It’s Monday, December 30th, 2019…but before we begin, here’s a real shocker, courtesy of Katie Pavlich writing at Townhall.com:

As Durham Closes in on Brennan, Democrats Call on Him to Resign

Next thing you know, either Christine Blasey Ford…

…will accuse Durham of groping her at a party no one else remembers, or Alexander Vindman…

…will recall how the U.S. Attorney dismissed his advice on how to proceed with a particular prosecution…and THEN told him there were no seconds on Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese. 

Now, here’s the last 2019 edition of The Gouge…and this time, we mean it!

First up, it’s only fitting we kick off the final installment of the year courtesy of Jeff Foutch, and this summary of what Breitbart ‘s Joel Pollak terms…

Blue State Blues: A Decade of Fake News

The idea of a “decade in review” article at the end of 2019 is a bit of “fake news.” Technically, the current decade does not end until December 31, 2020.

In that spirit, it is worth looking back at the past ten years through the “fake news” lens. These were years in which the mainstream media used false allegations and biased reporting to suppress conservative voices; they were also the first years in which, thanks to Andrew Breitbart, we began to resist them. (We’re proud to note The Daily Gouge, which began in 2009 as a regular mass email to a number of friends (not all of whom were like-minded), was first published as a blog in August of 2011.)

2010: Tea Party “N-word.” The media’s claimed, based on false allegations by House Democrats, that Tea Party protesters called civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) the “n-word” at a demonstration on Capitol Hill against Obamacare. Andrew Breitbart offered $10,000, then $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund if anyone could provide video proving the allegation. No one ever did, but the fake news tarnished the Tea Party — permanently.

2011: Sarah Palin and Tucson shooting. The media blamed former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for inciting a mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona because her PAC used crosshairs in an ad identifying “targeted” congressional districts, including that of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). The shooter turned out to be insane. In other fake news, media blamed Tea Party Republicans for the debt limit showdown, though many ultimately would vote to raise it.

2012: Mitt Romney’s taxes, and Benghazi. The media played up sensational accusations that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had killed a former employee’s wife, or failed to pay taxes. These were all untrue — a fact later justified by former Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who noted with satisfaction that Romney had lost. The second presidential debate featured a CNN moderator intervening to defend Obama’s lies about Benghazi.

2013: Obamacare collapse. The media mocked and attacked Republicans after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) used a “talking filibuster” to shut the government down ahead of the imminent launch of Obamacare. When Obamacare finally opened, however, the federal website did not work; one state’s insurance exchange collapsed and never recovered. In subsequent years, households were shocked by rising premiums and  unaffordably high deductibles.

2014: “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The media reported — and celebrated — the infamously false claim that black teenager Michael Brown had been shot in the back while attempting to surrender to police; in fact (as the Obama DOJ investigation concluded!) he had grabbed an officer’s gun and was charging him when he was shot in self-defense. That fake news story damaged race relations and disrupted policing in urban neighborhoods — ironically, making black Americans more unsafe.

2015: Trump remarks on Mexicans and Muslims. In what would become the new template for coverage of Donald Trump, the media claimed that he had called all Mexican immigrants “rapists” in his campaign launch speech, though he had clearly attempted to distinguish between criminals and “good people.” His later call for a “Muslim ban,” likewise, was a response to Islamic terror, not an expression of some innate religious prejudice.

2016: Russian intervention in the election. When Trump joked at a press conference, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” the media — and the Obama administration — took that as evidence that he was colluding with Russian attempts to interfere in the election. That led to surveillance of the Trump campaign and to media leaks that planted the seeds of the conspiracy theory that still haunts us to this day.

2017: Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax. President Trump condemned violence on all sides; specifically condemned racism; then noted that there were “very fine people” among non-violent protesters on both sides of the issue of the removal of a Confederate statue, adding: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” The media later said that he had called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”

2018: “Kids in cages.” In 2014, Breitbart News broke the story that thousands of illegal alien kids were suddenly swamping the border. The media covered the story, but largely ignored that Obama had built chain-link fences in temporary holding facilities. By 2018, they claimed Trump was putting “kids in cages” by enforcing existing laws. Later, the media spread unsubstantiated sexual allegations against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanagh.

2019: Ukraine phone call and impeachment. The Democrats, relying on a second- or third-hand complaint from a so-called “whistleblower,” claimed that president Trump tried to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” Trump released the rough “transcript” of the call, showing he had done nothing of the sort. The Democrats pressed ahead with impeachment, using the media to publish selective leaks of closed-door testimony.

No doubt 2020 will bring more fake news, with an impeachment trial and a presidential election looming — against the backdrop of the most successful economy in American history. What Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” will be fighting hard, assisted by the censorship of tech giants in Silicon Valley.

However, thanks to him (and many others like him), the American people still have alternative media through which to find the truth, to fight back, and to win.

In a related item, over at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald lists…

Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story

Then there’s this from Townhall.com, as Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel recall…

Topics We Aren’t Allowed to Talk About

“Throughout the impeachment drama, the press repeatedly told you that the president was a liar. They said his lies are why he had to be impeached. Donald Trump is a salesman; he is a talker, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. If Trump hadn’t gotten rich in real estate, then he could’ve made a fortune selling cars. Most people know this.

