It’s Wednesday, May 1st, 2013…but before we begin, our apologies; between battling a recurrence of colitis and fighting a particularly nasty head cold coupled and associated sinus infection, we’ve been, quite literally, too pooped to publish.  So you’ll forgive us if tonight’s offering is somewhat abridged.

And now, our prolonged period of radio silence notwithstanding, we’re back…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, Carol Liebau highlights how Progressives politicians continue…

Putting Political Correctness Above American Safety

Jihadists have enjoyed some decent success in America during the Obama years — as this list of attacks from Investors Business Daily shows –including:

6/1/09: After visiting Yemen for 16 months, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad murders a military recruiter;

11/5/09: Nidal Malik Hasan, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” kills 13 and wounds 29 on a Ft. Hood army base;

3/4/10: A Muslim convert, John Patrick Bedell, shoots and wounds two Pentagon policemen; 

4/15/13: Boston bombings.

Bill Gertz, a reporter long considered to have some of the best sources in the military/intelligence community, sets out what might well explain these failures: An FBI policy forbidding the linking of Islam and jihad created and enforced by Obama administration political appointees:

U.S. officials familiar with the FBI’s counterterrorism training program and its controversial public outreach program to Muslim groups said FBI policy toward Islam—that it should not be used to describe those who seek to wage jihad or holy war against the United States and others they regard as infidels—has prevented both effective counterterrorism investigations and training.

The officials said the problem is that most field agents understand the nature of the threat but have been hamstrung by policies imposed by senior FBI leaders who are acting under orders of political appointees in the Obama administration, including Islamic advisers to the White House. The policies have prevented the FBI from conducting aggressive counterterrorism investigations of Islamic radicals or those who are in the process of being radicalized.

If this is true, it is an outrage.  Political correctness shouldn’t get in the way of the #1 responsibility of the President (and the executive branch he heads): Keeping America safe.

Yet there are clues that raise legitimate suspicions.  Remember how the DoD refused to classify Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack as terorrism, referring to it instead as “workplace violence”?  Remember how Janet Napolitano tried to re-name (Islamofascist) terrorism as “man-caused disasters”?  Ever noticed how — as Charles Krauthammer points out — the President goes to comical links to avoid using any words that would even imply a connection between radical Islam and terrorism?

Indeed, in his own book, The Audacity of Hope, the President seemed to view FBI interviews in the wake of 9/11 as a unjustly oppressive to Muslims, writing:

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

This exquisite sensitivity to such feelings can be tolerated in a state senator (or even a US senator), but they are a big problem if a President decides that they must be honored at virtually all costs.  But is that what’s been happening?

There is no doubt that the President and the rest of his appointees are genuinely saddened by the deaths of all of those mowed down by jihadists on their watch.  The problem is that they are so enmeshed in a politically correct world-view that they are unwilling to identify hard realities…and then act accordingly — even in the interest of doing their duty to their fellow Americans.

You know a problem’s obvious as the veins on Teddy Kennedy’s nose when Bill O’Reilly’s forced to climb down from his customary overly-pious perch and call a spade a spade:

Pardon our French, but the only last words we’d have given that asinine Islamist would have been…

In a related item, writing at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy offers the harsh reality Liberals and Islamic apologists the world-over refuse to face:

Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away

But willful blindness remains the order of the day

‘Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan — namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims.

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with improvised explosive devices. IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude explosives and unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers. The bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But that’s not the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of everyday life. IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily camouflaged amid the traffic, the everyday debris, and the eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad to cross the finish line.

Willful blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario — namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked innocent civilians — became the least likely scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions. As our Kevin D. Williamson quipped, the “literal Caucasians” they got were not quite what they had in mind.

To listen to the commentary was to assume that the jihad’s nimble post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs had never happened. Prior to 2009, much agitprop was made over the thousands of American troops killed and maimed by IEDs in Iraq — they signified, the Left told us, that George Bush had brought al-Qaeda to previously jihad-free Baghdad. So did IEDs at the Marathon mean the same jihad had now come to Boston? Perish the thought. Surely the Marathon bombing was the work of either the right-wing extremists Janet Napolitano has been warning us about since 2009, or those notoriously violent Catholics and Evangelicals that today’s Army equates with Hamas and Hezbollah.

