It’s Wednesday, February 10th, 2016…but before we begin, a brief bon mot commemorating Cam’s Super Bowl performance; before, during and after:

Particularly in light of his having used utterly unfounded allegations of racism to explain distaste for his antics in certain quarters, you’ll forgive the pun when we wonder whether in Super Bowl 50, Cam showed his true…”colors”?!?

More on that later.  But now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Townhall.com, two of Guy Benson’s seven points regarding Hillary’s on-going email obfuscation:

“(3) In an effort to signal that the contents of the dozens of (non-deleted) top-secret-and-above emails found on her unsecure server were “innocuous” (false), Hillary’s campaign is asking that the emails be released publicly — knowing full well that isn’t possible, for national security reasons.  It’s her own former agency that has deemed those messages so sensitive that they cannot even be disclosed in redacted form.

(4) Meanwhile, while cynically urging the release of national security-endangering emails, Team Clinton is resisting publishing the transcripts of her six-figure speeches to Wall Street firms.  She claims she used those addresses to speak truth to power, warning bankers about mortgage crisis before the 2008 crash.  Really?  Let’s see the proof of that self-serving tale. She also says she accepted the financials firms’ high speaking fees because “that’s what they offered.”  No, it’s what she charged.  By the way, how do we know these withheld transcripts even exist?  Because she herself required them, along with other elaborate speaking demands.  We know she was reckless in her handling of national security secrets, but she’s assiduously protective of whatever she said in those speeches.  Why?“

Inquiring minds would really like to know!

Which brings us to the Oh What Tangled Webs They Weaved When First They Practiced To Deceive segment, as NRO‘s Andrew McCarthy notes the rabbit hole that is Hillary’s server has become a sinkhole threatening to drag down anyone and anything within reach of its increasingly voracious vortex…including The Great Prevaricator:

Obama’s Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton E-Mail Scandal

“…So egregious have the scandal’s latest developments been that a critical State Department admission from last week has received almost no coverage: Eighteen e-mails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have been identified, and the government is refusing to disclose them. The administration’s rationale is remarkable: Releasing them, the White House and State Department say, would compromise “the president’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel” from top government officials.

Think about what this means. Not only is it obvious that President Obama knew Mrs. Clinton was conducting government business over her private e-mail account, the exchanges the president engaged in with his secretary of state over this unsecured system clearly involved sensitive issues of policy. Clinton was being asked for “advice and counsel” — not about her recommendations for the best country clubs in Martha’s Vineyard, but about matters that the White House judges too sensitive to reveal.

That explanation got me to thinking about General David Petraeus. Recall that the Obama Justice Department prosecuted Petraeus for mishandling classified information. His offense involved conduct narrower in scope than Mrs. Clinton’s systematic transmission and storage of classified information on her private system.

What is the relevance of Petraeus’s case? Well, in order to outline the factual basis for his guilty plea, the Justice Department filed a document describing the information involved. In the main, it was the classified contents of the general’s journals. Among the most significant of this information, according to the prosecutors, were notes of “defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.”

In light of Mrs. Clinton’s numbing repetition of the legally irrelevant talking-point that the classified information found throughout her thousands of e-mails was not “marked classified,” it bears emphasizing that General Petraeus’s journals were not marked classified either. That did not alter the obvious fact that the information they contained was classified — a fact well known to any high government official who routinely handles national-defense secrets, let alone one who directly advises the president.

Moreover, as is the case with Clinton’s e-mails, much of the information in Petraeus’s journals was “born classified” under the terms of President Obama’s own executive order — EO 13526. As we’ve previously noted, in section 1.1(d) of that order, Obama directed: “The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.” In addition, the order goes on (in section 1.4) to describe other categories of information that officials should deem classified based on the national-security damage disclosure could cause. Included among these categories: foreign relations, foreign activities of the United States, military plans, and intelligence activities.

If the administration is refusing to disclose the Obama-Clinton e-mails because they involved the secretary of state providing advice and counsel to the president, do you think those exchanges just might touch on foreign-government information, foreign relations, or foreign activities of the United States — deliberations on which are presumed classified?…”

In any event, with a hat tip to Balls Cotton, like another individual dedicated to achieving equal justice for all, we have a dream:

Though, truth be known, what Hillary deserves isn’t the inside of a prison cell: 

At least, not in this world!

Next up, writing at PJ Media, Roger Simon records…

Obama’s Islamophobia

“Barack Obama suffers from serious case of the real Islamophobia — fear of telling the truth about Islam. Even though a “progressive,” he says nary a word about the rampant misogyny and homophobia in Islam or about Sharia law whose medieval strictures are preferred by 51% of American Muslims. Nor does he seem to care that so few of these same American Muslims actively oppose radical Islam. The president prefers the Hamas-linked CAIR to courageous reformers like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. But that’s no surprise. For Obama, radical Islam doesn’t even exist.

