It’s Monday, April 17th, 2017…and due to our having enjoyed a pleasant Easter dinner at the home of our eldest son in Falling Waters, WV (where Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac during their retreat from Gettysburg), here’s an abbreviated edition of The Gouge!
First up, as the internecine warring within The Donald’s West Wing continues, NRO‘s Rich Lowry ponders what transpires if and…
Can someone reacquaint President Donald Trump with Steve Bannon, his ideologist whom the president now professes barely to know? Trump’s jaw-dropping public distancing from Bannon is the latest twist in a struggle that is astonishing even by the standards of a White House that deserves its own Chris Buckley novel.
For Bannon, the internal fight with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is going about as well as could be expected, which is to say it couldn’t be going much worse.
No one can know for sure how this ends. Perhaps it’s all papered over, or maybe Bannon keeps his head down to fight another day. But it’s hard to see how Kushner doesn’t prevail in one form or other, together with the faction including his wife, Ivanka Trump; the influential economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn; and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell.
Who says bipartisanship is dead?With the exception of Dina Powell — a nonideological Republican — this group is all Democrats who have marinated for decades in the financial and social elite of Manhattan. Their ascendancy would potentially represent Trumpism’s Thermidor. If Jared and Ivanka end up running the joint, it’d be hard to overstate the turnabout from last year’s campaign.
A candidacy whose supporters reviled so-called RINOs may produce a White House run by people who aren’t even RINOs. A populist revolt that disdained people who allegedly spend too much time at Georgetown cocktail parties may result in a White House run by people who have spent too much time at New York cocktail parties. The biggest middle finger the mainstream media has received in modern American politics may empower people who care deeply about what’s written about them in The New Yorker and Vogue.
For his part, Gary Cohn could have been the totem of everything Donald Trump was running against in 2016. To put it in Jacksonian terms, it would be like Andrew Jackson inveighing against the Second Bank of the United States and then handing his domestic-policy portfolio over to its president, Nicholas Biddle…”
The Trumptanic ain’t there yet…but if Jared and Ivanka ever take the helm, heaven help us.
Next up, writing at The Street, Ted Reed details how…
“Airport security officers on Sunday took a belligerent passenger off UnitedAirlines flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville.Many people have concluded,after watching a 33-second video, during which the passenger screams loudly as he is dragged down the aisle and a woman declares, “Oh My God” five times, that United Airlines was at fault.
Of course, there is more to know about this incident. But in our country, it seems, a 33-second video is enough to stimulate days of outrage, fueled by a slew of inaccurate reporting and blogging and tweeting, accompanied by dozens of “experts” offering their views on how United’s reputation has been damaged and how they should be hired to improve it.
…Let’s state a few facts upfront. The flight wasn’t overbooked, despite the outcry regarding airline overbooking. United has the right to ask passengers to give up their seats on flights. It must compensate them and report the event to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Such events are extremely rare — about two for every 20,000 passengers in the fourth quarter. But they happen.
Also, United didn’t drag anybody off an aircraft — this was done by three Chicago Department of Aviation security officers. They have all been suspended.Essentially, United is guilty of calling the police.
…At this point, many details of the incident are widely known. A full 70-seat aircraft was about to depart when four crew members arrived. They needed seats because they were scheduled to fly out of Louisville the next morning. Had they not been seated, the morning flight would have been cancelled, likely inconveniencing several dozen paying passengers.
On the flight, United asked for volunteers to give up their seats. It offered $800. Nobody accepted. So United used a protocol to select passengers to be involuntarily denied boarding. These passengers are required to be compensated. Three people left. The doctor refused to leave.
In a letter to employees on Monday, United CEO Oscar Munoz described the subsequent events. “When we approached one of these passengers to explain apologetically that he was being denied boarding, he raised his voice and refused to comply with crew member instructions,” Munoz wrote. (Steeeerike ONE!)
“He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent,” he wrote. (Steeeerike TWO!)“Our agents were left with no choice but to call Chicago Aviation security officers to assist in removing the customer from the flight.He repeatedly declined to leave. (Steeeerike THREE!!)“Chicago Aviation security officers were unable to gain his cooperation and physically removed him from the flight as he continued to resist — running back onto the aircraft in defiance of both our crew and security,” Munoz said. (Yer OUTTA HERE!!!)