But no: It was in fact the jihad that stubbornly refuses to be wished away. It will have to be defeated. It was never a molehill we were exaggerating into Mohammed’s mountain. After 1,400 years of aggression, we can safely say it is not anytime soon going to evolve into the ballyhooed “internal struggle for personal betterment” — not for the tens of millions of Muslims for whom Islamic supremacism is, quite simply, Islam.

So will we be roused to meet the challenge? Doesn’t seem like it. On Friday morning, the damning and utterly predictable details began pouring in the second the jihadists were identified — “Outlook: Islam”; a YouTube playlist called “Terrorists” that included the ditty, “I will dedicate my life to jihad”; a wife who abruptly converted to Islam and began dressing in what a neighbor called “the Islamic style”; an apparent reverence for the notorious sharia jurist Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. Yet the media commentary, even if it grudgingly mentions these things, internalizes none of them. “How shocking it is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev want to mass-murder Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and the Chechens’ beef is with the Russians, not us.”

Good grief. It is the Uighurs all over again. You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from the Xinjiang region of China, detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement). At least some of them fought against American forces. Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because they weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China, right? After all, Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice people, so why should we assume they might have a problem with us?

We are in a war driven by ideology. “Violent extremism,” which is the label the government and the commentariat prefer to put on our enemies, is not an ideology — it is the brutality that radical ideologies yield. Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.

The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying it out loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and they don’t care, even a little, what you think.

You do not defeat an ideology by hoping it will change or disappear. You have to challenge it, to make it defend its baleful tenets in the light of day. You cannot protect yourself from its violent outbursts absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.

Asked about his “outlook,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered a pregnant response, “Islam,” that raises more questions than it answers. There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.

Soooo…

That’s easy; the innocent pay…

…while the willfully ignorant…

…go free to visit the price of their political correctness upon other innocent Americans.

Next up, courtesy of ConservativeIntel.com, Eric Johnson details how the…

Obama sequestration strategy backfires by illustrating government’s backward priorities

Last night, I was reading Joe Weisenthal’s contrarian piece on why President Obama should veto the deal the Senate passed last night to return to work the air traffic controllers who had been furloughed in connection with (I hesitate to say “due to”) sequestration. I found it too clever by half.

First of all, it’s an endorsement of bad behavior by career bureaucrats looking to maximize their budgets permanently, and of political appointees trying to support Obama’s 2014 election strategy.  The FAA actually has a larger budget under sequestration than Obama’s administration originally requested.

But that argument is not really responsive to Weisenthal’s. He asserts that sequestration cuts falling on the least among us — the poor — will continue to be ignored unless airline delays are allowed to continue. Let me point out why this just isn’t true, and why, in fact, the Obama administration’s handling of sequestration may be further undermining Americans’ faith in government.

The Obama administration’s strategy on sequestration isn’t convincing people they need more government — it’s actually just teaching them how screwed up and thoughtless government can be. It is showing them that government is an obtuse institution, lacking in common sense and incapable to recognizing obvious priorities. It takes your money and then produces irrational outcomes that no normal person would ever strive for.

Think, for a moment, about how the first reaction of the Department of Homeland Security was to release thousands of detainees who faced deportation in advance of budget cuts. Don’t get bogged down in the details of who was released (such as the man the New York Times profiled, who had been convicted of child abuse and assault in 2005). Rather, just think about what message this sends. Would you donate money to a non-profit whose first reaction to a downturn was to do something that specifically defeated its mission? Would you do business with a company that invested its money this way?

Weisenthal brings up Section 8 housing vouchers. Here’s a program — not a very good program, mind you, but a well-meaning program — that puts a roof over the heads of families that make an average $12,500 per year in reported income. The liberal Center for American Progress points out that Section 8 is taking a hit from sequestration, such that when families get up off their feet and start doing well enough to “graduate” from the program, many cities’ housing authorities have been “retiring” the vouchers instead of awarding them to the next person on the waiting list. They specifically mention Philadelphia’s as one housing authority that laid off 82 workers in order to avoid removing families from the program.

That sounds terrible. But of course, how does Philadelphia use the money it has? Let’s start by looking at the Housing Authority. In 2010, its then-director, Carl Greene, was making $350,000 a year — more than the mayor of Philly and governor of Pennsylvania combined. But that’s not all. After spending $900,000 to settle four separate sexual harassment lawsuits against Greene, the authority fired him. It then had to pay $625,000 to settle his subsequent wrongful termination lawsuit, after spending an additional $1 million in legal fees to defend it.

