It’s Wednesday, February 13th, 2013….and no, we didn’t watch the Misstatement of the Union.  If we want to wade knee-deep in bullsh*t we’ll visit a cattle farm….or check out what’s on MSDNC.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, first she lies repeatedly about a video nobody saw causing the deaths of 4 Americans; and now this:

Ambassador Susan Rice Offers UN Response to North Korea’s Nuke Test: “We’ll Do The Usual Drill”

An over-stuffed dwarf with delusions of grandeur (imagine The Obamao, only shorter and stouter!) has just exploded a markedly improved nuclear device….and Rice’s initial thoughts are, “We’ll do the usual drill.”

Well….at least for once she’s being honest!

But as Max Boot, writing at Commentary Magazine, correctly notes, such pusillanimous pussyfooting is precisely what’s emboldening our enemies:

U.S. Weakness Provokes N. Korea and Iran

So much for the exaggerated hopes of those that believed Kim Jong-un would turn out to be a different kind of dictator. Following a long-range rocket test in December, North Korea has now apparently tested a nuclear weapon bigger than any it has tested before. This, despite warnings not only from South Korea, Japan, and the United States, but also from China, not to test. Far from being the reformer as many naively imagined, Kim is showing himself a chip off the old dynastic bloc, once again using North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction to posture before the world and no doubt to shake concessions out of the U.S., South Korea, and other states.

What makes this test truly disturbing is the close cooperation that is known to exist between Iran and North Korea in the development of ever-more destructive weaponry. The two countries have worked closely together on missiles and may well be working together on nuclear weapons. If so, the North Korean test is an indication of growing danger not only in Northeast Asia but also in the Middle East.

And what is the American response to this latest provocation? To his credit, President Obama has not repeated the pattern of his predecessors in trying to shower North Korea with aid to get it to desist from its dangerous behavior—a pattern that only subsidized North Korean malfeasance. Rather than trying to relaunch stalled six-party talks, he has actually pushed for the toughest sanctions yet on North Korea although their ability to actually coerce Pyongyang is limited as long as China refuses to cut off economic aid.

But these tough responses are undermined to a large extent by the symbolism of Obama proposing steep cuts in the American nuclear arsenal—from 1,700 to 1,000 warheads—in the State of the Union address on the very day when North Korea is testing a nuke and Iran is drawing closer to acquiring its own nukes. It is hard to know why the president imagines unilateral American cuts will encourage more responsible behavior from the likes of Iran and North Korea. The more likely consequence is to call into question America’s deterrent capacity, an especially pressing issue if, as Bret Stephens argues in this Wall Street Journal column (as featured in yesterday’s edition), China’s nuclear arsenal is actually larger than commonly supposed.

With the danger growing from both Iran and North Korea it is all the more incumbent on the US to reassure regional allies—from Saudi Arabia to South Korea–that they will be sheltered securely underneath the American nuclear umbrella. If we cut our own nuclear forces drastically, the credibility of our guarantees diminishes and the likelihood goes up that our allies will seek nuclear weapons of their own, potentially setting off two nuclear arms races.

Of course it is not just in the nuclear realm that the US is undertaking defense cuts. Our overall military budget is to undergo drastic cuts within weeks assuming that the Congress and White House do not reach an agreement to turn off the sequester. Already the military services are cutting back on readiness and training. The Navy, for one, has announced that the Persian Gulf area will for the time being have only one aircraft carrier battle group on station, rather than two.

It is hard to think of a more threatening prospect than unilateral American military reductions at a time when our enemies our growing stronger. Weakness, it is often said, is provocative. By that measure we are provoking two of the most dangerous rogue states in the world.

While at the same time further reducing the combat capabilities of a U.S. Military whose forces are already dangerously depleted.

In a related item, courtesy of Jim Gleaves and The American Spectator, Hal Colebatch suggests tonight will mark….

