It’s Monday, March 14th, 2016…but before we begin, two brief observations.  First, this headline:

Chicago PD: We Didn’t Tell Trump to Cancel the Rally

 

Integrity = honesty = telling the truth…which just ain’t in him!

On Friday, a planned Donald Trump rally in Chicago was canceled after protestors swarmed the event venue. In a statement released by the Trump campaign, they said that the decision to cancel the rally was made after meeting with law enforcement.

According to the Chicago Police, this isn’t true, and no threats were issued. Specifically, the police say they were “not consulted” until after the rally was canceled.

The Chicago Police Department said it was informed shortly before 6:30 p.m. that the Trump campaign had canceled the event. Police were not consulted before this decision was made, according to spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, and he said police did not issue any public safety threats or safety risks before the cancellation.

Strange.

No, not “strange”; simply par for the course for a man with only the faintest passing familiarity with the truth.  Hell bells, let’s be honest: Trump wouldn’t know the truth if he tripped over it.  And, by almost all accounts, he cheats at golf.  Just so we’re straight on this: he cheats at golf…he cheats on his wives.  Any questions?!?

Second, we stand corrected: Jeb (shown below correctly identifying the joint between the forearm and bicep), does know the difference…

…between his ass and his elbow.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the Monday edition with a most excellent commentary courtesy of the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel, who details…

Hillary’s Other Server Scandal

The focus is on state secrets in her email—but what personal favors lay within?

 

“…Classified information matters, and Mrs. Clinton stands accused of sloppy handling. Yet the former secretary of state didn’t set up a home-brew server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. Mrs. Clinton went to elaborate lengths to build a secret, private system for some other reason. She says it was for “convenience.” Others speculate she did it out of the Clintons’ longtime paranoia over paper trails.

In a strange twist of Progressive politics, just as one of Liberalism’s leading lights is looking to hide her deepest, darkest secrets from a public with a definite right to know, the other is seeking unconstitutional access to the legitimately secure records of private citizens: 

Sidestepping Apple dispute, Obama makes case for access to device data

 

“U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday made a passionate case for mobile devices to be built in such a way as to allow government to gain access to personal data if needed to prevent a terrorist attack or enforce tax laws.

…But he made clear that, despite his commitment to Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, a balance was needed to allow some intrusion when needed. “The question we now have to ask is: If technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer, how do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?” he said…”

Are we the only one puzzled at the equivalence of apprehending child pornographers and solving or disrupting acts of Islamic (let’s call a spade a spade!) terror?!?  Yeah, we know; he’s ALL about “the children“…excepting of course unborn children.

Here’s an idea: we’ll give you access to our iPhone; you release your scholastic records and original birth certificate.

Next up, writing at NRO, Mona Charen opines on the thoughts and motivations behind those who have it in…

For the Establishment

 

“‘Burn it down.” That’s the slogan of faux conservatives who now rejoice that the Republican party is being smashed by a slick, howlingly transparent grifter. The urge to destroy has a kind of pornographic appeal to a certain personality — but it’s a shock to find it so widespread.

The Republican party is choosing an odd time to commit suicide. Obama’s two victories were painful setbacks, but in the Obama era the Democrats lost 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 House seats, 910 legislative seats, eleven governorships, and 30 legislative chambers. All that stood between Republicans and real reform at the federal level was the White House — and the Democrats were sleep walking toward nominating the least popular major player in American politics.

Republicans have managed to find someone who is even less acceptable. One-third to 40 percent of Republican primary participants are embracing a figure who not only loses the general election but who introduces an element of fascism to American politics, and thus demoralizes the Republican majority while delegitimizing the party in the eyes of others. It is Trump’s unique contribution to wed authoritarianism — threatening the First Amendment, promising war crimes, admiring dictators, encouraging mob violence, fomenting racial and ethnic strife — with Sandersesque leftism on entitlements, abortion, and a 9/11-truther foreign policy.