Instead, he claims American citizens are mistreating their Muslim brothers and sisters when anyone with a web browser can see that simply isn’t true and is yet another Obama lie. In fact, anti-Muslim acts in the USA are few and far less than those against Jews. According to the FBI,  in 2014, 57% of hate crimes targeted Jews, only 16% Muslims. (Editor’s Note: PLEASE, understand the actual definition of “hate crimes”; it ain’t like Muslims are being lynched, beheaded or burned alive!) Moreover, hate crimes themselves are extremely infrequent in this country, only 1140 (again from 2014) in a nation with a population well over 320 million. Compare hate crimes to burglaries — 2,159,878, according to the FBI, in 2010 — and it becomes obvious how minuscule the threat is, particularly to Muslims. It’s almost non-existent.

Yet Obama continues to hector us about our anti-Muslim bias. Actually what he is demonstrating is an unconscious contempt for Muslims, treating them like children who need to be coddled.  And as most parents know, coddling children is a sure way to ratify, even encourage, bad behavior.

Obama’s choice for his first mosque visit did just that…”

In a related item, the great Victor Davis Hanson details the inevitable results of decades of Progressives’ purposeful practice of Ex Uno Plures: 

America’s Balkan Values

White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society.

“The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. And three, racialism must remain defined as a one-way bias.

…In truth, government efforts to racialize Americans — mostly for the benefit of tribal careerists — have failed and have left behind utter chaos, rank opportunism, and dangerous cynicism.

Eager for government-promoted racial advantages, and aware that appearance is no longer necessary for socially constructed racial status, a number of white careerists have reinvented themselves as minorities to gain job traction. Senator Elizabeth Warren was Harvard Law School’s first “Native American” faculty member on the basis of her grandfather’s high cheekbones and unsubstantiated family lore. Ward Churchill, with beads and headband but without an earned Ph.D., became a “Native-American” tenured campus activist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Rachel Dolezal teased her hair a bit and reinvented herself as the president of the local NAACP chapter in Spokane. Shaun King altered his patois, claimed he was black, and became a national spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement. Note well: None of these people claimed that their ancestry was really Italian, Punjabi, Jewish, Korean, or Arab. Apparently, invented “diversity” status of that nature would not win career advantages.

So who is deserving of special set-asides? Take the case of multimillionaire Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who fled Mexico’s censorship and came to America to establish a lucrative career under the singular protection of the U.S. Constitution as a self-appointed advocate against supposed American nativism. Has America been so unkind to Ramos that his children will have to have special help getting into college, while the progeny of an out-of-work coal miner in West Virginia or an Armenian farmer in Chico cannot qualify?

Sometimes just changing names is all that is necessary when politically correct race is in doubt. When children are unsure that the state knows their racial IDs — and since the government has not yet issued yellow, star-shaped DNA badges — they must amplify their tenuous heritage through language. (We forget that Hitler’s problem in the racist Third Reich was that he had built a career on demonizing Jews as parasites and then discovered that most Germans could not distinguish German Jews in their midst without Nazi-issued lapel badges, often the work of genealogists and pseudo-race-studies hacks in the university.)

So a Susan Smith with a Mexican grandmother becomes Susan Lopez-Smith, while a German-American would not become Susan Schmidt Wilson. A Rick Smith becomes Ricardo Smith, and with that change gains a hundred or so SAT points as a bonus. As a general rule, the more exotic the name, and the less white and less American it sounds, the more one’s career is aided. Certainly, a prep-school kid called Barry Dunham or even Barry Soetero would not have the career trajectory of Barack Hussein Obama. A Barry cannot claim to be the victim of American nativist prejudice; a Barack can…”

Neither can a guy who identifies with the White mother and/or grandparents who raised him; but opting to ally with the Black father who abandoned him?!?  That’s a…

…literally!

Then there’s this from Thomas Sowell, who opines on the true impact…

Toxic Words

“During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes. One of these words is “entitlement.” To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from “affordable housing” to “a living wage.”

But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don’t produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don’t build housing, then we are not going to have housing, “affordable” or otherwise.

Particular individuals or groups can be given many things, to which politicians say they are “entitled,” only if other people are forced by the government to provide those things to people who don’t need to lift a finger to earn them. All the fancy talk about “entitlement” means simply forcing some people to work to produce things for other people, who have no obligation to work.

It gets worse…”

So, words really can hurt you…along with sticks, stones and semi-jacketed hollow points.

