It’s Wednesday, October 26th, 2016…but before we begin, a couple more reasons we believe NeverTrumpers can’t see the forest for the trees…or to be accurate, the rampant corruption for their understandable distaste for The Donald.  First, Exhibit “A” via FOX News:

State Department aide pleads the Fifth more than 90 times

“A former State Department IT aide invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer more than 90 questions Monday during the final deposition in a lawsuit over Hillary Clinton’s private emails. John Bentel, former Director of Information Resource Management of the executive secretariat, would not answer questions about whether the Clintons had paid his legal fees or offered him financial incentives, according to Judicial Watch, the conservative-leaning group that brought the suit.

A federal judge in August ordered Bentel to testify under oath because “the record in this case appears to contradict his sworn testimony before the Benghazi Committee.” Bentel told the House Select Committee on Benghazi in June 2015 that he had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email server…”

Then there’s Exhibit “B”, as the WSJ reports…

Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife

Group linked to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe donated nearly half a million dollars to 2015 state Senate candidate

“…Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.

The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort.

…The governor could recall only one meeting with Mr. McCabe—when he and other state Democrats met with the couple on March 7, 2015, to urge Dr. McCabe to run, according to the spokesman.

…Mr. McCabe’s supervision of the Clinton email case in 2016 wasn’t seen as a conflict or an ethics issue because his wife’s campaign was over by then and Mr. McAuliffe wasn’t part of the email probe, officials said.

…Dr. McCabe announced her candidacy in March 2015, (at the urging of Terry McAuliffe!) the same month it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton had used a private server as secretary of state to send and receive government emails, a disclosure that prompted the FBI investigation.

At the time the investigation was launched in July 2015, Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, which provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email probe.“

As Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson notes:

“Hmm.  So Hillary’s email scheme was revealed by the Times, then a few days later, McAuliffe importunes an FBI honcho’s wife to run for a contested Virginia Senate seat, then sees to it that she receives well over a half-a-million dollars in payments from his PAC and the Democratic Party.  Months later, the candidate’s husband was “part of the executive leadership team overseeing the Clinton email investigation.”  It does sound suspicious.“

Nothing to see here, folks…move along.  We don’t believe in coincidence, particularly when it involves the Clintons…any more than we believe Vince Foster’s body moved itself…

…after his suicide!

By the way, as this meme from our sister-in-law Amy so eloquently observes, make no mistake about it:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the mid-week edition with the latest installment of the Educated Idiots segment, brought to us today by these ignorant MSM myrmidons who obviously only catch the news on their own network:

In all seriousness, it’s like these feckless fools have been abiding in another dimension during Obamacare’s predictable descent into dissolution.  As Keith Koffler notes, Norah “The premiums are skyrocketing!” O’Donnell “sounds like she just found out Martians had landed and opened up a chain of delicatessens.”

So what’s the CNN solution?  Mo‘ money, mo‘ money, MO‘ money…

…YO‘ money!  Although how this bimbette believes the millions of unemployed Millennials and Generation Z’ers living in their parents’ basements can afford Obamacare’s soaring insurance premiums, let alone her arbitrarily increased penalty, is beyond us!  Then again, Progressives never have to make sense, they need only emote!

Next up, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson offers…

Some Advice for President Clinton

Elevating the gun debate from culture war to real reform

“…There is not much to like about you. You are intellectually and morally stunted, a creature of pure politics who has never had a single interesting or original idea. You are deeply corrupt yourself and a source of corruption in others. The republic truly deserves better than you. You don’t just do discredit to your party and your country, but to your species. Unhappily for us, better wasn’t on the menu, only different varieties of horror.

