It’s Monday, March 6th, 2017…but before we begin, a rousing BZ goes out to LTJG Jack Wilson on the occasion of his first shipboard landing in the MH-60:

Well done, son!  Just remember, landings should always equal take-offs.  And bear in mind the three most useless things to a Naval Aviator (as if there’s really any other kind?!?): (1) runway behind you; (2) altitude above you; and, (3) fuel you left back on the ground.  Hat tip to our son Michael for creating the YouTube clip for us.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as always, we’re with Stilton regarding the ongoing battle between the President and what is nominally HIS intelligence community:

Sorry, but when the best Chuck Todd can offer in support of an Administration which during its eight years in office only told the truth by accident is a hopelessly compromised Jim Clapper…

…you know, the same Jim Clapper who inexplicably kept his position of trust despite repeatedly perjuring himself before the Senate Intelligence Committee…

…color us skeptical.

We can only hope, as the WSJ suggests, someone close to The Donald gets him to play the part of the adult in the room.

Which reminds us: Mr. President, if you’re going to continue tweeting (which we suspect you will), PLEASE, at least have someone with a solid command of proper grammar and sentence structure check your offerings prior to transmission. Seriously, we’re no Shakespeare, but many of your tweets seem written by someone…

…with a kindergartner’s command of the King’s English.  Though in fairness to Jethro, he dun gradiated the 6th Grade!

Next up, courtesy of NRO, Jonah Goldberg offers this review of The Donald’s big debut:

‘Halfway Decent,’ They Raved

Low expectations make Trump speech seem like a triumph.

 

“Low expectations are a hell of a drug.

Donald Trump gave a good speech the other night before a joint session of Congress. It was not, as some commentators have suggested, one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the halls of the Capitol. One test: Can you remember a single line just a few days later? (Actually, as shown by the meme above, we can.) Can you identify any passages that you honestly believe will be remembered a decade from now? (That’s open to question.)

I don’t mean this as criticism of Trump. It was by far the best speech of his presidency and, probably, his political career. Not only was it disciplined — a quality in rare supply in the president’s public speaking — but it was hopeful, inclusive, and, as far as political speeches go, unselfish. Had he adopted this tone the day he was sworn in, he would have avoided quite a few problems.

The response to the speech was far more significant than the speech itself, and it tells you a lot about politics and ideology in the age of Trump.

The Left’s reaction was predictable: dismiss the positive and demagogue the rest. The same people who praised Hillary Clinton’s use of Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen American soldier, as a campaign surrogate were horrified by Trump’s supposed exploitation of the wife of a Navy SEAL who died in combat.

The response from the right is more intriguing. The vast majority of conservatives and Republicans, particularly party activists, are psychologically or politically invested in Trump’s success. (As is the country, though Goldberg doesn’t say so.) For his most rabid fans, he can still do no wrong, and they heard in his address whatever they wanted to hear.

…Again, what is remarkable is not what he said, but what people heard. Consider the Tea Party Express, the biggest of the tea-party PACs.

“Since 2012, Tea Party Express has hosted the official Tea Party response to the President’s address,” the group said in a statement. “Last night was the first night that our address wasn’t necessary. Not because the ideas of limited government and economic growth have fallen out of vogue — because they surely haven’t — but because that speech was delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by the President of the United States.”

Maybe I’m crazy, but I’d bet that if President Obama (or a President Jeb Bush) had made a similar speech with similar spending commitments and no explanation of how to pay for them, the Tea Party Express would have mustered enough objections to respond.“

Goldberg’s not crazy, he’s correct…his status as an implacable foe of everything/anything Trump notwithstanding.  Let’s be honest: if The Donald’s actually the answer to anything but the avoidance of…

…eight more years of the same old Islamofascist sh*t, we failed to grasp the question.

The reality is, Trump was the beneficiary of what Shelby Steele terms in this offering at the WSJ…

The Exhaustion of American Liberalism

White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.

 

“The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us. 

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

…This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black president.”

For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization. (All it cost him was his honor and self-respect.) For Mr. Obama it was raw political power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist…”

...Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.“

Here’s the juice: many of us aren’t in love with The Donald.  Rather, like the majority of Americans outside of California, we’ve simply had it with the whole, sordid, self-loathing scam which is contemporary Progressivism.

