It’s Friday, August 10th, 2012….but before we begin, any crass commercial announcement urging you to visit our home page at www.thedailygouge.com, where you can enjoy regular editions of our Cover Story, featured videos and take part in our Daily Polls.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last Gouge of the week, the WSJ describes what is more and more….

The Postmodern President

The challenge is finding anything his campaign says that is true.

President Obama spent his formative years in academia, so he’s no doubt familiar with postmodernism, the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative “truth.” At any rate he’s running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe.

The most important document of this new approach to politics may be this week’s now famous TV commercial in which a man on camera accuses Mitt Romney of killing his wife. (The man’s late wife, not Ann.) The spot features a Missouri steelworker called Joe Soptic, who recounts how Bain Capital bought his plant and eventually closed it, costing him his job and health benefits. “A short time after that,” he says, Ilyona Soptic was diagnosed with cancer. “I don’t know how long she was sick and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew we couldn’t afford the insurance.”

He continues: “There was nothing they could do for her. And she passed away in 22 days. I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone, and furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

It’s a sad tale, affectingly told. The production values are also excellent, courtesy of Priorities USA Action, Mr. Obama’s super PAC that ostensibly doesn’t coordinate with his campaign. But its notions about cause and effect are, well, novel.

Bain bought the struggling company GST Steel in 1993 and held the investment in a turnaround bid throughout Mr. Romney’s tenure as CEO, which ended in 1999. He had been gone from Bain for two years when the mill went bankrupt, in 2001, amid a larger competitive upheaval that reshaped the U.S. steel industry. Mr. Soptic’s wife died five years later, in 2006.

Mr. Soptic also revealed to CNN that when he worked at GST, his wife had her own health insurance policy through a thrift store job, which she lost after an injury in 2002 or 2003. By then he’d been hired somewhere else, but that plan didn’t cover spouses.

So Mr. Romney is to blame because of decisions he didn’t make at a business he didn’t run that may or may not have set in train a series of random unconnected events many years apart that included Ilyona Soptic’s illness. Even more culpable is the butterfly in Peking that flapped its wings and forever altered the course of history.

At least the Obamateers didn’t suggest that Mr. Romney was the direct biological cause of her cancer. Perhaps they are saving that charge for October, given that a routine Democratic theme is that Republicans are in favor of killing people. After all, the most substantive liberal critique of Paul Ryan’s budget is an ad depicting his stand-in literally flinging an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff.

The other day Nancy Pelosi said the GOP believes there should be “no government role” in food safety and “They do not want to spend money to do that.” Therefore the Republican Party is “the E. coli club” that Ms. Pelosi implied wants to poison children.

Riffing as only the postmodernists can, the House Minority Leader sat for a separate session with the Huffington Post to declare that “Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact.” What she means by “fact” is that the Senate Majority Leader asserts with zero proof that Mr. Romney got away with paying no taxes for a decade, which is “true” because he says an anonymous investor called to say so. If the food inspectors ever went by Reid-Pelosi evidentiary standards, we’d all be dead.

The same pattern tessellates across the entire Obama campaign, from former White House counsel Bob Bauer’s insinuation in July that Mr. Romney is a “felon,” to the Tax Policy Center’s white paper that makes up tax details that Mr. Romney has explicitly disowned, to hanging economic claims on the preposterous analysis of a columnist no one has ever heard of, to the President’s serial genuflections about Mr. Romney’s “sincere beliefs” that neither he nor any other normal person actually hold.

Mr. Obama likes to claim everything he does is unprecedented, and in this case that happens to be true—true in the old-fashioned, not postmodern, sense.

Our point isn’t that politics is often brutal and unfair. That’s always been so. And it isn’t that Mr. Obama promised to elevate the national conversation for an era of partisan comity. Dumping that 2008 pose was inevitable.

The point is that more than any President we can recall, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade voters that he deserves to stay in office because of his philosophy, record or positive vision for the country. Rather, his case is that he deserves re-election because Mr. Romney is worse, and he is so very much worse because of things that were invented in the West Wing but are detached from reality.

