even Trump does. Yes, the same people who spent four years trying to convince you that Trump posed a unique, once-in-a-lifetime threat to the republic are trying now to convince you that an even greater threat to the republic is now upon us. Just ignore the part where they do this bit every four years. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that Mitt Romney, the sweetest, most wholesome presidential candidate you ever saw, was out there being accused of manslaughtering a woman diagnosed with cancer.

…Trump is clearly terrified that DeSantis will beat him in the 2024 GOP primary. Call it a matter of personal pride. Members of the press are likewise terrified DeSantis will defeat Trump, not least of all because Donald Trump is a guaranteed ratings and subscription gold mine. Oh, come on, don’t feign ignorance or indignation. Everyone knows former CBS chief executive officer Les Moonves said the quiet part out loud in 2015 when he enthused about Trump’s political ascendancy, the 2016 GOP primary, and all the associated campaign spending: “The more they spend, the better it is for us. And go Donald! Keep getting out there! Let them spend money on us, and we love having them in there.”

But there is also a nonfinancial reason some in the media are sounding the alarm over DeSantis: It’s called force of habit. The governor may be the next president, and, as far as the commentariat is concerned, every new GOP president is worse than the last. It doesn’t matter who the person is, but should he make his way into the White House, he’s Hitler. Or Mussolini. Maybe both. It’s not until the Republican no longer poses a risk as a serious candidate for higher office that the people warning about “threats to our democracy” develop what is commonly known in conservative circles as “strange new respect.”

Which is to say, now that there’s a chance Trump may not, in fact, be the 2024 nominee, some in the press have already moved on to the rehabilitation portion of the post-Trump presidency, but only insofar as it can be used to convince voters that a possible new Republican contender is even worse than the last guy.

“Ron DeSantis Would Kill Democracy Methodically and Slowly,” warns New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “Trump poses a greater danger of triggering an immediate constitutional crisis, while DeSantis is more likely to methodically strangle democracy through a series of illiberal Orbanist steps like he has modeled in Florida.”

For what it’s worth, Chait argued this exact position in 2015, claiming Trump would be a safer nominee than Senators Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Chait went on to spend the entire Trump administration peddling Russian-collusion theories, including an exceptionally wild-eyed article arguing that Trump has been acting as a Russian asset since as far back as 1987…”

Next, the Morning Jolt accurately asserts…

If Barney Frank Were a Republican, He’d Be the Media’s Banking-Crisis Villain

Whose Signature Is on the Banking Crisis?

 

“Picture, if you will, a 16-term congressman who plays a major role in overhauling the nation’s regulation of banks. He then retires and joins the board of directors of a New York-based national bank traded on NASDAQ, a bank with assets of about $50 billion. As a former congressman and member of the bank’s board, he lobbies Congress to loosen the rules for banks like his, making the not-insane argument that the rules for a bank with about $50 billion in assets shouldn’t be the same as the rules for a bank with $1 trillion or more in assets.

Imagine that while this congressman was still serving in the legislature, he denounced two of his former staffers who had gone to work as lobbyists for banks, saying of one of them, “It never occurred to me that he would jump so quickly from the committee staff to an industry that was being affected by the committee’s legislation. When he called me to tell me that he was in conversations with them, I told him that I was disappointed.” The congressman instructed his current staffers not to talk with former staffers who had gone to work for banks. But this congressman sees nothing wrong with himself going to work for a bank, and urging his colleagues to vote a particularly way on additional bank-regulation reforms.

Imagine that two years after the congressman joined the bank’s board, the New York state attorney general put the congressman’s bank atop her list of banks that loaned the most money to the landlords on the state’s Worst Landlords Watchlist.

Imagine that the bank’s former director — a former senator from New York — warned that the bank was getting too heavily involved in cryptocurrency and taking its “eyes off of that small entrepreneur.”