Since we’re on the subject of the whole, sordid, self-loathing scam which is contemporary Progressivism, writing at NRO, David French offers an exceptional analysis of its impact on America’s military readiness, which we’ve excerpted below…though we strongly suggest you read it in full:

The Dangerous Implications of Democrats’ Obsession with Trump’s Yemen Raid

To call the raid a “failure” is to hold the military to a much different, much more limiting standard than ever before.

 

“On Saturday, December 6, 2014, there was an American commando raid in Yemen. As reported by the New York Times, special forces attacked a village in the southern part of the country in an effort to free hostages, including an American journalist, held by jihadists. But instead of accomplishing what it set out to accomplish, the raid “ended in tragedy”: Terrorists killed two hostages, including the American, and in the ensuing firefight, a number of civilians died.

That’s not a scandal; that’s war.

Fast-forward to late January of this year. Donald Trump, just nine days after assuming the presidency, ordered a raid into Yemen that had been planned during the Obama administration and endorsed by James Mattis, the new secretary of defense. During the attack, American forces encountered tougher-than-expected resistance, Navy SEAL Ryan Owens was killed, and civilians died in the crossfire. At the end of the attack, American and allied forces took possession of intelligence that may or may not (reports conflict) be valuable to the war against jihad.

That’s not a scandal; that’s war.

But don’t tell that to the Democrats, to the Trump administration’s most committed critics, or to multiple members of the media, including some who should know better. Suddenly, there is an odd new standard for success or failure in military operations: Special-forces raids are scandalous unless they 1) yield exactly the intelligence or other assets they sought; 2) do so without encountering unexpected resistance; and 3) do not cost any American lives.

By that standard, my own deployment to Iraq was one scandal after another…

…When soldiers enlist, they trust their commanders (including the commander-in-chief) not to throw away their lives carelessly or recklessly, but they know that they could die in the line of duty nevertheless. Americans are allegedly “war-weary” (a strange term for a nation in which only the tiniest fraction of citizens have fought), and we’ve already suffered thousands of casualties abroad, but so long as the enemy still seeks to do us harm, we’re crippling our national defense if we unilaterally decide to fight without loss.

…Third, when terrorists use civilians as human shields, who’s to blame for the civilian deaths that result? By adopting a near-zero tolerance for civilian casualties (as the Obama administration often did), we incentivize violations of the laws of war, extend combat operations, and risk American life. When jihadists hide behind women and children, they bear the legal and moral responsibility for civilian deaths.

…January’s Yemen raid was one battle in a very long conflict, a conflict that it will be increasingly difficult to fight if every engagement must end with absolute, cost-free success. We will never consistently have perfect knowledge, achieve perfect surprise, or obtain perfect results. That was not the standard of success during the Bush or Obama administrations. And it must not be the standard of success for Trump.“

We can only add a hearty “AMEN” to that.  Not because we don’t value the lives of every single one of America’s warriors (we in fact value any individual soldier/seaman/airman over the entire coterie on Capitol Hill), but because we understand no battle plan is perfect, and every military operation carries a certain risk.

Unless of course, such action was refused…as in the case of Benghazi…or terminated…like Iraq and Blackhawk Down…in furtherance of Progressive political policies.

By the way, whilst surfing the web for pictorial support of the previous item, we came across the archives of a self-described “retired Air Force Lt. Col., professor and historian” who featured this meme at his blog… 

We could find no corresponding criticism of B. Hussein, Hillary or Bill.  Any questions?!?

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ uncovers more utter idiocy from the EPA:

How a Michigan County Road Got Stuck in Regulation Purgatory

Building a direct path to a new mine makes perfect environmental sense, but the EPA hasn’t budged.

 

“President Trump renewed his call for a $1 trillion infrastructure package during his speech Tuesday to Congress. But if that money is to do any good, Washington must first get out of the builders’ way. A good example of a shovel-ready project trapped in regulation purgatory is Michigan’s County Road 595, which has been blocked for years by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The project has its roots in a “eureka” moment eight years ago. A large deposit of nickel and copper was discovered in the state’s Upper Peninsula at what is now known as the Eagle Mine. This presented Marquette County with a new economic opportunity, but also a dilemma. The mine is only 22 miles from the nearest refinery as the crow flies, but the trip is nearly three times as long via existing roads. The usual route would send processions of heavy, noisy trucks through commercial and residential areas in small towns, as well as along the edge of campus at Northern Michigan University.

