The Daily Gouge Archive, Friday, June 3rd, 2016

On June 5, 2016, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, June 3rd, 2016…but before we begin, let’s hearken back to Monday for a moment to check in with our youngest Pomeranian Lola instructing Luke (Oh, by the way: Luke and his brother Duke are for sale!), one of her two young puppies, on the meaning of Memorial Day:

“And those are the heroes, son, we have to thank for the freedoms we enjoy today!”

To borrow phrase from Henry V‘s Saint Crispin’s Day speech, “this shall a good woman teach her son.” Judging from the state of many of America’s more privileged youths, the lesson is either no longer taught or isn’t getting through.

And here’s one of those heroes:

Captain Jeff Kuss, USMC…

…was killed today during practice for an upcoming show at Smyrna, TN. Rest in peace, Captain Kuss. We know you died for and doing what you loved.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the WSJ, a tale of two equally-flawed candidates. First, Doug Schoen, long-time Clinton pollster and political advisor, weighs in on the one who’s a crook:

Clinton Might Not Be the Nominee

A Sanders win in California would turbocharge the mounting Democratic unease about her viability.

“There is now more than a theoretical chance that Hillary Clinton may not be the Democratic nominee for president.

How could that happen, given that her nomination has been considered a sure thing by virtually everyone in the media and in the party itself? Consider the possibilities…”

We rejoice at the mere concept of such a Clinton catastrophe, which, as Kimberly Strassel relates, could be just around the corner:

Clinton’s Lawyer, Under Oath

Hillary’s aide is so evasive that she can’t even clearly vouch for her own honesty.

“You see, my mule don’t like people laughin’. Gets the crazy idea you’re laughin’ at him.”

“The news out of last week’s Cheryl Mills deposition was that the Clinton confidante didn’t say much about Hillary’s email server. Which only goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has a serious problem—and she knows it.

This is, after all, Cheryl Mills. For more than 20 years, she has served as the Clintons’ very own Winston Wolf ( Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction”)—their fixer, their problem-solver. From impeachment right up through Benghazi and the server, Ms. Mills is the one constant in the behind-the-scenes obstruction. The less she talks, the more alarm bells ought to ring.

…Ms. Mills can barely recall any conversation with anyone while at the State Department about a server, or email, or anything. She is clueless or mum on why the server came to be or who knew about it, or how it worked.

…Frustrating as this surely was for Judicial Watch and the nation, it can’t have been surprising. The Clintons haven’t survived all these years without the support of talented people, and Ms. Mills—give her credit—is unrivaled when it comes to protecting her bosses. Her deposition was something approaching performance art, a perfectly crafted mix of polite ignorance, purposeful misdirection and clever defense.

Yet the presence of all those lawyers proves that Ms. Mills knows she, and her boss, could have a major problem…”

We could be wrong, but do not a number of Hillary’s recovered emails clearly indicate Mills knew about Clinton’s private server, indeed expressed concern about it, while she was a federal employee?!?

As Yogi Berra so eloquently observed…

…or at least until the…

…fat lady sings!

And remember, as this 1995 National Review article recounts, Hillary’s criminal activities date back long before her flouting of national security laws:

Herd Instincts

“…On October 11, 1978, the future First Lady, a neophyte investor with an annual income of $25,000, opened a commodity-futures account with a deposit of $1,000. Her first trade was the short sale of ten live-cattle contracts at a price of 57.55 cents a pound: a commitment to deliver in December of that year 400,000 pounds of cattle with a market value of $230,200. One day later, she bought the contracts back at a price of 56.10 cents, just 0.15 cent above the low of the day, pocketing $5,300 for a return of 530 per cent.

Mrs. Clinton continued to be a net winner at the game. By the time she closed her trading account ten months later, she had racked up $99,541 in profits, a spectacular 10,000 per cent return on her initial investment of $1,000. Either Mrs. Clinton was a better trader than the legendary George Soros, whose best-ever annual return in thirty years of trading was 122 per cent, or she was led by an invisible hand.

During a press conference last April, the First Lady attributed her success to her advisor James Blair’s “theory that because of the economy in the early part of the 1970s, a lot of cattle herds had been liquidated, so that there was going to be a big opportunity to make money in the late Seventies.” After examining Mrs. Clinton’s trading records, Leo Melamed, the father of financial futures and former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Jack Sandner, the Merc’s current chairman, found nothing irregular except, on occasion, insufficient margin in her account. Anyone could have done as well, these gentlemen said, given the doubling of cattle prices during her year of trading. Mr. Melamed called the brouhaha over the First Lady’s financial affairs “a tempest in a teapot.” Mr. Sandner attributed her success to her “trading the biggest bull market in the history of cattle. If someone caught that trend and traded it well, they could make an extraordinary amount of money, a lot more than $100,000, on a small investment.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton bucked the trend and traded it well. Most of her trades, including her first two, her last two, and her single most profitable trade (in dollar terms) were initiated from the short side, anticipating a decline in cattle prices. Short selling by the public is extremely rare, especially on a first trade. When one considers that both the investor and her trading advisor were using a herd-reduction theory to capitalize on the biggest bull market in cattle in history, the success of her short sales raises a bright red flag…”

Yeah, the kind of bright red flag which would land the rest of us in an orange jumpsuit.

