It’s Wednesday, January 28th, 2015…but before we begin, we offer what we believe accurately depicts the policies of the entire Obama Administration…
…foreign and domestic!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, you tell us what’s wrong with this picture painted by Yahoo! News:
Gunfire erupted during a crowded party in a vacant house in Omaha early Saturday, leaving three people dead and five wounded, and most witnesses refusing to help investigators, according to police. As many as 50 people were in and around the small home when shots were fired “by multiple shooters” around 2 a.m., Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said. No arrests have been made, and police said they were confident the shootings were gang-related.
The vast majority of people at the scene refused to help police, the chief said during a news conference Saturday evening. He said he understood witnesses’ fear but pleaded for them to come forward. “Now that you are away from that scene and have opportunity to be away from any intimidation, I’m asking you for the sake of the community to contact law enforcement,” Schmaderer said.
Police said 19-year-old JaKela Foster and 24-year-old Latecia Fox were declared dead at the scene, while 26-year-old Cameron Harris died several hours later. Schmaderer said it’s unclear if the victims were intended targets or bystanders.
Foster’s mother, Kristina Young, waited for hours outside the small, tan house in the city’s northeast side while investigators gathered evidence. She said she wasn’t going to leave until the body of her daughter was taken away. Young said her boyfriend got a call from an aunt shortly before 2 a.m. telling him there was a shooting that may have involved Foster, who had a 1-year-old son. She said a friend later called to say Foster had been shot.
19-year-old unwed mother…out at 0200 with 50 people…her 1-year-old at home with an unwed grandmother; what could go wrong?!?
Ya know, somehow, someway…if we’re required to bankroll these people’s errors in judgement, it’s not an unreasonable expectation they’d adhere to some fundamental code of morals and ethics. And JaKela Foster’s example AIN’T IT!
As James Taranto notes at Best of the Web, modern Liberalism’s biggest flaw is their hopelessly misguided reliance on…
So what purpose does “empathy” serve for Kristof’s argument? Mostly, it seems to us, that of a status display. In a particularly unattractive passage, Kristof reminds his readers that he is a lot more successful than his high-school chum ever was: “My kids would see Kevin and me together and couldn’t believe he had run cross country with me, and that he wasn’t 20 years older.”
Dan Calabrese argues that it is not Green over whom Kristof wishes to assert his higher status: “Kristof needed to let us know all the failures in Kevin Green’s life because he wanted to tell us something about Nicholas Kristof, which is: Kevin Green made all these mistakes and lived all these failures, but Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all you horrible people. Nicholas Kristof is morally superior to you.”
It seems to us Calabrese doesn’t quite hit the target here, though he comes close. Kristof’s ideal reader is one who shares his sense of moral superiority. The message is more like: Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all those horrible people. You are morally superior to them.
This is the very attitude which enables Progressives, who like the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, to sleep better at night having convinced themselves of their superior feeling for others.
Since we’re on the subject of those whose feelings trump any semblance of reality, also from Yahoo! News…
New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow says he’s “fuming” after his son was allegedly stopped by a Yale University police officer at gunpoint Saturday night because he apparently fit the description of a possible burglary suspect.
“So, my son, a 3rd year chem major at Yale was just accosted — at GUN POINT — by a Yale policeman bc he ‘fit the description’ of a suspect,’” Blow tweeted on Saturday. “He was let go when they realized he was a college student and not a criminal.”
Blow added: “He’s shaken, but I’m fuming!”
In a statement, Yale police said they responded Saturday to reports from several students of a possible burglar who “had just entered their rooms under false pretenses, pretending to be looking for someone.” The suspect was described as “a tall, African-American, college-aged student wearing a black jacket and a red and white hat.” During a search, Yale police briefly detained a Yale student “who closely matched the description of the suspect.” The student, who was not named, was released.
The actual suspect was later located on an adjacent campus and arrested. He will be charged with felony burglaries. According to the Yale Daily News, there has been a series of recent robberies reported by Yale undergraduates. In one, the suspect allegedly threatened the victims with a handgun, New Haven police said.
Just so we understand the facts: Blow’s son is Black and fits the description (“tall, African-American, college-aged student wearing a black jacket and a red and white hat.”) of a suspected armed burglar prowling the hallowed halls of old Eli. During said search, young Master Blow, who “closely matched the description of the suspect”, was “briefly detained”, then released.
Uhhh…isn’t this the way the system’s supposed to work?!?
This is nothing more than a racist Black writer filling the role of B. Hussein in saying the Yale police acted stupidly; when in reality, the only person acting stupidly…or perhaps more accurately overreacting stupidly…is Charles Blow!
Speaking of acting stupidly, writing at the WSJ, Laure Mandeville opines on…
Too late, Ahmed; the current occupant beat you to it!
“…By denying that this is about Islam, “President Obama does us a disservice, because doing so deprives the Muslim community of its responsibility to fight this radical monster,” says Muslim democrat Naser Khader, a former member of the Danish Parliament, now at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “By doing that, the West fails to understand that the Muslims will be the most crucial soldiers to fight this Islamic terrorism.” Mr. Khader calls for a revolution in Islam that would reinterpret the sacred texts in a way that is “compatible with modernity.” (Good luck with that.)