…United warrants criticism for not offering higher compensation. The United supervisor who oversaw passenger removal should have realized that $800 isn’t enough to get seated passengers to leave an aircraft. It may be enough at the gate, but it’s not enough once passengers are seated.
As for the rest of it, maybe someone who wasn’t there can figure out how to quickly get someone off an airplane so that 66 other paying passengers can get to their destinations on time and then several dozen more passengers can get to their destinations the following morning.
A few hidden factors here: Due to federal regulations, crews can time out and not be able to fly any more on a given day. This becomes more likely late in the day. Without an available crew, a flight may be delayed for hours, or not depart at all. Also, it can be tough to get out of O’Hare. These sorts of things weigh on customer service supervisors.
But a 33-second video cannot show everything. Sometimes it shows only enough to stir up the angry mob and point it toward the ticket counter.“
And sometimes it shows a disturbing trend in America towards a refusal to recognize lawful authority:
We’re frankly disappointed at Tucker Carlson’s inability to recognize the reality of the circumstances. Sure, United could have done more; but David “Doctor” Dao was legally obligated to deplane, and it was his refusal to do so which precipitated this fiasco: case closed.
Turning now to the Follow-Up segment, also writing at NRO, Denise Burke reports how…
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!
“Abortion advocates around the world and particularly in the United States are increasingly abandoning their professed political and moral adherence to “choice,” and instead adopting an agenda of coercion. Nowhere is this dangerous and calculated shift more evident than in their utter disdain for the freedom and fundamental rights of citizens who disagree with them.
Those who are quick to argue that abortion is a universal human right protected by both international and domestic law are equally quick to disregard longstanding legal and moral principles when these revered standards impede their radical pro-abortion agenda. For abortion advocates, seminal documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted after the devastation of the Second World War, are to be ignored when they seek “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief” as the “highest aspiration of the common people.”
For example, France has criminalized “obstruction to abortion” for more than 15 years, prohibiting “moral and psychological pressure searching to hinder abortion.” Pro-life French citizens are not permitted to attempt to dissuade women from having abortions or to hold public demonstrations near facilities providing abortions. Under this law, an elderly and nearly blind man was fined for giving knitted baby booties to a woman in the stairway of a building housing Planned Parenthood.
But this was not enough for abortion advocates who want to completely eradicate pro-life voices from the public square. With their encouragement, French president François Hollande just signed into law a measure that prohibits any person or website from posting information on alternatives to abortion or espousing the belief that abortion is immoral. Violations of the new law are punishable by two years in prison and a €30,000 fine.
…Sadly, in seeking to methodically strip its pro-life citizens of their most basic rights, the French are in good company. An Australian woman’s conviction for peacefully displaying an image of an aborted baby outside a Melbourne abortion clinic was recently upheld, while pro-life students at some of England’s most prestigious universities regularly face ostracism and censorship. Not to be outdone, abortion advocates in the United States are actively seeking to deny pro-life Americans their constitutional rights.
…More than 200 years ago, James Madison wrote, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments…than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Today, we are seeing an incremental, steady, and covert campaign by abortion advocates and their allies to silence those who actively oppose or even disagree with their militant agenda of abortion-on-demand, at any time, for any reason, and at taxpayer expense. By their extreme and desperate actions, abortion proponents are, in fact, tacitly admitting that medical science and public opinion are against them and that the abortion debate is turning inextricably toward affirming and valuing life.
Pro-life advocates and those who value individual rights must expose and resist these insidious efforts to strip Americans and others around the world of their most precious freedoms. Nothing less than life and liberty hangs in the balance.“
Here’s the juice. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The Left, quite literally, eats, drinks and BREATHES abortion. The killing of unborn innocents is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, absolutely and unequivocallyESSENTIAL to modern Liberalism’s very existence; as without the defense of this legalized slaughter, there would be no unifying principal around which its disparate interests could coalesce.
And that, dear friends, puts Progressives on a par with the Nazis.
By the way, those who peddle this particularly abhorent tripe…
…know as much about Scripture…
…as we do quantum mechanics or chaos theory.
Which brings us, inappropriately enough in this case, to The Lighter Side…
Finally, from Balls Cotton, this sad indication America has a long way to go before sexism, racism and every other form of discrimination are finally behind us:
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