…Let us begin with the basics: The United States of America may be a beacon of liberty and prosperity to the world, but it is also a horrifyingly violent society. Firearms are not the live variable in this: We are off the charts when it comes to stabbings, beating people to death, strangulations, homicidal drownings, any kind of murder you can think of. We also have very high rates of deaths from drugs and alcohol, motor-vehicle mishaps, accidents, and the like. The question of why, exactly, that is the case is a matter of intense scholarly interest, and there is, so far, no conclusive answer. But any discussion of homicide in the United States, whether it is of the Chicago street-corner-gangster variety or the lonely-misfit-shoots-up-the-school variety, must begin with the knowledge that we are an unusually violent and unruly people, and have been for a long time. The Swiss keep the prime criminal demographic, young men, armed to the teeth, not with what your friends like to call “military-style” weapons but with actual military weapons, and they have fewer murders in a year than Chicago has on a bad Saturday night. The issue is the character of the people, not the state of gun laws.

…But that is not to say that there is not room for improvement when it comes to the intersection of guns, crime, and violence. And that’s where you could, if you were so inclined, proceed in a way that not only wouldn’t antagonize Second Amendment partisans such as myself but would in fact invite our cooperation.

The first thing you should do is have a conference call with your U.S. attorneys and insist that they either start prosecuting straw-buyer cases or start putting their personal possessions into shoeboxes and scooting their lazy asses out the door. We have, at the federal level, robust laws for the prosecution of “straw buyers,” people who have clean criminal records and act as proxies for felons and others unable to legally purchase guns. Straw purchases are not the only or even the main way by which firearms find their way into the hands of those forbidden to possess them, but they aren’t a negligible one, either. Unfortunately, many federal prosecutors (including the one responsible for Chicago) as a matter of openly stated policy refuse to prosecute these cases unless there is a sexier angle to the case, such as a shot at a major trafficking ring or an opportunity for a headline-grabbing organized-crime prosecution.

…In New York City, which you once pretended to represent as senator, the vast majority of murders — more than 90 percent by the New York Times’s count — are committed by people with prior criminal histories. Kathryn Steinle, the young murder victim upon whose corpse Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, was murdered by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions. There is no excuse for such a man to be anywhere other than a prison cell. But what this all implies is not only the need for a more serious approach to violent crime short of murder but also wide and deep reform to our probation and parole systems. Mental-health reform also will need to be a part of the program — another topic upon which you could, if you desired, offer policy solutions that would be supported by many conservatives, from former Texas governor Rick Perry to the editors of National Review.

You know the problems you will face from my people. But the real problem you face in pursuing what we might call “common-sense” reforms come from your people. For your people, the question of the Second Amendment and access to legal firearms is pure culture war. So-called assault rifles are so seldom used in crimes that the federal government does not even bother keeping track of the figures. (All long guns — which is to say, all rifles and shotguns combined — account for the instrument of death in about 2 percent of our homicides.) It is for this reason that Democrats’ gun-control offerings have been targeted almost exclusively at law-abiding gun owners and federally regulated and licensed firearms dealers, two groups of people who, statistically speaking, commit essentially no crime at all. That they are disproportionately white, male, and conservative-leaning makes them attractive targets for the kulturkampf Left, and that they have fixed business addresses, regular hours of operation, and copious business records makes them attractive targets for law-enforcement officials, who are no more inclined toward hard work than are the functionaries of any other government agency. But leaning on them will serve only to inflame partisan passions and genuine constitutional concerns. It will do nothing at all to make our cities or schools safer.

That being the case, you should proceed with these assumptions: The Second Amendment does indeed, as the Supreme Court has decisively ruled, protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, including all of the arms that it currently is legal for civilians to keep and bear; the obsession with such armory exotica as fully automatic weapons (one legally owned by a civilian has not been used in a murder in modern history) or accessories such as sound suppressors and folding stocks does not actually contribute to public safety; the approach to reform that relies on harassing and restricting federally licensed dealers and their law-abiding customers rather than prosecuting criminals is intended mainly to humiliate hated cultural and political rivals in the service of culture war and will produce nothing but conflict and litigation; the situations in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore, and in cases such as that of Adam Lanza, represent institutional failures, both of law-enforcement agencies and mental-health authorities, the reform of which must be central to any serious effort at crime reduction.

