The Daily Gouge Archive, Friday, April 7th, 2017

On April 9, 2017, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, April 7th, 2017…but prior to launch, are we the only one thinking the goal of Chuckie and the Dims’ SCOTUS shenanigans isn’t keeping Neil Gorsuch off the bench, but rather diverting attention away from the real problem staring them and their Manchurian MIA…

…squarely in the face?!?

After all, they knew Gorsuch was more than qualified, they knew McConnell had the votes to…

…the filibuster, and they knew the votes were there to confirm him. So why go to the mat for a seat which truly wouldn’t shift the balance of the court?

Just a thought.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Mark Tapscott and The Hill, Scott Uehlinger offers a brilliant breakdown of…

How the intel community was turned into a political weapon against President Trump

“The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.

What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate” debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order…”

As was the entire eight, interminable years of The Dear Misleader’s malevolent reign.

You can read Uehlinger’s commentary in full through the link on the title above (it’s well worth your time), but we want to call your attention to his analysis of The Left’s thought process as evidenced by Evelyn Farkas’ statements to Mika Brezhinski, which is particularly noteworthy:

“…In this PC world, all diversity is embraced — except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.

Watching Evelyn Farkas admit on TV that the Obama administration wanted the intelligence community to “get as much information as you can” before Donald Trump took office resembles some sort of social science experiment gone bad — and it frames the problems wrought by PC/political brainwashing. Here a mid-level official, permanently dwelling in a bubble of progressive liberalism, acknowledged being complicit in the breaking of U.S. ethics rules and perhaps law — because, as she explained, that’s what they needed to do!

Farkus has all the right credentials: a Ph.D. and a career shuttling between academia, the government and the press that is the hallmark of the anointed “Washington insider” class. What is lacking, however, is any level of self-awareness, common sense or judgment. She is emblematic of the denizens of the Deep State that everyone in Washington likes to tell us doesn’t exist.

I am here to tell you, having served in the CIA and the Naval Reserve, that the Deep State does indeed exist. And it’s not a bunch of centrally controlled drones in black robes meeting at midnight. The Deep State is made up of thousands of similarly credentialed, remarkably “un-diverse” civil servants and political appointees who saw themselves promoted rapidly during the eight years of the Obama administration. The appointees have left, but make no mistake — the progressive civil servants remain.

There is little doubt that intel leadership saw Obama’s relaxation of rules regulating the sharing of NSA raw intelligence — for which there is NO operational justification — and did nothing. They also saw the Obama administration’s demand for “incidental” collection on the Trump campaign at an unprecedented level — and still they did nothing.

Like some binary poisonous reagent, these dynamics combined to foster an environment ripe for political abuse and leakage — a fairly transparent attempt, from the point of view of any discerning intelligence officer. This weaponization of intelligence for the sake of discrediting the political opposition I have seen in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Moldova and elsewhere — sadly, it is now on our shores…”

Take your pick of any government bureaucracy: the IRS, FBI, FCC, EPA, CIA, DIA, NSA, DoD, DoJ, NLRB…or any other department whose name you can pull out of a bowl of alphabet soup. Prior to The Obamao’s poisonous politics, can anyone recall anything even remotely approaching the rankly partisan, politically-correct, extraconstitutional, anti-American conduct every branch of the federal government has displayed over the last eight years?

It’s worrisome Farkas and her ilk may not understand what they’ve done…and are doing…not only runs against their oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but by their actions they’ve actually become the latter! Worse still is the far more likely prospect they comprehend they’re conduct runs counter to Constitution…but because their loyalty lies with Liberal ideology rather than the law of the land, just don’t care.

Which brings us to a second must-read commentary brought to us by G. Trevor and Daniel Greenfield, who advises us at Frontpage Mag there’s no need to wait:

The Civil War is Here

The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.

“A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible…”

…The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

…Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

Those who cannot recognize this reality are just whistling past the graveyard…

…of the Founders’ Republic…as well as surrendering their country and its future to whatever whims possess Progressives on a given day.

To borrow a phrase from Professor Dave Jennings:

And just as The War Between the States had as its primary cause an egregious sin, the indefensible “peculiar institution” which was chattel slavery, so too does America’s second civil war…in the form of the abomination which is abortion.

Here’s the juice: The Left eats, drinks and breathes abortion. The killing of unborn innocents is, quite literally, essential to its existence; as without it, there would be no unifying principal around which its disparate interests could coalesce.

