The Daily Gouge Archive, Friday, May 11th, 2018

On May 13, 2018, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, May 11th, 2018…but before we begin, here’s a timely reminder from the Morning Jolt…

“They’ve released the body-cam footage of police responding to the Las Vegas shooter…but we still have no clue on motive.

This leaves us with two possibilities. The first is that the shooter was that rare combination of meticulous, clever, and completely insane, with no motive that would ever make sense to sane people. The second is that there’s some sort of marginal evidence of a politically inconvenient narrative — say, he targeted the country-music concert out of hating Trump or conservatives or whatever — that is being, if not covered up, deemphasized, like the copy of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance that was reportedly found in the Unabomber’s cabin.“

…along with this satiric yet accurate meme forwarded by G. Trevor:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the You Can Tell a Lot About a Political Party By the Friends It Keeps segment, a single headline which confirms Gina Haspel is the right person to head the CIA:

9/11 mastermind joins partisan opposition to CIA nominee Haspel

Sorry, we were distracted; tell us again why we should give a…

…what Khalid Sheik Muhammad and his Progressives pals think about Gina Haspel…or anything else for that matter?!? At the risk of coming off as a racist, misogynistic, homophobic Islamophobe, given their shared objections to such a manifestly-qualified candidate, one might almost be tempted to consider the possibility, however remote, Progressives are playing…

…for the other team!

Since we’re on the subject of the Dimocrats’ Islamic allies who, at least according to them, have nothing but America’s best interests at heart…

Iran’s ballistic-missile spending will continue, official says after Trump’s nuke-deal pullout

“The head of Iran’s parliamentary committee on national security said Wednesday that the country is preparing to continue spending on its ballistic missile program, a direct response to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of an Obama-era nuclear deal.

“With America’s decision, Iran’s missile program will not change at all,” Alaeddin Boroujerdi said…”

Note the operative term: “will not change at all”; in other words, it’s business as usual. Thus, despite specific prohibitions under two toothless U.N. Security Council resolutions (1929 and 2231) the Mullahs have never stopped their ballistic missile test program intended to produce weapons capable of striking Israel and/or any other neighbors with whom they disagree.

Hells bells, the nose of one missile was even in inscribed with a humorous note specifically intended for the residents of Tel Aviv:

Sorry, though we’re not a rocket surgeon like those behind the U.N. resolutions and the Iran Agreement, we remain curious why anyone would spend the time and money developing ballistic missiles if they weren’t proposing to arm them with nuclear warheads?!?

As the Jewish Press reported…

Iran Claims Obama’s Consent to Ballistic Missiles Capable of Hitting Israel

IRGC Aerospace and Missile Division director Amir Ali Hajizadeh said, ‘The Americans are telling [us]: Don’t talk about missile affairs, and if you conduct a test or maneuver, don’t mention it.’

In all honesty, which would shock you more: If Obama said it…

…or if he hadn’t?

Meanwhile, meet the backwards clowns Barack Hussein Obama was determined to hand nuclear weapons by virtue of a handshake agreement with no visible means of verification or enforcement:

Gee,…where have we heard this before? Oh,…now we remember:

Here’s the juice: as Sohrab Ahmari writes at Commentary Magazine, if The Dear Misleader wants to assess blame for the evisceration of his only foreign policy “triumph”, he need look no further than…

…his own mirror, because…

Obama Killed His Own Iran Deal

Failure was a feature.

President Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal, triggering a paroxysm of fury among liberals, Never Trumpers, and the keepers of conventional foreign-policy wisdom. Yet it wasn’t the 45th president who set the stage for the deal’s collapse. Blame for that belongs to his predecessor.

Beginning in his first term, President Obama set his sights on a nuclear accord with the mullahs, one which he hoped would allow Washington to extricate itself from the Middle East. It was an ill-conceived idea that failed to take sufficient account of the nature of the regime in Tehran, its long record of terror and nuclear deception, and the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism that form its ideological DNA.

Set all that aside for now. Even if such a deal were desirable, Obama went about pursuing it in the worst possible way. He dealt with crucial foreign and domestic stakeholders—America’s traditional Mideast allies and congressional Republicans—as nonentities and fools, who just couldn’t see that rapprochement with Iran was in their best interests. (i.e., in the same fashion he approached every other policy initiative and political issue.)

He tried to circumvent the Israelis by keeping them in the dark about secret negotiations with the Islamic Republic. For Obama, Arab fears of Iranian expansionism were a tertiary concern, and he was surprised when the most important Sunni powers didn’t show up for a 2015 summit that was supposed to sell them on the deal. He likewise pooh-poohed Iran’s eliminationist anti-Israel rhetoric (“at the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on [Jew] hatred as opposed to self-interest,” he told The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg). His aides described a sitting Israeli prime minister as a “chickens—t” (on background, naturally).