We conservatives do not like you, Madam President, and we are not going to learn to like you. But many of us would in fact prefer to work with you on useful and productive measures than to be obliged to work against you on stupid and destructive ones. There will be plenty of time for the latter, I am sure, but if you are serious about the violence in our society, there is an opportunity for you to do something good — and a smart president would seize that opportunity.“

Which means Hillary won’t give it a second of consideration!

Since we’re on the subject of candidates who won’t heed sage advice, also courtesy of NRO, as Rich Lowry accurately asserts, in the event of a Donald disaster…

Don’t Blame Never Trump

Never Trumpers did not force the Donald to self-destruct.

Holy rode-hard-and-put-away-wet, Batman!

No one can accuse Kellyanne Conway of complacency. She is already preparing for post-election recriminations.

Donald Trump’s campaign manager has recently cited Hillary Clinton’s financial advantage, media bias, and President Barack Obama’s popularity as reasons Trump should be losing to Clinton even more badly. She also floated the stabbed-in-the-back thesis: “We have the Never Trumpers,” she said in a MSNBC interview, “who are costing us 4 or 5 percent in places.”

No one can doubt that Trump is at a financial disadvantage (which is why he either should have spent more of his purported $10 billion on his campaign, or built a serious fundraising operation); that the media hate him (it also hated Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who won four presidential elections between them); or that Obama is popular (alas). (An assertion we frankly don’t believe as it applies to those whose support Trump needs.)

It is the claim about Never Trump that is risible, and will set the stage for the initial hostilities in the impending post-election Republican Civil War.

The Trump forces have never gotten their story straight about Never Trump. At times, the GOP’s internal opposition is supposed to be irrelevant; at other times, it is invested with more sinister significance than the Doctors’ Plot at the height of Josef Stalin’s paranoia. Which is it?

It was never right to call Never Trump a movement; it is a motley collection of conservative commentators, political professionals, policy experts, and a handful of politicians who had the (not particularly stunning) foresight to see that Trump would be the weakest and most vulnerable of the Republican general-election candidates and the (not particularly acute) discernment to recognize in him qualities unsuited to the presidency.

The arguments between Never Trump and its critics are fascinating and important, but it is fantastical to consider them electorally decisive in a contest with some 130 million voters.

Prior to the first debate, Trump had more uniform party support than Hillary Clinton in some polls. Gallup shows Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans has been steadily falling since. He was at 72 percent favorable and 26 percent unfavorable in late September. Now, he’s at 63-34.

This is unsurprising, given his jaw-droppingly self-destructive past month. Never Trumpers didn’t advise Trump not to prepare for the first debate; they didn’t tell him to attack Alicia Machado and tweet foolish things in the middle of the night; they didn’t sanction him saying lewd things on tape, or allegedly groping women; they didn’t recommend charging the election is “rigged.”

All of that is on the campaign, and especially the candidate. For more than a year, Trump has had the biggest megaphone on the planet. His performance has mattered more than what any columnist or blogger says about him.

And Trump has damaged himself, especially among voters already leery of him. Data from NBC News has Clinton leading by 26 points in the inner suburbs, 10 points better than Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in these areas.

To think this is the work of Never Trump, you have to imagine moderate suburban women intensely following the intraconservative debate over Trump and changing their allegiances based on the latest Twitter flame war. Anyone who believes this has probably never been to a kid’s soccer practice.

If Trump thought he needed any of his conservative critics or reluctant endorsers, he could have actively sought to allay their concerns and conduct himself and his campaign more rationally. But the fundamental conceit of his campaign was that he could do it his own way, and win. With the exception of the month prior to the first debate, he has indeed done it his own way, and is losing.

Should Trump come up short against a desperately flawed Hillary Clinton, it will be his failure and his alone. So if Kellyanne Conway is preparing for the blame game, the first thing she should do is direct the candidate’s attention to what is surely one of his favorite household accoutrements: the mirror.

