It’s Friday, September 11th, 2015…but before we begin, a brief moment of silence in honor of…

And it truly is up to us to remember, as the power-that-be refuses to recognize the source of the problem…

…let alone act as if the problem…

…even exists!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, a quick shout out to Senate Majority leader McConnell: thanks, Mitch…

Senate Democrats Block Measure Against Iran Nuclear Deal

…you’ve just reinforced our reason NEVER give another penny to a national Republican organization.  Truth is, as Andrew McCarthy pulls aside the curtain to reveal, passage of the most destructive bit of diplomacy since the Munich Accord had less to do with Barry, and far more about…

How the GOP Pretends Not to Authorize Obama’s Agenda

“In my weekend column I offered a concrete plan to undermine President Obama’s atrocious Iran deal. It is an easy one, because all that the Republican-controlled Congress has to do, if it really wants to derail this thing, is follow the law that they wrote and Obama signed, the Corker law — the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, sometimes also known as “Corker-Cardin,” after Senate sponsors Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) and Ben Cardin (D., Md.).

Sadly, in another iteration of the anger that is the wind beneath Donald Trump’s wings, many readers insist that GOP leadership has no intention to block Obama on Iran. If that is so, it is passing strange. The national-security threat here is grave. Plus, how much credibility can Republicans have (maybe I should just end the sentence there) in complaining about Obama’s disregard of federal law if they won’t even follow the law they themselves enacted just four months ago?

In my column I demonstrate that Obama has failed to comply with the crystal-clear conditions spelled out in the Corker law. This is indisputable. “Side deals” that the statute explicitly requires to be disclosed to Congress — involving, for example, IAEA inspection terms and Iran’s prior nuclear work — have been withheld. Moreover, not addressed in my column is yet another alarming side deal Obama has refused to disclose: one that shows the president is deceiving the public when he preposterously claims that sanctions will “snap back” if Iran is caught cheating. (I’ll have more to say about this in another post. For now, see this important Real Clear World report, particularly the subsection “Fallacious ‘Snapback’ Sanctions.”)

Under the Corker statute, in order to get the benefit of the review process that enables him to “win” approval of his Iran deal with the support of only one-third (plus one) of one house of Congress, Obama had to provide the entirety of the Iran deal, including all relevant side deals between any parties, by July 19. He has failed to do this. Thus, Congress must not go forward with the review, because (a) that is what the law says, (b) forcing full disclosure is the solemn political commitment Republicans made to voters in justifying the wayward Corker review process, and (c) if they go through with the review process, they will be deemed to have forgiven Obama’s default.

In this connection, it is necessary to address what has brought us to this perilous point: the GOP scheme I call “Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight.” It is a form of political gamesmanship that, as we are seeing, has dire legal and national-security consequences.

“Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight ” is Republican leadership’s shameful approach to “governing.” The quotes around “governing” are intentional. After voters, having trusted the GOP’s 2014 campaign promises to block Obama’s agenda, gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) notoriously said that the party’s primary objective was to show the public that it could “govern.” As I countered at the time, this was gibberish. Governing is principally an executive exercise. Presidents govern, while legislators prescribe. Prescribing law and monitoring the administration’s execution of it are crucial functions, but they are not governing, because lawmakers are powerless to carry out policy.

Worse, the “show we can govern” tripe is just a rationalization for capitulating to Obama. GOP leaders said they must prove they can overcome legislative gridlock and (all together now) “get things done.” Perforce, the way a legislature “gets things done” is by helping the president do the things he wants to do.

Since the president is currently Obama, the people who elected Republicans obviously wanted them to stop things from getting done. The resulting rage of its increasingly estranged base puts the GOP in a quandary: Republicans must avoid being seen as supporting the things they are getting done — i.e., the Obama agenda. So some sleight-of-hand is in order, some schemes to grease the wheels for Obama while posing as staunch Obama opponents.

Among the most pernicious is “Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight.” It is a legislative template for obscuring the GOP’s enabling of Obama, a ruse designed to make it appear that the president is getting his way with only minority support (i.e., his hardcore Democratic supporters), while Republicans stridently condemn what they have actually voted to allow. Obama is delighted to play along, because he gets what he wants…”

And events proved McCarthy correct, as neither McConnell nor Boehner lifted a finger to stop it.  Thus the ineptitude of the GOP leadership contributes to making The Obamao the most evilly-effective President in our nation’s history.  Then again, with an opposition like this…

…Jimmy Carter could have been a two-term President!  In all seriousness, we wouldn’t piss on this despicable duo were they fully engulfed in flames.

