It’s Friday, September 1st, 2017…but before we begin, submitted for your perusal, a prescient point from Stilton Jarlsberg well worth repeating:

“…At some point, a citizen is going to take poorly to being beaten in the streets, and is going to demonstrate to an Antifa member how the 2nd Amendment works. And unfortunately, this is exactly what Antifa and the Left are hoping for: a precious martyr. Frankly, we’re surprised that they haven’t fragged one of their own yet just to try to pin the blame on the evil Freedom of Speech lovers. And for all we know, that fallen Antifa member might wind up surrounded by 72 virgins – which is ironic because the same was true whenever he attended an average Antifa organizational meeting.”

If, and only if, such a “sacrifice” is indeed inevitable (which we believe it is!), we’re all for it being someone capable of perpetrating a scam as abhorrent as this one featured at PJ Media:

SCAM: Linda Sarsour Fundraising For ‘Harvey Hurricane Relief Fund’ Goes To Left-Wing Activist Group

Leave it to an Islamofascist Leftist to set the bar lower than anyone ever thought possible.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich reports, it’s…

CONFIRMED: Comey Decided He Wasn’t Going to Refer Hillary For Prosecution Long Before FBI Investigation Was Over

“According to new transcripts released by the Senate Judiciary Thursday afternoon, former FBI Director James Comey made the decision not to refer then Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for prosecution long before ever interviewing key witnesses. Members of the Committee allege Comey made the decision months before FBI agents were finished with the criminal investigation of her mishandling classified information during her time as Secretary of State.

The transcripts were revealed in a letter sent to current FBI Director Christopher Wray, in which lawmakers are demanding an explanation and more documents surrounding the case.

“According to the unredacted portions of the transcripts, it appears that in April or early May of 2016, Mr. Comey had already decided he would issue a statement exonerating Secretary Clinton.  That was long before FBI agents finished their work.  Mr. Comey even circulated an early draft statement to select members of senior FBI leadership.  The outcome of an investigation should not be prejudged while FBI agents are still hard at work trying to gather the facts,” (Now THAT’S an understatement!) the letter, signed by Chairman Chuck Grassley and Committee member Lindsey Graham states. “Conclusion first, fact-gathering second—that’s no way to run an investigation…”

This is right out of Alice in Wonderland:

Curiouser and curiouser indeed!  

Jim Comey: unlike Henry Gondorff in The Sting…

…not only is he a liar, he’s a gutless, treasonous, self-serving liar as well.

Next up, writing at NRO, Kyle Smith relates the latest un-American commentary emanating from The Left:

Slate: Houston Doesn’t Show America at Its Best

The piece’s problems didn’t end with the title.

“”Houston,” declared a Slate headline, “Doesn’t Showcase ‘America at Its Best.’” When a tweet promoting the article from the site’s official account went viral, and not in a good way, the editors reconsidered the wisdom of trolling a suffering city, deleted the tweet, and changed the title to “Why It’s Misleading to Say That Houston Showcases ‘America at Its Best.’” An accompanying photo showed a National Guardsman carrying a woman in hip-deep floodwaters.

Neither of these headlines quite captures the essence of the essay by Katy Waldman, though. Waldman thinks it’s unfortunate that the spirit in Houston today is bound to recede with the floodwaters. Underlying the piece is an old impulse of the Left dating back to Lenin and beyond: A wish to keep society in emergency mode because of the opportunities it opens up. Catastrophe tends to loosen up all that red tape that gets in the way of progressive action. Catastrophe leads to immediate mobilization. Catastrophe gives us spontaneous collectivism. Why can’t we have collectivism always and everywhere, not just in the Houston area when 50 inches of rain falls on it? Waldman is looking toward the aftermath of Harvey and fears that this disaster will be allowed, in the deathless words of Rahm Emanuel, to “go to waste”; i.e., it won’t lead to a major leftward turn for Texas or the U.S.

