It’s Friday, December 4th, 2015…but before we commence to bloviating, a brief observation.  As we were just discussing with TLJ (who, incidentally, is lovelier than ever!), there is soooo much going wrong with the country it’s hard to keep track of it all, let alone maintain one’s sanity in the midst of the madness.

For example, has anyone had time to focus this week on the impending meltdown of ObamaScare?!?  The WSJ’s Dan Henninger correctly identifies the source of most of the nation’s, indeed the world’s problems…

…but as we detail below, there’s any number of our senior Military, both active and retired, fighting for second place, albeit a fur piece behind Barry.  And let’s not forget the “leadership”…if the word can even be applied…of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, who, to borrow a line from Ghostbusters II…

…a sequel almost as disappointing as Mitt Romney following John McCain.

So since we can’t cover it all…not to mention much of what transpires doesn’t merit exposure…we’ll present all the news we deem fit to print!

So here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, submitted for your perusal, Tom Elliott offers this…

Montage: The Ten Dumbest Things Said about the San Bernardino Attack

It’s been less than 24 hours since multiple gunmen slaughtered 14 innocent people in San Bernardino, Calif., yet the major media have already compiled a lengthy list of embarrassing missteps. From rank speculation to premature politicization, the frequent departure from simply reporting factual information isn’t going well.

Here are ten of the worst moments thus far:

Senator Tim Kaine saying the atrocity proves America is addicted to guns.

Former FBI assistant director, Tom Fuentes – later joined by CNN’s Harry Houck – speculating an anti-government “right-wing group” is behind the attack.

MSNBC reporting (almost as soon as the shooting began) that the city of San Bernardino houses a Planned Parenthood.

A gun-control activist insisting Congress could stop these tragedies, it simply chooses not to.

George Stephanopoulos portraying President Obama as another victim in the tragedy.

President Obama arguing the feds are powerless to stop suspected terrorists from buying guns. (Which is untrue.)

An MSNBC guest arguing armed self defense, including armed guards, provides no security benefit.

Chris Matthews wondering if the attack can be traced back to the American revolution.

NBC’s Kerry Saunders suggesting the Christmas party that was attacked could have served as a “trigger” for the gunmen.

Senator Tim Kaine arguing that, much like terrorists themselves, critics of increased gun control are the “voice of evil.”

And it hasn’t even been a full day. 

We’d suggest, before opening their pie holes, Progressive politicians and the sycophantic MSM…

In a related item, as the incomparably well-informed John Lott advises us…

The facts shoot holes in Obama’s claim that US is only host to mass killings

“On Tuesday, President Obama stunned Americans and French alike with his false claims about gun violence in America. “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries,” claimed Obama. It is a claim that he has continually repeated over the years.

Talk about being self-absorbed. (Or, as we prefer to term it, lying through his teeth!)

The French have witnessed three mass public shootings this year. January saw two attacks, one on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and another on a Paris supermarket. In the November attacks, 129 people were killed and 352 were injured. In just 2015, France suffered more casualties – killings and injuries – from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424). This number includes the San Bernardino massacre on Wednesday.

Obama also overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated.  Of the four worst K-12 school shootings, three have occurred in Europe. Germany had two of these — one in 2002 at Erfut and another in 2009 at Winnenden, with a total death toll of 34.

Obama isn’t correct even if he meant the frequency of fatalities or attacks. Many European countries actually have higher rates of death from public shootings that resulted in four or more murders. It’s simply a matter of adjusting for America’s much larger population…”

In other words…

But The Left will always meet any argument based on fact or logic with an utter non sequitur, the proverbial Progressive red herring:

Meanwhile, the devastation The Dear Misleader continues to deal America’s domestic security doesn’t hold a candle to the havoc he’s wreaking upon our national defense: 

Defense Secretary Says U.S. Opening All Military Combat Roles to Women

‘Mission Effectiveness Must Come First,’ Ash Carter Says

“The U.S. military will open combat positions to women, with no exceptions, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said Thursday in a decision that settles a decades-old debate surrounding the armed forces. The positions in all service branches will be open to women in 30 days, Mr. Carter said.

“This means that, as long as they qualify and meet the standards, women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before,” Mr. Carter said…”

Aye, there’s the rub!  For as this next item, courtesy of Balls Cotton and US Defense Watch informs us…

Something is rotten at Fort Benning

US Defense Watch and other media outlets have been covering the Ranger School records story since late September. Here’s a summary of the story until now:

Congressman Steve Russell (R, OK) contacted the Secretary of the Army on September 15, 2015, and requested the Ranger School records for the first two female graduates, Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver. Russell, a Ranger School graduate, who served 21 years in the Army and earned a Bronze Star with Valor device, was elected to Congress in 2014. He led 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment during its deployment to Tikrit, Iraq.

The Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, stalled Russell for nine days and then asked for an extension to obtain documents readily available. The Army waited another two weeks to tell Russell the documents had been shredded. (Starting to sound familiar?!?) The Army still refuses to tell anyone what the school’s policy is for the storage and destruction of Ranger School records. The Army still refuses to tell the media why they shredded Griest’s and Haver’s records. The Army refuses to tell the media what they are doing with the third female graduate, Major Lisa Jaster’s records. The Army now refuses to send Congressman Russell the so-called “Green Cards” for the female Rangers. The Green Cards are basically a report card on how any Ranger School graduate performed, in a practice dating back to 1952, the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade keeps a Ranger student’s Green Card, which verifies their attempt or successful completion of the course.

McHugh, who stepped down as secretary Nov. 1, likened it to a university transcript, which does not include “every test or paper that a student completes within a course.” McHugh also wrote that the Army cannot provide the Green Cards for the Ranger students “outside of a formal request from an appropriate oversight committee, as the Privacy Act would require almost full redaction of all information on each document, rendering them effectively useless.” Russell is working with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Armed Services Committee to take necessary steps and obtain the records, according to a source in the congressman’s office.

…So, we have records shredded and now the Army refuses to send the Green Cards to Russell. Instead, Russell was given some type of half-baked white paper showing that women were performing just like men at Ranger School.

You don’t have to be Columbo or Sherlock Holmes to smell a rat. Something is rotten down at Fort Benning and the trail of stench leads all the way to the Pentagon. (And across the river to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!) It’s more than obvious that the Army is clearly hiding something, in order to placate the White House and their social engineering agenda. Think this couldn’t happen? Read the news today about the military doctoring intelligence reports to create the fiction that ISIS was on the run. The Pentagon is chock full of moral cowards and lackeys these days.

The idea that the Army could be deliberately pushing women through Ranger School is not a popular topic among many currently serving military officers and even some veterans. I’ve been asked, “Why am I covering this story?” “Don’t you know it’s 2015?” Ah, 2015, as if female human beings have been given some altered DNA. Perhaps, Keanu Reeves met aliens that handed him some new technology to turn women into Xena Warrior Princesses. I’ve also been told that “I’m old school and things are different now.” They sure are; on a level that’s disastrous for the nation.

It’s senior officers who are driving the feminist train wreck, because they are simply too worried about their jobs and their retirement packages to speak up. The troops know better. They always do. A sergeant in the Ranger Training Brigade at Fort Benning told me that the politically correct atmosphere in the Army was “suffocating.”

Any person who has knowledge of Ranger School, or current and former Ranger ops knows that what is happening at Ranger School is a complete farce. Yet, the Army expects us to believe that women are making it through one of the hardest military schools in the world. They also expect us to believe that 37 year old mommies are blood and guts Ranger School graduates…”

According to a friend whose judgement in matters military we value opined:

“…from what I’ve heard from all the services, women have to be detailed to these positions due to lack of qualified males.“

Unfortunately, been there/done that!  We lived out this bullsh*t at the Naval Academy with the first female Plebes; we know how it plays out, and it ain’t in the interest of either the nation or national security, which should be… 

At least they used to be; now national security is sacrificed for a social experiment with rigged results.

Then again, as this next item, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and Bret Stephens writing at the WSJ explains, what else can one truly expect from an group who either (a) refuses to recognize the face of the real enemy, or (b) is on their side?!?

Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies

In Paris, it’s easier to battle a climate crisis than confront jihadists on the streets.

“Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.

The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.

I mention these examples by way of preface to the climate-change summit that began this week in Paris. But first notice a pattern.

Dramatic crises—for which evidence tends to be anecdotal, subjective, invisible, tendentious and sometimes fabricated—are trumpeted on the basis of incompetently designed studies, poorly understood statistics, or semantic legerdemain. Food insecurity is not remotely the same as hunger. An abusive cop does not equal a bigoted police department. An unwanted kiss or touch is not the same as sexual assault, at least if the word assault is to mean anything.

Yet bogus studies and statistics survive because the cottage industries of compassion need them to be believed, and because mindless repetition has a way of making things nearly true, and because dramatic crises require drastic and all-encompassing solutions. Besides, the thinking goes, falsehood and exaggeration can serve a purpose if it induces virtuous behavior. The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.

And so to Paris.