His Queeg Moment

In Herman Wouk’s classic World War II novel, The Caine Mutiny, there is a moment when a group of the ship’s officers are getting away from the increasingly eccentric Captain Queeq by relaxing ashore. Suddenly the malcontent Lieutenant Keefer asks the others: “Does it occur to you that Captain Queeg may be insane?

In fact Queeg is not insane, at least not at that time. He is simply grappling, more and more disastrously, with a job too big for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he becomes paralyzed and nearly sinks the ship by failing to give the obvious orders. At the subsequent court-martial he appears quite normal until he breaks down under the pressure of cross-examination. Before this, the officers have searched the regulations for guidance, but the regulations refer only to a captain who is clearly and unmistakably insane, not one who is merely guilty of eccentricity and bad judgment. At a lower level of responsibility, Queeg might have performed adequately, but with Keefer’s question, the remaining respect for Queeg’s office has gone.

Obama’s second inauguration speech may be his Queeg moment — an undeniable demonstration that, in an emergency, he is incapable of grappling with reality. For all his unceasing invocation of the word “change,” the outstanding thing about Obama has been his apparent inability to react, even to an imminent crisis. Like Queeg, he stands frozen on the bridge as the waves grow higher, or obsesses over issues like homosexuals and women in the military as the typhoon rises.

Faced with the worst looming fiscal cliff-fall in world history Obama, like Queeg in the typhoon, has done nothing at all, but has, increasingly, resorted to meaningless words. His pseudo-Keynesian fiscal notions and a mantra-like repetition of old and failed ideas, suggest a serious lack on mental versatility.

Economics is not an exact science, but some of its rules are now well-known, and one is that a government cannot spend its way out of a recession.

Yet Obama does not project any sense of urgency, merely a smug, radiating sense of his own greatness. The one fiscal measure to which he seems committed — taxing the rich — is infantile stuff, like Queeg’s obsession with who ate the wardroom strawberries. Any first-year politics or economics student knows that there are not enough rich, even in as wealthy a country as the United States, to have raising their taxes make any appreciable difference. President Reagan’s application of the Laffer Curve proved emphatically, and only a short while ago, that the way to both stimulate the economy and to increase government revenues is to lower taxes. And it is not hard to pick some areas as least where towering taxes would make no appreciable difference to public infrastructure.

Like Queeg, Obama shows an inability to change course when such a change is desperately needed. Giving 20 F-16 fighters and hundred of tanks to Egypt was never, in my opinion, a clever idea. Even when Egypt was an unequivocal friend its security required things like armored cars to put down street violence, not these hi-tech weapons whose only conceivable use would be against Israel. Indeed, Obama seems to show no awareness that Egypt and other major Islamic countries have changed from being friends to something like enemies in a few months. For a President of the United States there is a difference between making a bad policy choice and clinging to that policy when it is plainly completely wrong, like the Caine steaming in a circle and cutting its own tow-line. Mistakes that cannot be ignored are always someone else’s fault (refer George Bush).

The dancing is still there, the golf, the celebs, the multi-million dollar holidays, but behind them it is possible to detect a desperate emptiness, a interconnected mosaic of failure. The one much-boasted triumph, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was the work of other men. One of those most responsible, Dr. Shakil Afridi, rots in the hellhole of a Pakistani jail, abandoned. Obama’s oath to bring the Benghazi murderers to justice seems to have been forgotten as soon as it was made, something — I am not sure if there is a word for it — actually below the level of a campaign promise. Allies have been lost or slighted in almost every part of the world, the Afghan war has brought the U..S and NATO humiliation and Russia and China lead in Space. The defenses of the U.S.’s major allies, such as Britain, are in an even more dire situation.

This does not even consider the exploding levels of domestic poverty. Restoring flexibility to the wage system, so as to give American industry a reasonable degree of competitiveness, seems out of the question.

