On November 13, 2016,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Friday, November 11th, Veteran’s Day 2016…but before we carry on with our post-election gloating…
…er,…celebrating…remember Gerald Daugherty?
He won; and Charlyn Daugherty thanks you! By the way, given the results of The Daily Gouge‘s last election poll immediately to the right, 60% of respondents, including yours truly, predicted what was coming!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, a compendium of some of our favorite election memes, courtesy of, in no particular order, Shannon Wood, Balls Cotton, Stilton Jarlsberg, Chris Muir and James Patrick Crilley:
Oh,…and as Balls Cotton informed us, there’s a 757 available…
…as well as a broom…
…the latter thankfully, blessedly, in perpetuity!
Continuing our post-election coverage, though we remain ecstatic the Clintons are finally kaput, The Donald continues to temper what little elation we felt on the occasion of his election:
With regard to…what: everything NOT to do as President?!? Couple this with Trump’s immediate call for untold billions of unavailable dollars to be spent on infrastructure improvements (can you say “Stimulus II”?!?), and we’re compelled to express cause for concern.
Sure, he needs to make nice; but words matter, particularly to the people who just elected The Donald, many having held their noses to do so. Had Trump voiced similar praise for Barry Obama at any point in his campaign, he’d be negotiating his next reality show rather than planning the occupation of the Oval Office.
Besides, having been in sales most of our adult life, we know those with a flair for words can tell someone to go to Hell in such a way they look forward to the trip. And if there’s ever been a President more deserving of such a message than Obama, we can’t recall him.
All of which makes the answer to Gary Varvel’s rhetorical question not “no”, but…
…HELL NO!!! As it should be. Has anyone else noted The Left only invokes the spirit of cooperation after they’ve had their electoral asses handed to them? Seriously, when did bipartisanship play a role in the passage of Obamacare….gay marriage…the Iran deal…the dizzyingly high level of national debt…forcing children into transgendered bathrooms…etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam?!?
A number of Conservative pundits and publications are urging Trump to make nice now that the campaign is over. Problem is, Progressives never stop campaigning; they’re on the stump 24/7, 365 days a year; and their sole focus is to upend everything we hold dear.
To borrow a phrase from The Terminator: “Listen, and understand! The Liberals are out there! They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop…ever, until every vestige of Conservatism and the Founder’s Republic is dead!”
The sooner Republicans realize this the better…though after 8 years of The Dear Misleader, you’d think they’d have the lesson burned in their hearts.
Meanwhile, The Obamas continue to demonstrate their command of just one thing:
“The Obamas canceled a photo-op of the current and future first couples outside the south entrance of the White House. In his first visit to the White House after the 2008 election, Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle Obama posed for the cameras alongside President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush.The decision not to participate in this tradition illustrates how bitter the campaign was, particularly for Mrs. Obama who delivered some of the most emotional arguments against electing Mr. Trump.“
complete and utter classlessness! Only yesterday, as Bill Meisen observed, “Obama recalled how gracious and welcoming Laura and George W. were to Michelle and him during their first visit to White House. It took less than 24 hours for their kindness to slip his mind.”
…with any comparable reaction by the GOP following an election won by a Dimocrat. Don’t strain your brain; there ain’t any! As long-time reader and friend Jeff Foutch noted, we must have missed the Republican riots following Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.
In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the folks who warned us about riots in the streets following a Trump defeat are engaged in an orgy of urban arson and destruction, requiring, for the first time in history, a lame duck President to plead for calm…
Then there’s Lily , a total and absolute nincompoop who publicly professes The Donald’s election calls for killing, while failing to comprehend a couple prominent problems…
…with the position she espouses. First, the folks Lily marks for murder are the ones with the guns, many of who would be only too happy for Lily and her comrades to bring on the revolution!
Second, what could possibly lead this fat, pampered Hispanic princess to believe she knows the first thing about…
…let alone the reality of…
Perhaps because, like the author of our next item, Lily’s been spoon-fed (which, given her girth, required a very large spoon!) diet of Dimocratic disinformation, and hasn’t the faintest clue regarding reality.
Hence the latest from Maureen Dowd, who, though she recognizes the historical nature of what just happened, still cannot bring herself to admit the unrivaled unsuitability of her candidate was the primary force behind it:
Lifelong Liberals like Dowd couldn’t see the ominously darkening forest for the trees!
