It’s Friday, March 25th, 2015…but before we begin, two pictures from our favorite cartoonists each worth well over a thousand words:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Balls Cotton forwarded the following from Truth Revolt confirming, when it comes to The Left’s plan for dealing with Islamic terror, surrender is the only option:

Britain’s Labour Party Suggests HavingTea with ISIS, Not Air Strikes

A key ally of Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested a ridiculous, but very British, way of dealing with ISIS, according to The Telegraph: instead of dropping bombs on the Islamic terror group, try having tea with them. The woman responsible for offering this friendly invitation is a sitting member on the party’s National Executive Committee, Christine Shawcroft.

…Shawcroft believes it’s time that British soldiers put away their weapons and “get the teabags out” to solve the Syrian crisis:

“I think we should bear in mind that having cups of tea might actually be the best kind of system of defence and national security that you could have.“

“I’m not crazy; I only look that way!”

After other moderates of the Labour Party reacted negatively to Shawcroft’s suggestion, calling it “grotesque in its naivety,” she is claiming to have said it in a “jocular” manner. But it’s no joke to those moderates who are now urging party members to kick her off the NEC in the upcoming election. And even though Shawcroft attempted to soften her words, she added, “behind the joke there is a serious point.” (No, there is a serious disconnect from reality!!!) That is, her belief that bombing raids have failed to bring about peace.

Suicide by stupidity

This idea, however, is part and parcel to the mission of the party’s hard-left wing led by Corbyn, who previously condemned Osama bin Laden’s assassination as a “tragedy” because he wasn’t given a trial in the courts, as The Telegraph notes.

Corbyn and Shawcroft are hoping they can find any way to increase Britain’s security that doesn’t involve the use of force. She said:

“Bombing countries doesn’t seem to be improving our national security; we should be looking at other strategies to improve our national security and resolve conflicts.“

Allow us to translate:

One small problem: the cooperation of the principal party required for the realization of this unachievable utopia…

…ain’t forthcoming!

Since we’re on the subject of sufferers of Progressive Derangement Syndrome, courtesy of Commentary Magazine, Noah Rothmann updates us on the status of another terminal case:

Obama’s Self-Affirmation in Cuba

Not to mention his morals and/or personal beliefs.  Is it any wonder every totalitarian mass-murderer on the globe…

…LOVES this clown?!?

In a related item, the WSJ reports how a “man” whose person and family are protected by 24/7 armed security, bullet proof glass, unceasing video surveillance and fencing feels the rest of us…who he’d LOVE to disarm…have…

An Inordinate Fear of Terrorism?

Obama wants you to keep cool about jihadist mass murder.

“Tuesday’s coordinated terrorist attacks in Brussels have left at least 30 people dead and more than 200 wounded, shut down the capital of Europe and raised security alarms from Frankfurt to London to New York. So maybe it’s time we all get over our inordinate fear of Islamist terrorism.

Believe it or not, that’s the not-so-subliminal message we keep hearing from President Obama, even as he condemned the attacks during his visit to Cuba. “Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents and falls in bathtubs do,” reports Jeffrey Goldberg in a lengthy profile of the President’s national-security thinking in the Atlantic magazine. Islamic State, Mr. Obama is quoted as telling adviser Valerie Jarrett, is “not coming here to chop our heads off.”

At least not on the golf course; hey, we all grieve in different ways…right?!?

We wish we felt reassured. As Sohrab Ahmari notes nearby, there wasn’t a day in the last week when Islamists didn’t undertake a violent attack. That includes a shooting assault on a tourist resort in Ivory Coast that killed 16 people, and the bombing of a shopping district in Istanbul in which four people were killed, including two U.S. citizens.

“In 2014 the total number of deaths from terrorism increased by 80% when compared to the prior year,” reports the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in its widely cited Global Terrorism Index. In absolute terms, that comes to 32,685 deaths from terrorism, up from 3,329 at the turn of the century. The economic cost, the IEP adds, is somewhere north of $52 billion, plus another $114 billion that various countries budget for counterterrorism efforts. Last we checked, nobody was spending that kind of money on bathtub safety…”

So people are dying at the hands of Islamic terrorists around the world on literally a daily basis while the First Marxist and family (undoubtedly including Moochie’s Momma) are in South America on another taxpayer-funded vacation…and all Barry can offer America is an incredibly lame…

Seriously?!?  Too bad the rest of us can’t jet off to exotic destinations under airtight Secret Service protection…instead of presenting tempting targets for the very terrorists this Dimocratic dissembler pretends don’t exist.

Meanwhile…and yes, we confirmed Moochie’s Momma IS once again vacationing on your dime…

Either that or Dr. Zaius took time off from his Minister of Science duties to take in a game.

…ISIS is using it’s financial resources for decidedly deadlier purposes:

ISIS Trains 400 Fighters to Attack Europe in Wave of Bloodshed

“There’s plenty more where we came from!”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with the would-be leader of The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, lest anyone accuse us of not recording words of praise for The Donald, here’s James Taranto’s thoughts on…

Brussels and Trump

If only his knowledge began to match his instincts.

