It’s Monday, July 29th, 2013…and though it’s a somewhat abbreviated edition, here’s The Gouge!

As our first item from the WSJ details, like the MSM’s unconscionable, continuing refusal to report them, the misrepresentations, misstatements and out-and-out lies uttered by this Administration quite literally know no bounds:

Keystone Contradictions

The President sneers at 2,000 jobs for ‘a year or two.’

As President Obama continues his income inequality tour, the contradictions multiply. In the latest example, the President disparaged the number of jobs that would be created by the Keystone XL pipeline even as laments the lack of opportunities for the middle class.

“Republicans have said that [Keystone] would be a big jobs generator. There is no evidence that that’s true,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with the New York Times. “The most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline, which might take a year or two, and then after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs in an economy of 150 million working people.”

TransCanada, the company that wants to invest $5.3 billion to build the pipeline, claims there will be 13,000 jobs in construction alone. That doesn’t include the U.S. companies that would supply steel pipe, valves and motors for the project, plus the jobs providing services to those construction crews.

But even if TransCanada were lying, think about a President sneering at 2,000 jobs for “a year or two” when the U.S. jobless rate is 7.6%. This is the same President who justified his $830 billion stimulus, and even now wants more government spending on public works, in the name of creating jobs, some of which are also for only “a year or two.” The jobs Mr. Obama seems to despise are those created by someone other than government.

After all, Obama’s got his…

…piece; and that means…

So, as the French from Monty Python and the Holy Grail might say with their outrageous accents, “Bon appetit, you bourgeois pipeline peoples!”

Next up, writing at NRO, Andrew McCarthy relates the ruthless reality behind…

The Obama Administration’s Race-Baiting Campaign

Democrats want 2014 to be an us-versus-them election.

Can anyone imagine Laura Bush urging WHITES to ‘increase intensity’…or anything else?!?

Sebelius is not agitating because she actually believes there is some faint connection between Jim Crow and opposition to socialized medicine. Sensing that no one was looking as the country kicked back for an extended Independence Day weekend, the president’s Myrmidons conceded that Obamacare is collapsing of its own fiscally reckless weight. Alinskyites are about power. Obama realizes he won’t have much left if Democrats are yoked to a smoldering train wreck in advance of the 2014 midterms. So he is struggling to keep it a looming train wreck. A third-string Treasury bureaucrat was thus dispatched to announce, in passing, that Obama has “waived” the employer mandate until 2015.

Quite apart from the lawless imperiousness of this maneuver, it is not going to work. Not being well acquainted with the private sector, the president may not realize that, for corporate executives, planning ahead means more than scheduling the next tee time. As National Review’s editors have observed, Obamacare has already “complicated business decisions touching on everything from long-term investments to hiring to the number of hours worked by part-time employees.” It is, right now, a ball and chain around the ankle of a high-unemployment, no-growth economy.

Even if Obama gets his way — such that only the employer mandate is delayed, with Republicans unable to shame Senate Democrats into putting off the equally noxious individual mandate — the calendar is not in his favor. The administration cannot allow 2014 to be an election about policy. It has to be an us-versus-them election, with the “us” enjoying the “animated by rage” advantage. What we saw from Holder and Sebelius this week is the ugly start of a wickedly divisive enterprise.

The rule of law demands that criminal statutes be applied faithfully and that law-enforcement officials respect due process by conducting their investigations in silence, speaking publicly only when they are prepared to file charges they can prove in court. (See “Lacrosse Scandal, Duke”) Yet Holder and his Department of Social Justice have publicly and unethically agitated against George Zimmerman for over a year: partnering with Sharpton, saber-rattling about a federal civil-rights prosecution, and browbeating Florida officials into charging Zimmerman with murder despite evidence woefully insufficient to meet the statute’s terms.

Now, Holder is ensnared in this web of his own making. The state prosecution predictably failed, and it turns out there has never been a plausible civil-rights prosecution. Holder can commission all the bizarre anti-Zimmerman “tip lines” he likes; it won’t fill the cavernous holes in his case.

Obviously, he knows this. But he has also dramatically raised the expectations of Obama’s hard-left base — and note that the anti-Zimmerman protests are being driven at least as much by Occupy types and outfits such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation as by anguished supporters of the Martin family. After all the attorney general’s bold talk, they want to know where the civil-rights indictment is. Holder’s stall is that he is “investigating,” but Trayvon Martin was killed nearly a year and a half ago. How long does it take to investigate a comparatively straightforward altercation about which Florida has already completed a full-blown trial and the FBI has already conducted exhaustive interviews?