And what sin has brought down this despoiler upon the Republican party? Why are so many self-styled conservatives complacent about his success? Failure to stop Obamacare? Please. That was never possible with Obama in office. It would have been possible, in fact it was probable, that it would have been replaced if Republicans held majorities in Congress and got an agreeable executive. Now? No. Failure to get control of the border? Illegal immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle and, in fact, more Mexicans are now leaving than coming. Failure to defund the Export-Import Bank? Yes, crony capitalism is disgraceful, but the irony of those who are offended by such things sidling up to Trump — who boasts of buying influence — is rich…”

We disagree with one of Charen’s points and would add another.

(1). Despite numerous promises to secure our southern border, it remains as porous as the first 300′ of the Titanic‘s starboard bow.  And if illegal immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle (a claim we heartily dispute), it’s still gushing from Guatemala, El Salvador and other parts south.

(2). What ailed the Republican leadership since 2010 wasn’t sin; rather…

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and the rest of The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight were and are the worst communicators we can remember in pivotal roles of political leadership.  Mitt couldn’t convey his Conservatism, nor Boehner and McConnell the limitations of the power of their positions.  This is why the Kentucky Turtle had to overplay his hand by publicly announcing he wouldn’t grant any Obamao SCOTUS nomination the slightest consideration.  Right-thinking Americans didn’t trust him, because they hadn’t any real clue what he was going to do.  Had they trusted him to play the role for which he was elected, his premature statement wouldn’t have been necessary.

We liken it to passengers sitting in the cabin of a aircraft experiencing unexpected delays; you don’t mind the waiting nearly as much provided the captain keeps you updated as to WTF is happening!

In a related item from the latest edition of The Goldberg File, Jonah Goldberg expresses the frustration we feel listening to and reading the reasoning of otherwise sane Conservatives in support of The Donald.

I feel a bit like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. No one has strapped me to a chair or attached those metal scaffolds to my eyes to keep them open as I watch that oleaginous clump of non sequiturs sweat his insecurities on national television. But I still feel drained as I try to resist what feels like a kind of crowd-sourced brainwashing spread across the land like a wet rolling fog.

At times, I sometimes think I’m living in a weird remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you’ve seen any of the umpteen versions, you know the pattern. Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew.

Except. Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to. It’s almost like they became Canadian overnight — seemingly normal, but off in some way.

…I’m losing the will to rebut Donald Trump’s “arguments” because he really doesn’t make any. First of all, most of his interviews are rapidly becoming as journalistically adversarial as the infomercial host asking, “Mr. Foreman, is it really true I’ll lose weight and save money by using the George Foreman grill?”

But more importantly, if you listen to Trump’s answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he’s not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we’ll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people.

In other words, he has no idea how to fix it.

Before Trump gelded him, or before he went to sleep and awoke from his husk with a strange, new, Renfield-like respect for his master, Chris Christie was very good at pointing out how Trump can’t explain how he will do anything. Now no one seems to care.

What I can’t get my head around is how other people can listen to this stuff and hear something substantive or serious. I truly don’t understand it. Or maybe I do understand it, and I just don’t want to because I don’t like what it might say about a lot of people I respect.

…I am a frequent listener to Bill’s [Bennett] radio show, mostly when perambulating my canines. Bill is not entirely pro-Trump, but he’s certainly anti-anti-Trump. Bill says concerns about Trump amount to “Trumpophobia.” Last week, he asked rhetorically, “Is it because he’s crude?” And then Bill Bennett rhapsodized about how he’s so worldly that a little profanity doesn’t bother him. Again, we’re talking about Bill-fudging-Bennett (that was a fantastic example of tmesis by the way). That’s not the Bill Bennett I know.

Then there’s this from last week’s Washington Post:

“I’m used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him?” asked Bennett, now a conservative radio host. “We’ve been trying to get white working-class people into the party for a long time. Now they’re here in huge numbers because of Trump and we’re going to alienate them? I don’t get it. Too many people are on their high horse.”