Am I being unfair in saying Waldman calls for a permanent mindset of catastrophe? Consider this passage: “These waterlogged suburbs have become zones of exemption, where norms hang suspended and something lovelier and more communal has been allowed to flourish in their place…Disruptive events loosen our mores just enough to permit new kinds of compassion.” Waldman calls Houston today “a beautiful anomaly” and a “provisional utopia.” Absent catastrophe, America is just a “moral junior varsity team” where the usual rules are “selfish, capitalistic.” She concludes, “Humans may possess inherent goodness, but that goodness needs to be activated. Some signal has to disperse the cloud of moral Novocain around us. Some person, or fire, or flood, has got to say: now.” It’s chilling to observe a young writer openly thirst for destruction and chaos as a necessary first step to a more evolved humanity. As V. I. Lenin put it (quoting fellow revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov), “The worse, the better.”…”

Again, just when you thought the bar couldn’t be set any lower, The Left accomplishes the seemingly impossible.

In a related item, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty highlights how…

Politico Dares to Mess with Texas

What Politico tweeted…then deleted!

Here’s Politico’s Richard Parker’s analysis of the situation in Texas:

When Gov. Greg Abbott won election in 2014, he said of his agenda: “We will celebrate the frontier spirit of rugged individualism.” Since then, he and the legislature have sought to limit government power — except their own. (Though Parker offers no evidence how.) They have enabled individuals to more freely carry guns and knives and diverted taxpayer money from public to private schools. Most recently, Abbott led the failed effort to nullify local tree ordinances — regulations limiting tree removal — because these posed, Abbott argued, a threat to individual freedom. But Harvey has changed all that.

“A Texas-sized storm requires a Texas-sized response, and that is exactly what the state will provide,” Abbott said Monday in Corpus Christi. “While we have suffered a great deal, the resiliency and bravery of Texans’ spirits is something that can never be broken. As communities are coming together in the aftermath of this storm, I will do everything in my power to make sure they have what they need to rebuild.”

This is a man whose signature boast was that he got up every day, went to work and sued the federal government, who has called for a constitutional convention to strip power from Washington and yet, on Monday, said, “To see the swift response from the federal government is pretty much unparalleled.”

Parker’s tone deafness — in an article positing that Harvey’s legacy might signal the end of “the Lone Star State’s rugged individualism” — is hard to fathom. While state, local (and federal) officials seem to have reacted competently under the circumstances, the true story of the last week has been private citizens spontaneously rising to the occasion to help their families, friends, and communities in need. The “Cajun Navy” of flat-bottom boats, canoes, and bass boats is the product of the local citizenry — not the federal behemoth in Washington or even the state government in Austin.

To Politico, “self-reliance” must mean something like “dying in a flood before letting the government help” — most Texans, however, believe it means taking the initiative to help your neighbors, your community, and even strangers in an emergency. Politico also ignores the fact that Texans — and most Americans — don’t hate the federal government, they just don’t trust it, especially when it comes to disaster relief. Governor Abbot’s award of an “A+” to FEMA isn’t some sacrifice of rugged conservative values, it’s an acknowledgement of a government that’s functioning properly.

Something Progressives couldn’t hope to fathom.

By the way, just as we find the opinions offered above repugnant, we consider this Charlie Hebdo cover equally disgusting:

Though, unlike Leftists and Islamofascists reacting to opinions with which they disagree, we’ve no plans to drop by Charlie Hebdo‘s offices masked in black and pummel the employees, let alone open up on them with automatic weapons.

Moving on, also courtesy of NRO, Victor Davis Hanson records the latest Progressive ploy in support of their counterproductive policies:

Linguistic McCarthyism

Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers.

““The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer.

The terrified poet points out to the mob this case of mistaken identity: “I am Cinna the poet.” The mob answers: “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!…It is no matter, his name’s Cinna!”

Shakespeare certainly would recognize that, like the playwright’s Roman mob, we have launched a war against words in our frenzy to find targets for our politically correct madness.

Recently, there were progressive calls at the University of Southern California to rename the school’s mascot, the white Andalusian horse “Traveler.” Members of the Left thought that the mute animal’s name too closely resembled the name “Traveller,” the favorite horse of Confederate general and sudden demon of 2017 Robert E. Lee.

