It’s Monday, June 28th, 2021…but before we begin, two brief observation on the increasingly woke nature of our nation’s Military and its senior officers:  

You’ll note we referred to the likes of Mark Milley, Mike Mullen and George Casey as senior officers, not “leaders”.

Thought #1: America’s domestic enemies are engaged in a thinly-disguised conspiracy to remove any remnants of loyalty to the Constitution from our increasingly emasculated Military, thus minimizing any opposition to future the unconstitutional use of America’s Armed Forces against her own citizens…say, for example, national gun confiscation, or enforcing fraudulent federal elections.

Thought #2: In the short term, America’s foreign enemies are laughing their a*ses off.  In the long term, they’re biding their time…and licking their chops.

Now, here’s an exceedingly rare Tuesday edition of The Gouge!

First up, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty opines on this decidedly un-intelligent assessment from the…

U.S. Director of National Intelligence: Hey, We May NEVER Know the Origin of COVID-19

“…If, after a 90-day review, specifically in response to a directive from the president, the U.S. intelligence community’s answer is, “Well, we just don’t know how this pandemic started,” it will be not just a colossal disappointment; it will also set off a million conspiracy theories about coverups.

The U.S. intelligence community has access to all kinds of information that we mere laymen don’t — signals intercepts of every kind from the NSA, satellite photos and footage, information from allied intelligence services such as the “Five Eyes,” and who knows, hopefully at least one human source in the Chinese government. There’s that rumor of a high-level defector, although some unnamed U.S. official told the Daily Beast that’s not true — but governments aren’t usually eager to confirm rumors of major-league defections. (If that denial is accurate, that raises the question of just where Dong Jingwei, vice minister of the Ministry of State Security, currently is.) At minimum, the U.S. intelligence community should be able to determine if anyone of significance within the Chinese government secretly feared or believed that the pandemic was indeed the result of a lab leak. Between the early lying, the delayed release of key information to the WHO, the taking down of previously accessible databases of virus information, the refusal to allow a WHO team to visit for a year, the refusal to turn over raw data on the first COVID-19 patients, and the suppression of academic research into the virus’s origin, Lord knows the Chinese government has been acting like it’s guilty from the start. And then there’s this simple fact, laid out in Katherine Eban’s piece in Vanity Fair:

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

There was one comment from Haines in that interview with Yahoo that seemed a little curious:

Haines even posited a third, hybrid theory for the virus’s origin. “It could be, for example, a scenario in which a scientist comes into contact with an animal that they’re sampling from” and contracts the virus in that way.

A scientist contracting the virus while collecting a sample is not morally or ethically all that different from a lab leak. (That particular scenario doesn’t seem all that unlikely, considering the fun-and-games images of bats hanging off the hats of the researchers with exposed skin collecting the samples, and Tian Junhua’s description of the time he “forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops” and self-quarantined for two weeks.) In either case, an effort at virus research that the institutions publicly insisted was safe was not safe and set off the worst pandemic in modern history. The only mitigating factor would be that no gain-of-function research was involved.

There is no bigger question facing the world right now than how this awful pandemic got started. Sure, thanks to vaccinations, the pandemic’s effect on American life is getting smaller each day. But this progress comes after more than 617,000 Americans succumbed to the virus, at least $16 trillion in economic losses, a lost year of schooling for almost all of America’s kids, the health effects of the “long-haulers,” and a million other disruptions and tribulations in the lives of ordinary people, all around the globe. We’re almost at 3.9 million deaths worldwide, and have more than 179 million cases worldwide. There’s also a good chance that all of these official figures underestimate the true toll in lives lost. (At least in China; we know here in the U.S. the total has been grossly over-inflated in the name of continued control.)

No one wants to go through this again, which means we have to know how it started. A “We just can’t figure it out” from the part of the U.S. government that is specifically assigned to protect us and and find out what other countries are hiding isn’t going to cut it…”

It will as long as Xi Jinping controls the WHO, the MSM and the White House.

Since we’re on the subject of those far more interested not in what is right, but rather that which fattens their already-bloated bank accounts, NRO‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty details…

Our Cruel COVID Class System

Three tiers: essential, inessential, and expendable

“Over a year ago, seeing the immediate effect that quarantines, shutdowns, and lockdown policies were having on Western democracies, I put out my futile prayer: “Let’s Never Get Used to This.” I was appalled by the culture of snitching taking over the United Kingdom, the open contemplation by major Western governments of “antibody certificates,” and the U.S. attitude of going into lockdown without ever explaining what measures would end it. There were none.

But I’m worried that, in the future, historians will laugh at us. Over a period of 16 months, we have just discovered that governance inspired by Chinese despotism could be practiced in the West in the name of public health. Across the former free world, constitutional rights were enthusiastically violated in the name of saving lives, and the vast majority of people complied happily or even became zealous enforcers themselves.

This is something governments can’t “unsee.” When governments and other powerful entities take a hard look at the wholescale shutdown of businesses and social and religious institutions, the requirement to work at home if possible, the Zoomification of social life, the suppression of dissenting opinion and the promotion of government party lines by all major social networks across the globe, what will they see? Tools available for many other problems…”

Such as combatting the non-existent threat of anthropogenic global warming, just to name a few.

