It’s Wednesday, December 13th, 2017…and no, we’re not staying up to see whether Roy Moore wins.  Nonetheless, before we begin, we came across a story which epitomizes so much of what’s wrong with The Left, as FOX News recounts…

Oberlin College accused of bullying small business over students’ arrests

“Students at Oberlin College have long enjoyed pastries, bagels and chocolates from Gibson’s Bakery, a century-old, family-owned business near campus. That sweet relationship has turned bitter amid hotly disputed accusations of racism, roiling a school and town long known for their liberal politics.

The dispute, which began in November 2016 with the arrest of three black Oberlin students who tried stealing wine from Gibson’s, is now a lawsuit in which the exasperated bakery owners accuse the college and a top dean of slandering Gibson’s as a “racist establishment” and taking steps to destroy the family’s livelihood.

The three students arrested at Gibson’s pleaded guilty in August to attempted theft and aggravated trespassing and said in statements required by a plea agreement that their actions were wrong and that the store wasn’t racist.

Even so, students continue to boycott Gibson’s over perceived racial profiling, causing business to suffer. Pressed by a reporter to provide evidence or examples of profiling, they said only that when black students enter the store, they feel as though they’re being watched.

A clearer, more conclusive example of Progressive “feeling” triumphing over unassailable fact could hardly be created; after all, the tree yutes confessed, for crying out loud!

Yet they confessed only after initially (and this will come as a shock!) not only denying the truth, but concocting a complete lie:

The three students were arrested after punching and kicking the white shopkeeper. The 18- and 19-year-old students said that they were racially profiled and that their only crime was trying to buy alcohol with fake identification; the shopkeeper, Allyn Gibson, said the students attacked him after he caught them trying to steal bottles of wine.

Which, in the best tradition of their Missiah, without knowing anything of the facts…or anything else, for that matter…the Oberlin faithful unquestioningly concluded…

The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery. Members of Oberlin’s student senate published a resolution saying Gibson’s had “a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment.

Meanwhile…

The clash has inspired Oberlin senior Jake Berstein, who said he witnessed the initial altercation, to produce a podcast trying to create a conversation that “isn’t being had” between the two sides. “Gibson’s has become all that is wrong with America,” Berstein said. “It’s a classic case of those political bubbles that don’t communicate with each other, and don’t want to.”

No Jake: in a blend of Orwell’s 1984 and Mao’s Red Guards, it’s a classic case of a law-abiding citizen engaged in honest commerce being subjected to the unreasoned reaction and hatred of the Progressive mob for the purported “crime” of proffering charges against a members of a protected class engaged in attempted shoplifting and assault.

Then again, what would Jake know?  After all, his perspective is based upon 3-1/2 years of Oberlin indoctrination.

Surprisingly, a former Oberlin miseducation specialist comes nearer the mark, but still slightly off target:  

Many believe the timing was right for the conflict to boil over; the arrests came the day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, electrifying students who had long heard suspicions of racial profiling at Gibson’s. “I can understand why people were looking for some outlet for their frustration, but it’s just counterproductive to bend that anger towards a small family business that to my knowledge is not guilty of the sort of racial profiling that people accuse it of,” said retired Oberlin professor Roger Copeland.”

In all seriousness, WHAT frustration…WHAT conflict?!?  These are overprivileged little snowflakes attending a vastly overrated Liberal Arts bastion in a high-end suburb of Cleveland.  The closest most of them have ever come to stress was choosing between a Prius or a Volt!

And we completely and categorically disagree with Professor Copeland’s contention anyone has a right to outlet their frustrations, imagined or otherwise, on anyone else’s property, business or person. 

Furthermore, it wouldn’t surprise us one bit were the owners of Gibson’s card-carrying Liberals! Not that their past support would mean anything…

…to The Mob.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in an item closely related to our opening, writing at NRO, David French details the continued denial of…

Our Progressive Press

Ideological monocultures are blind to their own bias.

It any wonder?!?

“Every now and then, you read a statement that makes you realize just how vast the gulf is between the Right and the Left in this country. Earlier this morning, I read two.

Here’s the first, from Vox’s Ezra Klein:

Did you catch what he said? He called academia and mainstream journalism “transpartisan.”

Curious to read the full piece that Klein summarized, I clicked the link, read David Roberts’s argument that America is in an “deep epistemic breach” — where a large percentage of Americans reject facts that counter conservative narratives — and came across this statement:

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

The conservative movement didn’t “reject” journalism, science, and the academy. Those institutions (especially journalism and the academy) became so astonishingly, uniformly left-wing that they rejected the conservative movement. Now they’re mired in their own ideological monoculture, marinating in their own confirmation bias.

It’s especially odd to read Roberts’s and Klein’s argument in a week that featured a stunning number of media missteps — all pointed against Trump. ABC, CNN, and Bloomberg were each forced to walk back big “scoops” that damaged the Trump administration. And sadly, this week was unusual only in the frequency of mistakes, not their direction. In a devastating piece for The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald outlines story after story that had to be modified, corrected, or retracted — all of them hyping Russian influence in America and many of them including unverified or debunked links between Russia and Trump officials. The sheer number of “mistakes” has multiplied to the point where the fear that Roberts expresses — that Mueller could produce direct evidence of Russian collusion and conservatives wouldn’t believe it — is entirely justified, but journalists will have made decisive contributions to our culture of disbelief.

It’s a fact that our mainstream-media newsrooms, our nation’s faculties, and even the elite college student bodies that disproportionately produce the newsrooms and faculties are overwhelmingly left-wing. The result is an ideological monoculture so narrow and so uniform that its members often view much of the rest of the country like an anthropologist visiting an obscure tribe in the Amazon rain forest.