So is lying really the reason the left despises Trump? Or could the problem be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim? What drives them completely crazy are those moments when Trump dares to tell the truth. Think back over the last four years to when the CNN anchors have been angriest. Was it when Trump exaggerated his own accomplishments? No. They are used to that kind of lying from all politicians. (As well as from each other!) What infuriates them is when Trump tells the truth. Truth is the real threat to their power.

There is an unspoken agreement among the people in charge of our country not to talk about what has happened to it. They are personally implicated in its decline. Often they are profiting from it. The last thing they want is a national conversation about what went wrong. So they maintain an increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance. Everything is fine, they shout. Voices rising in hysteria. Shut up or we will hurt you.

Trump won’t shut up. That is his crime; that is why they hate him. It started with his very first speech as a presidential candidate: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump could have worded his statement more clearly (After all, as we’ve often observed, English is like a second language to the man!), but he never claimed that everyone coming over the border is a criminal. But acknowledging that not every illegal immigrant improves America raises uncomfortable questions. If illegal immigration has a downside, then why has Washington allowed so much of it? If the people in charge actually cared, they would have tried harder to protect our borders. But Washington, for decades, has let millions of foreigners with no screening come across the border to use our services, often lower wages and in some cases, commit crimes. That is all true, which by definition made it unacceptable to say. The news anchors pretended that by saying it, Trump was somehow attacking defenseless Mexicans. Actually, he was attacking the gatekeepers in our national media. The people who should have been sounding the alarm about all of this, but instead made common cause with the ruling class they were supposed to be covering. Our system is rotten and corrupt, and the news media are a major reason for why that is. That is what Trump pointed out, and, not surprisingly, they despised him for doing it…”

Speaking of liars aided and abetted by the MSM Progressive propaganda machine, as the editorial board at the WSJ warns…

Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My

She may not win the nomination, but her ideas show where the American left wants to go.

“She’s the candidate with a plan for everything: That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brand. But even that sells her ambitions short, as we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers. Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation of American government, business and life that exceeds what the socialist dreamers of a century ago imagined.

Her standing in the polls has fallen after missteps over Medicare, but she is still in the top candidate tier. Her ideas deserve to be taken seriously because they show where the American left wants to go…”

Lions…and tigers…and Lizzie, OH MY!!!  All we can say is hang onto your hat…and your 401K, IRA and any savings you may have squirreled away.

Since we’re on the subject of hypocritical narcissists who would divorce their wheelchair-bound wife to further their own unbridled ambition, courtesy of BizPacReview.com via Jeff Foutch, Frieda Powers reminds us…

John McCain funneled reports from Steele to Comey after British spy was terminated, IG report reveals

“The late Senator John McCain reportedly continued to provide fired FBI Director James Comey with reports from Christopher Steele even after the former British spy had been terminated.

Five separate reports from Steele were funneled to Comey by the late Arizona senator even though the former British intelligence officer had already been dropped as an FBI source, the recent report from the Justice Department Inspector General revealed.

…Even though Steele had already met with FBI agents on a few occasions to pass on his reports, by December 2016, it was McCain who delivered the anti-Trump dossier to Comey. Whether McCain knew at the time that Steele had been terminated as an FBI source in the fall of that year was not clear.

But the IG report revealed that McCain passed on five reports from Steele to the FBI that the agency did not previously possess. Those reports were allegedly obtained by an unnamed McCain staff member from Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS – the firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

“Several weeks later, on December 9, 2016, Senator John McCain provided Comey with a collection of 16 Steele election reports, 5 of which Steele had not given the FBI,” Horowitz’s report read. “McCain had obtained these reports from a staff member at the McCain Institute. The McCain Institute staff member had met with Steele and later acquired the reports from Simpson.”

…Though that report concluded that McCain acted as the middle man between Steele and Comey, the senator, who died in August 2018, never admitted that he played a part in delivering the dossier to BuzzFeed. In a book released before his death, McCain admitted he “had no idea” if the “unproven accusations” in the dossier were true but he felt he had an “obligation” to pass it on to Comey and would do so again.

“Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,” he declared.“

Where, Mrs. Dingell’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s likely her late husband John joined McCain last February.

As G. Trevor reminded us, the entirety of this mean little man’s post-POW experience can be summed up in one act of self-centered spite, as, despite having centered his reelection campaign on ridding the country of the scourge which is Obamacare, McCain voted instead to preserve it, JUST to deny Donald Trump a legislative victory.  To HELL with the rest of the country!!!

Sorry John: not to beat a dead senator, but again…

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

Then there’s these memes courtesy of Balls Cotton…

…these three pearls of Conservative wisdom from Mark Foster…

…along with this view of a still unconfirmed entry in the 2020 race from Ed Hickey:

Personally, we feel she’s a has-been nag who, if she runs at all, won’t even get out of the gate.

Finally, we’ll call it a year with one more titillating tale of stupidity torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this just in from the Heart of Dixie:

Alabama woman, 29, missing after leaving bar with 2 strange men, texted she could be in trouble

“…Police said Houston left the Tin Roof bar on her own free will with the men, who were described only as two heavy-set black males…”

Sorry, but with all due respect to the undoubtedly deceased, this is yet another instance of life imitating art, as it’s a scenario…

…which NEVER turns out well.

Here’s wishing everyone a safe and blessed 2020!

Magoo