That is, whatever portion of the nation, at least our nation, The Dear Misleader…
…hasn’t already laid to waste! Rumors (first floated by the great Stilton Jarlsberg, who was kind enough to put Hillary’s mug on the missile above) the new Russian super-weapon is based on the U.S.-designed Hillfire remain unsubstantiated…but Hill-arious nonetheless!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, we continue our coverage of the most incomprehensibly irresponsible conduct by a prominent politician since Slick Willy gave himself a happy ending in the Oval Office door jamb with this story from ABC News:
“The State Department said today it can’t find Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer during her tenure there. Pagliano would have been required to turn over any official communications from his work account before he left the government. State Department officials say he had an official email account, but that they can’t find any of those records he would have turned over and continue to search for them.
“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said today, referencing a file format that holds email.
…This statement about Pagliano’s email comes in response to a FOIA request-turned-lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, which wants the State Department to turn over all his emails as well as Clinton’s text and Blackberry Messenger communications.In a court filing today, the RNC said the State Department has told them there are no documents responsive to either of those requests.
Pagliano was responsible for setting up the now-infamous private server in the basement of the Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York. He has since become a key witness in the FBI inquiry into the handling of sensitive material on that server and has been granted immunity by the Justice Department in exchange for his cooperation…”
Can’t you just hear Hillary in her best imitation of Andy Dufresne:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch with the would-be leader of The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty updates us on the latest progress of…
The Trump Tryout
So, let’s see how presumptive-nominee Donald Trump is doing.
A new poll from the Republican firm Civitas finds Hillary Clinton leading Trump in North Carolina, 49 percent to 40 percent.
Trump is ahead, 37 percent to 31 percent . . . among Miami-Dade County Cuban-Americans, traditionally one of the most heavily-Republican demographics in the state of Florida. Trump’s share of the vote is the lowest level of support among this group ever recorded.
The ORC national poll commissioned by CNN finds Clinton ahead nationally, 54 percent to 41 percent. Other than Rasmussen,every pollsterhas Clinton ahead, usually by double digits or close to it, in every poll since the beginning of March.
But Trump’s numbers will improve once the Republican party unifies behind him, right?
“Does it have to be unified? I’m very different than everybody else, perhaps, that’s ever run for office. I actually don’t think so,” Trump told George Stephanopolous Sunday. “I think it would be better if it were unified, I think it would be — there would be something good about it. But I don’t think it actually has to be unified in the traditional sense,..”
As for the idea of unifying behind the Trump agenda, that’s harder than it sounds because he keeps changing his positions.He’s alreadyreversed positionson tax increases, the minimum wage, self-financing, and paying down the debt,and suggested the United States might tell its creditors it needs to renegotiate what it will pay back, despite contractual obligations.
We’ve been hearing from Trump fans for the past year that he’s going to beat Hillary Clinton like a drum, that his win is going to be “yuge,” that we can’t put any stock in head-to-head polling during the primary. They insist “once he goes to work on her” his numbers will rise and her numbers will drop.
Well, it’s time to go to work.
We’ll have two months of general election polling between now and the GOP convention July 18. Think of this as an audition.If Trump really is the general-election juggernaut that his fans insist he is, he should have no problem closing the current gap and improving his currently abysmal numbers. If, as we skeptics contend, he’s electoral poison, radioactive among women, Latinos, and young voters, and that voter opinions of him are already set and largely intractable, the numbers won’t move significantly.
In mid-July, the Republican delegates will gather in Cleveland, and they will face the choice about whether to continue on a path that appears disastrous, or whether to choose a different one.
The delegates could vote to change the convention rules even BEFORE the first round of balloting takes place. That’s right, in the days leading up to the convention, the RNC Rules Committee could recommend rules changes to the Convention Rules Committee. That committee could tweak the recommendations but they they would ultimately have to send the new rules to the floor of the convention for a vote by the delegates. If the delegates vote to change the rules so as to ‘unbind’ themselves, then they could vote for whoever they wanted even in that first round.
If Trump is still down by ten points or so nationally in mid-July, traditionally red states are turning purple, purple states are turning deep blue . . . why shouldn’t the delegates alter the rules and choose a new nominee?Why are they obligated to ratify a landslide loss?
The Trumpeteers would tell you recent polling data makes the race much closer than before, and even the great Secretariat was known to break late out of the starting gate. But not only may Trump’s continued refusal to meaningfully enlist the support of the GOP’s Conservative base cost him the election, should he win (Heaven help us!), he could experience problems engaging those he’s currently alienating to support his ultimate agenda…whatever the Hell that proves to be!
Next, Dennis Prager identifies…
The Scariest Reason Trump Won
There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump.
They are all valid. But the biggest reason is this:The majority of Republicans are not conservative.
Conservatives who opposed Trump kept arguing — indeed provided unassailable proof – that Donald Trump is not a conservative and has never been one. But the argument meant little or nothing to two types of Republicans: the majority of Trump voters who don’t care whether he is a conservative, and the smaller number of Trump voters who are conservative but care about illegal immigration more than all other issues, including Trump’s many and obvious failings.
So, then, what happened to the majority of Republicans? Why aren’t they conservative? The answer lies in America’s biggest – and scariest – problem:Most Americans no longer know what America stands for.For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico.
But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
Why haven’t Americans over the past three generations known what America stands for? Probably the biggest reason is the influence of left-wing ideas…”
That…and the dumbing-down of our education system coupled with the proliferation of mind-numbing reality television shows and video games.
In a related item, courtesy of NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson asks what inquiring minds are really wondering:
What do conservatives do when there is no conservative candidate?