“I sat watching in astonishment. The one who couldn’t bear to show up to concede was not, as expected, Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton.
I thought the hard-core support for Trump had dwindled down to a hardy band of loyalists: Rudy, Newt, Chris, Sarah, Kellyanne, Omarosa, the kids, Melania — the woman who told him “If you run, you’ll win” — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon, Hope Hicks, David Bossie, Alex Jones, Bill Mitchell, Mike Pence and my brother, Kevin.
The Republican establishment couldn’t stand Trump. The Democratic establishment mocked him. The Republican nominee didn’t even really seem to have much of a campaign. He spent more on “Make America Great” hats than on polling.When I visited his campaign headquarters this summer, there were more pictures, paintings and cardboard cutouts of Trump around than Trump advisers. If you don’t count Newt Gingrich — and I don’t — only one major political historian, Allan Lichtman, had predicted that Trump would win.
But then the impossible happened. As Salena Zito had presciently written in The Atlantic: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally…”
Like the rest of the MSM, and the perhaps apocryphal tale of Pauline Kael before her, Dowd couldn’t contemplate even the most obscure circumstance under which Trump might be elected; but her Conservative brother Kevin could…and knew why it happened:
”When the Apocalypse came at midnight and the TV analysts — even on Fox — were scrambling to reverse their analyses and justify their bad polling data; and the stock exchanges had to temporarily halt the futures market because it was falling too fast, and the world was spinning off its axis, I called my conservative brother to see what the heck was going on.
“As flawed a candidate as Trump was, he had his finger on the pulse,” Kevin said. “The polls were off because nobody wanted to admit that they were going to vote for him. But it’s a populist revolt and a lot of people believed in Trump’s message: too much regulation, too much government. The whole thing is a bunch of guys getting rich on Capitol Hill and not paying attention to the people who elected them. They stay in Congress a couple years, then move on to K Street and call on the same people who replaced them.”
…“Hillary was the status quo and one of the most flawed candidates in history,” he said. “This is a complete repudiation of President Obama, the man who pushed Hillary and deemed Trump a clown.”
It is unthinkable to imagine the most overtly racist candidate — and head of the offensive birther movement — driving in the limousine to the inauguration with the first African-American president. What would they discuss? How Trump plans to repeal Obamacare? How Trump will appoint Supreme Court justices that will transform America into a drastically more conservative landscape over the next 20 years? How Trump plans to undo the Iran deal? When will Trump begin deporting Hispanics? When will Attorney General Rudy Giuliani pardon Chris Christie and put Hillary in jail?
Hillary’s closing line in the campaign was that she was the only thing standing between her and the abyss. But to my conservative family, Hillary was the abyss while Donald was the baseball bat to smash Washington.
“She is a weak campaigner with a documented history of unsavory dealings,” Kevin wrote in an essay for my new book, “The Year of Voting Dangerously.” “She is declared unlikable by 55 percent of the electorate and untrustworthy by 67 percent. … When the director of the F.B.I. laid bare her gross negligence for arrogantly setting up her own email system while secretary of state and announced there would be no prosecution, you could hear the heavens thunder for justice. Not since O.J. Simpson had someone so obviously guilty by the facts, walked away. A separate investigation tying Clinton Foundation contributions to speeches made by Bill adds to the pungent aroma of shiftiness and entitlement that routinely hovers above them.Bill only adds to it with his surprise thirty-minute visit to the attorney general on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, a stunt even a first-year law student knows is verboten. The D.N.C. thought it was lining her up with a weak sparring partner she could destroy, marching into Philadelphia with momentum and money for the general campaign.Whoops.”
When Trump beat 16 seasoned pols in the Republican primary, Kevin wrote, that should have sent a clear message that the public was fed up with political insiders, including Hillary, who “has been in the public eye for 25 years,” with an image “cast in concrete.”
...“The Clintons remind me of the Universal horror movies where you thought the monster was dead and then the monster would show up in a bad sequel. I’m glad now that they’re finally gone.”