The entire theory of the Obama campaign seems to be that the more outrageous the claim the better, because the more you repeat it the more the media will talk about it, and the lie will achieve a kind legendary truth.

It’s like the Nazi General Nagel said, “What matters not is what’s true or false, but exclusively what is believed”.  And if it was good enough for Socialists then, it’s certainly good enough for Socialists now.

But, at least to us, what’s worse than the lies is the incredible ineptitude of the Romney campaign to capitalize upon them, as Conn Carroll details in the Morning Examiner:

Conservatives reminded why Romney wasn’t their first choice

Yesterday should have been dominated by the news that all of President Obama’s top political advisers blatantly lied about their intimate knowledge of the false campaign ad Obama’s Super PAC produced about the death of a former steelworkers wife in Kansas City. When the ad first aired earlier this week, Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter, Obama Campaign Senior Adviser Robert Gibbs, and Obama Campaign Spokesperson Jen Psaki all categorically denied any knowledge about the facts of the incident in question.

But then yesterday, Politico posted the audio of an official Obama campaign conference call, hosted Cutter herself, featuring the exact same steelworker, Joe Soptic. “Thank you, Joe. We really appreciate you and David sharing your experiences,” Cutter says at the end of the call, right after Soptic detailed the facts of his case.

But instead of playing up that story, conservatives were distracted by how the Romney campaign chose to respond to the steelworker ad. Yesterday, Romney campaign press secretary Andrea Saul told Fox News, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” (Was the Romney camp the last to learn the Soptics still had healthcare through Mrs. Soptic’s employer?!?) This is not the response conservatives wanted to hear. The Washington Examiner‘s Phil Klein explains:

The central difference between conservatives and liberals on health care is that conservative solutions tend to focus on reducing health care costs by removing government policies that create barriers to the free market and distort incentives. Reducing costs and increasing choices, we argue, will in turn increase access. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that more government intervention is needed to correct market failures and make sure everybody is covered.

It isn’t too hard for the Obama campaign and his liberal allies to use Saul’s comments in defense of Obamacare.

After their success running against the law in 2010, Conservatives wanted to run against Obamacare again in 2012. But the obvious similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare make that almost impossible. Romney could have chosen to renounce Romneycare early in the primaries as a failed experiment and a warning to the rest of the country as what not to do, but he chose to embrace it instead.

The scariest part for conservatives is that what Saul said was not a gaffe. It is official Romney campaign policy. The Romney campaign will continue not only to defend, but even to highlight, Romneycare throughout the rest of the campaign.

Not only does Romney miss a chance to land a serious punch on an already-reeling opponent, but he manages to at the same time to disaffect the critical component of his own base.  Not bad for a guy that’s been preparing for this chance since 2002.

Following up on yesterday’s Cover Story detailing the Left’s hypocritical double standard, Victor Davis Hanson asks what inquiring minds want to know:

Who Gets a Pass?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently said of the Chick-fil-A fast-food franchise that “Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago’s values.” Why? Because Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy is on record as being opposed to gay marriage — as is close to half the U.S. population, according to polls. The mayors of Boston and San Francisco also suggested that the company isn’t welcome in their cities.

Oddly, none of these public officials have lectured President Obama to keep clear of their cities. Yet until recently, Obama was likewise on record as opposing gay marriage. Why the exemption?

Nor have the mayors in question disinvited any black churches from their cities. Yet some pastors in churches with black congregations have been quite loud in their denunciations of gay marriage. Fundamentalist Islamic mosques routinely disparage homosexuals, often publicly so in their literature. Is there something about white Christian males that makes their opposition to gay marriage different from that of their black or Muslim counterparts?

Even as Emanuel warned Cathy that his company did not reflect “Chicago values,” his own city remains among the most murderous in the world. This year, Chicago youth have killed more Americans than have the Taliban in Afghanistan. Unable to stop the carnage, a desperate Emanuel welcomed in Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan to help quell the mostly black-on-black violence, even though the latter has a long record of racist and anti-Semitic tirades. Is the Chick-fil-A CEO a greater danger to Chicago than gun-toting gangs, or more illiberal than the racist Farrakhan?

