It’s Friday, October 28th, 2016…but before we begin, a headline which seems relatively innocuous…

FBI questions Jolie for 4 hours over child abuse charges against Brad

 

…until one considers, as Drudge points out, that’s 30 more minutes than they interrogated…

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…Hillary!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, Rich Lowry correctly identifies…

Trump’s Achilles Heel

He is a genuinely self-destructive candidate.

 

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Just one among soooo many!

Hillary Clinton may be the first candidate in American history to win a contest of personalities without having one. She has been content to make the election all about Donald Trump’s character, and Trump has obliged because, really, what else would he consider as fascinating and important as himself?

In a more normal year, Obamacare would be a byword for the failures of liberal technocrat rule. Insurers have been exiting the exchanges, and many of those that are staying are hiking premiums by 20 percent or more. Even a Democratic governor, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, has said that Obamacare is “no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.

In a more conventional election, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy would be under relentless assault. The Russian reset is in flames. Syria is Obama’s Rwanda. Iran, with its nuclear program intact, is making a bid for regional hegemony. ISIS established its caliphate in the space created by Obama’s passivity.

In any other campaign, the economy would be front and center, and the slowest recovery in the post–World War II period a constant flashpoint.

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Instead, none of these issues have had the resonance of Donald Trump’s early-hours Twitter war with a former Miss Universe, or even his aside in the third debate that Hillary Clinton is a “nasty woman.” And these have been third-tier controversies, compared with the ones that have truly rocked the campaign, such as Trump’s post-convention fight with the Khan family and the airing of the Access Hollywood tape.

It’s not as though Trump doesn’t talk about the issues. But nothing besides his core of immigration and trade has the force to escape the extreme gravitational pull of his persona, which is outsized, compelling, and — in a presidential campaign — ripe for deconstruction.

If Trump is defeated in November, he will lose, more than anything else, on the basis of his character flaws. His lack of discipline. His thin skin. His boastfulness. His refusal to admit error, even when it’s in his interest. His inability to project seriousness or to hit a grace note. The Clinton campaign has exploited them all, and Trump, ever himself, has lacked the self-awareness or wherewithal to keep from playing to type every single time.

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Then again, Napoleon never encountered The Donald!

The so-called beer test is the usual personality metric in presidential politics. Which candidate would you prefer to share a cold one with? Hillary’s campaign has worked instead to make the personality benchmark the “nuclear code” test. Which candidate would you prefer to have his or her finger on the button? It is meant to portray Trump’s outrageousness as affirmatively dangerous, and cast her own persona — which belongs in the same leaden category as Al Gore or Michael Dukakis — in the best possible light.

No candidate who has had such a seemingly commanding lead in a presidential race has ever been so little in evidence as Hillary Clinton. She is winning a presidential election when politics isn’t her strength because she can rely on surrogates to do much of the campaigning (especially Barack and Michelle Obama) while she raises the money to feed the massive Democratic political apparatus. Otherwise, she tries to stay out of her own way — with some mixed success — and counts on Trump to soak up all the attention.

And so he does. His “closing argument” speech over the weekend started with a threat to sue his accusers that inevitably drove all the press coverage. Any other candidate would want to change the subject from the accusations, but not Trump, who can never let a damaging controversy go, even two weeks before the election.

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In the primaries, Trump displayed an uncanny ability to understand and target the vulnerabilities of his opponents. But he either never understood, or didn’t care to minimize, his own. This is why he chose to make the election about the single hardest thing for him to defend effectively, namely Donald J. Trump.

Please don’t mistake our continuing criticism of Trump for a lack of support, at least at this point.  Prior to the Cleveland convention, we opposed Trump with every fiber of our being.  And we remain committed to highlighting his shortcomings come what may in November and beyond.

The salient issue at this point in time remains whatever Trump did in his past…and we MEAN whatever…, he’s a rank amateur compared to the Clintons, who’ve taken corruption to an completely new level.  And they, and their entire crooked circle of cronies, need to be eradicated like the highly contagious cancer infecting the American body politic they are.

Any questions?!?

Oh, and while we appreciate the spirit in which Ben Shapiro penned the following…

Never Trumpers and Reluctant Trump Supporters, Stop Questioning Each Other’s Motives

 

…we don’t question the NeverTrumpers’ motives…only their judgement!  Now Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, Drudge, Gingrich, Huckabee, Palin and Breitbart.com…these are but a few of those whose motives we do in fact question.

Speaking of the devils, writing at Commentary Magazine, Jonathan Tobin reveals…

How Clinton Corruption Works

 

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“…The details of the infighting between Chelsea and her parents’s camp followers are fascinating. When Hillary’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, snidely pointed out that an insincere note from the presidential daughter illustrated how she was so like her parents in having the ability to give someone a kiss on the cheek while stabbing them in the back, the rest of us can only nod in agreement.

There’s no getting back that uranium mine any more that there is any way to claw back the benefits the Clintons’ influence peddling gave to their donors. But what is relevant today is the fact that the same merry band of grifters is about to return to the West Wing. The Clintons are not wrong when they say the Wikileaks documents are the result of an unconscionable interference in a U.S. election by Russia. Nor should even those shocked by what we’ve learned treat foreign espionage on American targets as a good thing. Yet what Wikileaks has done is to expand upon what we learned from Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash and investigations carried out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and given us a clear-eyed preview of how the people who will probably soon be running the government operate.

As the WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel notes, Hillary, Chelsea and Bill back in the White House would initiate the reign of the…

Grifters-in-Chief

 

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In an election season that has been full of surprises, let’s hope the electorate understands that there is at least one thing of which it can be certain: A Hillary Clinton presidency will be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law.

