It’s Wednesday, April 10th, 2019…but before we begin, a thought recently struck us regarding The Green New Deal: it sounds an awful lot like another, older green deal with which you’re probably familiar…and its economics are every bit as fanciful:

“We get up at 12:00 and start to work by 1:00, take an hour for lunch and then at 2:00 we’re done”…jolly good fun is right!!!  At least the residents of Emerald City technically showed up for work, albeit briefly.  As part of The New Green Deal, Progressives would relieve less ambitious Americans of even that…

…overburdensome requirement for receiving the government’s tax-payer-funded largesse.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, since we’re on the subject of green flights of fancy, we’ll change up the order and lead off with today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, and two must see video clips of MIT-educated Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie calling out John Kerry for both his questionable scientific credentials and ignorance of global climate, its history and how and why it changes:

If you thought Massie was good in that clip, he was just warming up; for, as Maggie O’Hooligan might have observed, you ain’t seen nuttin‘ yet.  Watch as Kerry demonstrates Hell hath no fury like a pompous, self-important Progressive politician scorned:

John Kerry: he’s been everywhere, seen everything!  Note his reliance on computer model predictions…every single one of which thus far has proved utterly inaccurate!  As for Kerry himself, from climate change to North Korea, the Iran deal to illegal immigration, Rhah might well have been addressing Lurch directly to his face when he said…

Next, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson details why, if you say government’s the answer, perhaps you didn’t understand the question:

“…Which is to say: The things that make people want to put czars in charge of complicated and intractable problems are also the things that make it a terrible idea to put czars in charge of complicated and intractable problems.

If designing an apartment building is complex, then how much more complex is designing, say, a national system of regulating and subsidizing health-insurance companies, medical providers, employers, state governments, and — oh! — just about every one of the 327.2 million residents of this country from sea to shining sea, in a way that optimizes at least a few hundred major criteria that are in many cases either rivalrous or incompatible? How much more complicated than that is reorganizing more or less the entirety of human economic activity in simultaneous pursuit of environmental and social-justice goals involving competing factors so complex that the relationships among them are literally incomprehensible?

The same bureaucracies and politician-dominated processes we expect to ensure substantial justice for the entirety of the human race while optimizing the sum of human material life in accord with certain slippery and vaguely defined environmental goals cannot figure out how to raise an apartment building in San Francisco — which in reality entails not figuring out how to develop the needed housing but how to let other people who want to use their own money and energy to develop that housing do so — or how to run a high school in Milwaukee, or how to ensure that all of the people on Death Row actually belong there. The federal government cannot even say with any confidence how many programs it currently administers. Don’t ask its auditors where the money went.

All of the Instagram-ready chin-up posturing and declarations of moral urgency in the world will not change the facts of problems before us or render inoperative Immanuel Kant’s maxim that “oughtimplies can.” The adjectives “ambitious,” “inspiring,” “audacious,” and “sweeping” should be met with dread by those who value boring things like reason, responsibility — and reality.“

We pledge to publish any accurate assessment of a government program or policy which could not be far more effectively and efficiently delivered by a private, for-profit enterprise…subject of course to allowing us to retort.

Speaking of those in need of a cold, hard dose of reality, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty correctly concludes…

The More Time You Spend on Culture-War Politics, The Less You Focus on Other Problems

“The editors observe that “Chick-fil-A faces explicit, official retaliation [by government agencies] not for any incidents of discrimination in its stores, but rather for the constitutionally protected freedom of expression of its associated foundation” and declare it intolerable.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal is demanding that the IRS hand over six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, ostensibly to prove that the Internal Revenue Service is properly auditing Trump’s returns. Many of us suspect the real aim of demanding the returns is to overcome Trump’s refusal to disclose them and sniff through them, looking for embarrassing details.

Pete Buttigieg challenges Vice President Pence, “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”(Never mind that it’s far from clear that Pence has a problem with who Buttigieg is.)

The country has real problems: opioid addiction, economic anxiety and insecurity, a long-term debt and unstable entitlement programs, a rising suicide rate, ensuring that every child and young person gets an education that prepares them for a changing economy. But at this moment, the single most popular thing that political leaders of either party can do is “go after” figures and institutions associated with the other side…”

We understand in that last sentence Geraghty’s trying to be fair, but there’s a reason the examples he cites of “leaders” of a particular political party going after “the figures and institutions associated with the other side” exclusively involve Progressives.

