It’s Monday, January 2nd, 2017…and, submitted for your perusal and approval, here’s the first 2017 edition of The Gouge!

We kick off the year with another classic from Hope ‘n Change:

“…Mind you, Hope n’ Change isn’t suggesting that Russia didn’t hack into the email servers of Hillary, Leon Panetta, and the DNC. Of course they did; the cyber-porch lights were left on, the cyber-front door was wide open, and there was a big cyber-sign on the porch saying “please don’t steal anything while we’re not home.”

The secret keepers were, in the laughable words of James Comey, “extremely careless.” Meaning neither Russia nor anyone else had to be extremely clever to steal documents…”

Besides, as the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel so astutely observed back in March of 2015…

“…the email escapade has to be viewed in the context of a Clinton presidential run, and the need to control the story line. The beauty of the Clinton home-brew system is that it puts her in total control. She runs the Clinton email cloud. She alone decides what documents to hand to State. This is why her agreement to allow State to release the 55,000 pages she has now sent it is hilariously hollow; she’s agreeing only to the release of emails she’s selectively provided. Even if she turned over the entire contents of her server (which she has no intention of doing), there’s no way of knowing what she already deleted.

…Mrs. Clinton is the sole arbiter here of what is “preserved,” made public, or available to freedom of information requests or to congressional overseers. Don’t think any of this was by accident….”

…the Russians didn’t make Hillary use an unsecured home-brewed email server…or hire an email firm run out of the bathroom of a Denver apartment; the MSM-crowned Smartest Woman in the World…

…accomplished that all on her own…

…for purely personal political purposes.

The Russians, were they involved at all, were merely bit players in a high-stakes gambit of the Clintons’ own creation.  As Lord Melbourne observed to the Duchess of Kent and her paramour Sir John Conroy in Young Victoria after their play for power came up snake eyes, “You have played the game and lost.”  As did the Clintons.

Next up, as the Wicked Witch of the West Wing and her serial-rapist husband ride ignominiously into the sunset with their ill-gotten gazillions, we witness another fitting end, this the disrespectful dismissal of an Administration which has prostrated itself before every totalitarian regime on the planet…

…with about as much to show for it as Neville Chamberlain in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement.

So much for…

…flexibility…not to mention peace in our time!

For more on the most anti-American, self-serving President ever to haunt the West Wing, writing at NRO, Kevin Williamson offers his thoughts on…

The Last Days of Barack Obama President Obama in the Oval Office

There will surely be others like him, and that should frighten us more than it does.

Their last days in office…or on the planet…cannot come soon enough!

Rock stars, the heroes who stormed the beaches at Normandy, or Jesus Christ Himself — it doesn’t matter who you are next to the president.

For the past year, there have been cringe-inducing headlines reminding us that x, y, or z is Barack Obama’s last as president. “This is Obama’s last Veterans’ Day as president,” the cable-news mouth said, as though that were the story. President Obama is about as beside-the-point as it is possible for a commander-in-chief to be on Veterans’ Day: He isn’t a veteran, for one thing. It isn’t his day.

But all the days are the president’s days. The Kennedy Center honored James Taylor, Mavis Staples, Al Pacino, Martha Argerich, and the Eagles — it is easy to see Barack Obama as a James Taylor fan — and the headlines announced: “Obama’s last Kennedy Center honors as president.” Barack Obama is many things, but he is not exactly what you would call a man of culture. I doubt he knew who Martha Argerich was before he was called on to present her with an award. But everything the president touches is about the president — that is true of all recent presidents and especially true of this remarkably self-regarding one.

“And God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten” — hey, wait, this is Obama’s last Christmas as president! And — thank you, Wall Street Journal, for this one — his last Christmas vacation as president, too.

Meanwhile, the president-elect this week publicly thanked himself for recent improvements in economic indicators: “The U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points to 113.7, THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! Thanks, Donald!”

Trump has also claimed personal credit for a year-end bump in the stock market. Presidents do this sort of thing all the time. Voters go along with it, too, blaming or rewarding presidents for developments in the economy that often have precisely nothing to do with who occupies the Oval Office.

The American presidency is degenerating into a cult. Historians a century or two hence will look back on this development with some puzzlement.

To be a republican in the 18th century was to be a radical. The American founders were deeply suspicious of pomp and circumstance: It is not mere coincidence that the ban on an official national church (that, and not having a manger scene at city hall, is what “establishment of religion” means) came in the first item on the Bill of Rights. Many republicans of the founding era were so suspicious of religious bureaucracies that it was not a foregone conclusion that the Catholic Church would be tolerated throughout the colonies. (Indeed, for a time it wasn’t.) And they were even more suspicious of the claims of royalty. In the person of the English king, they found a compound of those sources of suspicion: a hereditary monarch who was head of state and church both.