Only the ChiCom’s under the evil inspiration of Chairman Mao, whose Great Leap Forward claimed some 45 million victims in just four years, rival the death toll rung up by Margaret Sanger and her disciples since Roe v. Wade. If there are levels in Hell, we don’t envy them their fate.

As the ghost of Jacob Marley observed of torment awaiting his former partner…

Then again, there but for the grace of God through his Son Jesus Christ go we.

Since we’re on the subject of the greatest travesty in the history of jurisprudence, submitted for your approval courtesy of NRO, the brilliant David French provides a primer as to how…

The Long Shadow of Roe Haunts the Supreme Court Debate

How one decision corrupted the judiciary and made the nuclear option necessary

As Senate Democrats prepare to filibuster one of the most qualified Supreme Court picks in a generation, as they continue to seethe that Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, was denied a hearing, and as Republicans prepare to nuke the filibuster to confirm Neil Gorsuch, well-meaning Americans look at a “broken” process and wonder, “What went wrong?”

There are narrow answers to the question, and I offered one yesterday, writing that Ted Kennedy killed the judicial filibuster in 1987. His extraordinary and slanderous personal attack on Robert Bork transformed the confirmation process for the next three decades (and counting). But even Ted Kennedy was a symptom of a larger problem, one that the Supreme Court unquestionably brought on itself. The people who are truly to blame for the present crisis all wore (and wear) black to work.

What went wrong? The Supreme Court went wrong, and it did so most decisively and consequentially when it created the right to kill a child.

It is difficult to overstate the legal and moral consequences of the Supreme Court’s decisions, rendered inevitable in 1965, formalized in 1973, and reaffirmed in 1992, to dishonestly create and illegitimately protect a “constitutional” right to abortion. In a series of strokes, the Court declared that the text and history of the Constitution — even reason and logic itself — were inconsequential compared with the presumed social justice of the outcome. This was the “living constitution” turned into a child-devouring monster.

Consider the foundation for Roe v. Wade, the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. This case concocted a constitutional right to purchase and use contraceptives. This is the textbook example of how bad facts make bad law. In this case, Connecticut had on the books an unenforced and unenforceable law prohibiting even married people from using contraceptives. One court dismissed a challenge because it deemed the law a “dead letter.” The statute was so meaningless and the case so artificial that the district attorney let the plaintiffs (according to a glowing Newsweek profile) “in a sense write the script for their arrest.”

No matter. Planned Parenthood got its test case, and Justice William O. Douglas obliged with one of the most incomprehensible opinions in judicial history. Since of course there is no right to purchase contraceptives in the Constitution, and there was a very long history of state-regulated sexual conduct in the United States (including laws against adultery and fornication), the Court had no actual textual basis for ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood.

John Hart Ely, Yale Law School

But who needs text when you have “penumbras and emanations”? In his opinion striking down Connecticut’s law, Justice Douglas actually wrote that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” This was sheer nonsense. It was embarrassing rhetoric, but embarrassing rhetoric from the Supreme Court has the force of law.

Just like that, the majority of the legal heavy lifting was done. Roe v. Wade was foreordained, and the Court that held that a Constitution that “did not explicitly mention any right of privacy” was somehow “broad enough” to grant one person (the mother) the constitutional right to hire someone to kill another person (her child) — a person that the Court arbitrarily called a mere “potential life.”

While the outcome of the decision was immediately hailed by leftists across the land, the more honest liberal legal scholars were (to put it charitably) dubious. (see below) Earlier this year, the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney collected some of the better examples. Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe famously said that “behind [Roe’s] own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” Edward Lazarus, a former law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the Roe opinion, said, “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible.” Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the “Notorious RBG” herself, once said the case was “heavy-handed judicial intervention [that] was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.”

But that was then. Now Roe is sacred. So sacred, in fact, that it’s worth creating a new religion to protect. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court turned back a direct challenge to Roe in part by issuing a stirring ode to the power of precedent and in part by embedding a deeply religious principle deep in the heart of constitutional jurisprudence. Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter (GOP appointees, all) declared that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

This is a bold philosophical statement, found nowhere in the Constitution, that is utterly at odds with Christian orthodoxy and the fundamental beliefs of most major religions. It creates a kind of constitutional “super clause” that literally cloaks the act of mass-scale killing within a fictional right of each person to “define” for themselves the “mystery of human life.” Never mind DNA. Never mind science. Never mind logic.

Never mind the Constitution.