None of this means that there aren’t good progressive reporters who do outstanding work. (Though we’d suggest it means there ain’t many!) And none of this means that a person should automatically discount any scoop that comes out of the Washington Post or any study that comes out of Harvard. (Though we’d recommend everyone be viewed with extreme skepticism!) But what it does mean is that conscientious Americans should not believe that the “referee” has spoken. I’d even say that Ronald Reagan’s famous admonition in arms-control talks to “trust, but verify” should be changed to simply, “Verify.”…”

For those still wondering why Conservatives question the veracity of once-revered institutions, we present two rather glaring examples.

Here’s Exhibit “A”, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and The Washington Times:

Obama IG guy flags ‘strategic coordination’ of State, Clinton on emails

“Here’s something you don’t hear every day — but an inspector general who was actually appointed by Barack Obama told Tucker Carlson of Fox News that there was “strategic coordination” taking place among the State Department, Campaign Team Hillary Clinton, certain key legal minds and politicos on Capitol Hill, regarding the behind-scenes talk of The Emails.

Yes, those emails — the ones that were marked classified and top secret and that were found on Clinton’s private and unsecured email system.

Thud. That’s the sound of Democrats’ jaws dropping.

From the mouth of former Inspector General Charles McCullough III, as reported by Mediaite: “I’m well aware there was a strategic coordination between the campaign, the State Department, certain officials at the State Department, certain law firms in town and people on Capitol Hill.”…”

Next, we present Exhibit “B”, brought to us by Victor Davis Hanson writing at his Private Papers, who reveals there’s (far more than)…

One Mueller-Investigation Coincidence Too Many

Stacking the deck with anti-Trump staffers is proving to be a really bad idea.

We’re going with the latter.

“Okay — but one such conflict of interest swallow does not make a discredited spring. But then…”!!!

Which Hanson follows with nine more “but thens”, including the latest and greatest revelation senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie worked with Fusion GPS, the firm which organized the discredited Steele dossier, during the 2016 election.

All of which leads to Kurt Schlichter’s conclusion concerning…

Woke Conservatives And The Awesome Power Of Not Caring

“Have you noticed that if you fail to do, think, and vote exactly the way that the liberals and their Fredocon minions demand, you’re a racist, sexist, homophobic, child molesting, greedy, NRA terrorist determined to murder kids? Yeah, you probably have. And you’ve probably also realized that if you do everything that the liberals and their Never Trump minions demand, you’re still a racist, sexist, homophobic, child molesting, greedy, NRA terrorist determined to murder kids.

When you understand that, you’re on your way to being conservative woke.

And when you’re conservative woke, you’re ready to deploy the most powerful non-bullet firing weapon in your liberty-loving arsenal – your devastating capability not to give a damn what the liberals and their Conservative, Inc., cruise-shilling Benedict Arnold buddies say.

When you don’t care anymore, they got nothing.

What are these whiny weasels going to do to you anyway? Not like you? Think bad things about you? Taunt you a second time?

Look. Learn. Accept the harsh truth. They hate you. They hate you. They hate you.

No matter how you try to please them, regardless of whether or not you comply with their every command, that will never change. They hate you. Govern yourself accordingly.

Don’t believe me? Then you are not yet fully conservative woke…”

Which many don’t…which is why the Alabama Senate race was ever close!

So why, as the WSJ details, if The Donald was supposed to drain The Swamp, the denizens are still apparently controlling the outflow:

Christopher Wray’s FBI Stonewall

The new director hides behind a phony excuse for refusing to answer Congress’s questions.

“Christopher Wray was supposed to bring a new candor and credibility to the FBI after the James Comey debacle, but the country is still waiting. The director’s testimony Thursday to the House Judiciary Committee suggests he has joined the Justice Department effort to stop the public from learning about the bureau’s role in the 2016 election.

Which begs the question posed by Andy McCarthy at NRO:

Did the DOJ Misuse the Steele Dossier — to Spy on the Trump Campaign?

Some Trump supporters are making that claim. The president can disclose warrant applications proving whether it’s true.

“…Grilling FBI director Christopher Wray at an Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday, my friend Jim Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio, deduced that the Clinton campaign, through its law firm, had retained the research firm Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a “dossier” filled with “fake news, National Enquirer garbage”; that dossier was then “all dressed up by the FBI, taken to the FISA Court, and presented as a legitimate intelligence document.” It is speculated that this was done, fraudulently, in order to persuade the FISA Court that Trump associates, and perhaps Donald Trump himself, were in cahoots with the Kremlin’s operations against the United States. There is a problem with the theory, though — a metaphorical “elephant in the room.”

That elephant is the president. What the president’s champions fail to mention is that he is in charge of classified information — including classified applications submitted to the secret FISA Court. Was candidate Trump the victim of political spying? Of a weaponization by the Obama administration of the government’s intelligence-collection power, with ramifications that, thanks to the Mueller investigation, beset the Trump administration to this day? If President Trump is indeed a victim, then it just so happens that he is uniquely positioned to expose this shocking abuse of power. All he has to do is order disclosure.

Mind you, we are talking here about Donald Trump: the “when attacked, never apologize, always hit back twice as hard” brawler. He has never seemed like a guy who would suffer in silence if he had the power to reveal such treachery perpetrated against him. If what happened is as bad as it is being portrayed, why are the Justice Department and FBI, under Trump-appointed leadership, stonewalling Republican-led congressional committees? After Thursday’s hearing, why didn’t the president tell Director Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that, by close of business Friday, either the FISA application should be in the House Intelligence Committee’s hands or their resignations should be on his desk?…”

Unless, of course, the FISA applications were NOT based on a blatant misrepresentation of Trump’s involvement…in which case The Donald would have every reason to instruct his FBI Director to obstruct.

Which finally brings us to The Lighter Side…

Magoo