It’s Wednesday, February 18th, 2015…and, submitted for your perusal, a special edition of The Daily Gouge dedicated exclusively to the most self-absorbed, thoroughly hypocritical nitwits (and yes, we meant to use the plural form!) ever to darken the corridors of the White House.

First up, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens details the irreparable damage inflicted on his office by…

President BuzzFeed

‘You do you’ is the ultimate slogan for the ultimate self-referential presidency.

“George Washington did not shake hands as president and would grip the hilt of his sword to avoid having his flesh pressed. The founding father understood that leadership in a republic demanded a careful balance between low populism and aristocratic lordliness. Personal comportment, the choice of clothes and carriage, modes of address: these things mattered. And so we have “Mr. President” as opposed to “His Highness.” Or “George.”

With Barack Obama —you won’t mind, Señor Presidente, if we call you Barry?—it’s another story. Dignity of office? How quaint. In this most self-infatuated of presidencies, the D-word is at best an accessory and more often an impediment to everything Barry has ever wanted to be: Cool. Chill. Connected.

So it was that, hours after the U.S. confirmed the murder of Kayla Jean Mueller at the hands of Islamic State, Mr. Obama filmed a short video for BuzzFeed, striking poses in a mirror, donning aviator shades, filming himself with a selfie stick and otherwise inhabiting a role that a chaster version of Miley Cyrus might have played had Hannah Montana been stuck in the White House after a sleepover with the Obama girls.

…“You do you” is the ultimate self-referential slogan for the ultimate self-referential presidency. It’s the “be yourself” piety of our age turned into a political license by Mr. Obama to do as he pleases. It’s what drives his political choices: the immigration amnesty; arbitrary rewrites of the Affordable Care Act; the Environmental Protection Agency’s coal rules; the $128 billion in settlements the administration extorted from six banks convicted of no wrongdoing.

It is also what seems to explain the president’s insistently passive foreign policy. In its 2015 National Security Strategy, unveiled earlier this month, the administration underscored the importance of what it called “strategic patience,” a high-toned euphemism for doing as little as decently possible in response to crisis. Invade Ukraine: You do you, Vladimir Putin. Build a robust nuclear infrastructure: You do you, Ali Khamenei. Continue gassing your own people: You do you, Bashar Assad…”

It also explains the abject failure of said foreign policy.  Think about it; the only reasons Barry’s domestic idiocies survive is (a) the presence of a fawning MSM which shields his every misstep through either deliberately distorted reporting or a total news blackout, and (b) the craven cowardice of a Republican leadership unwilling to contest his unconstitutional executive orders.

For those unfortunate enough to suffer the consequences of The Dear Misleader’s feckless foreign forays, the world outside this carefully constructed domestic cocoon is populated by bad guys…REALLY bad guys…whose only thought concerning The Obamao’s historical significance is to take advantage of every second his racially-based, Socialist-inspired invulnerability…and utter ineptitude…allows them.

In a related item, courtesy of Townhall.com, the great Thomas Sowell relates the reality behind Team Tick-Tock’s…

Glib ‘Happy Talk’

“When Alfred E. Neuman said “What me worry?” on the cover of Mad magazine, it was funny. But this message was not nearly as funny coming from President Barack Obama and his National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. In a musical comedy, it would be hilarious to have the president send out his “happy talk” message by someone whose credibility was already thoroughly discredited by her serial lies on television about the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012.

Unfortunately — indeed, tragically — the world today is about as far from a musical comedy as you can get, with terrorists rampaging across the Middle East, leaving a trail of unspeakable atrocities in their wake, and with Iran moving closer to producing a nuclear bomb, with an intercontinental missile on the horizon.

We will be lucky to get through the remainder of President Obama’s term in office without a major catastrophe, from which we may or may not recover…”

It’s life imitating art…

…with the potential for just as catastrophic an outcome.

Next, courtesy of The Atlantic via Newsbusters.org, Graeme Wood describes not only what Islam is all about, but…

What ISIS Really Wants

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned (An assertion we most heartily dispute!) but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

…The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Yeah; THAT…and find them all…

…living-wage jobs!  And yes, Liberal Dimocrats are going to teach others how to improve their economies!

Speaking of idiotic statements by Administration mouthpieces, the Offal Office’s refusal even to remotely recognize the reason by ISIS’ latest mass-murder has Keith Koffler wondering…

Were These People Not Christians?

But believe Barry: this has NOTHING to do with Islam!

“The White House Sunday issued a statement condemning the barbaric beheadings of more than a dozen Egyptian Coptic Christians, but somehow the statement failed to note that that they were killed because they were Christian – or even that they were Christian at all.

The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens.

ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds. It is unconstrained by faith, sect, or ethnicity. This wanton killing of innocents is just the most recent of the many vicious acts perpetrated by ISIL-affiliated terrorists against the people of the region, including the murders of dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai, which only further galvanizes the international community to unite against ISIL.

President Obama’s determination to portray Islamist terrorism as merely “extremism” untethered from any religious motivation has now crossed the line from absurdity into profound offensiveness. These people died, horrifyingly, because of their religion. They are martyrs. But not, apparently, in the view of the White House.