Imagine that the congressman’s bank came under the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission, over concerns that the bank didn’t take sufficient steps to detect potential money laundering by clients, such as scrutinizing people opening accounts and monitoring transactions for signs of criminality.

Imagine that a former executive claimed that employees at the congressman’s bank kept their jobs despite being accused of a $1 million wire-fraud scheme.

Imagine that the New York State Department of Financial Services suddenly took possession of the congressman’s bank, making it the third-largest bank to fall into financial failure in U.S. history.

Then, imagine that in an interview with the Financial Times, the congressman explained why he joined the failed bank’s board of directors: “I need to make some money.” The congressman received nearly $2 million in cash for serving on the bank’s board over the past eight years, for what is characterized as “a (very) part time gig.”

But you don’t have to imagine anything in that scenario, because all of that really occurred with Barney Frank, the former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts and co-architect of the Dodd-Frank Act, who went on to serve on the board of the now-shuttered Signature Bank.

If Barney Frank were a Republican, he would be the face of the current banking crisis. He would already be on the covers of magazines and the front pages of major newspapers, on television all the time, and the subject of condemning profile pieces. If Frank were on the right, he would be the villain of this story already, and ipso facto evidence of the greed, incompetence, malevolence, and recklessness of the GOP…”

Now imagine this same former congressman had used the power of his office to “fix” 33 tickets for his live-in boyfriend, a former male prostitute who had run a gay brothel out of the congressman’s apartment, and for who he knowingly wrote a misleading letter to a Virginia probation officer.

Any chance a Republican would have merely been reprimanded?  Truth be told, were Barney Frank a Republican, he’d likely be in prison.

Since we’re on the subject of those deserving of prison, courtesy of AEI, Max Eden reveals…

The Trans-Parent Core of Gender Identity in Schools

 

“If you thought it would just be about biological boys in girls’ bathrooms, you were naïve. If you think it’s primarily about biological boys playing girls’ sports, you’re still not getting it. The core of the debate over gender identity in schools is this: Should school staff have the power to rename and re-sex children without parental notification or consent?

With virtually no public discussion or debate, the default answer to this question is rapidly becoming, “yes.” Due partly to the effects of an Obama-era federal “Dear Colleague” letter, partly due to the efforts of the LGBTQIA+ lobby, and partly due to the pervasive influence of teachers’ unions, so-called “gender support plans” have become de rigueur in American public schools. These plans require staff and students to conform to a child’s requests for “social transition”—typically entailing a new name, new pronouns, bathroom access, and locker room access. These plans then leave it up to the student to determine whether his or her parents are clued in. Teachers can thus be required to call Harry “Sally” in school and punish students who don’t refer to Harry as “her,” even as they call Harry “Harry” when talking to parents about his grades.

A recent report by Parents Defending Education, a parental rights watchdog nonprofit, found that nearly 6,000 schools have these policies on the books. But it must be stressed that this study was non-exhaustive, and thus almost certainly dramatically understates the true extent of the policies’ proliferation. Entire states, such as California, have adopted secret social transition requirements, and countless school districts have adopted these policies sub rosa. What’s more, reading between the lines of its proposed Title IX regulation, the Biden administration appears intent on finishing what the Obama administration started: Every school district taking federal funds will be pressured to implement secret social transition.

Why? The dubious rationale of the LGBTQIA+ lobby is: If we don’t “socially affirm” kids, they will kill themselves. And if we clue parents in, we’d be putting these children in potentially grave danger.

Critics point out that there is actually no reliable, externally valid evidence whatsoever to support the LGBTQIA+ lobby’s “affirm or kids will die” narrative. The critics also point out that if school officials have any genuine reason to believe that a child is in danger or at risk for abuse, they are mandated to report that to the authorities.

…But schools are not merely implementing an experimental medical intervention without parental consent (something that they don’t have the authority to do with even a proven, low-risk medical intervention such as Tylenol). They are also formally endorsing a metaphysical catechism: that there is a gendered soul, separate and apart from a physical body, and which properly compels the moral deference of others. Put more simply: that men can become women and you’re a bigot if you don’t nod along approvingly.