This isn’t a guess. It is spelled out, in black and white, in the latest bombshell revelation from WikiLeaks. It comes in the form of a memo written in 2011 by longtime Clinton errand boy Doug Band, who for years worked simultaneously at the Clinton Foundation and at the head of his lucrative consulting business, Teneo.

It is astonishingly detailed proof that the Clintons do not draw any lines between their “charitable” work, their political activity, their government jobs or (and most important) their personal enrichment. Every other American is expected to keep these pursuits separate, as required by tax law, anticorruption law and campaign-finance law. For the Clintons, it is all one and the samethe rules be damned…”

Since we’re on the subject of Wikileaks and the sleaziest humans ever to run for high office, the latest release offers conclusive evidence even Hillary’s inner circle recognized the hypocrisy…and potential peril…of the enabling pot married to the serial rapist calling the womanizing kettle black:

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The pertinent section, #4, is magnified below:

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“b”, “c” and “d” should be featured in a Trump campaign ad everyday for the rest of the race.

Next up, the great Victor Davis Hanson offers…

Lessons from the Highway of Death

Elites’ impossible dreams often become dangerous realities for more vulnerable and distant ‘others.’

 

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“…The 99 is emblematic of a state in psychological and material decline. Running parallel to the southern portion of the 99 is an underused, subsidized Amtrak passenger rail line. Not far away is yet another rail corridor, where the state is plowing up some of its best farmland to build the first link of high-speed rail. That boondoggle’s projected price tag has soared from the original $33 billion to somewhere between $60 and $100 billion — without a single foot of track yet laid.

Californians are apparently too sophisticated to allot $10 billion or so to first ensure that the state has adequate north-south freeways. In addition to the 99, state residents must also contend with the equally primitive coastal Highway 101 and the now-overcrowded Interstate 5. All societies in decline fixate on impossible postmodern dreams as a way of disguising their inability to address premodern problems.

Ensuring that California’s freeways were all six lanes, well-lit and safe would have been a gargantuan but practical task that could have been completed long ago and would have saved thousands of lives (though it would have required the admission that the mundane modern automobile was here to stay). Instead, cool bureaucrats and hip politicians preferred to blow money on visions of grandiose space-age rail.

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The 99 also reminds the nation of California’s unique lessons about how to ruin a paradise: The more taxes are raised, the worse public service often becomes. Currently, Californians pay among the highest sales, income, and gasoline taxes in the nation. Yet in return, the state’s decrepit transportation system in many national surveys rates nearly last. California public school test scores are likewise near the bottom of national rankings.

The state has become a pharaonic society of two classes. The coastal rich are exempt from financial worries over their high-tax dreams. And the subsidized poor in the state’s interior live out the real-life consequences. Meanwhile, the disrespected middle class, without either high incomes or state entitlements, is leaving the state in droves.

The 99 has become a neglected, poor person’s highway. California has far more residents receiving welfare than any other state, and it has among the highest poverty rates in the nation. Most of the state’s poorest counties are bisected by the 99. About a quarter of California’s inhabitants were not born in the United States. Many are still not U.S. citizens.

The result is a perfect storm that blows in daily over the 99…”

Along with, unfortunately, the rest of the country; as California’s example is what the rest of America eventually emulates.

Case in point, courtesy of John Berry and American Thinker, as Patricia McCarthy highlights The Left’s starring role in…

The Dissolution of American Culture

 

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“Joni Mitchell wrote “Both Sides Now” in 1967. Though she wrote it in the midst of the ’60s cataclysm of protests against the Vietnam War, the advent of free love and all that that entailed, and what seemed like an all-out rebellion against everything that had come before, it was a sweet song about clouds and how children see them. Like Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon”, it was just a lovely song. Sure, there is wistfulness in it, regret and ambivalence can be read into the lyrics. But it was well and truly just a beautiful song. And that was the turbulent sixties.

Rows and rows of angel hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feather canyons everywhere, I’ve looked at clouds that way…

Fast forward to 2016. There are no beautiful melodies to what is still called “music” but is not music at all. Consider Kanye West’s latest, called “Facts”:

Dirt and grime and filth inside the story of my lifetime. Of cheating, stealing, never feeling pain of a brother, your dirty mother…”

We won’t quote the rest because his lyrics are truly disgusting to anyone born before 1995. That millions of young people have made this man a millionaire is a sad commentary to say the least. West is vile, lewd, and rude — everything we do not want our young people to become. But Kanye and his wife are good friends of Obama and are frequent guests at the White House along with numerous other rappers who spew equally offensive lyrics.

West’s lyrics could almost be sung to Joni Mitchell’s music. But they instead reveal the dystopian version of our culture that the Left has successfully brought about; cynical shallowness, no respect for anyone or anything, braggadocio, and a celebration of a materialism and personal wealth never before known or embraced. Because rap and hip hop are the vernacular of the black left, it must not be criticized, no matter how profane, sexist, racist, anti-police, or pro-violence. No matter how much a majority of black citizens hate it, they cannot speak out against it any more than peaceful Muslims can speak out against Islamic terrorists. They are afraid of being politically incorrect or of offending members of their own “community.” Some community. The level to which American culture has demeaned itself is a betrayal of the word “community.”

The transformation of American music naturally coincides with the transformation of American traditions on every level. The Left’s agenda begun in earnest in the 60s has come to fruition with regard to music, culture, and of course, politics…”

Absent The Left’s culture war in general, and The Dear Misleader’s destructiveness in particular, the rise of The Donald would not have been possible.

And anyone doubting the accuracy of McCarthy’s conclusions need only watch the video below of a young Black male sucker-punching…

an 85-year-old man!  Yet another reason to say…

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…”THANKS Obama!!!”  For as the late, great Private Hudson of the Colonial Marines so eloquently observed, as a country, almost exclusively thanks to Progressives…

Finally, on The Lighter Side

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