For more on the subject of the Progressive policy of institutionalized racism and its associated grievance industry, we turn to NRO‘s The Corner, and David French writing on the University of Missouri’s…

Mandatory Diversity Training and the Racist Injustice of Serena Williams’s Multimillion Dollar Endorsements

“Let’s check in on the University of Missouri. Last semester, campus radicals pushed out the president largely because of a few alleged racial incidents that no sentient person believed he caused or could control. Now comes the brave new world of mandatory diversity training — where young students learn all about the oppression inherent in the system. There’s one slight problem with the narrative, however. This isn’t 1950. So the racial injustice is a bit harder to find.

Consider this portrait of a diversity training session, painted by the New York Times:

Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question. Why, he had asked, does Maria Sharapova, a white Russian tennis player, earn nearly twice as much in endorsements as Serena Williams, an African-American with a much better win-loss record?

“We like to think it’s all about merit,” said Dr. Brooks, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, speaking in the casual cadence of his days as a nightclub D.J. “It’s sport. Simply, the best should earn the most money.”

Serena Williams is a global figure — that’s why she earns a whopping $13 million in annual endorsements for playing a sport few Americans care about — but Sharapova is from Russia, playing a sport Europeans follow far more closely, and she’s a classic European beauty. Ahh, but there it is. If you prefer slim (and rather attractive) blondes to more full-figured (and rather unattractive) African-Americans, there is something wrong with you:

[Brooks] offered a gentle explanation of the Williams/Sharapova discrepancy: “Maria is considered a beauty queen, but by what standards of beauty? Some people might just say, ‘Oh, well, she’s just prettier.’ Well, according to whom? (Duh…how ’bout the people buying what she’s selling?!?) This spells out how we see beauty in terms of race, this idea of femininity. Serena is often spoofed for her big butt. She’s seen as too muscular.”

The racial reductionism and intellectual simplicity are painful to behold. What’s the social justice warrior explanation for the fact that Peyton Manning — a five-time NFL MVP, a Super Bowl champion, a starting quarterback in the current Super Bowl, the all-time leader in passing yards and passing touchdowns in by-far America’s favorite sport — makes $23 million less in annual endorsements than Kevin Durant, a one-time MVP from a small-market NBA team who’s not yet won a championship? The endorsement game isn’t about race, it’s about dollars. And Durant moves more product than Manning. Good for him…”

But if you think, as we most definitely do, Mr. Brooks’ racial logic is fatally flawed, get a load of the politically-correct claptrap students at Glen Allen High School in Henrico County, Virginia were recently served:

Thus do Progressives inexplicably accord the sons and daughters of the Shanty Irish and other impoverished immigrants, Yours Truly included, who had to sweat for every penny they ever earned, the same privileged status as those born with a silver spoon welded to the roofs of their mouths…while bestowing perpetual victim status upon the descendants of the dark-skinned, regardless of economic status, for generations to come.

Romans 1:22, baby; it’s all in Romans 1:22!

Since we’re on the subject of unfounded claims of racism, not to beat a dead horse, but a certain highly-paid 6’5″ 245-lb. adolescent would do well to take Sowell’s entitlement lesson to heart, as Ron Borges notes in the Boston Herald:

Cam Newton must learn that no one is entitled

Speaking of losers…

Yet another reason, when it comes to the Super Bowl, we watch nothing but the game itself…and turn down the sound whenever Jim Nance is within even the remotest range of a microphone.

Moving on, as The Washington Times reports, the descent of America’s Military into madness continues, as the…

Pentagon orders commanders to prioritize climate change in all military actions

“The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

[The] new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.” It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.”

...Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. Central Command planner, said the Pentagon is introducing climate change, right down to military tactics level.

…“The climate does change over great periods of time, typically measured in millennia, though sometimes in centuries,” he said. “But the document mentions accounting for such down to the level of changes in ‘tactics, techniques and procedures’ as if reviewing how a squad conducts a patrol should be accorded the same level of importance and attention as determining whether the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, might have to be relocated as sea levels rise over the next 100 years.”

The directive originated in the office of Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Final approval came from Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work. The directive is loaded with orders to civilian leaders and officers on specifically how counter-climate change strategy is to permeate planning…”

Remember their names: Frank Kendall and Robert O. Work.  If you see either of these two out in the world…

…be sure to ask them how it feels to have betrayed their country in the name of social change and the politically-correct agenda of the first truly Manchurian candidate…as well as give them a swift kick in the ass if the spirit moves you!

On The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with proof educated idiocy knows no generational boundaries…

…and may well be the product of nurture rather than nature.  After all, nature abhors a vacuum, even when it’s between two ears!  And young Grace’s tenuous grasp of economic reality…okay, utter lack thereof…says less about Bernie’s appeal than it does the parlous state of America’s education system.

Magoo