It’s Wednesday, June 1st, 2016…but before we begin, a couple of brief observations.  First, as regards the latest stop on The Dear Misleader’s world-wide Apology Tour…

In historic visit to Hiroshima, Obama calls on the world to morally evolve

 

“We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.”

…and recognizing we don’t possess Barry’s towering intellect, we remain confused how allowing Iran to develop a deliverable nuclear weapons capability…

…advances either global moral evolution or a nuclear-free planet.  But why should his latest pronouncement be any more pertinent than the rest of this Progressive putz’s policies?!?

We’re completely with Charles Krauthammer on this one:

If ANYONE needs to apologize for the horror of Hiroshima, along with the rest of the War in the Pacific, it’s the Japanese.  Though we refrained from commenting on this ass-clown’s latest antics over the weekend out of respect for Memorial Day, we’ve no such compunction now.  He cannot depart the White House nor shuffle off his mortal coil fast enough to suit us.

Meanwhile, back in the Islamofascist-in-Chief’s adopted hometown, which, after some 85 years of Dimocratic rule (the last 5 under B. Hussein’s former chief-of-staff), sky-high taxes and the toughest gun laws in the country, should be a literal Liberal utopia, we learn…

Police Are Pleading for Peace in Chicago: ‘We Could Be Looking at a Blood Bath’

 

Anyone intent upon visiting the Windy City, please raise your hands…

…so we can read you your last rites!

Here’s the juice: We suggest Liberals in general, and B. Hussein in particular, heal thyselves…you pack of hopeless hypocrites!

Oh,…and P.S.:  As bad as Barack might be, and he indubitably occupies the veritable bottom of the political barrel, we cannot help but mention our disgust at likely having to cast our vote for a would-be Commander-in-Chief…

…who’s used every trick in the book to avoid risking his life for his country.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, since we firmly believe what’s good for the transgendered Progressive goose is good for the confidently-heterosexual Conservative gander, submitted for your perusal and approval, an example of a right-wing red herring that continues to harm Republican candidates absent any discernible benefit or basis in reality:

Cruz Intends to Prevent Trump From ‘Watering Down’ Pro-life Language in RNC Platform

 

“Ted, I don’t see you; time to resume haunting the Senate.”

It’s akin to military planners wasting their time strategizing how to fight the last war.

Earth to Pro-lifers: we’re a pro-lifer, and we share your abhorrence of abortion with every fiber of our being!  But we are also a pragmatist living in a nation of laws under the Constitution…or at least it used to be.  And were a President, Conservative or otherwise, to assemble a SCOTUS willing to overturn the terrible, tortured jurisprudence of emanations and penumbras which is Roe v. Wade tomorrow, the issue of abortion would then rightly be returned to the states…where it belongs.  And where, with the possible exceptions of North Dakota, South Dakota and Mississippi, it would remain legal (even in South Carolina), at least through 19 weeks.

Consequently, in the vast majority of states, regardless of one’s personal proclivities or religious beliefs, it would remain a political issue, and thus subject to compromise.  Say…a ban on late-term and partial birth abortions in exchange for exceptions in case of rape, incest and/or the life of the mother.  Sure it’s not everything you want; but it’s one helluva lot better than what you’ve got now.  And since, certain as the sun rising tomorrow, the Far Left and their Abortion Lobby allies (i.e., NOW, NARAL and Planned Parenthood) would never agree to restrictions even as modest as these, merely proposing them will present the public with the appearance of reasonableness and moderation.  And that, friends, is how one wins political arguments.

Next up, writing at the WSJ, Peggy Noonan observes how Hillary…

Clinton Embodies Washington’s Decadence

She breaks the rules and gets away with it every time. No wonder voters are fed up.