He lectured and condescended, and then lectured some more.

On the home front, meanwhile, Obama relied on his signature “pen and phone” methods to ram the deal through. Rather than welcome GOP hawks as good-faith actors seeking to strengthen his hand against an adversary, he treated Republicans as the adversary. (Because, for him, they were and are!) He thought his diplomacy pitted him and reasonable Iranians like Javad Zarif against “hard-liners” in Washington and Tehran. (In fact, it did!)

Meanwhile, Obama’s Ben Rhodes-operated media echo chamber swarmed and shouted down journalists and experts who raised concerns about the terms of the accord, not least the fact that it permitted the Iranians to inspect their own military sites and left unaddressed the question of ballistic missiles. The Obama administration never satisfactorily answered critics’ questions about Iran’s refusal to come clean about its prior weaponization activity—the glaring flaw in the deal’s architecture that contributed the most to its undoing this week.

And here we are. The deal’s demise, then, was written into it by its primary author.

Speaking of those beneath contempt, here’s another reason we’ll always consider John McCain occupies a level just lower than whale sh*t:

McCain Confirms He Gave Trump Dossier to Comey: ‘Duty Demanded I Do’ It

Again, what McCain endured in Vietnam was the result of involuntary incarceration. But giving him that, before and ever since, McCain wouldn’t know duty or honor if it swam up and bit him on the ass.

Case in point: consider what McCain “believes” now…

“Right now, Republicans are on the wrong side of that progress and if we want to retain our competitiveness in the fastest-growing communities in the country we’ll stop letting the zealots drive the debate, and fix the problems that [give] them their soapbox…They’re still a small fraction in the Republican Party. But they’re the ones getting all the attention right now. They need to be confronted, not ignored or winked at or quietly dismissed as kooks. They need to be confronted before their noxious views spread further and damage for generations the reputation of the Republican Party.“

…McCain asserts that those seeking to limit (illegal!!!) immigration fear America is being “contaminated by the customs of non-European immigrants.” That is, they’re racists.“

…versus what he held dear when he was running against determined opposition in 2010:

Talk about a two-faced, hypocritical, hell-deserving piece of human excrement.

For more on those who confuse the pursuit of personal power and profit with patriotism, writing at the WSJ, Bill McGurn records…

The Two Rod Rosensteins

Limiting Congress but letting the special counsel do pretty much what he pleases.

Frankly, we despise both of them!

“In federal court last Friday, Robert Mueller’s prosecutors claimed it was no big deal if they didn’t abide by the Justice Department’s own regulations in their prosecution of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Before a manifestly skeptical judge, they argued their real authority to do what they did is rooted in (secret) “discussions” with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Three days earlier, Mr. Rosenstein had himself taken a distinctly different approach when the authority in question belonged to Congress. When asked about nascent efforts to impeach him because of dissatisfaction with the way he has responded to congressional subpoenas, Mr. Rosenstein’s choice of words was arresting. “The Department of Justice,” he said, “is not going to be extorted.”

Meet the two Rod Rosensteins.

The first Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel, seems to have signed off on everything Mr. Mueller has done, from his choice of a prosecutorial team devoid of any Trump supporter to the expansion of Mr. Mueller’s authority well beyond his public mandate. The president may bellow about witch hunts, and federal Judge T.S. Ellis may complain that no special counsel should have “unfettered power,” but if Mr. Rosenstein believes there are limits on what Mr. Mueller can do, he isn’t letting on.

By contrast, Mr. Rosenstein has been less than accommodating in signing off on documents Congress has demanded. The documents are essential to informing lawmakers about what went on in the 2016 presidential election. Today Congress is rightly frustrated, at not only the pace of production but also the heavy redactions.

This is why congressional requests for documents have turned into subpoenas, and why subpoenas are now turning into calls to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt or impeach him. At stake is the ability of Congress to fulfill its oversight responsibility…”

[LATE-BREAKING UPDATE]

The WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel offers this bit of late-breaking news…

About That FBI ‘Source’

Did the bureau engage in outright spying against the 2016 Trump campaign?

“The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.

Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.

House investigators nonetheless sniffed out a name, and Mr. Nunes in recent weeks issued a letter and a subpoena demanding more details. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response was to double down—accusing the House of “extortion” and delivering a speech in which he claimed that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” is a constitutional “duty.” Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall. And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in “loss of human lives.”

This is desperation, and it strongly suggests that whatever is in these files is going to prove very uncomfortable to the FBI.

…I believe I know the name of the informant, but my intelligence sources did not provide it to me and refuse to confirm it. It would therefore be irresponsible to publish it. But what is clear is that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the FBI’s 2016 behavior, and the country will never get the straight story until President Trump moves to declassify everything possible. It’s time to rip off the Band-Aid.”