Next, some more of that sh*t you just can’t make up, as, courtesy of Judicial Watch via G. Trevor, we learn a…

Jailed Murderer Wins Public Office in D.C. Election, Defeating Four Other Inmate Candidates from the Same Prison

“As the homicide rate hits a record high in Washington D.C. the city elects a convicted murderer to public office in a unique election featuring all inmate candidates. The freshly elected public official, Joel Caston, has been in prison 26 years and is currently incarcerated at the District of Columbia Jail. In 1996 Caston was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder for ambushing and killing a man in the city’s Anacostia neighborhood. Court records obtained by Judicial Watch indicate that a 2016 appeal was denied. In the document, Caston’s attorneys name the victim, which is not common practice today. Court records also reveal a “speed loader”—a device used to rapidly load ammunition into a firearm—was found by police under Caston’s mattress after the shooting. It contained six rounds of .44 caliber ammunition as well as additional rounds of ammo.

Now Caston is a commissioner on D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC), which advises the D.C. Council and other local government entities involving matters ranging from liquor license applications to public safety. Commissioners serve two-year terms and are elected in even-numbered years. The ANC was established to bring “government closer to the people, and to bring the people closer to government,” according to its website. Caston was chosen by voters to represent Ward 7, one of D.C.’s most crime-infested areas. It is represented by Councilman Vince Gray, an ex-D.C. mayor who was embroiled in a campaign finance scandal. The Ward 7 ANC seat has never been occupied and D.C. officials conducted an unprecedented election earlier this month to fill the post. All five candidates and the majority of voters they courted are incarcerated at the same prison with Caston, according to a local news report.

Last year the D.C. Council passed legislation allowing incarcerated convicted felons to vote…”

Talk about a group of citizens getting the government they deserve.

In a related item detailing the present-day circumstances of those who may well be the next Joel Caston, FOX recently reported an…

Illinois trio has been charged with beating, strangling police officer over traffic stop

Aurora Police chief said she will not allow city to become place ‘where criminals feel emboldened‘

Sorry, chief: Criminals began to feel emboldened the day The Obamao took office, and they grow ever more impudent under 46* at an increasingly dizzying pace.  But the story here is NOT that three Blacks would feel free to assault a law enforcement officer over a traffic stop, rather at what point…and, given Progressives’ continued support of the law-breaking over the law-abiding, that point is fast approaching…will an officer, in justifiable fear for his life, draw his service weapon and shoot savages such as these?

Here’s the juice: Certainly the officer assaulted by the heirs of Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Jacob Blake and St. George of Floyd featured above had far more cause to have shot any of his attackers than the trigger-happy Quickdraw McGraw of Capitol Hill had to execute the unarmed, nonthreatening Ashli Babbitt.

We turn now to another sextet of items specially selected to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). In yet another indication Trump’s judicial legacy won’t be nearly as significant as we’d hoped, the SCOTUS declined to take up a case over a Virginia school board’s policy on transgender bathroom use, leaving in place a lower court’s ruling that the school unconstitutionally discriminated against a biologically female student who was denied access to the boy’s bathroom.

(2). Anyone still wondering whether America has a two-tiered system of justice in which the upper level absolves prominent Progressive politicians and government bureaucrats of any meaningful retribution or guilt, consider the “sentence” handed down to Kevin Klinesmith, the former FBI lawyer who deliberately doctored a FISA warrant application as part of the Deep State’s dogged pursuit of The Donald.

(3). Courtesy of Townhall.com, Matt Vespa records a recent Loudon County school board meeting was engulfed in total mayhem over critical race theory.

Yet what disturbed us most was not the uproar, but rather local law enforcement’s reaction to it:

It should disturb you greatly to know certain police officers are more than willing to circumvent and/or disregard the law to protect the unpopular, unconstitutional policies of bumbling bureaucrats.

(4). In a forward from James Nichols, Newsbusters.org relates the curious fact that though Sonny Cuomo’s many scandals live on, the MSM’s interest in them has died.

It’s the MSM’s Ralph “Blackface” Northam strategy:

Did his retro-racism actually happen if no one covers the story?

(5). Writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman wonders, other than dodging shoplifters in your local drugstore, what’s the best way to explain why YOU are leaving the once-Golden State?

(6). Since we’re on the subject of The Land of Fruits & Nuts, the New York Post reveals Dianne Feinstein has listed her Lake Tahoe digs for a cool $41M.  Reports Black Lies Matter co-founder and Marxist Patrisse…

…-Cullors is considering adding it to her existing stable of more-equal-than-others estates remain unconfirmed.

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

Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…

…Speed…

…and Ed Hickey:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Sports Section, courtesy today of the…

Third-place hammer thrower turns back to US flag during national anthem at Olympic trials

As if we needed another reason not to watch the Olympics.

Magoo

P.S.  It’s Monday evening.  We had a long weekend, worked in the garage much of today, and will be playing Merion tomorrow.  It’s gonna be hot, and we’re gonna be tired.  So rather than miss publishing on Wednesday, we decided to move things up a day.  We’ll resume our regular schedule on Friday.  ‘Til then…

Video of the Day

John Stossel marks the 60th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged.

Tales of The Darkside

Assuming he ever had it to begin with, here’s proof Biden has lost it.

On the Lighter Side

In keeping with the subject of our Quote of the Day, one of our favorite clips from The Simpsons.