“Last night this columnist attended an off-the-record talk on international relations by a U.S. government official. Terrorism was among the topics discussed, and the talk was heavy on clichés. “Violent extremism” made an appearance, as did “ISIL.” We heard that the lack of economic opportunities was leaving young people vulnerable to “radicalization,” though no information was supplied about the identity of the radicalizers. We were warned of the dangers of “xenophobia.”

Oh, and there were a couple of supercilious remarks about “what the hell is going on in the U.S. presidential election.”

This morning we awoke to the news that terrorists—sorry, “violent extremists”—had murdered at least two dozen people in a series of bombings in Brussels. And it wasn’t long before Mr. What The Hell weighed in. “Do you all remember how beautiful and safe a place Brussels was,” tweeted Donald Trump. “Not anymore, it is from a different world! U.S. must be vigilant and smart!”

Soon enough, at least in America, Donald Trump had become the main topic of conversation. A comparison of his reaction with his rivals’ helps illuminate what the hell is going on with the U.S. presidential election.

…The whole episode, it seems to us, is yet another testimony to Trump’s acute political instincts. He is alone among the candidates in addressing Americans’ anxiety that if our leaders are not careful, our country could end up like Western Europe, facing repeated attacks from a deadly internal enemy.

Foreign-policy experts don’t see it this way, and they have a point. Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School, summed up the attitude with a tweet mocking Trump’s assertion that he’d close the border “until we figure out what’s going on.” Drezner: “Given the caliber of his national security team, that means he’d have to close the borders permanently.”

That’s a fair hit. Trump’s team, announced yesterday, is by all accounts an unimpressive group. And although some of the common criticisms of Trump strike us as overwrought, the one that does not is that he is sorely—perhaps almost completely—lacking in knowledge of policy substance. We’d feel a lot less uneasy about the prospect of a Trump presidency if we thought his instincts would be tempered by the advice of experts.

That said, even if expertise is a necessary condition for good foreign policy, it is certainly not a sufficient one. No one doubts that President Obama is surrounded by experts, yet they failed to dissuade him from withdrawing fully from Iraq. That contributed to the rise of ISIS, as did his abortive near-intervention in Syria in 2013. In the latter case, as the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reports, he expressly rejected the expert consensus:

Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.

“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”

Note that the president does not express regret for damaging American credibility by issuing a serious threat that he ultimately decided not to carry out. He simply pooh-poohs the idea that credibility matters at all. One suspects that Trump, even without expert advice, would know better than to make this mistake. (True, he makes a lot of threats—but his bombastic style always leaves room for doubt that he means them.)

Here’s another example: No one doubts Mrs. Clinton surrounds herself with experts. One day last November, she did so literally, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. During that speech, she asserted categorically: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Has any foreign-policy expert—this columnist does not qualify—pointed out that this statement is simply and obviously false?

When conventional politicians, relying on expert advice, respond to terrorism with platitudes and even outright lies, it’s no wonder that someone like Trump can thrive as the only candidate who senses and responds, however imperfectly, to legitimate public fears. That is what the hell is going on in the U.S. election. Trump is a formidable politician. Somebody with his instincts and a degree of intellectual seriousness would be a formidable leader.“

“Instincts”?  Maybe.  “Intellectual seriousness”?  We highly doubt he possesses it.  But we may well be about to find out.

And in the Environmental Moment, as CNSNews.com relays via Jeff Foutch, Brussels, Paris and San Bernardino notwithstanding, The Dear Misleader still refuses to recognize the reality of a malevolent, murderous mob his policies have not only perpetuated, but enabled to grow at an alarming rate: 

Obama Says Climate Change Is a ‘Major’ Problem, But ISIS ‘Not an Existential Threat‘

“Groups like ISIL can’t destroy us, they can’t defeat us,” President Obama told reporters in Argentina on Wednesday. “They’re not an existential threat to us,” he said.

…On a day when morgues and hospitals in Brussels were still trying to identify the dead and the grievously injured, Americans among them, Obama described the terrorists as “vicious killers and murderers who have perverted one of the world’s great religions, and their primary power, in addition to killing lives, is to strike fear in our societies, to disrupt our societies.” Obama said he will be “systematic and ruthless and focused” in going after the disrupters, but in the meantime, “It is very important for us to not respond with fear.”

The president told people to remember that terrorists “do no have power over us” because they “offer nothing except death.”

In the next sentence, he mentioned climate change:

“And so it’s important for the U.S. president and the U.S. government to be able to work with people who are building and who are creating things and creating jobs and trying to solve major problems like climate change...”

This guy’s disconnect from anything remotely resembling reality is breathtaking.

On The Lighter Side…

Finally, this photo from our old friend Wink Martindale reveals why Air Force One was delayed leaving Havana:

Magoo