Since we’re on the subject of the ever-evil, writing at NRO‘s The Corner Jonah Goldberg wonders…

Who Cares If Hillary Apologized?

So Hillary Clinton mumbled some kind of apology yesterday:

“Even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails,” she told ABC News. ”That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”

This raises the question: Who gives a rat’s ass? Were you demanding an apology from Hillary Clinton? I wasn’t. I wanted the facts. And those are still in short supply. Which raises a second point: What the Hell is she talking about when she says the State Department “allowed” her private, off-site, server? First off, Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. Does she mean that she allowed herself to do it? If so, this may be the greatest example of Clintonian weasel-wording yet. If she doesn’t mean that, can we have the name of the official who told Clinton it was okay? Can we have the paperwork? Or is the Clinton team still drawing straws to see who gets to take one for the team? Which brings us back around to this apology business.

Note that she’s apologizing for the narrowest definition of her transgressions, which is a clever way of trying to minimize the scandal.​ It was perfectly allowed…but I should have used two email addresses. My bad. This is a strange way to “take responsibility,” after months of saying you did absolutely nothing wrong and attacking anyone who said otherwise.  If she’s going to apologize for anything, she should apologize for that. Or she could apologize for putting national security at risk. Or she could apologize for violating rules rank-and-file people can get sent to jail for. This “apology” is a response to her falling poll numbers and nothing more. That’s because everything she does these days is in response to poll numbers.

As James Taranto sarcastically observed:

“No doubt she now disagrees with the choice she made to allow herself to make the choice with which she now disagrees.“

Then there’s this from National Journal‘s Ron Fournier, hardly a Clinton critic:

Sorry For What, Hillary?

Apologies aren’t answers to these 19 questions Clinton must answer.

““I’m sorry about that,” Hil­lary Rod­ham Clin­ton said six years after seiz­ing con­trol of gov­ern­ment email and after six months of deny­ing wrong­do­ing. Just this week, it took three dif­fer­ent in­ter­views in four days for her to beg the puni­est of par­dons: “I do think I could have and should have done a bet­ter job an­swer­ing ques­tions earli­er.”

You think? By any ob­ject­ive meas­ure, the Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner has re­spon­ded to her email scan­dal with de­flec­tion and de­cep­tion, shred­ding her cred­ib­il­ity while giv­ing a skep­tic­al pub­lic an­oth­er reas­on not to trust the in­sti­tu­tions of polit­ics and gov­ern­ment.

An apo­logy doesn’t fix that. An apo­logy also doesn’t an­swer the scan­dal’s most im­port­ant ques­tions…”

Hillary now disingenuously claims, “I am now trying to be as transparent as I can.”  To which Taranto responds:

“In a way, she is succeeding. She is delivering scripted evasions, and it is obvious to everybody that is what they are.“

In a related item, Victor Davis Hanson details a disturbing trend The Dear Misleader certainly started, but which Hillary would most definitely attempt to accelerate:

America’s Descent Into Lawlessness

“…In the eight-plus since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

…America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.

The abyss of chaos…

…is right!  In other words, welcome to Baltimore, America!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Rich Lowry and Eliana Johnson weigh in on the man who was once our hands-down first choice to succeed The Great Divider:

Scott Walker: What Went Wrong?

And how he can he make it right.

“…Of course, it’s still early. The old baseball cliché that you are never as good as you seem when you’re winning and never as bad as you seem when you’re losing often applies to politics. And Walker, like all of the candidates this year, has been buffeted by an unexpected force. No one would have guessed that the candidate who talks of buying affordable shirts at Kohl’s and campaigns at Harley-Davidson outlets would get shoved aside in Iowa by a loudmouthed billionaire who brags about his incredible wealth and woos voters by taking their children for rides in his helicopter.

Walker can still come back — his campaign and his super PAC are planning to reset in the coming weeks — but it will be made harder by what’s happened over the last eight months.