The same self-deceiving approach seems to be affecting the debate about the limits of free speech. Anxious not to offend Muslims, many in America and in France distanced themselves from Charlie Hebdo after its post-attack publication of an issue showing Muhammad in tears, wearing an “I am Charlie” T-shirt and saying, “All is forgiven.” The drawing seems hardly disparaging, but it alarmed those who think silence is preferable to the risk of offending. A fellow French journalist confided to me: “We should establish some kind of self-censorship, because we don’t want that a cartoon published in France leads to the burning of churches in Niger.”
That kind of thinking could jeopardize freedom of speech itself. Will this hard-won freedom, so precious to the West, be sacrificed because a village imam in the Middle East or Africa incites people to violence during Friday prayer? Many in the West seem tempted to capitulate, in the name of “peace.” They are allowing themselves to believe that it is our fault if the churches burn. That is what the radicals are betting on…”
Capitulation in the name of peace didn’t work with the devil incarnate who conceived the Final Solution…
…and it’s sure as hell not going to work with those who exult in a willingness to do this:
In a related item, courtesy of PJMedia, Richard Fernandez observes how Liberals are living in a…
“One of the most interesting forms of rebuttal is to invoke the counterfactual. Apparent failure must always be contextualized against the background of the what-might-have-been. For example president Obama once claimed he saved 1.1 million jobs that would have been lost had he not bailed out Detroit. We are also told that Obamacare has saved everyone money, although premiums are rising under it, because premiums would have risen faster without the program. These are successes despite appearances.
Today president Obama justified his policy in Yemen saying the alternative to his strategy would have been disaster. The rise of Isis, the loss of vast territories in Iraq, the dissolution of Libya, the upheaval in Egypt are the best of possible worlds in comparison to what would have occurred if Bush were in charge.
President Barack Obama defended his administration’s drone-based counterterrorism strategy against al Qaeda militants in Yemen, saying the alternative would be to deploy U.S. troops, which he said was not sustainable.
While the outcomes of his policies do not seem to be a success in themelves, they are deceptively brilliant when it is considered they headed off some alternative future which would have been far worse. This type of reasoning is called counter-factual thinking “a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.”
Thus you can rationalize, for example, the “failure” of the Secret Service to protect president Kennedy in Dallas by arguing that ‘if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have’. If you think about it in that way the protective detail prevented what could have happened…”
For more on the subject of the Devil incarnate, we turn to Kurt Schlichter, who requests…
“…Apparently all that’s needed to get something these days is to unleash your inner wanting and hack politicians will start promising to provide it for free. In the dark, wicked past, things like fine touring sedans and reserved parking spaces – as well as community college degrees – came after one put forth something called effort. “Effort” is a word that describes the means by which the people called upon to subsidize lay-about Democrat-voting losers acquire the money the liberals seek to plunder. But today, we have legions of over-schooled, under-wise, neckbeards voxsplaining to us about how demanding they expend effort before they get stuff is really just discrimination.
…I refused to listen to President Bottomless Piehole’s speech the other night, but I understand that he pointed out some Potemkin villager as his example of an oppressed prole trying to survive in the living hell that is the America he has led for the last six years. He lamented that Ms. Julia Potemkin worked hard, but darn it, didn’t have the money left at the end of the month to take a vacation or get a new car. Now, how did he come to the conclusion that this is a bad thing? People who are financially squeezed shouldn’t take vacations or drive new cars. That’s not a problem to be solved. It’s an example of thrift to be applauded.
To the extent the situation Ms. Julia Potemkin finds herself in is even a problem at all, it is not for the President or anyone else to address. Hey Julia, you’re a grown woman, at least chronologically. Figure it out. Want a nice vacation? Work more hours, or get a better job. Save money by canceling cable, or cooking at home. Maybe you could do what I did for years as I built my law firm and just not take a vacation. I don’t know what the answer for you is, and I don’t care. You’re a grown women. If you’re unhappy, figure it out.
I do know one thing – the answer is not to come to me and tell me I should subsidize Ms. Potemkin’s decisions by giving her my money. That’s money I got through my decisions, like my decision to spend years working three jobs (lawyer, writer, Army reservist). You know why I have a nice car? Because I made a bunch of decisions that let me get a nice car without asking anyone else to contribute a dime…”
As the late, great Judge Elihu Smails so eloquently put it…
Or, as Ike once observed:
Such false narratives form an integral part of Liberalism’s biggest lies; to whit, Joe Septic…
…the Frost Family of Baltimore…
…and The Dear Misleader’s deliberately deceptive depiction of his own mother:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, writing at NRO, Quin Hillyer offers America a revealing…
“Late last week, a nasty little scuffle of the premature 2016 presidential campaign reminded us why both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee should be kept miles away from the Republican presidential nomination. It also reminded us that Huckabee thinks he can sell snake oil even to water moccasins. Neither the moccasins nor Republican voters should buy what he’s selling…”
We for one have never been in the market.
Finally, on the Lighter Side…
Magoo
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