Here’s the juice: with the possible exception of The Donald, such actions are, for all practical purposes, always pulled from The Left’s playbook.  And not even Trump has plumbed the depths of patent prevarication and character assassination which contemporary Progressives regularly reach.

More importantly, there’s a side to this demonization which seems to have eluded the Lowing Herd.  Just as the Arabs, were they ultimately able to drive all of Israel into the sea, would find they’d just eliminated the catch-all excuse for problems of their own creation, should The Left successfully consign every last Conservative and Christian to concentration camps, they’d still be forced to confront an insoluble dilemma: with the supposed source of every ill in their world now neutralized, who will they blame henceforth for the continued failure of their counterproductive methodologies and mismanagement?!?

You guessed it: because, like Creepy Uncle Joe (featured below), the votes of all the newly-enfranchised, recently-arrived illegal Hispanic immigrants will have rendered America’s Blacks of no further importance to Progressive purposes. 

In a related item again from NRO, Rich Lowry relates…

“The fast-food chain Chick-fil-A is wanted on suspicion of aiding and abetting Christian organizations.

…The left-wing outfit ThinkProgress issued a report cited widely in the press and among Chick-fil-A opponents accusing the company’s foundation of “anti-equality” giving. By which it means it donated to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (and a small Christian home for troubled young men in Vidalia, Ga.). 

Needless to say, a lot of other people are guilty of the same offense, given that the Salvation Army raises about $2 billion a year. To consider all that the Salvation Army does — its thrift shops, aid for the homeless, disaster relief, anti-trafficking programs, Christmas gifts to needy children, and much, much more — and reduce the organization to an allegedly anti-LGBT group is perverse.

For its part, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes stands accused of seeking “to spread an anti-LGBTQ message to college athletes.” It’s true that FCA asks its leaders to forswear homosexual acts, but it also wants them to pledge not to engage in heterosexual acts outside of marriage and, for that matter, refuse to use drugs, alcohol, or tobacco.

According to Chick-fil-A, its donation to FCA supported sports camps and school programs for inner-city kids — not exactly controversial causes. And its gift to the Salvation Army went to youth camps and Christmas presents for thousands of Atlanta kids. 

The latest campaign against Chick-fil-A is based on the idea that it is impermissible for it to associate with any group with a traditional Christian understanding of sex and marriage, for any purpose whatsoever, no matter how unobjectionable or noble.

Any public official joining the punitive campaign against Chick-fil-A needs a remedial lesson in the Constitution, which forbids discrimination against private companies on the basis of political or religious viewpoint. It is the enemies of Chick-fil-A who are intolerant and out-of-the-mainstream. They desperately need to abandon their tawdry McCarthyite crusade and “Eat Mor Chikin.”“

Then again, if Progressives were to abandon every unconstitutional platform they supported, they’d have nothing on which to run.

And not to beat a dead White guy, but Kurt Schlichter’s requiem for a certain presidential campaign dead in the starting gate is worth perusing:

Joe Biden Needs A Hug

“It’s pretty obvious to everyone who isn’t Joe Biden that Joe Biden’s quest for the White House is a dead campaign fondling…

…Word on the street is that it’s the Bernie Bros behind the knife in the kidney that is the daily drip-drip-drip of women recounting Biden’s various creeperies. That’s strange – you would think Sanders would just naturally appreciate someone named “Joe.” But it’s a good lesson for those of us who might be suckered by the Vermont Marxist’s funny old guy act. Bernie Sanders is a communist, and communists put their enemies in the ground. He is not a nice old man with wacky hair. He’s the eager acolyte of the butchers who murdered north of 100 million people in the last century. Compared to most of the victims of Bernie’s poisonous ideology, Joe Biden has gotten off easy.

And in keeping with Cultural Revolution best practices, Biden took to YouTube to abase himself in what is certain to be a vain effort to ensure his campaign doesn’t die before it is born. Watching a grown man set fire to his dignity by sucking up to these aspiring fascists is mortifying – it turns a delightful bit of schadenfreude into something sad.

