It’s Wednesday, March 4th, 2020…but before we begin, submitted for your perusal, here’s a recent clip from FOX News featuring former DNC chairman Donna Brazile:

Yes, the pot that gave Hillary debate questions in advance, then lied about doing so, is telling a Republican kettle, who was simply commenting on the possibility of a brokered Dimocratic convention, to go to Hell.  Donna, we’re giving odds you’ll be arriving first!

P.S. If Brazile still has a job at FOX come sun-up it will confirm the network isn’t about news, but entertainment.

P.S.S. As we see it, based on the early returns, with the exception of Massachusetts and possibly Minnesota and Virginia, Biden’s winning states the Dims have no chance of taking in November.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the day with a question: How do you beg to be included on the Dimocratic ticket without actually asking?  It’s as easy as…

Amy Klobuchar Ends Democratic Presidential Campaign, Endorses Biden

 

Next, in a follow-up to an item we featured on Monday which noted, in his assessment of The Donald as the fattest President in American history, David Frum had characterized himself as either…

…an incredibly poor reporter or a liar, G. Trevor called into question the girth given Trump in the original photograph, suggesting it might have been photoshopped.  We report…

…you decide, but…

…we think Trevor’s accurately assessed the situation.

Since we’re on the subject of accurate assessments, writing at NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson correctly classifies Progressives as…

‘Gray Matter’–Deficient Americans

The billionaires and bureaucrats depend on the skilled workers they mock — and that makes them more than a little uneasy.

 

“…Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

In the earlier 2008 campaign, then-progressive candidate Barack Obama wrote off the rural voters of Pennsylvania, a state he lost in the primaries to Hillary Clinton. Of those who apparently did not vote for him, he claimed: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

A contrite Obama knew relatively little about rural Pennsylvania other than the stereotypes he had embraced about country life from his Hawaiian prep-school cocoon, Occidental College, the Ivy League, and his subsequent elite, identity-politics cursus honorum.

His then-opponent Hillary Clinton pounced and attacked Obama as “elitist and out of touch” — and she soon transmogrified, as Obama put it, into “Annie Oakley” Hillary. Remember that, in those few days of her failed first bid to capture the Democratic nomination, Hillary drank boilermakers, talked guns, bowled, and bragged about her solid support among the “white” working classes.

Of course, eight years later Hillary herself wrote off the base of her 2016 opponent Donald Trump as “a basket of deplorables.” And after smearing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — you name it,” she boasted that some of them were “irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.” When candidate Clinton went to impoverished West Virginia, she lectured poor and often out-of-work coal miners, promising, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This from someone who gave inane 20-minute talks to Wall Street grandees for over $12,000 a minute — on their expectation that she’d be a compliant quid pro quo political investment.

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden said of Trump’s working-class voters, “They’re a small percentage of the American people, virulent people, some of them the dregs of society.”

Biden, by 2019, had also metamorphosed from good ole Joe Biden of rural and coal-mining Scranton, Pa., to the grandee who could advise doomed coal miners to learn how to program computers: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”

A coal miner might have replied to Joe Biden: “Anybody who cannot do much of anything other than get mired in drugs and illicit affairs can certainly learn how to make $80,000 a month as a consultant to a foreign energy company.”

…Of course, there is also an element of fear, even apprehension, in such demonic generalization, a result of segregation from and ignorance about the physical world. Barack Obama, who once complained about the price of arugula and either had never heard or never spoken the word “corpsman,” knew that he knew nothing about farming or guns or clinging working people. Did he realize that his food, his safety, the maintenance of his home and car depended on others who could do things to keep his world viable that he not only could not do but also could not even imagine? Ask Obama and his class to replace a 30-amp breaker, or prune a peach tree, or drive a semi, and one could see that he assumes others who are supposedly less gifted provide his power, food, and consumer goods, using skills he lacks.

Ditto Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg claims he could teach anyone on an Oxford stage how to be a farmer. But he knows that he has no knowledge of farming, ancient or modern, and has no detailed notion of where or how his fruits, vegetables, grains, and choice cuts arrive at his various estates and hence his table. He may even sense that while the world could do without Bloomberg News, it could not survive without skilled farmers. So he is a bit edgy when he thinks about the physical world of muscle that allows him to be Mike Bloomberg, multibillionaire Socratic dunce.

We need to move beyond the idea that the elite caricature the deplorables because they are insensitive and arrogant. True, they are, but they also do it because they are insecure — and terribly afraid of those they don’t like, but also sense they desperately need.“

Then again, when you’re dealing with someone so self-absorbed and out-of-touch they see nothing wrong with licking their fingers as they dine on communal pizza…

…even in the midst of the coronavirus “crisis”, tone-deafness comes with the territory.

Speaking of the misconduct of the permanently entitled and tone-deaf in the midst of the coronavirus “crisis”, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and Frontpage Mag, Dan Greenfield reveals how…

An Obama Holdover in an Obscure Government Arm Helped Cause the Country’s Coronavirus Crisis

Who really decided to bring infected people to the United States?

 

One of only two photos of Dr. William Walters we could find.

“…The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.

That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.