 

“…But the real decadence Americans see when they look at Washington is an utterly decadent system. Just one famous example from the past few years:

A high official in the IRS named Lois Lerner targets those she finds politically hateful. IRS officials are in the White House a lot, which oddly enough finds the same people hateful. News of the IRS targeting is about to break because an inspector general is on the case, so Ms. Lerner plants a question at a conference, answers with a rehearsed lie, tries to pin the scandal on workers in a cubicle farm in Cincinnati, lies some more, gets called into Congress, takes the Fifth—and then retires with full pension and benefits, bonuses intact. Taxpayers will be footing the bill for years for the woman who in some cases targeted them, and blew up the reputation of the IRS.

Why wouldn’t Americans think the system is rigged?

This is Washington in our era: a place not so much of personal as of civic decadence, where the Lois Lerner always gets away with it.

Which brings us to the State Department Office of Inspector General’s report involving Hillary Clinton’s emails. It reveals one big thing: Almost everything she has said publicly about her private server was a lie. She lied brazenly, coolly, as one who is practiced in lying would, as one who always gets away with it could.

No, she was not given legal approval to conduct her business on the server. She was not given the impression it was fine. She did not comply with rules on storage and archiving. Her own office told U.S. diplomats personal email accounts could be compromised and they must avoid using them for official business. She was informed of a dramatic increase in hacking attempts on personal accounts. Professionals who raised concerns about her private server were told not to speak of it again.

It is widely assumed that Mrs. Clinton will pay no price for misbehavior because the Democratic president’s Justice Department is not going to proceed with charges against the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

This is what everyone thinks, and not only because they watch “Scandal.” Because they watch the news. (Only if they watch FOX News!)

That is the civic decadence they want to see blown up. And there’s this orange-colored bomb…”

Cause and effect, friends…cause and effect!

In a related item, also courtesy of the WSJ, Bill McGurn explains the concept behind…

Hillary’s Crooked Defense

In Clintonworld, anything that isn’t found criminal becomes permissible.

 

““I’m not a crook.” In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.

In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.

...Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clinton successfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.

In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.

Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years…

…Even putting aside the question of criminality, we know the following: While in a position of trust, Mrs. Clinton deliberately chose to put American security at risk by setting up her home server. In so doing, she also concealed what should have been public records from the American people. In the year since she’s been found out, almost every public statement she has made in defense of her actions has been exposed as false. And she refused to cooperate with investigators.

In short, this is a woman who never tells the truth when a lie will serve her purposes equally well.

What an extraordinary place this has left her party and her country. Here we are, six months out from the presidential election, and the Democratic nominee is under federal investigation.

It used to be, before the Clintons first moved into the White House, that having no criminal conviction was something that kept you out of prison. But the way Mrs. Clinton and her defenders talk, it’s almost as though it should make her president.“

It’s the inevitable Progressive putrefaction of American politics; and yes, given his healthcare proposals, imposition of wage and price controls, abandonment of the gold standard, creation of OSHA and the EPA, signing of the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts and sell-out of South Vietnam and Taiwan, we count Richard M. Nixon as a card-carrying Progressive.

Turning from card-carrying Progressives to birds of utterly unknown plumage, writing at NRO, Ben Shapiro asks and answers…

How Could a Trump Presidency Go Wrong? Let’s Count the Ways

A look at the possibilities, from the border Wall to the Supreme Court to Iran.

 

“In 2008, then-senator Barack Obama announced in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Obama campaigned on supposed practicality and ad hoc politicking. This left his most cynical detractors shadowboxing at the leftist positions they knew that he actually held, even as the media and his supporters tut-tutted such catastrophic thinking.

Then, it turned out, Obama’s detractors were right.

Donald Trump may despise President Obama enough to question his origin of birth (he pulls all the girls’ pigtails, from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz). But he mimics Obama’s tabula rasa campaign to perfection. He’s an ink blot. When Trump’s detractors point out that Trump has swiveled on every major campaign promise, every major issue, Trump supporters accuse them of going full Rohrshach in Watchmen: Every ink blot, they say, can’t be an image of an atrocity. Some, they say, must be butterflies and clouds.