Then, there’s the child:

Trump’s Politics of Grievance

When it comes to criticism, he’s more Nixon than Reagan.

“Donald Trump laid out his energy policy last week, and it drew a sharp and welcome contrast with Hillary Clinton on developing U.S. oil and natural gas. Too bad few Americans will have noticed because the presumptive GOP presidential nominee spent the days before and since denouncing all and sundry who haven’t embraced his candidacy. This politics of personal grievance may be the businessman’s biggest obstacle to the White House.

For a candidate who claims we should all be less easily offended, Mr. Trump may have the thinnest skin in politics. (On a par with The Dear Misleader!) He seems to think all politics is personal and that his looming nomination means that every Republican should line up, Chris Christie-like, in political deference. His demand for obeisance is alienating more people than it attracts.

…Millions of Americans who might support Mr. Trump in order to shake up Washington are also asking if he has the temperament and character to be a good President. This means showing respect for the institutions of self-government, such as the judiciary. (Again, something The Obamao would do!) It also means not continuing a politics of racial polarization that equates ethnicity with judicial unfairness.

For all of his marketing genius, Mr. Trump is also remarkably sensitive to media criticism. He attacks reporters at seemingly every chance, turning his press conference Tuesday into a media struggle session. He called the press corps “dishonest” and libelous, singled out ABC’s Tom Llamas as “a sleaze” and mocked another reporter as “a real beauty.”

Many Americans who loathe the press will cheer him on, but down this road lies tears. An adversarial relationship with the press is inevitable for a Republican candidate, and for all Presidents, even Democrats. Mr. Trump ought to learn from Ronald Reagan and roll with it—rather than heed the Nixon model of letting it consume him until it induces an overreaction that takes him down…”

And an orange-skinned, spoiled child at that!

As Dan Henninger notes, and we wholeheartedly agree, all signs point to the fact…

Trump’s MAD

Donald Trump may be turning into a captive of his public persona.

One of them is mad as Hell, and he’s not going to take this anymore. The other is just bat-sh*t crazy!

“Is Donald Trump trapped inside his persona? Keeping up with Mr. Trump’s statements takes some doing, but one thing he said last week, after he had attacked Republican Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, stood out. “If I was nice to everybody,” he told a crowd later that day in Anaheim, Calif., “I wouldn’t be here today. I’d be watching television right now.”

Mr. Trump believes, correctly, that this persona brought him from his entry into the race last June to the GOP nomination now. It gave him one good year. But his assertions this week that he won’t change, that he will continue to attack any Republican “that is not on my side,” sounded oddly inadequate to the magnitude of the contest ahead. His public persona is starting to look like a comfortable but self-limiting security blanket.

Last week began very well for Donald Trump, if by “well” one means something bad happening to the myriad individuals and forces presumably arrayed against him. The State Department’s Inspector General released a scathing report on Hillary Clinton and the private email system she devised as secretary of state.

This being the year that God sentenced us to live with compulsive candidates, Mrs. Clinton’s was to offer preposterous defenses, such as, she wasn’t used to checking her emails on a PC. Even the liberal punditocracy was merciless. Lucky also for Mr. Trump, the polls hit Hillary in her bad week with the news that she and her Republican opponent are now in a statistical dead heat among national voters.

Anywhere else in political history, back to Julius Caesar, 99.9% of political candidates would have stood back and let their opponent bleed in public. Instead, Mr. Trump, the outlier of all time, stanched the bleeding of Mrs. Clinton’s week on Friday by attacking, with extraordinary and extended virulence, the federal judge presiding over the formerly obscure Trump University lawsuit. He called Indiana-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel “Mexican” and “a hater of Donald Trump,” adding that “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself.”

And so at the low point so far in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, Mr. Trump redirected the media’s pitiless glare away from her and back to him.

Politically, this is madness. But I think it is worth distinguishing between two Trump personas: the mad Trump and the MAD Trump…”

Again, in accordance with Occam’s Razor (i.e., all things being equal, the simplest answer is most often correct), it’s our opinion Trump is as crazy as a…

Hey, only time will tell; but we’re running out of time!

Next up, yet another reason we’ll NEVER contribute to a national Republican organization:

“Conservative” GOP Senator Caves on Bathroom Bill

“So, Senator Reid, you’re giving me a choice: drive this pencil through my head or surrender North Carolinians right to shower in peace and privacy.”

“…It’s now time for the city of Charlotte officials to recognize that they made a mistake,” Burr told ABC 11 in Raleigh. “It’s now time for the General Assembly to take the opportunity that if we can roll this back, that it’s probably in best interests of North Carolina,” Burr said.

“There didn’t seem to be a problem before. Charlotte created the problem and the General Assembly further created a problem,” he said.

“Further created a problem“?!? Here’s to you, Senator Richard Burr…