Here’s another story out of Philadelphia today about how Philadelphia uses the money it has:

IN A MOVE that the LGBT community called “historic,” City Council approved a bill yesterday that would require the city’s health plan to pay for transgender city workers to complete “gender-confirmation surgery.” The bill also would require newly constructed or renovated city-owned buildings to have gender-neutral bathrooms…The bill passed 14-3, with nay votes from Councilmen Bill Green, David Oh and Brian O’Neill. Mayor Nutter will sign off on the measure, said spokesman Mark McDonald.

The bill would establish transgender health benefits for city workers to cover psychotherapy, hormone treatments, laser-hair removal and gender-confirmation surgery, which costs about $50,000 per procedure.

Sequestration is actually showing us why government may in fact be the worst institution in our entire society to make decisions about what’s done with money. Amid a slight reduction in what Philadelphia gets from the feds to pay for low-income housing, the city leaves low-income families languishing on some waiting list, lays off a bunch of workers who are supposed to serve them, and then decides to pay for elective surgeries for any male city employee who wants female private parts, or vice versa.

I bet that really makes you want to restore all of that lost funding, doesn’t it?

That’s just one example — and it’s an egregious one, but there’s an example like this in every federal agency and every town and every state in America. That is why, I believe, Senate Democrats backed down so quickly on the FAA. For every person convinced by the air traffic control furloughs about the virtues of government, there are probably ten who have discovered just how badly misplaced its priorities are.

And since we’re on the subject of misplaced priorities, riddle us this, Batman!  What’s Chucky saying to Marco in the photograph below?

Answer:

Which provides the perfect lead-in for Kurt Schlichter to ask what inquiring minds want to know:

Can Marco Rubio Save Marco Rubio From Himself?

Marco Rubio, you need to run – but not in 2016. Run now. Today. Quickly.

Run away, Marco, run as fast as you can. Run away from the electoral Hiroshima that is this immigration reform bill. It’s a fraud and a scam, and we know it’s a fraud and a scam, and you telling us from every mic and every camera you can get in front of that it’s not a fraud and a scam is making us wonder just what the hell is going on with you.

Do you actually think it’s not a fraud and a scam? In that case, we worry that maybe you’re not as bright as we thought from your terrific work on other issues over the last few years.

That’s bad.

Or do you think it’s us that aren’t very bright and that your soothing assurances that Chuck Schumer and company have only the best of intentions and that we ought not to concern our simple selves with trifles like the actual text of the legislation are enough to get us to sign onto this political suicide pact.

That’s worse.

But Marco, I still have faith in you. (A faith we frankly don’t share!) I think your problem is naiveté – that you’re a nice guy who sees a very real problem, with very real human costs, and that you want to find a solution to it. However, human nature being what it is, you’ve become invested in the 844-page abomination that the rest of the Gang of Eight is determined to jam though before it can be disinfected with sunlight. So, you are stuck defending the indefensible.

Again, this comes from a friend, a guy who wants to be able to check the block for you in 2016. I love your conservative principles. I love your life story – hell, I married into a family that escaped Castro’s tyranny and came to America. People who are anti-immigrant don’t marry immigrants – or, as I describe my family and others like the immigrants I served beside in two wars, “Americans by choice.”

Except there’s a very real problem. Not all immigrants want to come here and build families and careers. Some want to come here and draw welfare and build bombs. The media and the rest of the Gang simply wave off these troublesome facts as if they are unworthy of consideration. But not all pressure cookers are used to make arroz con pollo, and when you ignore these very real concerns of the people who support you, your credibility nosedives.

We’ve only scraped the surface of this current immigration reform bill and what we’ve scraped off is pure muck. The promises to secure the border are a joke. The “long and hard” pathway to citizenship – which there shouldn’t be anyway – is bypassed with shortcuts. Promises that the zillions of people who weren’t invited here in the first place will pay their “back taxes” fall apart when you actually read the language. Assurances that they won’t be able to cash in on the welfare state and all its goodies are dubious at best. Even those who want desperately to support wise immigration reform, like Hugh Hewitt and Charles Krauthammer, have their doubts.