What, they ask, could go so wrong in a Trump presidency? Here, then, is an attempt to realistically assess what a Trump presidency would look like. My biases are clear up front: I don’t trust Trump. I don’t trust his promises, because he has shown no willingness to hold to them. I don’t trust his ideology, because he proclaims that his guiding star is his own self-assurance. I trust Trump to be Trump: a man of convenience, a thinker of no great depth, a reactionary with no constitutional understanding and a willingness to maximize executive power.

Here we go…

...One thing is certain: There’s nothing here that even hints at constitutional conservatism. Trump’s face, like Obama’s before him, would become the face of his party. In the wake of Trump’s continuous policy and media onslaught, the principles of limited government would disappear. Conservatives would fall in line behind Trump, seeking to uphold his agenda because he was “their man.” Those who failed to fall in line would be labeled enemies of the country in Republican circles. A New American Consensus would be formed, merging the ad hoc populist Right and the Democratic Left. The era of conservatism would end.

Perhaps I’m too skeptical of Trump. Perhaps he’d do only some of what I suggest. Or, more likely, this is on the milder end of what Trump would do as president. In either case, conservatives would be wise to consider the consequences of throwing their support behind an authoritarian with no allegiance to any of the ideals conservatives value.“

Something we, for one, remain unwilling to do!

Which brings us to the Follow-Up segment, courtesy of NRO via Balls Cotton, as the great Victor Davis Hanson responds to an earlier item by Charles Murray:

Class, Trump, and the Election

If the ‘high IQs’ of the establishment have let America down, where is a voter to turn?

 

Unlike the Brainiacs who inadvertently created him!

“…Charles Murray recently wrote in anger, addressing those who would vote for Trump because “Hillary is even worse”: “I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.”

I wish that the high IQs of the establishment class had taken Murray’s sage advice eight years ago and just listened to what Obama had said in denigration of the Pennsylvania working classes or the “typical white person” grandmother who raised him; or to his pseudo-macho references to guns and knives, and “get in their face”; or to the hokey promises to lower global temperatures and stop the seas from rising; and all the other Vero possumus tripe. Or that they had used their presumably formidable mental powers to review Obama’s public record as a state legislator and a U.S. senator — which presaged everything from Obamacare and the unconstitutional undermining of federal law to the apology tours and the near-destruction of 70 years of bipartisan foreign policy.

Murray has a point that Trump’s crudity and buffoonery should be taken seriously, but when he says establishmentarians have “high IQs,” what exactly does he mean? Did a high IQ prevent an infatuated David Brooks (whom he quotes approvingly) from fathoming presidential success as if he were a sartorial seancer, from the crease of Senator Obama’s pants leg? What was the IQ of the presidential historian who declared Obama the smartest man ever to be elevated to the White House? Or the Newsweek editor who envisioned an apotheosized Obama? Or the MSNBC host who motor-mouthed about the tingle in his leg at the sound of an Obama speech? Or, yes, the conservative policy analyst (and self-confessed “starry-eyed Obama groupie”) who wrote approvingly (“flat-out plain brilliant”) of the Obama race speech in March 2008, in which Obama revealed to the world that his own grandmother — the sole steady working breadwinner of Obama’s extended family, whose labors sent him to prep school — was a supposedly “typical white person” in her prejudices, while he further contextualized the abject racism and anti-Semitism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — a speech renounced by Obama himself when Wright later felt empowered to double down on his racism. Or perhaps the conservative wit who once wrote that Obama has a “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” and that he is the rare politician who “writes his own books,” which were “first rate”?

Establishmentarian high IQs? The point is not to castigate past poor judgment, but to offer New Testament reminders about hubris and the casting of first stones — and why hoi polloi are skeptical of their supposed intellectual betters.

So how did a blond comb-over real-estate dealer destroy an impressive and decent Republican field and find himself near dead even with Hillary Clinton — to the complete astonishment, and later fury, of the Washington establishment?

