It’s Monday, October 9th, 2017…but first, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this special report:

Bowe Bergdahl to Plead Guilty to Desertion, Misbehavior Before the Enemy to Avoid Trial

News of Bergdahl’s plea is particularly noteworthy as The Obamao gave up five…count ’em, FIVE…unrepentant enemies of the country HE swore an oath to protect and defend in order to secure the release of a traitor who willingly aided and abetted the efforts of a foreign foe.  We don’t refer to B. Hussein as the Manchurian-in-Chief…

…for nuttin’!  Bergdahl and his parents were simply his Islamofascist soulmates.

Speaking of traitors to their country, one’s the subject of this Tucker Carlson interview.  If you don’t have time for the entire video, the money moment comes at the 6:21 mark:

In a related item, though an initial report indicated another social justice warrior may be running out of money…

Colin Kaepernick Folds, Says He’ll Stand For The National Anthem If He Can Play Again

…it turns out to be yet another example of fake news:

“A CBS Sports reporter clarified his televised report saying quarterback Colin Kaepernick told him he would stand during the national anthem if he played in the NFL again, saying he didn’t actually discuss the issue with the player when they spoke…”

What a surprise CBS was once again the source of the fabricated facts.

However, had the facts been wrong and the story still true, one of two things would have been evident: (A) either racism and social injustice had ceased to exist in America…

…or, (B) this was all a self-serving publicity stunt from the beginning.  We’d have gone with (B), while emphasizing American society, though imperfect…and subject to certain limited exceptions…

…is neither racist nor unjust.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of the Monday batting order, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty literally begs…

Please, Democrats, Take Bret Stephens

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens — allegedly one of the right-of-center voices on the newspaper’s editorial page — is going to get a tsunami of grief for today’s column, which is not-too-subtly titled, “Repeal the Second Amendment.”

And if you take all of his arguments at face value, Stephens demonstrates an infuriatingly snobby contempt for his fellow citizens — “gun enthusiasts fantasizing that Red Dawn is the fate that soon awaits us” — and gets basic facts wrong. He declares, “from a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety,” ignoring the fact that crime rates have steadily declined as gun ownership has increased.

But then we come to this section:

In fact, the more closely one looks at what passes for “common sense” gun laws, the more feckless they appear. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.

There is only one way to do this: Repeal the Second Amendment.

Call me crazy, but I think Stephens’ proposal is a giant bear trap for liberals and Democrats.

We haven’t amended the Constitution since 1992, when we decreed any law affecting Congressional salaries cannot take effect until the next election — i.e., banning members of Congress from voting themselves a pay increase. We’ve never repealed a part of the Bill of Rights. And that’s just what Stephens is urging Democrats to openly embrace, promise, and campaign on.

Can you picture some Democratic candidate supporting the repeal of the Second Amendment? The attack ads would declare: “John Smith thinks the U.S. Constitution gives you have too many rights…and he wants to cut the Bill of Rights by ten percent!” Or even better: “If John Smith doesn’t think you deserve your Second Amendment rights…how many more of your Constitutional rights does he want to take away?”

If the Democrats made a sustained push for a Constitutional amendment repealing the right to bear arms, Republicans would never have to worry about getting out the vote again. NRA membership would explode. Pro-gun Democrats would switch parties. Portions of key groups within the party could recoil, no pun intended. According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 32 percent of African-Americans say either they or someone else in their household owns a gun.

The most incendiary Republican accusation of Democrats — that they don’t really care about the Constitution, that they just want ever-expanding government power and the authority to micro-manage every little decision in your life — would be largely verified in many American minds. (Democratic congressman Phil Hare of Illinois in 2010, when asked where in the Constitution it authorized Congress to make Americans purchase health insurance: “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this.” When pressed, he said, “I believe that it says we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When informed that he has just quoted the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, he responded, “it doesn’t matter to me.”)

And when asked by Gallup in October 2016 “whether there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?”, just 23 percent supported it, 76 percent of respondents opposed it.

The Democrats have 48 senators, 194 House members, 15 governors, and 3,114 members of state legislatures, their fewest number of elected offices held in generations. And now Bret Stephens wants them to spend the next few cycles campaigning for the repeal of America’s gun rights? This is some Iago-level manipulation right here.