So in his NAACP stem-winder, Holder refocused the community organizer’s lens from civil-rights laws to “stand your ground” (SYG) laws. You are to believe that, while he’d love to charge that civil-rights case, he is being frustrated — justice is being frustrated — by these self-defense provisions that “sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods.” According to Holder, justice for Trayvon mandates that SYG be repealed. Effectively, the attorney general would surrender the streets to criminal aggressors by imposing a “duty to retreat” on law-abiding citizens. (As another radical Leftist, Father John from The Enforcer noted, “Sacrifices have to be made, mister!”)

SYG has become the proxy for the case the Left can’t win. (In actuality, another oblique attack on the 2nd Amendment.) The game is given away by Holder’s race-mongering echo chamber. Pressed by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, radio commentator Tavis Smiley admitted that Zimmerman’s trial had been consistent with Florida law. But, he groused, “it’s the law I have a problem with.” Taking Holder’s bloviating to its illogical end, Smiley explained that Florida law gave Zimmerman a “right to stand his ground” but insidiously deprived Martin of this same right because our nation generally views black men “as a menace to society.”

Please. Martin did not just “stand his ground” when Zimmerman followed him; he initiated the fateful physical confrontation by attacking Zimmerman and brutally beating him. But the point is that Zimmerman’s right to stand his ground was utterly irrelevant to the case. Its newfangled pertinence is a fabrication of the Left. The Monday-morning quarterbacks now claim that SYG has seeped into all Florida law; thus, it was dispositive in the deliberations that led to Zimmerman’s acquittal.

In truth, Zimmerman did not claim the immunity of SYG because SYG matters only when there is an opportunity to retreat. If you are lying on the ground being pulverized, the fact that you’d have a right to stand your ground in the unlikely event you could get to your feet is beside the point.

The legacy media, which is joining the racialized campaign against SYG just as it joined the racialized campaign to charge Zimmerman, is quick to point out that a juror, in a CNN interview, mentioned SYG as a factor in the jury’s consideration. What they don’t tell you, though, is that it was the blunderbuss prosecutors, not Zimmerman’s lawyers, who injected SYG into the trial testimony.

Zimmerman did not ask for the pretrial hearing to which a person claiming SYG immunity is entitled. It was the prosecutors, in their desperation to come up with some modicum of evidence that Zimmerman intended to commit murder, who adduced testimony that he had taken a criminal-justice course that covered SYG laws. The suggestion, if you can follow this, was that maybe the shooting was sort of premeditated. (If you took addition in the first grade, you’d better not bounce a check in Florida — who knows what they’ll charge you with?)

Nevertheless, Zimmerman’s lawyers posited a classic self-defense strategy, under the standards that existed long before SYG was enacted in Florida. SYG had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin’s death.

Nothing more, that is, than opposition to Obamacare has to do with segregation. But logic won’t stop the bloody shirt of racial politics from being waved in dutiful pursuit of the Left’s dream world. It’s a world where you’d better hope everyone has “free” health care. With your right to self-defense stripped away, it won’t do you much good that the state’s police are nowhere in sight when you find yourself besieged . . . and with no better chance to retreat than George Zimmerman had.

In a related item highlighting Der Obafuhrer’s rank hypocrisy, courtesy of NRO, Jonah Goldberg describes the attributes which make the most divisive President an unfortunate America’s…

Cynic-in-Chief

President Obama ran against cynicism — and defined his presidency by it.

‘My rival in this race,” President Obama announced early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” Sadly, it’s now evident cynicism won. In a much-hyped speech at Knox College on Wednesday, Obama sought to pivot back to the economy — as the journalistic cliché goes — and shape the issue environment for the 2014 congressional elections.

Because of an “endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals,” the president said, “Washington’s taken its eye off the ball.” The ball here is the economy, in case you didn’t know.

It’s an odd claim. Elected twice, Obama is in the fifth year of his presidency. During his first two years in office, his party controlled both houses of Congress and rammed through its agenda. Largely as a result, Democrats lost the House in 2010, but they have retained the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has been playing the Igor to Obama’s Dr. Frankenstein ever since (though reporters have yet to catch Reid actually saying “Yetthhhh master” on tape). At Obama’s bidding, the Senate failed to pass a budget for four years and refused to take up any meaningful legislation passed by the House.

