It’s Friday, August 21st, 2015…and here’s The Gouge; as reveille is at 0500 so as to get TLJ to the airport for a 0730 flight, this will be short, sweet…and, as always, insightful!

First up, Hope n’ Change offers a satirical look at three things we’d never have believed possible seven years ago: a President of the United States actively acting to undermine America’s security…

…infanticide for profit…

…and the continued viability of a candidate for the highest office in the land clearly…

…guilty of conspicuous corruption.

Yet a sizable segment of the electorate seems positively begging for an encore; indeed, ready, able and more than willing to elect a liar equal to, if not far more experienced than, The Dear Misleader.  Hells bells; Hillary was lying…

…before Barry was out of diapers!

Okay…since before we’d regrettably heard of Barack Hussein Obama.

Absent our abiding faith in the controlling hand of God, all of this would be enough to make us question our sanity.  Instead, such events simply serve to confirm our assertion Liberalism truly is a mental illness, untreatable by anything other than the truth…which the disease unfortunately renders its victims incapable of hearing, let alone understanding.

What else could possibly explain anyone, other than the most diehard Feminazis, continuing to support Planned Parenthood, aka Calculated Carnage after this?!?

And we don’t use the term “Feminazis” lightly.  For those like us, who once wondered where Hitler found so many willing to engage in the wholesale slaughter of tens of millions of innocents…

…we’ve got our answer.

In a related item, courtesy of NRO, Victor Davis Hanson details the results of 6-1/2 years of rudderless rule:

Obama: Earning Contempt, at Home and Abroad

From Thucydides’s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner.

“…The more Britain’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier in 1938 genuinely sought to reassure Hitler of their benign intentions, the more the Nazi hierarchy saw them as little more than “worms” — squirming to appease the stronger spirit. Both were seen as unsure of who they were and what they stood for, ready to forfeit the memory of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of their own on the false altar of a supposedly mean and unfair Versailles Treaty.

Hitler perversely admired Stalin after the latter liquidated a million German prisoners, and hated FDR, whose armies treated German POWs with relative humanity. In matters big and small, from Sophocles’ Antigone to Shakespeare’s King Lear, we see the noble and dutiful treated worse by their beneficiaries than the duplicitous and traitorous.

Awareness of this pernicious trait is not cynical encouragement to adopt such pathologies and accept our dog-eat-dog world. Rather, in the postmodern, high-tech 21st century, we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we have evolved to a higher level than what Thucydides saw at Melos or Corcyra — a conceit that is dangerous for the powerful and often fatal for the weaker.

Not to mention the “duplcitous and traitorous”!

One thing Donald Trump got right was the pathetic spectacle of socialist Bernie Sanders being mystified about why Black Lives Matter activists would pick on him of all people. Why would they not first hijack a speech by Trump or Walker to shout down the conservative audience? If two white pro-life evangelicals had grabbed Sanders’s microphone, would he have so obsequiously ceded it? Would the activists have been more respectful of the microphone of the officious Sanders or the imperious Trump?

The most important characteristic of a sound diplomat and negotiator is the acknowledgment of this sad human characteristic, which to some degree is innate in us all. It was often said during the Cold War that the Soviet hegemonists would rather negotiate with right-wingers than liberals, apparently on the premise that those they could not bully they respected, and those they could bully they felt only contempt for. It reminds me of a minor Chinese official who once told me that she thought Obama must be a master of intrigue; otherwise, she could not believe a leader would so frequently neglect his own country’s strategic interests…”

Which assumes, of course, The Obamao’s interests are actually aligned with America’s; an assumption, were it made in court by opposing counsel, we’d state, “Objection, your Honor; offers facts not in evidence!”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins reports the reality behind Carly Fiorina’s record at HP:

CEO Fiorina Fought the Good Fight

No big-tech chief executive created value between 1999 and 2005. And Carly was one of them.

“…People get the wrong idea about CEOs, mostly from the media. CEOs are supposed to be magical persons who transform opportunities invisible to the rest of us into unlimited wealth. If only GM, some pundits moaned at the time of GM’s bankruptcy, had a Steve Jobs who could combine steel, plastic and glass in a way that would perform all the functions of an automobile yet liberate its maker from the tyranny of costs and intense price competition with other manufacturers of automobiles.

…What’s reasonable to expect is something else: CEOs who make conscientious choices and diligently execute them, knowing that superlative results will happen only if a lot of things beyond their control fall into place too. Look at HP’s stock chart under Ms. Fiorina, who had the misfortune to arrive eight months before the tech bubble burst: It’s indistinguishable from Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, etc. By the idiotic standard her critics apply, John Chambers is the worst CEO in history, since in 15 years he never made back the wealth Cisco lost in the crash…”

In the words of the immortal Pigpen:

Next up, as the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel relates, there’s winners (like Carly), and…

…losers, as evidenced by…

The Compassion of John Kasich

Big government conservatism isn’t big-hearted, despite the sermons from a few presidential hopefuls.

And the Lord sayeth to John, “Eembrace Obamacare and every other aspect of Progressive big government”!

“There’s compassion, and there’s compassion, and then there’s John Kasich. The Ohio governor has long odds at becoming the Republican nominee, at least for now. But he’s forcing conservatives to confront a very old—if shined up—choice about the role of government.

As the nation goes about mentally categorizing the crowded Republican field, here’s one way to divide the arena: small-government reformers and big-government surrenderists. That debate is at the center of a bigger GOP meditation on how to better appeal to the poor and minorities. Mr. Kasich has emerged as the most eloquent and compelling spokesperson for the go-big camp.

…Mr. Kasich is a happy-in-life-and-God conservative, and it makes him seem the optimist. Which is bizarre, because underpinning the entire compassionate-conservative movement is a glum surrender to the entitlement state. The left has won; all that remains is to argue that conservative big-government is better managed than liberal big-government. Note Mr. Kasich’s celebration that his poverty program is less bad than other poverty programs. Yay. It’s not really a winning message.

Of course, there is another approach to compassion. It’s the version made popular byJack Kemp, and embraced by House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan—and a growing list of converts. It holds that there is nothing whatsoever compassionate about consigning low-income Americans to a government health-care system that delivers second-class outcomes. There’s nothing compassionate about making today’s working poor pay into a bleeding Social Security system or finance middle-class tax perks. There’s nothing compassionate about propping up a federally run poverty industrial-complex that spends most of its money on itself.

The Kemp-Ryan view knows that government is the problem, not the answer—not in any form…”

A replay of Dubya?

Whether it be Kasich OR his brother!!!

Finally, on the Lighter Side…

Magoo