Simply because lots of people have become exhausted by political and media elites who have thought very highly of themselves — but on what grounds it has become increasingly impossible to figure out.“

Romans 1:22: “Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man…”  And a decided…

…Islamofascist dick-head at that!

Moving on, in his latest column at the WSJ, Dan Henninger details how…

We’re All in Disney World

The VA’s health-care wait lines are a metaphor for the entire U.S. government.

 

“A telling piece recently by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold described what policy specialists would describe as the “granularity” of Hillary Clinton’s mind. He notes, for example, that Mrs. Clinton’s idea of Wall Street reform is to add more detail to a regulatory form that already can take up to 300 hours to complete.

More interesting, though, was the justification for the Clinton approach, expressed by Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: “There’s some inevitable trade-off here between cost and simplicity. Put me down for, ‘Let’s spend our scarce resources more carefully, even if it means more complexity.’”

That statement is a succinct summary of the case for the administrative state and grand-scale planning as designed by Rexford Tugwell for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. What’s notable about liberalism as represented by Hillary Clinton, much less the socialist Bernie Sanders, is that across nearly 85 years, they never looked back.

They seem never to have revisited the possibility that an argument made for bureaucratic planning in the depths of an economic recession might not be appropriate for the American economy when normal growth resumed. Instead, they stuck unto eternity with the idea that “scarce resources” will necessarily require “complexity.”

But the argument that scarcity mandates complexity is what led to the fiasco called ObamaCare. Even the non-complex funding mechanisms for earlier entitlements, such as Social Security, are grinding toward collapse. The Social Security Trust Fund’s depletion date is 2035. Unnoticed by them is that their creations have grown into public agencies that have become too big to perform by any politically acceptable measure. (Or more likely the rents earned from being attached to this game mean results don’t matter much.)

The real analogy that the VA’s Mr. McDonald was groping for is France. One hears all the time that the medical care in the welfare states of France or Scandinavia is terrific and worth the long wait, even if some people die waiting for it.

Why should we be France? The problem with the administrative state as endlessly reinvented by Hillary Clinton and the “smart” people she’d bring into government is that it is out of sync with American life. Rather than standing in lines “for the experience,” a more apt metaphor to describe what people want and expect now is Amazon’s same-day delivery service. Or Uber and Lyft.

Egged on by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s Justice Department, Mrs. Clinton represents a politics whose presupposition is that the private sector is something that belongs in jail. Innovation as reimagined by Democrats in our time is a public project like Gov. Jerry Brown’s moribund, $68 billion “bullet train” in California.

Donald Trump, the real-estate developer, boasts that he’ll bring to government the ethos of Wollman Rink, the public ice-skating rink he rebuilt quickly in New York in 1986.

Beautiful. Skeptics, though, would say that his current public building project, the 1,000-mile wall on the border with Mexico, will bog down inside the same bureaucratic maw as the VA, TSA, ObamaCare and Jerry Brown’s train.

Mr. Trump’s supporters counter that the wall is best understood as a metaphor for something else. Could be, but that’s what Bob McDonald of the VA thought, too. At the moment, the metaphor known as Uncle Sam is causing the biggest lines, breakdowns and backups in human history. We await the alternative.“

And in the What’s In A Name? segment, as The Hill notes…

Broadwell seeks redemption from Petraeus affair

 

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Headless, Limbless Torso Washes Up Near San Francisco Bay Bridge

A contract worker on a lunch break discovered the body, police say

 

“Oakland police believe that a headless, limbless torso found near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge Wednesday afternoon has been in the water for at least a month and on the rocks for a couple of days, based on the rate of its decomposition.

Oakland Police Department spokesperson Johnna Watson said investigators believe the torso might be of a young man, but it will take a few days to determine the age and gender…”

Until they positively establish an identity, police reportedly will refer to the torso as “Bob”.  But what if unfortunate individual “self-identified” as a woman…or a cat…or a headless, limbless torso?!?

Magoo