As is almost everyone in the country…at least those who are honest about it! So,…
In a related item detailing the cognitive dissonance of Dimocrats, James Taranto details how…
Many in the media are kicking themselves, and deservedly so, over the way their organizations covered the campaign—though not all are especially clear-eyed about what went wrong. “To put it bluntly, the media missed the story,” writes Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post:
Trump, quite apparently, captured the anger that Americans were feeling about issues such as trade and immigration.
And although many journalists and many news organizations did stories about the frustration and disenfranchisement of these Americans, we did not take them seriously enough.
And although we journalists try to portray ourselves as cynical sometimes, or hard-bitten, we can also be idealistic, even naive.
We wanted to believe in a country where decency and civility still mattered, and where someone so crude, spiteful and intemperate could never be elected—because America was better than that.
I can fault journalists for a lot of things, but I can’t fault us for that.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not just that journalists were naive or even ignorant, it’s that their work was suffused with hostility, even bigotry. Another way of putting Sullivan’s “America was better than that” is “wewere better than them.”
Which is the mindset occupying the very heart of Progressivism.
“…Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton’s phony-baloney “Stronger Together” campaign? After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on Election Eve: “I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became.” Note the classic textbook employment of the passive voice to evade personal responsibility.
The good news is that after being blasted as haters by Clinton’s hate-filled minions, after being slapped down as racial “cowards” by Clintonite holdover Eric Holder, after being lambasted as “xenophobes” and “nativists” by immigration expansionists in both parties, after enduring a string of faked hate crimes blamed on conservatives, after ceaseless accusations of “Islamophobia” in the wake of jihad attacks on American soil, after baseless accusations of “homophobia” for protesting the government’s gay-wedding-cake coercion, and after mourning a growing list of police officers ambushed and targeted by violent thugs seeking racial vengeance, an undeniable movement of citizens in the 2016 election cycle decided to push back.
When all is said and done, one of the most important cultural accomplishments of Donald Trump’s bid will be the platform he created for Americans of all colors, ethnicities, political affiliations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to defy soul-draining identity politics.
Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters, who are rightly sick and tired of social-justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American people against political correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes. And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women, and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.
The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers. “Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week.He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator,” declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.
“The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.” Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color, or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.
“No matter what happens in this election,” Thiel concluded last week, “what Trump represents isn’t crazy and it’s not going away.”…”
More importantly, one shouldn’t have to be diverse to count! In other words, White Lives…along with any other lives on the planet…Matter!
Moving on, courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson poses the question, the answer to which inquiring minds truly want to know, as he wonders…
What Now, Mr. President?
The GOP must encourage Trump’s good instincts, discourage his bad ones, and hope for the best.
“…What kind of president will Donald Trump be? There is reason to be cautious — extraordinarily cautious — in any optimism. But conservatives should make the most out of the opportunity.
The first and most important thing to do is to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that Trump sticks by the promise he made — his record on keeping his word is not very good — on his list of Supreme Court nominees under consideration.If a Trump presidency means ensuring a generation of decent constitutional jurisprudence on the First and Second Amendments, then that will be worth a great deal in the way of tradeoffs. (Nominating Ted Cruz to replace Scalia would be a great start!)
What tradeoffs? Conservatives should meet Trump on his own ground on the question of immigration, especially illegal immigration. (Which is really the only aspect of “immigration” about which Americans care!)His proposals on the question have been fantastical — making Mexico pay for a wall and all that — but his insistence that this be addressed rather than being kept eternally on the national back burner is appropriate. There are reasonable steps on immigration that can be taken, an enforcement-first approach that secures the borders (and the airports and the visa system) and focuses on workplace enforcement before moving on to broader reform questions, such as replacing the reunification-oriented chain-immigration system with one based on economic criteria.
…There is not much to celebrate in the elevation of Donald Trump, but there is much to celebrate in the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some time back, I described the Clintons as the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics; it turns out that there is a treatment after all, though it may remind us of some of the more exotic and unpleasant treatments that were relied upon in the time before antibiotics. Mrs. Clinton is an unusually unlikeable figure, having as she does the same sliminess and slipperiness as her husband but none of his facile charm and nearly flawless political instincts. She is also wrong about some fundamental things: what the Constitution means and how the Supreme Court should interpret it, abortion, gun rights, crime, education, taxes, the economy.