Again: I love Bill. But I don’t know anyone who knows the view from the saddle more than Bill. Here’s an abbreviated list of his books:

The Book of Virtues

The Devaluing of America: Fight for Our Culture and Our Faith

The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals

The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Collapse of the American Family

Index of Cultural Indicators: Facts and Figures on the State of American Society

The Children’s Book of Heroes; The Children’s Book of Faith

The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood

Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism

And here’s just a few things that I would have thought the author of these books would find disqualifying for a president of the United States and de facto standard-bearer of conservatism:

– Trump said it doesn’t matter what the media writes about you “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

– Trump boasted that his ordeal of avoiding the clap while sleeping around so much amounted to his own “personal Vietnam.”

– He said that John McCain’s ordeal avoiding dying at the hands of his torturers wasn’t heroic.

– As for everyone else’s Vietnam, Trump got out of that by claiming to have a medical condition that instantly healed when hostilities ended.

– He bragged — in print! — about bedding married women and has admitted to cheating on at least two of his wives.

– He boasted that he “whines until I win.”

– He’s condemned Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and many other friends of Bill’s (including yours truly) with far, far more vitriol than he condemns Vladimir Putin, the butchers of Tiananmen, and David Duke.

-The man is so lacking in moral clarity that he dismissed Vladimir Putin’s murdering of journalists by saying, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

– This is a man who expresses a passionate desire to change the First Amendment so he can punish journalists who don’t kowtow to him.

– This is a man who praised the mass murder at Tiananmen and criticized Gorbachev for not being as tough-minded.

– This is a man who says he “reads the Bible more than anybody” but can’t — after months of opportunities — speak intelligently about it for 30 seconds.

– This is a man who, by any objective measure, lies nearly as much as Bill Clinton but with a tenth of the skill.

– He lacks the patriotic seriousness to do minimal homework, even when his ignorance has been pointed out time and again. (Bill’s colleague Hugh Hewitt asked Trump about the nuclear triad in August. Several months later, when the question came up again Trump was, if anything, more ignorant.)

– This is a man whose business dealings have been shot through with shady practices, mob ties, and fraudulent claims (also known as “lies”).

– This is a man with a totally thumbless grasp of what the Constitution is about or what conservatism is (“Conservatism means,” according to Trump, “to conserve our money”).

– This is a man who boasted for months that he will torture our enemies and indiscriminately murder their children as a matter of policy.

– This is a man who says that the last Republican president deliberately lied us into war and plays coy about whether 9/11 was an inside job.

Now, Bill has criticized some of these things, he just doesn’t think they add up to anything that justifies trying to keep this guy from taking over the GOP or the country. And, bear in mind, I haven’t even talked about Trump’s “policies”…”

Since we’re on the subject of the greatest act of flim-flamery and deception since Harold Hill hit River City, again courtesy of NRO, Rich Lowry offers this analysis of a candidate whose appeal is completely lost on us:

The Billy Mays of the GOP

 

“The presidency has been occupied by lawyers, ex-generals, a former actor, and even a peanut farmer, but never before by a pitchman. Donald Trump seeks to become the first.

He is the Billy Mays of the GOP, doing what the late, ubiquitous celebrity pitchman never could dream of: making the sale to a major political party and, he hopes, to the nation. Trump fashions himself a builder, but he is really a marketer and, more than that, a salesman, with methods that have their roots in infomercials and before that on boardwalks and at carnivals.

…An admirer of Mays writes that he “learned on the Atlantic City Boardwalk that buyers want to be led,” and that he makes “sure you understand he’s talking to YOU, that he understands the problems you have and, most importantly, he has the perfect solution.” Sound familiar?

…There is, of course, overlap between the work of a pitchman and a politician, but Trump makes the two indistinguishable. He isn’t a rejection of politics so much as a grotesque parody of it. He’s like any other politician, only more dishonest, insincere, and unscrupulous, and less principled, informed, and civil. He is a way for angry people to send a message to the political class: We have such low regard for you, we think you are no better or different than Donald Trump.