…“The issues that you would know as a governor he knows extremely well,” says one policy maven who has worked with the campaign, “but the related federal issues, it’s like talking to your uncle. And that’s just preparation; clearly he can do it.”…”

We still like Walker, but like Rick Perry before him, we wonder if his not-ready-for-prime-time premier hasn’t relegated him to a supporting role.

Moving on, the Marine Corps Times offers the straight skinny on the relative merit (i.e., NONE…ZIP…ZERO…NADA!!!) of women in combat:

Grunt life: Marines dish on the Corps’ women in combat experiment

“…Lance Cpl. Chris Augello arrived at the integrated task force believing that women should get a shot at service in the infantry as long as they could meet existing standards. It was a perspective that made him different from most male Marines, he said, and he’d argued with his unit members for hours on the point.

When Augello checked out of the task force months later, however, he submitted a 13-page essay to unit officials explaining exactly why the experience had made him change his mind.

…Over time, he said, discipline broke down because some noncommissioned officers were hesitant to hurt the feelings of more junior female Marines with orders or correction. Romantic relationships and friendships between male and female unit members also became a distraction, he said. “The female variable in this social experiment has wrought a fundamental change in the way male NCOs think, act and lead,” Augello wrote in the 13-page paper he presented to Marine leaders, which he shared with Marine Corps Times. “A change that is sadly for the worse, not the better.”

…When partnered with the platoon’s female Marines, he said he frequently had to compensate for their smaller frames and lack of upper body strength by hauling more of the load. “I told myself, ‘I don’t know how much longer my back will have after doing this,'” he recalled.

During one assessment, Augello said he found himself paired with the smallest male Marine in the platoon — one who was physically shorter and slighter than a number of the unit’s female Marines. But the Marine’s build and musculature made a significant difference, he said. “I didn’t feel a lot of stress on my back because he was able to actually help me,” he said. “His upper body strength made the difference at the end of the day.”…”

As Mike Fredenburg, writing at NRO so succinctly summarizes:

Putting Women in Combat Is an Even Worse Idea Than You’d Think

“…Putting women into close combat roles isn’t fair to the men who will be relying on them, and isn’t fair to the women who will find themselves continuously at a deadly disadvantage. When we send our soldiers into combat we should be giving them the best possible chance of succeeding and surviving. While women are equal to or better than men at many tasks, they simply aren’t when it comes to combat. Substituting men with far less combat-capable women is profoundly unfair, immoral, and utterly unnecessary…”

Here’s the juice: not only have we heard it all (i.e., in other nations and points in history women have been placed in front-line combat roles, Israel in particular being cited as an example), we’ve seen it all, having experienced  first hand the government’s preference for political correctness over combat readiness when we commanded the first female Plebes at the Naval Academy during the summer of 1976.  Suffice it to say, as regards the latter, our experience mirrors that of Lance Corporal Augello.

As to the former, two minor…okay, MAJOR…problems: (1) Women no longer participate in front-line Israeli Defense Force combat units, their employment having been limited solely to times of dire national emergency such as the Yom Kippur War.  (2) Like the Israelis in October of 1973, the other countries employing women in combat, the Soviet Union during WWII and present-day Kurdistan, also were/are engaged in battles for national survival, though even then women were/are almost exclusively relegated to duties protecting home and hearth.  It’s only by the grace of God the United States hasn’t found itself in such a position; at least, not…

…yet.  There’s 496 days to go!

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, in the Now THAT’S Gotta Hurt segment, the Daily Mail reports:

Farmer Urinating in a Field is Left in Agony After a Snake Bites Him on the Penis

“A farmer who urinated in a field was rushed to hospital after a snake bit him on the penis. The 46-year-old came to the emergency room of a hospital in Sringar, in the northern state of Jammu and Kasmir, three hours after suffering the bite. Although the man was stable, his penis was ‘grossly swollen’, and covered in fluid-filled blisters where the snake’s teeth had entered, said doctors describing his case in the New England Journal of Medicine.

…At a follow up two weeks later, he was found to be completely recovered…”

All we have to say is, had the farmer been of Irish descent, the snake might as well has saved his energy, as even Robin Hood, William Tell, or Annie Oakley couldn’t have hit a target that small!

Magoo