The proposed solution was to construct a new county road, a direct path from the mine to the mill. That would allow the trucks to bypass busy city streets and groggy college students.

State and local officials in both parties broadly support the project, since they see it as critical for the community’s safety and environmental health. Both houses of the Michigan Legislature have even passed resolutions backing County Road 595, noting that the direct route would conserve resources, while building it would create jobs.

The problem is the federal permits. In 2012, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality announced it intended to approve the new road, which complied with all federal and state laws. That’s when the Obama administration stomped in…”

The question shouldn’t be whether the EPA‘s rulings should be subject to court review; it’s whether the EPA should have any say whatsoever over a road approved under the laws of  a sovereign state.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…

Finally, in the Sports Section, writing at NRO, David Harsanyi makes the correct call:

Don’t Let Politics Ruin Baseball

Baseball players already exemplify American civility, and no one should require them to adhere to a political code.

 

“Jayson Stark, a longtime baseball writer for ESPN, recently asked whether Major League Baseball players’ lack of political involvement is an abdication of their responsibility as citizens. He asked: “Is 2017 the time for a new code of conduct? Is it time for a more socially aware culture — in this, the sport of Jackie Robinson?”

What makes 2017 so special? Well, there’s a Republican in the White House, of course, which means the world is on the brink of calamity. So when Stark pens a piece lamenting the lack of political participation in the league of Jackie Robinson, he isn’t curious about why more African-American athletes aren’t protesting the destructive role of teachers’ unions in black communities, or why athletes aren’t speaking out about the spike in crime in cities controlled by Democrats. He is talking about President Donald Trump. If that were not the case, he would have written something along the same lines in 2010, when the nation was just as divided and the issues it faced were just as contentious.

…How many voters are going to change their ideological views because Mookie Betts of the Boston Red Sox took a leadership position on, well, whatever it is that Todd believes is dividing Americans? Most voters, I assume, conduct business and relationships with co-workers and family who hold philosophical positions other than their own. Should a cashier at Target or an accountant at H&R Block feel compelled to lecture everyone he or she meets about public policy? What would our communities look like if everyone were an activist? Insufferable, that’s what.

Moreover, the MLB’s great diversity reflects not only the bravery of Robinson but also his victory. There will never be another Jackie Robinson. We don’t need another Jackie Robinson. Baseball already proves that rural whites, Hispanic immigrants, African-Americans, and Yankees can all live and play on a team, pull together, aspire to greatness, and make a vast amount of money in the process. The ability of diverse people to live peacefully under a free system is the American ideal. Demanding unanimity of opinion is not. In many ways, we still have the former. The latter is what tears us apart.

Perhaps most players realize they’ve become famous because they can throw and hit, not because they have a position on monetary policy. I’m a free speech absolutist. If baseball players want to complain about Obamacare repeal, that is certainly their prerogative. But they should not be surprised if half the fans react negatively because for fans, baseball is an escape. For players, it is a business.

As one MLB official brimming with common sense told ESPN: “Our role is to provide an environment that’s politics-free and controversy-free. I just care about what’s best for my team. I don’t want to risk losing any fan. I want all our fans to support my team. So I don’t think I have the right to take a position that would alienate our customers.”

Baseball won’t change politics, but politics will ruin baseball.“

After all, such expressions of ignorance have worked so well…

…for the NFL.  Perhaps had the teams and players participating not sucked beyond belief…?!?

But as a broken clock on occasion provides an accurate read, so it is with Jason Whitlock, a writer with whom we rarely agree:

“This hyper-progressive movement that has lurched into sports and changed the conversation about sports and in sports TV. … So much of the conversation is inconsistent with the values of sports culture. I’m gonna say it until I’m blue in the face: Sports culture is conservative and religious! And we’ve turned ‘conservative’ into a curse word in this country and it’s just not. “We’re turning off our base, our base of support. The people that coach Pee Wee football, the people that participate in Pee Wee football all the way through, we’re making them uncomfortable by inviting in all these people that really don’t care about sports, don’t love sports — they have a political agenda — and they’re leading the conversation about sports? It’s turning people off.”

As regards Whitlock’s opinion, case in point:

In all seriousness, how many actual ESPN viewers did Schilling’s common sense offend?!?  Is it any wonder ESPN‘s ratings continue to plummet?!?

Magoo