It’s Friday, January 4th, 2019…and one day into the 2nd Reign of the Red Queen…

…the King…

…still has his head!

Now, primarily because we’re having a hard time getting back into the swing of things, here’s a somewhat abbreviated edition of The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Speed Mach and American Greatness, in response to his continuing refusal to recognize millions of Americans simply chose a dim light over the Princess of Darkness, Roger Kimball draws a direct comparison between…

Jonah Goldberg and Cardinal Newman

“My friend Jonah Goldberg has prompted me to think a bit about the issue of character as it relates to public service. Jonah thinks that Donald Trump is a man of bad character. He’s written this several times, most recently, I believe, at National Review where he puts it negatively: it is an “obvious truth,” he says, that “President Trump is not a man of good character.”

In August, on Twitter, Jonah issued a challenge that, he noted, he had been pressing for three years: “Please come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”

…My question is this: what is the character that Jonah wants us to champion and that he stipulates Donald Trump lacks? Let us grant that the president is an imperfect man. (Like, as we examine below, a number of his predecessors…the vast majority of who weren’t ever called to account for their foibles…let alone while in office!) What betokens worse character: tweeting rude things or having sex with your intern in the Oval Office? What’s worse, insulting Bob Corker or using the Department of Justice and the IRS to harass and persecute your political opponents?

I remember being taken aback when Bret Stephens (another diehard #NeverTrumper) this time last year took stock of Donald Trump’s accomplishments and concluded, “I still wish Hillary Clinton were president.” The list that Stephens mustered was long and impressive. It began with tax cuts, the effective obliteration of ISIS, and the decertification of the Iran deal and ended with the robust economy and the ascension of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. (Brett Kavanaugh was yet to come.) “What, for a conservative,” Stephens asked, “is there to dislike about this policy record as the Trump administration rounds out its first year in office?”

I thought that was a very good question. But Stephens’ answer was the same as Jonah’s: Donald Trump’s character, his “personality,” was defective. He suffers, said Stephens, from a virtue deficit. “Character does count,” Stephens insisted, and Trump does not have it. On the contrary, the president, he said, “has imported a style of politics reminiscent of the cults of Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez.”

This is where Cardinal Newman comes in. In his book The Grammar of Assent, Newman devotes some interesting pages to Aristotle’s concept of φρόνησις, “prudence.” “Properly speaking,” Newman says, “there are as many kinds of phronesis as there are virtues: for the judgment, good sense, or tact which is conspicuous in a man’s conduct in one subject-matter, is not necessarily traceable in another.”

[H]e may be great in one aspect of his character, and little-minded in another. He may be exemplary in his family, yet commit a fraud on the revenue; he may be just and cruel, brave and sensual, imprudent and patient. And if this be true of the moral virtues, it holds good still more fully when we compare what is called his private character with his public. A good man may make a bad king…

…profligates have been great statesmen, or magnanimous political leaders.

I don’t know anyone who voted for Donald Trump, or who later came to support him, because he thought the president was a candidate for sainthood.

On the contrary, people supported him, first, because of what he promised to do and, second, because of what, over the past two years, he has accomplished. These accomplishments, from rolling back the regulatory state and scores of conservative judicial appointments, from moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem to resuscitating our military, working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure, are not morally neutral data points. They are evidences of a political vision and of promises made and kept. They are, in short, evidences of what sort of character Donald Trump is.

Add them up and I think they go a long way towards a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.

Voltaire, writing against Rousseau and his self-intoxicated paeans to “virtue,” occupied a similar semantic neighborhood: “What is virtue, my friend?” Voltaire asked. “It is to do good: let us do it, and that’s enough. We won’t look into your motives.”“

Two quick thoughts come to mind: (1) When listing the reasons people supported Trump, the second should have been, “because he was the only alternative to Hillary”. And (2), Trump’s policies evidence Trump’s political character, NOT his personal. 

Moreover, were we able to communicate with him, we’d ask Goldberg how The Donald’s “personal character” truly differs from that of four of his Dimocratic precedents:

After all, Kennedy was a notorious philanderer, bedding not only Marilyn Monroe and mob moll Judith Exner, but having cavorted in the White House pool with with multiple White House interns simultaneously.  Hells bells, even Teddy only drowned one blond in his pond!

LBJ‘s political career not only rose to prominence on the backs of the dead Americans, at least according to the Newspaper of Record, but dead Americans undeniably sealed his political fate.  Need we mention he swore like a sailor and cheated repeatedly on Lady Byrd?!?

And while the lies and sexual depredations of Slick Willy certainly need no introduction…

…the patent propaganda promulgated by the first half-White President of the United States…

…and his weaponization of the federal bureaucracy…

…easily outdoes the example set by his Republican predecessor in prevarication…

…one Richard Milhouse Nixon, who is, next to Barack Hussein Obama, a paragon of presidential honesty and virtue.

Just sayin’.

Next up, writing at NRO, Ben Shapiro details the misguided meaning of… 

Here’s the juice: despite all the Dimocrat-induced problems facing America, along with all the positive policies and appointments Trump’s achieved, Mitt “Tone Deaf” Romney…

…decided the most important item on his agenda was attacking The Donald.

This from the candidate who, in the wake of the hurricane-like thunderstorm system which ripped through the Mid-Atlantic in late June 2012…

…decided rather than personally relating to millions of voters in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia (Maryland was a lost cause), many of whom were without power for over a week, by helping them dig out of the devastation…

…and comforting them with bottled water and ice cream handed out of a traveling campaign headquarters, decided it was more important to take off for a week of 1% fun…

…at the family compound on Lake Winnipesaukee.

Yeah,…

Mitt has as much chance of ever again securing the Republican nomination for President as do Felonia von Pantsuit…

…or Nancy the Red…

…of ever winning the Dimocratic nod.  Nancy’s claims to equality of power with the President notwithstanding.

And we kick off the 2019 installment of The Lighter Side with a toast to the New Year…

…followed by the harsh reality of what’s to come, not only with the Dims controlling the House…

…but their continued impact on a immigration system they deliberately broke…

…and an economy they’re desperately trying to tank:

Whatever…

Then there’s this series of political cartoons courtesy of Balls Cotton:

Finally, here’s a meme from Steve Knight of the Harrisburg, PA CBS affiliate via our eldest son Jon which sums up not only the condition of our lawn, but our thoughts on what was the rainiest year in our area of Maryland on record:

Welcome to 2019; in Progressive parlance, the Year of…

…the Ass…with or without a hole!

Magoo