Also deeply offensive is that the killings did not rate a “presidential” statement. The statement above was issued by the press secretary, a determination that is calculated based on what the White House perceives as its importance…”

Yet The Great Divider DID see fit to issue an inaccurate, inflammatory statement describing what, at least by all accounts to date, was the murder of three Muslims at the hands of left-leaning atheist over a parking dispute as an anti-Islam hate crime.

Go figure!

But what can one expect from the individual NRO‘s Victor Davis Hanson accurately identifies as America’s…

Snarker-in-Chief

No one — least of all the American people — is exempt from our president’s snark. 

“Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

“…Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers. As for those who wanted the Keystone Pipeline built to enhance North American energy independence, jobs, and prosperity, Obama reduced them to obsessed one-issue zealots: “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.” Note of the vast Keystone project the adjective “single” — perhaps as in a single Hoover Dam or a single Golden Gate Bridge.

Critics used to say they opposed Obama’s redistributionist programs, but conceded that he must be a pleasant guy. Supporters lamented Obama’s frequent inattention to detail but reminded everyone how charismatic the president was. Both diagnoses are probably mistaken. Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president.“

Three thoughts come to mind.  With all due respect to VDH, which is considerable, first: who are these critics who conceded Barry must be a pleasant guy?  It sure as hell wasn’t us!  Second, were such diagnoses as Hanson describes actually offered, they weren’t “probably” mistaken; they were, most decidedly, dead-ass wrong!  Lastly, The Obamao’s numerous character flaws aren’t only a growing embarrassment, they’re incredibly dangerous in an increasingly chaotic world populated with, as previously noted, real bad guys and real crises…

…rather than Republican punching bags.

Since we’re on the subject of The Obamao’s inherent inability to accept responsibility for ANYthing, NRO‘s Andrew McCarthy explains…

Obama’s Unconstitutional Attempt to Shift the Blame for His Losing ISIS Strategy

His proposed resolution would upend the Constitution’s national-defense framework.

“…In fact, less than 24 hours after Obama suggested that Congress should forbid him from using ground troops against Islamic State terrorists, Islamic State terrorists were busy capturing a western Iraqi town just 13 minutes away from the base where 320 U.S. Marines are on the ground, training hapless Iraqi forces. Forget ground forces to defeat ISIS; the way Obama is managing things, we may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces.

Still, it is not enough to say that in a time of real peril we have a president whose delusions are as impenetrable as they are dangerous. The proposed AUMF would continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of America by upending the Constitution’s national-defense framework.

…There is more here, though, than meets the eye. The president aims to establish the precedent that Congress may curtail the commander-in-chief’s use of force. Obama is not going away when he leaves office; he will very publicly assume leadership of the transnational Left. From that perch, he will urge the exploitation of that precedent by like-minded Democrats and Republicans (from both the progressive-lite and anti-government extremist camps). Before long, Congress would not content itself with mere combat restrictions. There would be efforts to rewrite the laws of war — e.g., limiting the president to the Left’s distorted notion of proportional uses of force. There would be a push to make prosecution in the civilian justice system, rather than indefinite detention and interrogation, the standard process for captured enemy terrorists…”

Here’s the juice: The Obamao’s entire adult life has been marked by a proclivity for two things: prevarication and the avoidance of accountability, be it through “leading from behind”, by voting “present” or promising repeatedly Americans could keep their health insurance and doctors.  As McCarthy goes on to note:

The effort to gull Congress into passing an AUMF that purports to forbid military commands that this commander-in-chief has already, and irresponsibly, decided not to give is not just the usual Obama blame-shifting; it is unconstitutional.

An American strategy that focuses only on ISIS, pretends that al-Qaeda has already been “decimated,” and regards Iran as a potential ally rather than a mortal enemy is doomed to fail. When it does, Obama wants congressional Republicans to share in the ignominy.

We only hope, and this is admittedly a stretch, Boehner and McConnell realize the game he’s playing.

And in the Picture Worth A Thousand Words segment, here’s one with a value just over $18,000,000,000,000…

…almost half of which is the exclusive responsibility of one man…oh, and his spendthrift wife…

…whose next vacation is a Spring Break trip to Japan…all expenses paid…by YOU!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York asks what inquiring Christian Conservative minds want to know:

Why do GOP candidates keep stumbling on evolution?

“…In the most recent poll, done in May 2014, a plurality, 42 percent, said God created humans in their present form, while 31 percent said humans evolved with God’s guidance. Just 19 percent said humans evolved with God playing no part in the process, and 8 percent had no opinion.

Looked at another way, 73 percent said they believe God has guided the creation of human beings. That’s a pretty solid majority which undoubtedly includes a number of Democrats in addition to Republicans and independents. No matter their specific belief — young Earth creationists, intelligent designers, evolutionary creationists, whatever — the key element is God. Which means that a candidate should be able to say some version of the following when asked about evolution:

I believe God has guided the creation of Earth and all of us on it. There’s a long scientific record of how life developed, and I don’t see any conflict between that science and my own faith in God. I know some people believe humans evolved and God played no part in it. Of course I respect their beliefs, but God’s role in our existence is a foundation of my faith. I believe He created us all…“

End of issue, right?  Frankly, we’re a little concerned Walker and his camp hadn’t given this more thought.

Finally, on the Lighter Side…

Magoo