The sentiment is understandable. But if you think it will end well, I have an Awesome Auger or an EZ Crunch Bowl to sell you, provided you order without delay.“

Though as the Journal suggests, Trump is simply the logical response to seven long years of The Great Divider:

The Donald and The Barack

Obama is Trump’s more sophisticated, articulate liberal antecedent.

 

“President Obama is said to be a reflective man, and often he is the one saying so, but you wouldn’t know it from his Thursday press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Asked about political polarization and the Donald Trump phenomenon, Mr. Obama denied all responsibility. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the kind of country he will leave behind. (Or (a) doesn’t care; or (b) intended to leave it this way.)

“What I’m not going to do is to validate some notion that the Republican crack-up that’s been taking place is a consequence of actions that I’ve taken,” Mr. Obama said. He explained Mr. Trump’s ascent as the result of “the nasty tone of our politics, which I certainly have not contributed to.” He blamed Republicans for this tone, as ever.

…As Mr. Obama tells it, all of this reflexive Obama bashing created “an environment where somebody like a Donald Trump can thrive. He’s just doing more of what has been done for the last seven and a half years.” In other words, Republicans didn’t clean up the standing water in their own backyard and now they’re complaining about mosquitoes.

One irony is that even as Mr. Obama denied any liability for Mr. Trump, he lapsed into the same rhetorical habit that helped fuel the businessman’s ascent. For Mr. Obama, principled opposition to his policies is always illegitimate or motivated by bad faith.

Like the President’s nonstop moral lectures about “our values” and “who we are as Americans,” by which he means liberal values and who we are as Democrats, he reads his critics out of politics. No wonder so many Americans feel disenfranchised and powerless.

And if we’re being objective, maybe Mr. Obama could account for the populist uprising among disaffected Democratic primary voters for a 74-year-old Vermont socialist vowing an economic revolution. Bernie Sanders is Mr. Trump’s leftward duplicate.

The difference is that the Democratic establishment is doing a better job keeping their outsider away from a delegate majority…”

Any way you slice it, particularly at this point, we’re with Stanley Kurtz:

Ted Cruz Can Win It All

 

“…it’s time for me to make my selection and lay my cards on the table. I choose Ted Cruz.

For many conservatives and Republicans, this is a moment of distress and pessimism. The prospect of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president raises the specter of an electoral disaster that allows Hillary Clinton to entrench permanently all of President Obama’s policies. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of Trump’s followers, many of them new voters and new Republicans, Trump remains unacceptable to the larger part of the electorate. I doubt this problem can be overcome by November. On the contrary, I believe Trump’s negatives will grow. (Particularly when the MSM begins airing his voluminous piles of filthy laundry

Even should Trump be elected, I have no confidence that he will govern as a conservative. Trump’s supporters like to say that no other issue matters if we lose our country through the continuation of our de facto open-borders immigration policy. Unfortunately, it’s equally true to say that no other issue matters if we lose our Constitution through the consolidation of an activist liberal Supreme Court. I have no confidence that Donald Trump will appoint the sort of justices who would save the court from liberal judicial activism. For that matter, I have no confidence that Trump will pursue a genuinely conservative immigration policy.

I don’t deny that Trump could win the Republican nomination, but I believe that result is far from certain. Only one man can stop Trump now, and that is Ted Cruz. Perhaps more important, I do not believe that a Republican ticket led by Cruz is destined to lose in November, bringing the congressional ticket down with him. Cruz’s biggest handicap has been the idea that he appeals to only a narrow slice of the Republican electorate, and so can’t win in November. This is very much an “establishment” analysis, yet oddly, many grassroots voters have bought into it. They’ve turned to Trump instead of Cruz in the false belief that only Trump can win in November. Actually, Cruz has a vastly better chance of defeating Hillary Clinton than Trump…”

Frankly, the alternative(s) are unthinkable.

On The Lighter Side…

We’ll be tied up with business this week, and while we’ll try our best to maintain contact, it may not be until next Monday.  So until then…perhaps sooner…

Magoo