“I watched Donald Trump serially blast apart all my preferred candidates — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — as if for sport they were sent up in succession as clay pigeons. And now the November Rubicon — vote for Donald Trump, or stay home and de facto vote for Hillary Clinton — is uncomfortably close. Most of the arguments pro and con have been aired ad nauseam.
The choice is difficult for principled conservatives, because no sooner should they decide to vote for Trump than Trump will surely say something outrageous, cruel, or crude that would ostensibly now have their imprimatur on it.And note, this matters to conservatives much more than it does to liberals. Few Obama supporters at Harvard or the Ford Foundation or the New York Times worried much in 2008 that their candidate had dismissed his own generous grandmother as a “typical white person” or that he tried to get away with airbrushing out the obscene Reverend Wright and mythologized his close friendships with reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger.
Aside from his dubious political loyalties, Trump persists in being mean-spirited. He seems uninformed on many of the issues, especially those in foreign policy; he changes positions, contradicts himself within a single speech, and uses little more than three adjectives (tremendous, great, and huge).But the problem with many of these complaints is that they apply equally to both the current president and the other would-be next president. When Hillary Clinton, playing to the green vote, bragged that she would put miners out of work, and then, when confronted with an out-of-work miner, backtracked and lied about her earlier boast, we had a refined version of Trump’s storytelling. The Clinton Foundation’s skullduggery and Hillary’s e-mail shenanigans seem to trump the Trump University con — and involve greater harm to the nation. Her combination of greedy Wall Street, for-profit schmoozing and paint-by-the-numbers progressivism is repulsive.
Trump’s cluelessness about the nuclear triad is a lowbrow version of Barack Obama’s ignorance, whether seeking to Hispanicize the Falklands into the Maldives (wrong exotic-sounding, politically correct foreign archipelago, Mr. President), or mispronouncing “corpsman,” or riffing about those Austrian-speaking Austrians; or perhaps of Hillary Clinton’s flat-out lie about the causes of Benghazi, hours after she had learned the truth. I don’t think reset, Libya, Benghazi, red lines to Assad, step-over lines to Putin, and deadlines to Iran attest to Clinton’s foreign-policy savvy. It is easy to be appalled by crude ignorance, but in some ways it is more appalling to hear ignorance layered and veneered with liberal pieties and snobbery. The choice in 2016 is not just between Trump, the supposed foreign-policy dunce, and an untruthful former secretary of state, but is also a matter of how you prefer your obtuseness — raw or cooked? Who has done the greater damage to the nation: would-be novelist and Obama insider Ben Rhodes, who boasted about out-conning the “Blob” D.C. establishment, or bare-knuckles Trumpster Corey Lewandowski?
Neither Jefferson, Lincoln, nor Reagan is on this year’s ballot.So voters must deal with realities as well as principles.Note as well that so-called Republican elites really did help to create Trump: On matters of illegal immigration, offshoring and outsourcing, huge deficits, trade, and political correctness, many conservative pundits, handlers, and politicians sounded about the same as their liberal counterparts. When they debated on TV, it was like listening to two divorce lawyers; in the green room, would they sip bottled water and swap stories about their crazy clients? I recently watched Fox’s star anchor Megyn Kelly, in fawning fashion, interview firebrand Michael Moore as if he were a genuine documentarian.Moore praised Kelly to the skies, and engaged in jocular buddy joshing about her post-Fox career plans, before he waxed on in magnanimous style about how he had felt poor George W. Bush was simply incompetent rather than malicious. His disingenuous mush went unquestioned.Yet Moore remains a reprobate who after 9/11 thundered: “If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California — these were the places that voted against Bush.” Of the American dead in Iraq, he once gloated, “I’m sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe — just maybe — God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.” Michael Moore cuddles on Fox the way Al Sharpton goes to the Oval Office.What is the difference?…”
Here’s the juice: other than Bret Baier’s Special Report, there’s not a show onFOX the primary concern of which isn’t one thing and one thing only: ratings!!!
“Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all…”
Including, but not limited to…
“…Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the former curator told Gizmodo. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics.”
So, congratulations Mark Zuckerberg:
Not to mention you’re so utterly lacking in the courage of your Liberal convictions you’re unwilling to subject them to honest debate in the free market of ideas.
Turning now to the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of HotAir.com, we present yet another in a recent string of victories over Environazi overreach:
“…A Wyoming rancher facing $20 million in fines for building a stock pond on his property has settled his lawsuit with the Environmental Protection Agency in a deal that allows him to keep his watering hole and his money. In a case that drew national attention, the EPA ordered Mr. Johnson in January 2014 to tear out the pond or pay $37,500 per day in fines for what the agency described as a violation of the Clean Water Act, even though stock ponds are exempt from the federal law and he had obtained the necessary state and local permits.
In a settlement agreement announced Monday, Mr. Johnson agreed to plant willow trees and temporarily limit livestock access on a portion of the pond in what his attorneys described as “a win for the Johnson family and a win for the environment.”…”
As writer Jazz Shaw went on to note:
“…Access to and use of public waterways impacts every aspect of life, and that applies to city dwellers as well as those in rural areas. Gina McCarthy would like to dig the government’s fingernails into every roadside culvert and wet sidewalk in the country, and without someone to push back against these schemes the way the Johnson Family and the Pacific Legal Foundation have, she’ll get away with it. We don’t just need a new, conservative president next year… we desperately require new blood in all of the cabinet departments, starting with the EPA.“
Better yet, we should just eliminate the EPA, with all its reduced duties and responsibilities delegated to the Department of the Interior.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.