The idea that a large, complex society enjoying English liberty could long endure without the guiding hand of a priest-king was, in 1776, radical. A few decades later, it became ordinary — Americans could not imagine living any other way. The republican manner of American presidents was pronounced: There is a famous story about President Lincoln’s supposedly receiving a European ambassador who was shocked to see him shining his own shoes. The diplomat said that in Europe, a man of Lincoln’s stature would never shine his own shoes. “Whose shoes would he shine?” Lincoln asked.

As American society grows less literate and the state of its moral education declines, the American people grow less able to engage their government as intellectually and morally prepared citizens. (Hence the Dimocrats’s deliberate dumbing-down of America’s public education system.) We are in the process — late in the process, I’m afraid — of reverting from citizens to subjects. Subjects are led by their emotions, mainly terror and greed. They need not be intellectually or morally engaged — their attitude toward government is a lot like that of Trump’s old pal Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.”

For more than two centuries, we Americans have been working to make government subject to us rather than the other way around, to make it our instrument rather than our master. But that requires a republican culture, which is necessarily a culture of responsibility. Citizenship, which means a great deal more than showing up at the polls every two years to pull a lever for Team R or Team D, is exhausting. On the other hand, monarchy is amusing, a splendid spectacle and a wonderful form of public theater.

But the price of admission is submission.

A ticket we for one will never be voluntarily purchase, whoever the offeror; and, unlike your average Dimocrat, whatever their party affiliation.

Since we’re on the subject of the Party of Slavery, be it the antebellum or entitlement version, Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa calls our attention to the thoughts of one Anthony Bourdain, who notes…

Snobby Liberals’ Hatred For Red State America Caused The Rise Of Trump

Yet another prominent Progressive “celebrity” we proudly wouldn’t know dead in a ditch!

“...The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible…”

It’s worth noting, however, Bourdain draws the line at heeding his own advice:

…Bourdain does not hide the fact that he will not eat at any of Trump’s new restaurants at his D.C. hotel, nor would he dine with the president-elect.

“Absolutely f—ing not,” he replied on the question of dining with the president-elect.

So at least Anthony and we agree on one thing, as we wouldn’t break bread with The Obamao for all the money in the Clinton Foundation!

Then there’s this, as the WSJ details the latest in a long line of overwrought Liberal hyperbole:

North Carolina’s Iron Curtain

A Harvard index says the state’s elections are akin to Cuba’s.

George Orwell said, probably apocryphally, that some ideas are so absurd that only intellectuals believe them, and maybe there’s a 2016 election corollary. Witness the uncritical ovation for a new study that claims elections in North Carolina are less free and fair than the likes of Cuba.

Progressives are enraged that the Republican-controlled Tar Heel legislature recently transferred some powers to the legislature from the Governor, who will be a Democrat come January. We thought the move was politically dumb, though debates about university trustee appointments and Senate confirmation for executive branch positions aren’t close to a democratic “crisis.” But don’t tell the academics who run the Electoral Integrity Project, a joint venture of Harvard and the University of Sydney.

“Our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy,” announced the Chapel Hill political scientist Andrew Reynolds in the Charlotte News & Observer last week. The professor helped design the Electoral Integrity Project’s index, which ranks state and international elections on measures like the rule of law, voter registration and honest counting of the ballots. For 2016 North Carolina scored 58 on a 100-point scale, which Mr. Reynolds says “places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.”

If the readout of your model is that North Carolina is as repressive as Cuba, maybe the problem is your model rather than North Carolina. (Sorta like your climate change models!) The state is peacefully transferring power to a Democratic attorney general from a former Republican mayor of Charlotte, not deputizing the secret police. Cuba, which jails political dissidents, hasn’t transferred power since 1959, unless the 2008 presidential handoff to Raúl Castro from Fidel Castro counts. Yet Cuba rates a 56.

More remarkable still is that North Carolina isn’t the worst preforming state on the Electoral Integrity Project’s scoring system. Some 11 states are allegedly less free. Democracy in New York (which scored a 61) and Virginia (60) is supposedly more imperiled than in Rwanda (64), though Rwanda is controlled by an autocrat. The worst-performing state, Arizona (53), is outranked by Kuwait (55), Ivory Coast (59) and Kyrgyzstan (54).

That so many progressives are taking such results as academic gospel shows that the real crisis isn’t democracy but common sense.

Finally, on The Lighter Side:

Happy New Year!

Magoo