I’m not the first to notice the incongruity of this huge gathering of world leaders meeting to combat a notional enemy in the same place where a real enemy just inflicted so much mortal damage…”

We’ll leave the last word on the subject to two of the most brilliant political cartoonists of our generation:

Next up, the stench of the corruption in The Anointed One’s adopted home town has finally penetrated the hardened olfactory receptors of the MSM.  Hells bells, even The Old Grey Nag is finally calling for an investigation into the political cesspool that is Chicago, a city so offensive, as the late, great Jimmy Malone termed it in The Untouchables:

This town stinks like a whore house at low tide

Exhibit “A”: Commentary Magazine‘s Noah Rothmann describes it as…

Rahm Emanuel’s Disaster for Dems

“Cook County, Illinois, an archetypical Democratic monolith, is at the epicenter of what may evolve into a political earthquake. For decades, Democratic politicians have taken advantage of the lockstep support they receive from African-American voters. Despite this voting bloc’s frustration with the status quo and it’s politically active members’ unconcealed exasperation with the politicians in whom they’ve placed their trust, Democrats seemingly cannot fathom the circumstances in which this group of reliable Democratic voters might rethink their allegiance. That circumstance might have materialized in Chicago…”

Exhibit “B”: another brilliant, must-read offering from NRO‘s Kevin Williamson, who points out corruption like Rahmbo’s is SOP for Liberals across the country…and in fact across time:

Chicago and Rahm Emanuel: Partners in Corruption

The city and the pol deserve each other.

Chicago’s latest version of the Dream Team: Rahmbo, his patsy and the infamous Father Pfleger

“…Chicago is corruption itself. If Bill de Blasio’s Manhattan is Dorian Gray, Chicago is the picture: 2,700 shootings already this year, neighborhoods entirely lost, a public-school system that is so deep into piddling corruption that it doesn’t even know what its dropout rate is. In a low blow for the ages, comedian Sherrod Small sneered about another city: “Philadelphia is nothing but Baltimore with electricity.” Perhaps. What is Chicago?

Port-au-Prince, eventually.

Faisal Khan — who was hired by the Chicago City Council to investigate municipal corruption and then was nearly chased out of office by the Chicago City Council for doing his job — was flabbergasted by what he saw:

“Thirty aldermen over 40 years have gone to jail,” he said in an interview with Politico. “We are the third biggest metropolis in the country. I would describe to you that the oversight in Chicago is comparable to the Wild West — anything goes. I will be honest with you — I could never have envisioned a city like Chicago being so devoid of ethical morals and values when it came to our elected officials. I could not believe how backwards the city was when it came to ethics. It needs to be blown up and started all over again.”

Faced with an indictment like that, the Chicago City Council did the only thing it could do when Khan’s term came to a close: It declined to replace him. Khan instead handed over his files to the FBI, which will be taking it from there — with all the rigor that one might expect of Barack Obama’s Justice Department investigating the city run by Barack Obama’s former chief of staff.

…Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Al Gore, and the rest of that sorry lot aren’t trying to get rich — they’re already rich, some of them wildly rich. They are building a patronage society. And building a patronage society costs a lot of money — more even than Goldman Sachs and Al Gore put together have at their disposal.

…But you cannot build a patronage society on patrons alone: You need clients. And that’s where the ever-growing public sector comes in. I have had many thoughts upon walking out of government offices (most of which are not printable here for reasons of good taste and possible criminal prosecution), but I never once have thought about the clerk with whom I was dealing: “Man, I bet that guy took a big pay cut when he took this job.” There is effectively no one working at your local DMV, public school, police station, or IRS office who could earn even 80 percent of his government compensation in a private-sector job. As I have argued at some length, the really nefarious dependency agenda isn’t focused on the people who cash welfare checks, but on the people who write them, the vast bureaucracies of overpaid functionaries whose main purpose in life is to stand between citizens and their objectives with their hands out saying “Pay me!” Get enough of those and you have effective control over the entire economy — Chávez-style socialism without the nasty business of formal expropriation.

Consider that the average front-office employee of the Baltimore (!) public schools earns $107,000 a year, with splendid health and retirement benefits on top of that. For what? The excellence we all associate with Baltimore public schools? They do a criminal disservice to their young, mainly poor, mainly black wards, but there are a lot of Clinton voters there, so Baltimore’s schoolmarms must be kept fat and happy, the kids be damned. If “reform” means that those $107K paydays would get linked to something like (horrible thought!) performance or outcomes, you can bet that the reformers will be dead in the water before they get started. That’s the power of the patron–client model.

In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel may very well end up losing his job. Ill-tempered, accustomed to getting his way, and arrogant as Pharaoh himself, he’s not much of a patron to begin with. But the model of public life he stands for will survive him. It may even get worse. People in Chicago may be unhappy with their schools, their police, their public finances, their roads and sidewalks, and the 2,700-and-counting shootings in their streets, but they are not victims of corruption at city hall: They are partners in that corruption. And they’re getting what’s coming to them.“

Even as the whole corrupt Dimocratic crew goes laughing all the way to the bank!  It’s just as H.L. Mencken so eloquently observed:

“No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

And here’s the kicker!

“Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

As Bill, Hillary, Barry, Harry and Rahmbo have proven repeatedly, the two are inextricably intertwined.  The rest of us exist only to foot their bills; any questions?!?

Finally, we’ll call it a week with a walk on the Lighter Side…

Magoo