In other words…

Though, at the risk of repetitive writing, we must note Trump would never had been in a position to drag the country into ruin were it not for the tireless efforts of his unabashed allies, including but not limited to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Newt Gingrich, Matt Drudge and Breitbart.com…

As for those whose manifest lack of judgement led them to back Trump when a host of genuine Conservatives where still in the running, they’re simply proof P.T. Barnum was right.

Moving on, writing at the WSJ, Heather Mac Donald once again exposes one of the foulest officially-sanctioned fables ever foisted upon the American people…at least since Obamacare:

The Myth of the Racist Cop

Four studies out this year show that if police are biased, it’s in favor of blacks.

“…But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.

Officers are second-guessing their own justified use of force for fear of being labeled racist and losing their jobs, if not their freedom. On Oct. 5 a female officer in Chicago was beaten unconscious by a suspect in a car crash, who repeatedly bashed her face into the concrete and tore out chunks of her hair. She refrained from using her gun, she said, because she didn’t want to become the next viral video in the Black Lives Matter narrative.

The Chicago Police Department now wants to institutionalize such dangerous second-guessing. Its proposed guidelines for using force would require cops to consider the “impact that even a reasonable use of force may have on those who observe” it.

A Los Angeles police officer recently described to me his current thought process in deciding whether to intervene in suspicious or criminal behavior. A man high on meth was violently accosting pedestrians around a Santa Monica bike path. The cops were “very hesitant to arrest,” the officer said, because “we knew we would be on YouTube before we could get back to the station.” That reluctance to make contact intensifies when the suspect is black, he added.

We are at a crucial juncture on law and order. Police officers unquestionably need more hands-on tactical training that will help them make split-second shoot-don’t shoot decisions. Some officers develop obnoxious attitudes toward civilians that must be eradicated. But as Mr. Comey said in San Diego, “Police officers are overwhelmingly good people . . . who took exhausting, dangerous jobs because they want to help people.”

No government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police. If the next administration continues to disregard that truth in favor of a false narrative about systemic law-enforcement racism, the next four years will see more urban violence and race riots, and more dead cops.“

And frankly, our concern is for the cops!

Here’s the juice:

Of all the crimes this Islamofascist would-be dictator has committed against the country, all the plagues he’s visited upon us…which are legion…this completely concocted anti-police narrative ranks among the worst.

In a related item, FOX News records how a…

Group says New Jersey high school’s police event sends ‘frightening message‘

“A New Jersey high school has come under fire after holding a ceremony honoring law enforcement, military and first responders before a football game Friday night.

According to NJ.com, the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union called the ceremony that was held in Middletown before a highly-anticipated game between Middletown High School South and Toms River High School North a “frightening message.”

Middletown police Deputy Chief Stephen Dollinger organized the event. It featured State Police Pipes and Drums of the Blue and Gold, state and local mounted units, personnel from all of the branches of the military and officers from several local offices. It also honored a Linden police officer who was wounded in a shootout with Ahmad Khan Rahimi, who is accused of planting IEDs in Seaside Park, Elizabeth and New York City.

…”As initially described, the event appeared to honor police officers, veterans, service members, and first responders,” the ACLU wrote in the letter. “According to press reports, however, the event is being used to intimidate and ostracize people who express their views about systemic racism and social justice.”

“Law enforcement officers are sworn to protect the constitution, and it is a disservice to the students and players that an event that should focus on them, their families, and their communities is being used to send a message that people who express concerns about disparities in the criminal justice system are unwelcome, disloyal or unpatriotic.”

One ACLU organizer, Jasmine Crenshaw…

…believes the event sent a “frightening message” that police wouldn’t tolerate people expressing views on the nation’s “history of unequal treatment and systematic oppression.”…”

Submitted for your perusal, what the benighted Ms. Crenshaw and the ACLU define as a “frightening message“:

 Terrifying, ain’t it?!?

On The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with this last brilliant bon mot from Hope ‘n Change we’ve retitled “Dreams of My Father’s”:

We’re down with Barack Sr. on that one!

Magoo