In other words…

For more on the subject of Bret Stephens’ latest departure from Conservative sanity in pursuit of Progressive prestige and personal profit writing for The New York Times, we turn first to Charles W. Cooke…

“…The logical jump at the heart of his case is an astounding one. Stephens concedes that the gun-control crowd is a hapless bunch, unable to get even modest measures through Congress, and he concedes that this is because voters know that the Democrats are only paying “lip service” to the Second Amendment and thus don’t trust them around the edges. And then he submits that these same people should switch their focus to all-out repeal. Or, put another way, Stephens argues that the people who can’t get anything because the voters think they want everything should now move to the most extreme position available. How this would work in practice is never explained. How a movement that can’t get to 50 percent would win two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states is left to the imagination. Why, given his own concessions, the attempt would represent anything less than widespread political suicide is left unaddressed. Instead we get a pep talk. The NRA, Stephens concedes, is “popular,” while the “liberals” are ignorant and dishonest and untrusted. But all great endeavors are hard, and that’s why…gay marriage.

Stephens is not a stupid man, and nor is he unaware of the reach that tyrannies have enjoyed. On the contrary, his is often a welcome voice in the fight for the liberty of all people. This being so, it is remarkable how blithely he elects to invoke Madison as a friend to his cause, and how readily he subordinates the right to bear arms to expediency. In truth, the Second Amendment was not an “amendment” at all, for, unlike some of the subsequent alterations to the charter, it represented neither a change in policy nor a remedy for an error. Rather, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights it was the product of a disagreement as to how to best protect freedoms that were generally considered unalienable. For reasons outlined in The Federalist Papers, Madison believed that the power of the federal government would be constrained by its structure; if the central state had only a handful of carefully enumerated powers, he contended, it would not be able to exceed them. Others, the “Anti-Federalists,” disagreed, demanding a belt to add to the suspenders. The debate that followed was strictly structural — not a fight over speech or due process or arms, but over how best to ensure the maintenance of ancient liberty. Madison acknowledged this when introducing the Bill of Rights in Congress. The rights he had included, he made clear to his peers, were those “against which I believe no serious objection has been made by any class of our constituents.” In encoding the right to bear arms among the set, neither Madison nor his opponents were innovating. Instead, they were channeling Justinian, Locke, and Blackstone, and ensuring that the people of the new country would enjoy a robust right to self-defense, and the auxiliary protections that enabled it…”

then to David Harsanyi:

“The idea that gun-control advocates don’t want to confiscate your weapons is, of course, laughable. They can’t confiscate your weapons, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps inch farther toward that goal. Some folks are more considerate and get right to the point. “I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment,” writes the New York Times’s new-ish conservative columnist Bret Stephens. Referring as a “fetish” to an inalienable right that has a longer and deeper history among English-speaking people than the right to free speech or the right to freedom of religion is an excellent indicator that someone probably hasn’t given the issue serious thought.

…But my favorite part of Stephens’s column is when he asks:

“I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War.”

Setting aside the population scale, Stephens might not know that one of the reasons the Federalists, including Madison, opposed the Second Amendment was that they believed concerns over protections from federal government were overblown because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable that any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the general public. Others, like Noah Webster, reasoned that “the supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States…”

Here’s the juice: while we doubt the accuracy of David Frum’s claim 3% of the population owns 50% of America’s guns, the fact remains loyal 2nd Amendment supporters in 2016 probably proved the difference in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania; hence, the nation.  And they’ll likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future…especially if the Dims take the former WSJ editorial writer’s advice.

So PLEASE Progressives, take Bret Stephens!

Since we’re on the subject of Constitutional liberties, courtesy of Best of the Web, James Freeman details how, at least for now…

He’s with Them

The President helps liberate the Little Sisters of the Poor to exercise their faith.

“President Trump is prone to crude language and gestures. His behavior can be inexplicable. He came to the job with no experience in government and it often shows. But he understands, unlike his increasingly radical political adversaries, that the federal government has no business forcing nuns to pay for pills that terminate pregnancies. And he’s not afraid to stand outside the media consensus.

Jake and Elwood could have told B. Hussein what happens when you fight with nuns:

Which brings us to the Environmental Moment, as G. Trevor brings us this bit of hilarity, which, though satire, nonetheless accurately represents the thinking of politicians who advocate action against anthropogenic global warming despite having had to have known better:

Next we turn, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this memorable meme from Mark Foster:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with The Pot Calling the Kettle Black segment, courtesy today of the man who brought us the Iran nuclear deal:

GOP Senator Bob Corker Accuses the White House of Being an “Adult Day Care Center“

Yeah,…unlike Corker and many of his fellow GOP Senators.  Can anyone even begin to imagine a Dimocrat senator offering similar criticism of Barry Obama or Bill Clinton?!?  Hells bells, they wouldn’t vote to convict Clinton after the House voted articles of impeachment for his proven perjury!

Magoo

P.S.  A special hat tip to Stilton Jarlsberg for supplying the “Will Stand for Food” and “Harvey, harass ME!” memes featured in today’s edition.  As if  ANYONE other than Donna Shalala, Janet Napalitaon, Babs Mikulsky or Rosie O’Donnell would want to sexually harass Hillary!