The Western position in Mali seems to have suddenly collapsed without warning, or without preventative action being taken, and meanwhile, we have had the North Korean threat. I somehow doubt we would have had that if Reagan had been at the helm. What, exactly have things come to when a cockroach of a country, apparently run by real, certifiable lunatics, can threaten the United States with nuclear weapons? The typhoon waves are starting to break over the bridge.

And the barometer’s falling faster than Enron stock.

Next up, also courtesy of Commentary Magazine, Peter Wehner weighs in with some personal observations concerning….

The Benghazi Scandal and Media Bias 

I served in the Bush White House during the intense press coverage about who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent, to Robert Novak. It was a story that obsessed the media and led to a three-year criminal investigation by a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald.

In the end, it turned out Richard Armitage was the person responsible for leaking Ms. Plame’s name, no laws were violated related to the leak, and the favorite target of the press, Karl Rove, was innocent of any wrong-doing. Though one individual in the administration was convicted of lying under oath, no underlying crime was committed. Ms. Plame and her husband Joseph Wilson, who we know made misleading statements during the whole episode, became celebrities of a sort. It was, in retrospect, much ado about very little, even if the press made life hell for innocent individuals.

Call it collateral damage from a scandal-crazed media.

I thought about all this in light of the testimony last Thursday of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey. As Bill Kristol and I point out in our op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (as featured in yesterday’s Gouge), we learned from their testimony that President Obama, upon being told about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, never once followed up with Panetta, Dempsey, or anyone else to see how things were developing. We learned that Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew the assault on the compound were terrorist attacks on the night of the assault, even as the administration – in the persons of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama – continued to peddle a false version of events for weeks afterward. And despite having been told about Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ repeated warnings that the embassy could not sustain an attack and he was concerned of the chaos and rise of Islamist elements in Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to a possible attack. And during the actual attack, which we knew about in real time, not a single major military asset was deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.

As a result, the first American ambassador in more than 30 years was murdered, and so were three other Americans.

Here’s a thought experiment. Assume during the Bush or Reagan years three things happened: (1) four Americans were killed in a terrorist-led attack on an American compound; (2) the president and his top aides showed stunning indifference and passivity before and during the lethal attacks; and (3) the nation was misled for weeks after the attacks, even though the highest ranking members of the administration knew the true story.

Do you think the elite media would have covered this story with intensity comparable to, or greater than, the Plame story? Absolutely. Presidents Bush or Reagan would have been bombarded with questions. There would have been a feeding frenzy. They would not have been subject to obsequious “60 Minutes” interviews.  The press narrative would have made this scandal a central part, not a footnote, of both presidencies.

Yet with a few honorable exceptions, journalists have devoted only a fraction of the attention to the Benghazi story as it did to the Plame story. The press, in fact, has shown a remarkable incuriosity to the period before, during, and after the terrorist attack that cost the lives of Ambassador Stevens, security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean Smith. There has been none of the burning passion and obsession with the lethal Benghazi attack and the administration’s misleading accounts of it that we witnessed during the Plame story.

I’ll leave it to discerning readers to figure out why.

This classic video clip featuring Pat Caddell should provide at least a hint:

In a related item forwarded by Jim Gleaves, CNSNews.com reports:

Kerry Took More Security on Trip to Arlington, Va., Than State Dept. Posted in Benghazi

Hey, Arlington can be a very scary place….particularly when you have to walk all the way from your armored limo into a secure government office building.

Moving on to the “THAT Was Then, THIS Is Now” segment, submitted for your perusal, yet another example of unapologetic Liberal hypocrisy:

Lew Had Close to $100K in Assets Secreted in the Cayman Islands

Hey, I ran the TurboTax audit check twice, and it never raised any red flags!

Jack M. Lew, President Obama’s former chief of staff and budget director, and now his nominee to head the US Treasury, will face the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday at the formal vetting stage prior to confirmation. Until several days ago, the nomination seemed to be a slam dunk. Not anymore.