According to this catechism, most Americans are bigots. Secret “social transition,” therefore, also drives a profound moral wedge between non-dysphoric children and their parents, whom school officials indirectly invite children to view as “transphobes.”

What can be done? There is a simple, elegant, and sure-to-be overwhelmingly popular solution at hand: State legislatures could adopt “Given Name Acts.” As per the design of model legislation produced by The Heritage Foundation, Given Name Acts would simply require school staff to refer to children by the names or pronouns provided on their birth certificates—unless they receive an explicit written request from a parent asking for another name or pronoun to be used. If Harry’s parents want Harry to be called Sally at school, then the parents can affirmatively ask and the school can accommodate. But no matter what, the school and the parents will be on the same page. The child will not be encouraged by school policy to live a double life, going by Sally at school and Harry at home.

This is not a 50-50 political wedge issue. It’s not even a 90-10 split. It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat—if you’re a parent, you’re sure to be unsettled by the idea that the school could rename and re-sex your child without your notification or consent. No one aside from the LGBTQIA+ lobby and its core partisan allies within the Democratic Party activist base earnestly supports secret social transition. Unfortunately, ideology and politics being what it is, there is probably no hope of “Given Name Acts” passing in blue states. But there’s no reason they should not pass in every red state, as soon as legislators realize that the core of the debate about gender identity in schools isn’t about bathrooms or sports. Rather, it is: Who has the power to name a child?“

Such is merely a symptom of a much larger, far more serious problem, one which causes the Great VDH to wonder are we the Byzantines?

Two cases in point, both courtesy of Nick:

Can Sodom and Gomorrah been that much worse than the destination Dimocrats intend for America?

Moving on, here’s another sextet of special selections certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). The Daily Mail reports New York state education authorities are lowering minimum scores for proficiency in math and English, admitting they won’t push students beyond the “new normal” of post-pandemic performance.  Thus does New York abandon its motto excelsior, “ever upward”, in favor of inferior, “lower, farther down”.

(2). Biden’s degenerate son has filed a legal action against Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac in retaliation for Mac Isaac serving Hunter with lawsuit seeking $1.5M in damages earlier this year.

(3). Kim Jong Un’s lackeys claim 800,000 students and workers enlisted in the North Korean armed forces on Friday, one day after Trump’s buddy the Rocket Man launched a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan during joint U.S./South Korean military exercises.  Officials attributed this amazing display of support for the NoKo dictator to “the unshakable will of the younger generation to mercilessly wipe out the war maniacs making last-ditch efforts to eliminate our precious socialist country, and achieve the great cause of national reunification without fail and a clear manifestation of their ardent patriotism.”  Yeah,…whatever.

(4). Mexico’s president claims the reason fentanyl is such a problem in this country is American parents don’t hug their children enough.  We respectfully suggest given the frequency with which his dad hugs young children…

…were El Presidente Señor AMLO right, Hunter…

…should have turned out quite differently.

(5). What kind of people, other than utterly amoral deviants…

…could mutilate a 13-year-old girl, let alone advocate for such an abominable practice?!?

(6). And in a tweet which truly speaks for itself, Aaron Sibarium informs us…

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these bits of St. Paddy’s Day humor from the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg…

…along with a few bon mots from Ed Hickey…

…as well as several more from both Balls Cotton…

…and Rick Page:

Magoo

Video of the Day

Listen as this retired Green Beret LT COL describes what may well prove to be the Biden clown car’s most fickle moment.

Tales of The Darkside

Ami Horowitz recorded these displays of utter ignorance some five years ago; Any chance even one of these dimwits has wised up in the interim? To quote the Duke, “Not hardly”.

On the Lighter Side

Matt Walsh highlights, particularly when it comes to radical transgenderism, how the more things change, the more they stay the same.




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