Biden’s cringey behavior is something we conservatives have laughed about for years and the media only suddenly discovered when Joe stopped being useful and got in the way. Biden’s pawing is sort of the counterpoint of John McCain’s conservative bashing. The mainstream media saw no evil when Touchy Toucherman was feeling up every skirt within his bursting radius, just like it loved Johnny Maverick when he was giving what-for to those wicked Rethuglicans. But the MSM turned on a dime and bared its collective fangs when these two dared get in the way of progress, be it McCain taking on (sort of) Obama or Joe lib-blocking Bernie, Beto, Brown’s ex, or Mayor Buttawhatever.

It’s important to remember that any Democrat pushing the #MeToo agenda is full of Schiff. The party of Chappaquiddick Teddy and Bill “Put Some Ice On That” Clinton views the protection of women not as a moral imperative but as an intermittently useful pose. And it’s a pose they don’t bother to strike unless there is something in it for them. That’s why ancient tales about Brett Kavanaugh dominated the headlines and why you now have to think real hard to remember the name of that Virginia Lieutenant Governor, who remains in office alongside the guy who still can’t tell us for sure if he was the dude in blackface or the dude in the Klan get-up.

It’s baloney, and everyone knows it, including Biden, who has got to be wondering how his decades-long free pass (a guy familiar with Delaware politics told me “There’s not a female fanny in the state that doesn’t have Joe’s paw-print on it.”) morphed into a campaign death warrant overnight. But that’s the nature of social justice warriorism – it’s a weapon designed to take out enemies by making it impossible to stay in accord with the rules because the rules keep changing and you don’t find out until you get dragged into the liberal kangaroo court and condemned.

Welcome to the world you helped create with Anita Hill, Joe. It couldn’t happen to a fake-nicer guy…”

Not to mention, a bigger…

…liar!

Then there’s this prose penned by Townhall.com‘s Scott Morefield to Progressives:

Dear Democrats: Your Desire For Reparations Leaves Us With These Questions

“Last week, virtually every serious 2020 Democratic presidential candidate spent an unserious period of time embarrassingly kissing the ring of race-baiter extraordinaire Al Sharpton at his National Action Network conference. Sharpton’s burning question for each of them?...Sharpton was asking if 2020 presidential candidates – 2020 mind you – support paying black slave descendants reparations for an institution that ended in 1865.

If you don’t already know, do you really need to wonder how the candidates answered this guy’s ridiculous question? Of COURSE each and every one of them responded with a “hell yah,” because it’s 2019 y’all, and because to a person everyone running for president under the Democratic Party banner are either shameless liars, intellectually dishonest, or hopelessly stupid.

…First of all, geniuses, where is the money going to come from? We know good and well it won’t be voluntary, so do we tax everyone, or just white people? What if the white person descended from Italians who, like my grandfather, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s? Do we tax ALL white people or just rich ones? What if the white person descended from Northern soldiers? What if the person being taxed is only half-white, or maybe, just for fun, three-fifths white? Finally, on the topic of where the money is going to come from, might it be possible that, should we finally settle on who is to be taxed, said parties might not be amenable to having their money stolen to cement the Democratic Party power base or, at best, assuage the consciences of guilt-ridden liberals?

Secondly, who gets the money? All black people, just poor ones, or just poor ones descended from slaves? Does Michael Jordan get the same as a Blood member just released from prison? And if poor is a criteria, how does one determine if someone is poor because of “systemic racism,” one’s capabilities, or just simply bad choices in life? To what percentage does one have to be of both black and/or slave descendant in or to qualify for all this free money? Or are we creating a scenario where, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham aptly put it during her Friday conversation with former ACLU Executive Committee member Michael Meyers: “The guy that came here from Serbia six months ago is going to have to write a check for a Somali refugee that came here 20 years ago?”…”

For more on Michael Meyers’…

…er,…Michael Meyers‘…

…reasoned rebuttal of the concept of reparations, check out the most recent edition of Tales From the Darkside, accessible through link #3 immediately beneath our Quote of the Day at the top of the page.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet uno más sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this real tear-jerker just in from Kansas City:

Illegal immigrant charged in 5 deaths in Missouri, Kansas found dead in jail cell

“An illegal immigrant who led authorities on a manhunt across two states after allegedly killing five people in 2016 was found dead in a jail cell early Tuesday, officials said.

…Serrano-Vitorino, who was in the country illegally from Mexico, had been charged with five counts of first-degree murder after he allegedly killed four men in Kansas City, Kan., and later killed another man in Missouri before being captured…”

All we can say is, like a busload of lawyers driving off a cliff, it’s a start!

Magoo