Politics — not just race or religion — is also a key to the paradoxical double standard. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) just slandered Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Bill Magwood, an African-American, as “one of the most unethical, prevaricating, incompetent people I’ve dealt with.” Reid, furious with Magwood because of his support for the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Reid’s state, also called Magwood a “treacherous, miserable liar,” “a first-class rat” and a “sh-t stirrer.”

In 2008, Reid condescendingly attributed presidential candidate Barack Obama’s success to the fact that he was “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

More recently, the crude Reid, in McCarthyesque fashion, claimed that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had not paid income taxes for 10 years — based on a rumor that an anonymous source supposedly had passed on to him. “His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid said of the late George Romney, Mitt’s father.

Reid has demonstrated that he is both vulgar and illiberal, but there are no calls for him to vacate his post. That exemption was not extended to an earlier counterpart, Sen. Trent Lott (D-Miss.). Lott, in similarly illiberal and crass fashion, said at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in 2002 that America would have avoided “all these problems over all these years” if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Lott was pressured by both the Republican Party and the media to step down, and he did so in shame.

There is a common theme here. Our self-appointed priests of fairness from time to time freely commit sins of intolerance. But don’t dare hold them to the same sort of accountability to which they hold other, less progressive Americans, whose similarly dumb remarks are not gaffes but rather windows into their prejudicial souls.

We must make allowances for the supposed Biblical conservatism of some black pastors in a way we cannot for the white, Christian CEO of Chick-fil-A. Farrakhan’s hatred cannot possibly earn him ostracism. We cannot extend the anger at evangelical Christians for their incorrect attitudes toward feminism and homosexuality to the Muslims who often share similar views.

Such selectivity is untenable. Classical Western liberalism was predicated on judging people as individuals — and on their merit and performance — rather than collectively as identity groups identified by gender, race and religion. Using illiberal means to advance supposedly liberal ends results not just in hypocrisy and cynicism, but in the current disaster of “Chicago values.”

Politically correct exemption is doomed, because who can sort out the conflicting agendas of various identity groups? Who certifies who’s really black, brown or white in a multiracial, intermarried America — Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren? Who deserves how much compensation for which particular past oppression?

Can black pastors who oppose gay marriage be judged prejudicial? Is the Asian-American who opposes illegal immigration subject to the same charge of nativism leveled at so-called whites? Can Harry Reid be judged a bigot and McCarthyite if he claims he’s liberal?

A simple antidote to multiculturalism and political correctness is to evaluate all Americans on their actual behavior, regardless of their politics, race, gender or religion — in other words, a return to the ancient liberal idea that one common culture treats all sorts of different people absolutely the same.

Were such the case, it would certainly have allowed The Dear Misleader to avoid one particular pitfall, as detailed by the WaPo‘s Jennifer Rubin, courtesy of George Lawlor:

Obama’s welfare debacle

Mitt Romney is hammering President Obama on welfare reform, and for good reason. The 1996 welfare reform legislation was overwhelmingly popular, was a great bipartisan achievement, stands as a policy success and comports with Americans’ deepest values about personal responsibility and the work ethic. And Obama tosses that aside, for reasons that still seem perplexing. Is there some anti-work welfare contingent out there? It’s inexplicable both on policy and political grounds.

Only if he sees a way he can profit from it personally, be it more money or more sex.

And in the Environmental Moment, as Newsbusters.org‘s Brent Baker informs us, rank political bias is evident not only in what the MSM says, but what they don’t say:

NBC Hypes July as ‘Hottest Month Ever’ – Doesn’t Bother to Mention It Was Barely Hotter Than 1936

“On our broadcast tonight,” Brian Williams teased his lead story Wednesday night, “extreme heat, but more than that: the official confirmation that came today that it has never been this hot in America.” Citing a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report which pegged the average July temperature in the lower 48 at 77.6 degrees fahrenheit, Williams proceeded to hyperventilate over the “official word that arrived today that” July was “the hottest of all time since they started keeping records.”

Yet, as fill-in CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer noted in a short item deep in his newscast, the “previous record for a single month [was] 77.4 in July 1936 during the dust bowl.”