The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

According to a State Department briefing, the missions were carried out by the Directorate of Operational Medicine within the Bureau of Medical Services.

You might think that sounds like it would be part of HHS or NIH, but the Bureau of Medical Services is actually an arm of the State Department.

The Directorate of Operational Medicine is a part of the Bureau assigned to deal with crisis response with a $250 million portfolio and a lot of employees that almost no one outside D.C. ever heard of. At least unless you remember an event at which Barack Obama honored Dr. William Walters, the head of the Directorate, for evacuating Ebola patients to the United States.

“Now, remember, the decision to move Kent back to the United States was controversial.  Some worried about bringing the disease to our shores.  But what folks like William knew was that we had to make the decisions based not on fear, but on science,” Obama said.

By “some”, Obama meant, among others, Trump, who had been a strong critic of the move.

Despite Obama’s end-zone dance, the State Department had badly botched the Ebola evacuations.

Under Bush, the CDC had prepped an evacuation aircraft for flying out contagious Americans. The Obama administration shelved the gear because of the cost, and then failed to make use of it. The evacuation process led to the same infighting between the State Department and the CDC as now.

Dr. William Walters is still on duty. In 2017, Walters was boasting of prepping more Ebola evacuations even over President Trump’s opposition to the practice. And he was once again at the wheel now.

“The question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Walters explained the decision to evacuate coronavirus patients to the United States. “And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”

Consulting President Trump was not part of the protocol even on a major national security issue.

In a Congressional briefing, Walters boasted that, “the Department executed the largest non-military evacuation of U.S. citizens in its history. The safe and efficient evacuation of 1,174 people from Wuhan, China and people onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan is a testament to the agility, proficiency, and dedication of our workforce to accomplishing our core mission – advancing the interests of the American people.”

And the triumph of the administrative state and its bureaucratic protocols over the President.

At a State Department briefing, Walters stated that, “The chief of mission, right, through the U.S. embassy, is ultimately the head of all executive branch activities.”

That is the problem. Right there.

…The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses…”

Like Donna Brazile’s employment at FOX, if this bureaucratic boob’s still in his position at the State Department tomorrow, we’ll seriously question Trump’s commitment to draining The Swamp.

In a related item concerning the Deep State, here’s one endorsement Joe Biden’s campaign initially rejected…

…but, as Best of the Web reports, subsequently welcomed:

“I forgot the #1 rule of politics, which is that if you talk about anyone or anything related to 2016, common sense goes out the window. It was meant to be a lighthearted joke – not a rejection. We appreciate the vote of anyone repelled by Donald Trump.“

Causing Jim Freeman to note, whether or not Joe’s leading the national Dimocratic field, he’s certainly ahead in the Deep State Primary.

Moving on, in a forward from Speed Mach, Politico reports a…

Judge orders Hillary Clinton deposition in email flap

The former secretary of state’s sworn written answers were “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory,” Lamberth says.

 

“…The judge, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, said the fact that more Clinton emails continue to dribble out from the State Department raises questions about the thoroughness of the government’s earlier actions to recover Clinton’s messages.

“Even years after the FBI investigation, the slow trickle of new emails has yet to be explained,” Lamberth wrote. He blasted Clinton’s prior answers given in response to another judge’s order as “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory, at best.”

Among the questions Lamberth said Clintonstill needs to answer: “How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention? Who told her that—if anyone—and when? Did she realize State was giving ‘no records’ response to FOIA requests for her emails? If so, did she suspect that she had any obligation to disclose the existence of her private server to those at State handling the FOIA requests?…And why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?”…”

Along with one more question inquiring minds want answered:

Were we Royce Lamberth, we’d hire a bodyguard (or, like Mike Bloomberg, our own small, private army!) and start having our food and drink tasted.

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

Then there’s this previously-featured meme from Balls Cotton we felt provided the perfect accompaniment…

…to this cartoon from the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg…

…along with this associated collaboration between Ed Harvey and Yours Truly:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Silver Linings Playbook, courtesy today of the aforementioned Balls and Zero Hedge, as Tyler Durden tells of… 

119 People Quarantined In A Brothel In Spain

 

“Of all the places to be quarantined, a brothel in Valencia, Spain, might not be the worst. You’ve got booze, you’ve likely got a small buffet of fried foods and you’ve got entertainment.

But in all seriousness, that was exactly the case a day ago when authorities found that a woman working at the “La Selva Negra” brothel had tested positive for coronavirus. The findings forced authorities to quarantine the premises and the 86 customers that were inside. The employee, who is now in the hospital, had “slept with several clients that same night,” according to a translated blog post on the story. 

In addition to the customers, the club’s owners, waitresses, security and cleaning crew were also quarantined. When added to the total of 86 customers, it makes 119 people under quarantine. They have been asked to “keep calm” and to just “live a normal life” inside the premises.

That may be easier for some of the patrons than they’d like to admit. And for all those guys who told their wives they were going to a wine tasting with their buddies and instead went to the brothel, the news may be worse than coronavirus – you’re officially busted.“

Reports drinks are on the house, lap dances are half off…and Hunter Biden’s among the quarantined…remain unconfirmed.

Magoo