That’s not the narrative you usually hear, because for most of Obama’s presidency, the Washington press corps was enthralled with him. It wasn’t until the dawn of his second term that most reporters stopped asking questions like “Can you create a boulder too heavy for you to lift?”

It’s also odd that Obama has pivoted back to the economy when, depending on whose estimates you use, he’s made similar “pivots” on average once every two to four months since he’s been elected. As one wag told The Weekly Standard, “You do that on the basketball court, you get called for traveling.” But the more apt image is of a basketball player with one shoe nailed to the floor, constantly pivoting in a circle.

But it’s not just odd, it’s deeply cynical. For starters, it was the reelected president — not “Washington” — who took his eyes off the economy to exploit a tragedy for new gun controls that would not have prevented the tragedy itself. His unilateral crackdown on carbon emissions isn’t exactly a full-throated effort to create jobs either. When Congress took its eye off the ball by taking up immigration reform, the White House cheered.

Even now, the Cynic-in-Chief admits that his “highest priority” is neither economic growth nor job creation but reducing income inequality. In fairness, he says he wants to reduce inequality through something called “middle-out” economic growth by taxing the wealthy (again). But my hunch is that the highest priority for those without work is . . . work. While the president’s highest priority is to exploit resentments.

But most cynical of all is Obama’s contempt for the “phony scandals” that have plagued him. Which ones are phony, exactly? The Justice Department’s monitoring of journalists was sufficiently outrageous that Obama ordered the attorney general to review DOJ policies. Why do that if the concerns were phony? When a few rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati were alleged to have deliberately targeted conservative groups, Obama said it would be “outrageous” if those allegations were proven true. But when that cover story is proved a deliberate lie from an IRS official in Washington, and it’s revealed thanks to congressional oversight that the policy actually went all the way to the office of an Obama political appointee, the scandal suddenly becomes “phony.” Odd how that works.

On the NSA wiretapping revelations, I agree with Obama that it is not necessarily a scandal but a significant policy dispute. Then again, many of the people who do think widespread secret electronic surveillance is scandalous happen to be members of Obama’s base. He can have that argument with them.

Finally, there was last year’s September 11 attack on our Benghazi compound and the president’s response to it. The White House has long said this was a phony scandal. They also said that the deadly attack was sparked by a YouTube video, until that was proven to be a lie. That deliberate deceit sparked a national conversation about whether we needed to give savages a heckler’s veto on American free-speech rights.

But that’s the theme of this entire presidency. Others — Washington, the Republicans, the Constitution, the global economy, Bush, et al. — are always to blame. In 2014, alas, cynicism won’t be on the ballot. He’ll be in the White House.

Which brings to mind the perfect plan by which Liberals can have their cake…

…and eat it, too!

Then there’s our Money Quote, courtesy today of The Great Prevaricator himself:

“But until then, when we’re getting outspent four to one and people are just uncertain about what all this means for them, we’re going to continue to have some polls like that,” Obama said. “And me just making more speeches explaining it in and of itself won’t do it. The test of this is going to be is it working. And if it works, it will be pretty darn popular.”

And when it doesn’t, so what if it’ll destroy what’s left of a struggling U.S. economy; from Der Obafuhrer’s perspective…

…it’s all part of the plan!

Speaking of things which are obviously part of The Obamao’s plan, as this forward from Bill Meisen serves to confirm, the Military Brass have been willing participants in The Apologizer-in-Chief’s abasement of America since he took office:

Unisex Uniforms Debut As Army Opens Units To Women

A new combat uniform with special consideration to the female body is now available at Fort Gordon, almost a month after the Army announced plans to open all units and military jobs to women by 2016. The March debut of the Combat Uniform-Alternate is the first in a series of moves the Army hopes to make in the next three years to help female soldiers feel like more professional members, officials said.

With narrower shoulders, a slightly tapered waist and a more spacious seat, the unisex clothing line has been in the works since 2009 and is being issued to all installations – except Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga. – for men and women with a smaller or more slender body.

Ah, yes; immediately after Der Obafuhrer took office…but four years before the Army’s craven capitulation to open combat slots to women.  And the Army’s idiotic expenditure of funds for such a purpose in the face of sequestration should signal to Congress where the remaining fat lies in the Pentagon budget.

Bill Meisen posed the question “What’s next?”; to which we’d answer, “We lose!”…as in the next war…with China!

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Entertainment Section, and word Anthony Wiener’s been offered the starring role in a remake of The Enforcer based on this screen test:

Magoo