So, all of NBC’s excitement came from temperatures 0.2 tenths of a degree hotter than before the widespread industrialization blamed for global warming and before the widespread development which causes heat islands that mean temperature stations which used to be in isolated areas are sitting next to pavement and buildings.  

A dire Rehema Ellis, who like Williams didn’t bother to inform viewers it was just about as hot in 1936, related: “The signs have been everywhere, highways buckling, planes trapped in melted asphalt, cracked Earth across the Midwest. Today the government scientists who monitor the nation’s weather made it official. July 2012 was the hottest month ever.” She warned “the average temperature for this July was 77.6 degrees. That is 3.3 degrees hotter than the 20th century average.”

Life as a climate “scientist” bears a lot of similarities, at least lately, to being Senate Majority Leader.  You can make outrageous statements without a shred of supporting evidence, claim any unconnected random events support your positions and suffer no career-limiting consequences when you’re proven wrong, all the while maintaining credibility with a fawning MSM.

 Hey, sounds like great work if you can get it; and it only you costs you your soul.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this preview of what may well soon be standard attire for plumbers nationwide, courtesy of G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors:

Next up in the Religion Section, we learn….

Parishioners Sick of Alec Baldwin Pontificating from the Pulpit

For most, a Sunday church service is a moment for peace, worship and reflection — unless Alec Baldwin is in your congregation. Sources tell The Post that some of the parishioners at Most Holy Trinity Parish in East Hampton are so sick of Baldwin’s blustering that a group stood up and turned their backs on the hot-tempered star as he gave a reading from the pulpit.

A source told us of the protesting parishioners on July 29: “Alec loves to be the center of attention and often reads from the pulpit, which really annoys some in the congregation. It is so bad that, one recent Sunday, he went up to read, and part of the congregation stood and rudely turned their backs on him.”

The source said, “Even though he has generously given a lot of money to the town, there are people who just don’t like him. He has a need for attention and shows up at every event. When people go to the church, they don’t want to see the movie star up there.”

Alec Baldwin reading Scripture; does his tongue turn to fire?  This must be the parish where Bill Clinton guest lectures on the sanctity of the marriage bed.

And in News of the Bizarre, another Oprah-inspired act of child abuse:

Parents arrested after dad accused of ‘waterboarding’ daughter

A Delaware couple has been arrested after their daughter claimed her father, a doctor who reportedly has appeared on  “Oprah” as an expert on near-death experiences of children, “waterboarded” her while her mother stood by and watched. MyFoxPhilly.com reports Dr. Melvin Morse, 58, and Pauline Morse, 40, are facing abuse charges stemming from alleged incidents against their two daughters, ages 5 and 11.

Dr. Morse was initially arrested after police received reports he had grabbed his 11-year-old by her ankle and dragged her across a gravel driveway July 12. The girl then told detectives that over a two-year period she was disciplined by her father using a method he called “waterboarding.” She alleged her father, on at least four occasions, held her face under a running faucet, causing the water to go up her nose and all over her face. The alleged incidents occurred between 2009 and 2011, MyFoxPhilly.com reports.

DelawareOnline.com reports the child said her father told her once he “was going to wrap her in a blanket and do it so that she could not move.” Another time she said he told her she “could go five minutes without brain damage.” The child told investigators she never knew what she had done to deserve such a punishment.

Rumors Dr. Morse is in negotiations with MSDNC for his own show remain unconfirmed.

Finally, we’ll end the week with the Medical Section, and this just in from St. Louis:

Doctors remove Lego wheel from boy’s nose after 3 years

A little boy can breathe a little easier now after doctors removed a Lego piece from his nose.  The toy had been stuck up his nose for three years. Issak Lasson, 6, began having sinus problems when he was three. His parents brought him to several doctors before finding the real problem. A Lego tire had been stuck up the child’s nose for years.

Issak doesn’t remember putting the Lego piece up there. His parents say since the toy was removed, he has more energy, more of an appetite, and he can finally sleep soundly.

Not to mention finally being able to finish the Lego car he’s been working on for the last 36 months!

Enjoy the weekend, and be sure to visit our home page.

Magoo