It is a myth that the Chinese word for “crisis” is a combination of the words for “danger” and “opportunity.” But this moment does present us with both dangers and opportunities. We may very well end up with a reliably constitutionalist Supreme Court for the first time in my lifetime, a reformed corporate-tax code, a sensible immigration system, and a more cautious foreign policy. Or we may end up with a series of stupid and destructive trade wars and a president sidelined by personal and business scandals that have not yet come entirely to light. (The president-elect is, among other things, being sued for fraud in the matter of Trump University, an enterprise for which the adjective “sketchy” would be generous.) We almost certainly will end up with an even more distorted and aggrandized presidency.
As has been the case for years, the most thankless task will fall to congressional Republicans, and to the Republican governors and state legislators who do important real-world work that is rarely noticed in the national conversation.
One of those thankless tasks will be learning to manage a Republican president who may be tempted to stray off course a bit in the pursuit of overly grand ideas. But that’s something that congressional Republicans would have done well to learn 16 years ago. So, here we go.“
We for one believe Williamson makes too much of Trump’s purported tendency towards despotism…particularly in light of the reality of The Obamao’s last 8 years, not to mention what Hillary had in mind. But his question stands.
It’s our studied opinion the future of the Trump Administration will be determined when his true colors are revealed: between now and the first 100 days following his inauguration. From where we sit, the jury is still out.
Meanwhile, south of the border, the AP “reports”…
Stunned Mexico Ponders New Relationship with U.S.
“Hours after the United States elected Donald Trump to be its next president, Mexico began carefully laying the groundwork for a relationship with a new leader who campaigned against its citizens and threatened to wreak havoc with its economy…”
No; Trump campaigned against the repeated and uncontrolled illegal entry of Mexican citizens into the United States as sanctioned by the kleptocratic Mexican government! Which not only wasn’t a campaign against Mexican citizens, but a legitimate defense of his nation’s borders and sovereignty.
Back in Washington, as the WSJ relates, the U.S. equivalent of all ten plagues of Egypt finalizes his mark on America:
“Congratulations to the President-elect, whoever you are, because you’re going to need it.Our deadline arrived Tuesday before we knew the election outcome, but not before we can say with confidence that President Obama is leaving his successor a large and growing federal budget problem.
That’s the message in the Congressional Budget Office’s summary, released Monday, of the fiscal year that closed in September. Though the subject barely came up in the campaign—little policy substance did—the federal fisc is once again heading for trouble. There are some lessons in this for the next President, who will quickly realize that Mr. Obama’s fiscal luck has finally run out—on his successor’s watch.
One lesson is that the days of easy deficit reduction are over.The annual deficit in 2016 rose for the first time in three years—by $148 billion to $587 billion. That’s 3.2% of GDP, up sharply from 2.5% last year. Mr. Obama has been able to ride falling defense spending from reduced military deployments overseas, but Pentagon outlays were flat in 2016. Military spending will probably have to increase in future years, no matter who wins Tuesday, to meet the growing challenges from Russia, China and Iran.
Mr. Obama will also leave town having failed over eight years to do anything to slow the booming burden of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.Outlays for those three programs grew by $75 billion last year, or about 4.2%. They now account for 10% of the entire U.S. economy, the highest level ever, and rising.
The President’s main contribution has been to put Medicaid on hyperspeed by expanding its coverage through ObamaCare. CBO’s budget gnomes report that Medicaid spending has climbed by nearly 40% in a mere three years—to $368 billion in 2016. That doesn’t include what the states are obliged to chip in.
…He has been the ultimate free-lunch politician, handing out new entitlements, exploiting the post-crisis era of low rates to grow the debt, and passing the bucks to the grandkids.
Mr. Obama once quipped in a meeting with Senators, only half seriously, that he couldn’t fix entitlements on his watch because he had to leave something for his successors. Too bad he’s done nothing except make the problem worse.It’s all yours, President-elect.“
Sorry; nothing in history suggests Trump should treat Obama…assuming Trump meant what he saidthroughout his campaign…like anything other than the cancer upon the body politic he truly is.
Finally, on The Lighter Side…
And remember…
Thank ’em if you see ’em!
We trust you enjoy the weekend as much we hope to; for it will take at least that long for us to wipe the sh*t-eatin’ grin off our face!
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