Marco, you are the key. The immigration reform cannot pass in any form without you – you are conservative cover, though your ability to provide it is shrinking by the day. You have the power to decide whether or not we make a mistake that could profoundly effect the future of this country. Use it.

First, stop this train wreck in its tracks. A reform bill need not pass tomorrow, or next week, or next month or even next year. It’s never too late not to pass a bad bill, and this one stinks.

Honor your promise to us that you will refuse to support any bill that is not fully debated through regular order. No “deals.” No up or down votes on some unread Obamacare-like monstrosity concocted by special interests in a senator’s office that’s rushed to the floor for the express purpose of being jammed through before anyone knows what’s in it. Use your pal Lindsay “We Need To Vote On It Before They Can Pick It Apart” Graham as an example – watch what he does, then do the exact opposite.

We want a bill that’s been posted online and painstakingly reviewed by senate staffers and, yes, by us out here in that oft-forgotten place called America. We want it debated, reviewed, amended, fixed and, when it’s the best it can be, and everyone knows everything about what is in it and what it will do, finally voted on.

That you are considering a step-by-step approach is terrific. Step One is securing the border. Do that and then we can talk.

Next, you need to take our concerns seriously. The way you go on radio and television shows with folks who are notably hostile to the bill is encouraging. We also appreciate that you avoid the kind of sanctimonious, WaPo-pleasing posturing so many “conservatives” adopt when they find themselves going against their supporters. Call it “Toomeying” – being unable to respectfully disagree with conservatives and to instead paint yourself as courageously resisting those short-sighted, knuckle-dragging buffoons who elected you.

You don’t do that, which is why you (unlike Toomey) have a political future even though we disagree here. But you do need to reassure us, and a head on a pike would help. Remember your minion who asserted that illegals are treated like slaves? You should have fired him and sent the message that you will not tolerate immigration skeptics being disrespected with that kind of nonsense. That would have shown unequivocally us that you stand with us.

Now, I know why you didn’t fire him. You’re a nice guy. That’s a problem. Nice guys are only popular in prison and in the Senate and for similar reasons.

Finally, if you really want to convince us to support immigration reform, you need to explain to us what’s in it for us. We hear a whole lot about people “living in the shadows,” but isn’t that how someone who is here illegally should live? They are here illegally – and if that doesn’t mean anything to the reformers now why should we believe it will suddenly start meaning something to them when this bill passes and it’s time for all that get-tough enforcement stuff to actually happen?

Why is it to our benefit for these illegals to be allowed to stay – much less be given the sacred gift of American citizenship? Sure, I got mine because I was born here, but I earned it wearing camo in a couple of wars – and no one’s prouder to watch fellow vets swear in than me. But for everyone else?

Marco, why should they get this amazing privilege as a reward for ignoring our laws – for disrespecting our sovereignty – in the first place? And don’t tell me again about living in shadows. I don’t care. That’s a consequence of their choices. It bothers me not a bit.

And another thing – why again do we want to add 11 million Democrat voters? Who is the immigrant who’s aching to join the Republican Party? Where is this guy? What’s his name? Explain to me how this isn’t going to generate eight figures worth of future electoral cheerleaders for an expanded welfare state. If you can’t, maybe we Republicans ought not to be for it.

Marco, you’re awesome and you have a great future as a conservative leader. I respect your passion even if I don’t like this policy. But to keep my trust – and that of millions of others – we need you to stop cheerleading and start leading.

Tell the Gang of 8 that it’s now the Gang of 1 – you – and that they can either walk your way or you can walk out. They have nothing without you – not a chance. Make them work for it. Make them present it through regular order. Allow it to be improved with amendments. Answer your fans’ concerns – and if you can’t do so, then pull out entirely.

You have the power to run this process, Marco. This is your audition for 2016. Run it, or run away.

Unfortunately, the only thing Rubio appears to running at this point is his mouth.

Speaking of those running their mouths, as reported in Politicker.com via The New Media Journal, The Ninny offers his latest pearls of wisdom:

Bloomberg: Interpretation of Constitution Will ‘Have to Change’

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Spoken like a man with 24/7 public and private security!

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, in yet another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter…

New Hampshire man loses life savings on carnival game

Yeah…

…whatever!

Magoo