The moral consequences of this intellectual bankruptcy have been profound. Millions of children have been poisoned, stabbed, and dismembered. Our democracy has been corrupted to protect abortion charnel houses even from the most basic commonsense regulations. The precedents and reasoning that created the abortion right have translated into a belief in a “living constitution” that is so deeply embedded into the philosophy of the Left that it now believes that the Court can and should simply decide the correct outcome of any given case and then “find” the right and reasoning in some combination of philosophy, law, precedent, and (sometimes) even selectively chosen foreign legal decisions.

It is against this backdrop that people who respect the text and history of the Constitution look at the unusual exercise of GOP will — blocking Merrick Garland and pushing Neil Gorsuch through a potential filibuster and say, quite simply, “Finally.” Finally the GOP understands the stakes. Finally the political branches are taking steps to correct the judiciary’s overreach and abuse. Finally the checks and balances are checking the justices of the Supreme Court. They are not high priests. They cannot define a new religion. And they are not ultimately beyond or above the Constitution they purport to rewrite.

Roe casts its long shadow. That shadow fell on Merrick Garland. It now falls on Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats. It falls on a political movement that won’t permit dissent from its child-killing ethos. Defying President Obama in 2016 and Chuck Schumer in 2017 won’t fix our nation’s jurisprudence, and it won’t necessarily end Roe, but it does signal that a critical mass of Americans have had enough. At long last, and for today at least, judicial supremacists face the consequences they so richly deserve.

As we noted earlier, we’re afraid in view of what awaits them in the afterlife, Neil Gorsuch’s elevation to the SCOTUS is the least of their problems!

For those not inclined to accept David French’s thoughts as the last word, feel free to peruse the opinions of numerous LIBERAL experts who took exception to the tortured, tendentious legal illogic which is Roe v. Wade:

Abortion defenders explain why Roe v. Wade was a terrible legal decision

Oh,…and since we’re generally critical of anything Mitch “Post Turtle” McConnell says or does, we take a moment to give him his due:

Like a broken clock, even the senior senator from Kentucky is correct…on occasion.

Next up, also courtesy of NRO, Michael Tanner details some…

Hard Truths about Health Care

Supply is limited, demand is inexorable, and prices cannot be fixed.

“Republicans have vowed to go back to the drawing board to draft a new Obamacare repeal-and-replacement bill. Meanwhile President Trump is threatening to work with Democrats to come up with a health-care plan — or maybe to simply let Obamacare crash and burn.

But whoever eventually comes up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act should keep a few hard truths in mind….

…Americans want widely contradictory things from health-care reform. They want the highest-quality care for everyone, with no wait, from the doctor of their choice. And they want it as cheap as possible, preferably for free. At the same time doctors, trial lawyers, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and government bureaucrats are all trying to protect their fiefdoms, hold onto their gains, and shift costs to others. There is simply no way to satisfy all these special interests and produce a health-care plan that will be hugely popular.

Given this reality, Republicans would be well advised to stop trying to win a popularity contest and simply do what’s right. They need to repeal Obamacare down to the last comma and semicolon, then replace it with true market-based reforms. Those plans are out there. All it would take is for them to face up to a few hard truths.“

While we hope our “leaders” in Washington are up to the task, we wouldn’t put any money on it. Because while “leaders” by definition “lead”, all The Gang Who May NEVER Learn How to Shoot Straight seems worried about is getting re-elected.

And in today’s edition of Educated Idiots on Parade, as NRO‘s Katherine Timpf informs us…

Stanford Accepts Student Who Just Wrote ‘#BlackLivesMatter’ 100 Times as His Answer to an Application Question

Success in activism is not measured by how strongly you believe that you are right, it’s measured by how effectively you can convince others of your views.

“…Now, I’m not taking a stand on whether or not Ahmed deserved to be accepted to Stanford, because I don’t have enough information to make that judgment. I don’t have access to his entire application, and, seeing as Stanford has refused to comment, it’s not clear how large of a role this particularly answer played in his acceptance. Hell, perhaps he was accepted despite it, not because of it. (Given Ahmed’s activist history, not hardly!) What is clear, though, is that Ahmed is particularly proud of his non-answer answer, and that being proud of non-answer answers is an absurd way to approach life…”

We can only laugh at the blissful ignorance of one supposedly so devoted to the rights and well-being of Muslims and Blacks…enraptured by those whose policies have been responsible for more deaths of those in whom he professes interest than anyone in our nation’s history.

In any event, we’re certain young Master Ahmed has a bright future being about his business; though…