It’s Wednesday, December 14th, 2016…but before we begin, in a video forwarded by Jimmy Crilley, the WaPo‘s Jennifer Rubin makes an utter ass out of herself:

Who knew the Joker’s sister followed politics?!?

Which got us thinking: why not go with Rubin’s partisan depiction of Trump’s picks as a collection of “ignoramuses, billionaires, and a few generals”…and follow its illogic to its logical conclusion.

First, since neither Nikki Haley nor Ben Carson are billionaires or generals, deductive reasoning dictates they’re ignoramuses.

Ben Carson’s a lot of things, but as the former Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, we’re relatively certain “ignoramus” ain’t one of ’em.  And while running a surgery unit may not have prepared him to lead Operation Overlord, it sure as hell provided him significantly more management experience than Robert Reich brought to the table when the undersized Socialist came on board as Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor; i.e., zip, zero, nada.

As for Haley’s purported lack of foreign policy expertise, we cannot recall Rubin expressing similar concern when The Obamao appointed Samantha Power to represent the U.S. at the UN.  After all, it’s not like Power’s resume screamed foreign policy expertise.  In fact, other than a number of meaningless appointments to meaningless committees, the only thing we can find which recommended Power for the job was her marriage to Cass Sunstein…and a dedicated devotion to The Dear Misleader’s Islamofascist agenda…including her unswerving support for his Libyan debacle.

But ultimately, why restrict our rebuttal of Rubin’s rank hypocrisy to mere cabinet appointments: based on her hiring standards, what on earth could possibly have recommended Barry Soetoro for the job he’s occupied for the last eight years?

That would be…

…absolutely nothing at all.  Case closed.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, a quick bit of that was then/this is now, courtesy of the…

…at least in Arizona!

“Putin is a thug and a murderer, and I don’t see how anybody could be a friend of this old-time KGB agent.” – John McCain responding to reports of prospective Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson’s purported friendship with Vladmir Putin.

“He was good company, my friend Ted.” – John McCain eulogizing Teddy Kennedy

Mary Jo Kopechne might disagree; unfortunately…

…she’s unavailable for comment.

Which brings us to today’s installment of The Progressive Pot Calling The Liberal Kettle Black segment, courtesy of George Lawlor, as The New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof belatedly recognizes…

The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campus

“After Donald Trump’s election, some universities echoed with primal howls. Faculty members canceled classes for weeping, terrified students who asked: How could this possibly be happening?

I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans. (Can Kristof truly believe students today are encountering either?!?

We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.

We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.

I fear that liberal outrage at Trump’s presidency will exacerbate the problem of liberal echo chambers, by creating a more hostile environment for conservatives and evangelicals. Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.

…Some of you are saying that it’s O.K. to be intolerant of intolerance, to discriminate against bigots who acquiesce in Trump’s record of racism and misogyny. By all means, stand up to the bigots. But do we really want to caricature half of Americans, some of whom voted for President Obama twice, as racist bigots? Maybe if we knew more Trump voters we’d be less inclined to stereotype them…”

On the other hand, after many hours spent perusing the prating, Progressive poppycock penned by Kristof, Dowd, Dionne and others whose feelings overrule any facts, we don’t need to know any more Liberals in order to form a homogenized assessment of their intentions; through their hopeless hypocrisy, they’ve stereotyped themselves.

Case in point, as NRO‘s Charles W. Cooke relates how…

Democrats Finally Wake Up to the Dangers of Illiberalism

Their concerns are welcome, but one wonders where they’ve been the past eight years.

“By a remarkable coincidence, on the same day that Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States, the progressive Left discovered a distaste for illiberalism. Writing on behalf of the “many scholars/journalists who study illiberal/authoritarian regimes” — all of whom are “deeply alarmed about [the] US right now” — Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan announced via Twitter that the twelve days since the 2016 election had been the “most alarming” of his “professional life.” The United States, Nyhan explained, was close to seeing a total collapse of the “norms of our democracy,” in part because “our institutions/elites keep accommodating illiberal behavior.” “Should democracy fail,” he warned, “there will be no one moment,” but rather a “slow descent into illiberalism.”