One of President Obama’s pet peeves has long been tax advantages for the wealthy. In 2007, when Obama ran for president the first time, one of his favorite targets for vitriol was “overseas tax havens,” in places like the Cayman Islands. And guess who had close to $100,000 in assets socked away right there in the Cayman Islands? Lew.

What makes us think Jack may be about to see the underside of his Boss’ infamous bus?

Turning now to our continuing coverage of the violent and deranged using firearms for exclusively criminal activities:

2 charged in murder of Chicago teen who performed at inauguration

Two gang members were charged with murder Monday in the death of a 15-year-old honor student who was shot near the Chicago home of President Barack Obama just days after she performed during his inauguration festivities in Washington, authorities said. The two young men were described by police as “persons of interest” when they were taken into custody early Sunday, a day after first lady Michelle Obama and other dignitaries attended the funeral of Hadiya Pendleton.

Michael Ward, 18, and Kenneth Williams, 20, are now charged with one count of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and aggravated battery with a firearm, Chicago police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton said. She said police believe both men are gang members.

Pendleton, a popular high school majorette, was with a group of friends who took cover during a rainstorm under a canopy in a park about a mile from the Obama home on the city’s South Side. Police said a man hopped a fence, ran toward them and opened fire with a handgun. Pendleton was struck in the back and died later that day. Two others were injured. Police have said none of the people in Pendleton’s group were affiliated with gangs but that the gunman apparently mistook one for a member of a rival gang that had encroached on his gang’s turf. The men charged Monday live nearby, Stratton said.

Pendleton’s death was one of more than 40 homicides in Chicago in January, a total that made it the deadliest January in the city in more than a decade….Homicides in Chicago topped 500 last year for the first time since 2008, stoking residents’ concerns about gun violence and leading the police department to put more officers on the street and to focus more on combatting gangs.

….[Chicago Mayor Rahm] Emanuel joined Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez at an afternoon news conference to announce they would push for tougher gun laws that would increase the minimum sentences and require offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.

….“The gun laws are not working,” said Alvarez. “They’re not deterring gangbangers. We’re not seeing gang member going to prison for long enough sentences.”

Then again, perhaps you’re just not enforcing the ones already on the books.  As it turns out, one of the alleged killers was arrested THREE TIMES of late while out on probation for a WEAPONS CHARGE! But one more law oughta do it!  And only a Liberal could decry the effectiveness of capital punishment one minute and advocate the deterrence-value of longer prison sentences the next.

Which brings us to our Money Quote, in which reader Dave Ford offers Marty O’Malley a brief primer in the Constitution via a letter he wrote Maryland’s governor following a personal encounter:

“I recently had the opportunity to speak with you and you argued that the license requirement was akin to our driver’s license. That argument is specious at best and ignores the fact the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a Right guaranteed by the United States Constitution, not a privilege to be granted by the State. You argued that the Founders did not contemplate the type of arms available today and that they were only talking about muskets and arms available during that time. I believe if you would study the historic record you will find in the Federalist Papers as well as the record of the Constitutional Convention indicated that the founders wanted the populous to own the same or similar weaponry that the standing army owns. By your logic, the First Amendment must only apply to speech uttered out loud or printed on an antiquated printing press similar to those in use in the late 1700’s; and it follows there should no Freedom of Speech protections for the internet, radio, television or movies, as none of these technologies were available or could have been envisioned by the Founders. Is this what you really believe? Or is it what you want the rest of us to believe….and you don’t believe in the Constitution at all?!?“

We’ll go with (C): doesn’t believe in the Constitution at all!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these bits of BO from Jeff Foutch….

….as well as this nominee for Woman of the Year from Shannon Wood:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Sweet Home Alabama Section, and news the….

Disabled Carnival cruise ship is en route across Gulf to Alabama

Alabama?!?  Show of hands for those who’d rather still be marooned in the Gulf?!?

Magoo