It’s Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018…but before we begin, a brief observation on the latest lunacy to escape the lips of the Vatican’s equivalent of Donald Trump:

Pope Francis: Ban All Weapons

Gee, did he come up with that one by himself?!?  Two responses immediately come to mind:

And…

Though we’re willing to bet even were Francis somehow able to beat all the world’s swords into plowshares, he’d continue to live behind walls patrolled by Swiss Guards armed with assault scythes.

As Bugs Bunny so eloquently observed…

Speaking of maroons, the Daily Beast reports…

John McCain in New Book: I’m Freer Now to Speak My Mind

“…I’m freer than colleagues who will face the voters again. I can speak my mind without fearing the consequences much. And I can vote my conscience without worry. I don’t think I’m free to disregard my constituents’ wishes, far from it. I don’t feel excused from keeping pledges I made. Nor do I wish to harm my party’s prospects. But I do feel a pressing responsibility to give Americans my best judgment.”

Of course, McCain never bothered to actually ask Americans whether they wanted the benefit of his opinions or judgment, because he already knew the answer:

Oh,…and if the illegals attempting to caravan into America are supposedly seeking asylum, WTF are they sitting on the border wall…

…waving Honduran flags, the country from which we can only assume they’ve just fled?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty opines on the reality of the stark choice offered by…

The White House Correspondents’ Blather

Do we need to hash out the White House Correspondents’ Dinner controversy any more, or have we emerged from that news cycle?

Yes, the comedienne’s routine was obnoxious, crass, and far too personal in the eyes of many. It says quite a bit about her that she joked about the inappropriateness of her routine: “Should have done more research before you got me to do this.” In other words, she knew what was appropriate at that time and place, and she chose the other path. It’s fascinating to see various commentators insisting her comments were not too gross or nasty for the occasion, when she herself was effectively admitting that they were.

Our former colleague Tim Alberta: “Every caricature thrust upon the national press — that we are culturally elitist, professionally incestuous, socioeconomically detached and ideologically biased — is confirmed by this trainwreck of an event. Journalists, the joke’s on us.”

Michael Graham: “Inviting Michelle Wolf was the DC media revealing their views of the president. They didn’t offer critiques of policy or comic takes on presidential foibles. They held a ‘We Hate Trump!’ party and invited the rest of America to look upon their loathing of a guy 60 million of their fellow citizens voted for. That was the set up.”

She said obnoxious things. Yes, the president says and tweets obnoxious things. Citing one to justify the other in either direction is an ipso facto defense of obnoxiousness. I will accept one of two universal standards. One is a public discourse where no holds are barred, everything is fair game, and nothing is beyond the pale for everyone on both sides. The second is one where decorum, decency, and respect are required in public discourse, from everyone and to everyone on all sides. I’d actually prefer the latter, but can function in either world.

But whichever standard we pick, it must be universal; it can’t be the first standard for political allies and the second standard for political foes. None of this “Hitchens was in the family, you aren’t,” open double-standard nonsense from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. If you want our discourse to be Firing Line or the Oxford Union Debates, you have to hold everyone to that standard. If you’re comfortable with a four-way debate between Bill Maher, Alex Jones, Ted Nugent, and Kathy Griffin, I can live with that, too. But under those rules, no one gets punished for inappropriate speech; no one ever gets fired for an offensive comment on social media anymore.

Pick one, friends.

“Friends” being a term Geraghty undoubtedly uses loosely.

Writing at White House Dossier suggests, Keith Koffler suggests…

“…The press can complain about Trump, and I believe he goes too far in his attacks. I don’t think the government should be attacking reporters, whether it was the Obama White House – which did it often but in private – or Trump. Defend yourself, counter the arguments, but don’t chill free speech.

But ultimately, the press has done this to itself. It is liberal, it has changed its mores so that it barely even tries to check its bias anymore, and it has given the president an opening to attack it and to have his arguments resonate, because many of them are true.“

By the way, to it’s credit, The Hill has opted out of future participation pending drastic reforms of the program.

In a related item, writing at NRO, David French astutely observes…

“I’m going to tell you perhaps the dumbest story you’ve ever heard — a story that is stupid with a heaping helping of malice on the side.

On Sunday morning, a teenage girl named Keziah Daum posted pictures taken on her prom night to Twitter. Daum isn’t a public figure; she’s a student at a Utah high school. Her message simply said, “PROM,” and it had four pictures:

If you’re a normal human being, like the majority of Americans who saw their Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter feeds fill up with prom pictures last weekend, you thought that was a pretty girl in a pretty dress. Nothing more.

But if you’re a toxic social-justice warrior, you saw something else. You saw oppression. You saw exploitation. You saw bigotry. You saw — gasp — “cultural appropriation.” The dress, you see, had obvious Asian influences, and Daum isn’t Asian:

We’re curious: has Jeremy Lam ever been to Asia?!?

Note the likes. Note the retweets. Note the comments. That’s a monstrously viral tweet – especially for a person with a mere 1,818 followers. It sparked so much attention and controversy that Twitter then created one of its “moments” to chronicle the controversy and chart the most salient responses.

…So, that’s the story. Here’s why it matters: It’s indicative of how the people who care the most about identity and oppression are seized by rage and unreason. And because cultures are shaped and defined by those who care the most, Daum’s story is not just a Twitter story; it’s increasingly the American story.

…Just so we’re clear, the radical progressive position is (1) America’s borders should be flung wide open to people from every culture in the world; (2) when American white people encounter people from those hundreds of different cultures, they need to stay in their lane; and (3) white people staying as white as possible will help our nation totally unify and diversity will be our strength.