A “slow descent” that began on November 9, 2016, mind you. A “slow descent” that came ex nihilo. A “slow descent” that followed a perfectly flat plane, and for which the president-elect’s predecessor bears no responsibility. Intrigued, I asked Nyhan whether he would consider recent trends toward judicial imperialism, executive overreach, and the abandonment of due process as undermining the “norms of our democracy” – and, in concert, whether as a college professor in 2016 he might have any insight into which “institutions” or “elites” have been most aggressively “accommodating illiberal behavior.” His response? The problems to which I was pointing were “not the same thing.” “This is not an NRO culture-war thing,” Nyhan griped.

It seems that “tyrannize” is one of those irregular verbs: I engage in the culture war; you undermine democratic norms; he’s ushering in Nazi Germany. It is uncontroversial to observe that Donald Trump was a poor choice for the head of a free republic, and I will gladly add my name to those who hope, as Burke put it, to “snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” But I cannot help noticing how silly and how capricious our newfangled doomsayers sound. How quickly did those who have cried “Obstructionism!” for eight years expect to be welcomed as bulwarks of Madison’s Constitution? How seriously did the purveyors of “privilege” imagine they would be taken when they abandoned overnight the claim that neutral principles are but a tool of the ruling class? In what manner did those who praised Obama’s “pen and phone” believe they would be received when the shoe was on the other foot? And, if excesses in pursuit of one’s goal are criticized only as part of a mere “culture-war thing,” why should anyone worry about Trump?

Where, one must ask, have the social scientists been during the overture to our “slow descent into illiberalism”? For almost all of Barack Obama’s presidency, the system of checks and balances that undergirds the unique American order has been treated by progressives as if it were an outdated relic…”

And now, having done their very best for the last eight years to destroy the Founders’ Republic in direct contravention of the Constitution, Progressives cry out for Conservatives to play by the very rules they repeatedly broke.

Yeah,…

Speaking of deliberate Dimocratic duplicity, also courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson correctly identifies The Left’s latest shiboleth:

Mandatory Nonsense

There are no election ‘mandates,’ only winners and losers

The efforts of The Left and their MSM to the contrary notwithstanding, no one with half clue thinks anybody but Obama…

…needs a “Man-date!

“The Washington Post is beside itself: “Nearly a third of Republicans don’t know that Trump lost the popular vote.” How about that?

There are all sorts of irrelevant things that Republicans — and voters in general — do not know. About 80 percent of voters do not know how many senators there are, which also means that they do not quite know what the Senate does. I’ll wager that large majorities of them do not know what political party Narendra Modi belongs to or which country’s capital is Bishkek. Most people don’t know how to field dress a javelina or identify poison oak, what the corpus callosum does, or how Infinite Jest ends.

They do not know these things because — pay attention here — they do not matter.

Not to the people who don’t know about them, anyway. In economics and political theory, this is called “rational ignorance.” Most people don’t know anything about most subjects, which is exactly how it should be: The world is far too complicated for most of us to have anything more than a superficial familiarity with most subjects. And many people, such as Joe Biden, never develop expertise in any of them. Biden always gives me the feeling that his real aim in life is acquiring the world’s coolest model-railroad set — he is famous for his love of trains.

Who lost (“lost”) the popular vote (“popular vote”) is irrelevant for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome of the election. For another, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist. We don’t have a popular presidential vote, or a campaign for that vote. There are all sorts of good reasons for that, most of them anticipated by men such as Alexander Hamilton and other people wiser and more prudent than Joe Biden and Jill Stein and you.

Donald Trump, who won the election, is annoying the heck out of Democrats by having the audacity to act like he won the election. Which he did. “Oh, sure, he won the phony-baloney Electoral College election,” the Democrats say, “but our girl Hillary Placeholder Clinton won…this other imaginary election…which is now super-important!”

To call this rhetoric “transparent” would be a disservice to Shrinky Dinks and Cold War–era Buhl Industries overhead projectors and other things associated with transparency.

Allow me to translate this language from the original Democratic: “Please, please, don’t go acting like you won the election you won and wielding that power the way we would and will and did last time around. Pretty please. If we believed in God, we’d be praying to God right now that you don’t act like us…”

It’s the classic “I win/you lose” coin flip…AFTER the contest’s been concluded!

Fortunately, as it applies to the upcoming Administration, at least to this point…

Since we’re on the subject of infernal nonsense, The Daily Caller reports…

New York Times Hires Reporter Who Sent Stories To Clinton Staffers For Approval