But the mob was not finished there. An Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee was recently yanked by the sports channel ESPN from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game. Apparently, Lee’s name was too close to that of Robert E. Lee.

Nearly a century and a half after his death, General Lee has gone from tragic figure to Public Enemy No. 1 of the Left.

Lee the sportscaster, like Cinna the poet, was found guilty on the basis of ignorant association with his name. If the politically correct herd could not get its hands on the long-dead Robert E. Lee, it would apparently settle for anyone in the present who shared nearly the same name.

Why would a supposedly civilized country descend into such linguistic fascism?

Part of the problem is the presumption by elites that a supposedly illiterate public must be protected from itself. But does anyone really believe that average people will confuse an Asian-American sportscaster who has the common Chinese surname “Lee” and the all-American first name “Robert” with a Confederate general — or that the sportscaster could thus be somehow tangentially connected with the recent violence in Charlottesville?

ESPN, however, does not bet on the intelligence of the average American. It prefers to virtue-signal that it is above all suspicion of sympathy for the Confederacy. In its search for cosmic justice, it cares little about the injustice it metes out to real live people.

ESPN has long politicized sports and continues to lose viewers over its adolescent political correctness. (Which is why we no longer watch it.) Not long ago, the network fired tennis commentator Doug Adler. He had characterized the aggressive play of tennis star Venus Williams as employing the “guerrilla effect.” (“And you’ll see Venus move in and put the guerrilla effect on, charging,” Adler had said.) Adler’s reference was drawn from the once-popular term “guerrilla tennis” that denoted a tough, brawling, take-no-prisoners style from the 1990s.

The word “guerilla,” remember, is a diminutive of the Spanish word guerra (“war”). In Spanish, guerrilla means “little war.” In English, “guerilla” is commonly used to describe a type of unconventional fighting.

But Adler forgot that “guerilla” is pronounced the same as its English homophone “gorilla.” Some ESPN viewers did not understand the guerrilla reference and charged that Adler was using “gorilla” as a racist smear. Adler tried to explain the reference, but he was fired and his career was ruined, making him a modern-day Cinna the poet, torn apart by the mob…”

Thus the word “niggardly”, neither spelled like nor meaning anything close to the term the good citizens of Rock Ridge used in reference to their new sheriff, is persona non grata in any contemporary commentary.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also terribly self-destructive.  There’s a reason the Ghost of Christmas Present warned…

Not to mention why Progressives remain so intent of keeping so many Americans in uneducated darkness.

Speaking of ignorance, as demonstrated in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, it’s a state of misinformation the Bishop of Rome shares with so many other Liberals:

Pope Francis to World Leaders: ‘Listen to the Cry of the Earth‘

“Pope Francis, who has a strong belief in the science of climate change, called upon world leaders on Wednesday to “listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer most because of the unbalanced ecology.”…”

With all due respect to the present pontiff, his statement smacks of Gaia worship; and we’re gonna need a little bit more than the word of an Argentine agitator before buying into that theology. 

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

Finally, we start September with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of Bill Meisen and The Kansas City Star:

‘Kill all white people’: Suspect in killings of five white men made threat in 2014

“The 22-year-old man suspected of shooting five middle-aged white men since last year — including four on south Kansas City walking trails — threatened in 2014 to shoot up a school and “kill all white people,” according to court records.

Fredrick Demond Scott, who was charged Tuesday in two killings and named as a suspect in three more, made those statements in January 2014 at Center Alternative School, as documented in a municipal citation for harassment.

…All five were white men between ages 54 and 67. All five were fatally shot, most from behind, in surprise attacks as they walked dogs, visited parks and, in one case, walked down a city street.

…Police said they did not know if the shootings were racially motivated. [County Prosecutor] Baker has said she saw no clear motive…”

Hmmm…a man known to have stated he wanted to “kill all White people”…arrested for the murder of five White men…but not charged with a hate crime; seriously?!?

We can only conclude the police aren’t anxious to know, and Ms. Baker has vision problems.  Or perhaps they’ve determined, rather than hating his Caucasian targets, Mr. Scott simply held them in low esteem.

Enjoy the Labor Day weekend!

Magoo