But don’t you dare try to point out the nonsense. After all your job — as a proper “ally” to oppressed people — is to acknowledge the rage of the oppressed and support their quest for social justice. I don’t think anyone doubts that Jeremy Lam, the young man who first attacked Keziah Daum, was actually and sincerely angry when he tweeted her pictures to his followers. Let’s at least presume his honesty. (A position with which we vociferously disagree.)

The proper response to his anger isn’t indulgence. His ethnicity doesn’t make him right. His fury doesn’t make him credible. Instead, the proper response is to tell him he’s wrong — wrong and destructive. Silly, frivolous attacks like Lam’s represent a form of “crying wolf” that render the body politic steadily more immune to claims of racism, while simultaneously enraging social-justice warriors who believe each cry should be met with a decisive response.

On the one side is a collection of Americans who rightly look at Daum’s dress and say, “That’s not racist. It’s just a pretty dress.” On the other side is a collection of Americans who (wrongly!) view this indifference and confusion as a provocation.

Now, let me ask. As you survey pop culture, the academy, and American corporations, which side has the upper hand? Which side is defining American discourse? America’s most prominent culture-makers obsess over identity. They elevate prom dress choices to matters of national debate. And that’s why people who still possess a sense of reason, proportion, and manners (on both sides of the political aisle) need to push back. Reason can’t cede the public square to rage. Sometimes a prom dress is just a prom dress. But Lam’s tweet wasn’t “just” a tweet. It was a symbol of the incoherent anger that is tearing this nation apart.“

We most respectfully disagree with David French on several points.

(1). When it comes to Jeremy Lam…or David Hogg for that matter…we would willingly…

We frankly couldn’t care less whether Jeremy Lam was sincerely honest or angry.  After all, Hitler was sincerely honest and angry about his loathing of Jews; it didn’t make his opinion either right or deserving of consideration.

(2). As we observed above, if one side is right, the other expressing the opposite position is, by definition, wrong!  It’s sorta like The North’s position on slavery versus that espoused by The South.

Lastly, (3). (and this is where things get interesting) Keziah Daum’s predicament highlights all that’s unsound about social media.  By craving publicity, which is the only way we can interpret the inescapable urge to publicize every aspect of one’s life, Ms. Daum and everyone else on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media forum, opens themselves up to the uninformed opinions and angry assaults of anonymous a*sholes, who are primarily, as David French detailed, those of the Progressive persuasion.

And it’s the anonymity which empowers them.  Were Jeremy Lam to have met Keziah Daum in a more public forum, we’ve no doubt Lam’s interest in Ms. Duam’s attire would have been exclusively focused on discovering what lay beneath it.

As it is, he can spout his vomitous invective without fear of any reprisal whatsoever, specifically because so many socially-stunted snowflakes agree with him.

Here’s the juice: while we may disagree with David French on a number of minor issues, when it comes to his main point we’re in complete conformity.

Since we’re on the subject of incoherence, regardless of source, PJ Media offers…

A Collection of Ben Rhodes’ Tweets That Got Everything Wrong on Iran

Yes, Ben, they are; and none of them are on your side!

It’s also worth noting, as the WSJ relates, Iran has been using the cash Obama handed them back in 2015 to finance their build-up in Syria.

Have you the time, it’s well worth watching Bibi Netanyahu expose the Iranian’s subterfuge, and with it, the Obama Administration’s concomitant complicty, in full:

Moving on, also courtesy of NRO, John Fund eulogizes the…

We’re guessing Kamala Harris won’t be using this photo-op in future campaign ads.

“A decade ago, high-speed rail was the new, new thing. In 2008, California voters narrowly approved initial bonds for a train that was supposed to go 220 miles an hour and deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. The next year, the Obama administration’s stimulus bill allocated money for it and several other high-speed lines. But soon the push for trains slowed to a crawl, and now it appears to be on life support.

In 2011, the new GOP governors of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin turned down federal money for trains. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker told me: “Washington may help pay for building it, but we’d be stuck paying the operating costs of a boondoggle.”

But California’s transportation planners, who never encountered a boondoggle they couldn’t embrace, pressed on despite mounting costs and construction delays. In 2015, desperate to beat a deadline that would have meant the end of federal funding, they began construction on a 119-mile segment of track in the state’s sparsely settled Central Valley. Fewer than 3 percent of the train’s potential riders live along that portion of the route, but backers believed that if they built the Central Valley segment, the sunken costs would convince state legislators to find money for the remaining segments.

That is increasingly unlikely. In January, the California High Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a train critic who represents Fresno, promptly labeled it a “going-out-of-business plan.”

According to the Authority’s own numbers, the train’s costs have soared to a likely $77 billion — more than double the original cost estimate of $32 billion. If anything (more) goes wrong, the tab for the project could hit $98 billion, or 50 times the current annual appropriation for the nationwide Amtrak system. As for delays, the Authority conceded that rail service on the portion of the route from Bakersfield to San Jose probably won’t begin until 2029, a full nine years after the entire system was supposed to be complete.

As for the “high speed” aspect of the train, the Authority now admits that the two-hour-and-40-minute travel time that helped sell the initial bonding of the train in 2008 will now slip to, at best, three hours and 30 minutes. Travel time on some runs will be up to five hours.

Release of the Authority’s depressing business plan has finally sobered up some experts…”

Sorry, but if they actually were experts, wouldn’t they have seen this coming?!?

Which brings us, finally, to The Lighter Side:

Magoo