It’s Wednesday, January 11th, 2017…but before we begin, yet another sign The Left doesn’t know right from wrong…let alone anything whatsoever about the Constitution:

Dems to rehang painting depicting police as pigs, after GOP rep took it down

“Democratic lawmakers plan to rehang a controversial painting on Capitol Hill that angered law enforcement groups with its depiction of police officers as pigs, after Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter personally took down the picture last week.

A Monday press release from the Congressional Black Caucus and Rep. Lacy Clay, D-Mo., whose office for months had sponsored the display of the student artwork, announced that Clay and CBC members will “rehang” the piece Tuesday morning in the Cannon Tunnel.

“The rehanging of this painting for public view represents more than just protecting the rights of a student artist, it is a proud statement in defense of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees freedom of expression to every American,” the statement said, noting it had been “removed without permission or proper authority” by Hunter.

Hunter, R-Calif., personally unscrewed and removed the painting last Friday, saying he was angered by its depiction of law enforcement officers. He then delivered the painting to Clay’s office. “Lacy can put it back up, I guess, if he wants to,” Hunter told FoxNews.com at the time, “but I’m allowed to take it down.”…”

No, Lacy, you benighted bigot; the 1st Amendment guarantees the young, misguided BLM-believer who dreamed up this abomination only the right to paint it.  Freedom of speech/expression in no way guarantees his work of farce…born of the “Hands Up/Don’t Shoot” myth…can or should be hung in the public hallways of Congress.  Were we Duncan Hunter, we’d have torched the thing; after all, sometimes it’s easier and better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and ConstitutionALLY.com, Dr. Robert Owens (Who, given his punctuation, which we’ve attempted to improve, didn’t earn his PhD in English!) correctly identifies…

The Lamest Duck of All

Long ago and far away, back in an America before Hope and Change changed our hope to dread, we used to have peaceful and dignified transfers of power when one party replaced the other in the Oval Office.  When Bill Clinton and Ross Perot defeated George the First he left Bubba the following note:

Dear Bill,

When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.

I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described. There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.

You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success is now our country’s success. I am rooting for you.

Good luck, George

That was a class act, and a hard one to follow, especially for people who allow partisanship and acrimony to eclipse good taste and good manners. Even the Clinton loving New York Times reported that the transition from the Clinton Inter-lewd to George the Second was anything but dignified.  It was instead sophomoric. According to the Times:

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said today that “damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex” in the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys.

The Arkansas Hillbillies leaving the White House.

Some of the damage, it said, was clearly intentional. Glue was smeared on desk drawers. Messages disparaging President Bush were left on signs and in telephone voice mail. A few of the messages used profane or obscene language. “A Secret Service report documented the theft of a presidential seal that was 12 inches in diameter from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,’’ next to the White House, on Jan. 19, 2001, the accounting office said. Six White House employees told investigators that they had seen graffiti derogatory to Mr. Bush on the wall of a stall in a men’s room. Other White House employees saw a sticker in a filing cabinet that said, “Jail to the thief,” implying that Mr. Bush had stolen the 2000 election.

Following in the tradition of the now discredited and finally discarded Clintons, the classless exit is being delivered not by nameless faceless staffers but instead by POTUS himself on the world stage.  Unfortunately the last days of our first anti-colonialist president and his anti-American regime is marked by the only bi-partisan approach of his divisive reign.  RINOs in Congress are helping him in his efforts to torpedo the incoming Trump Revolution from accomplishing the work we have sent them to the swamp-on-the-Potomac to accomplish.

From the president who sent his own campaign team to Israel to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in his election we get hyperbolic outrage at accusations of Russian hacking and leaks during the 2016 presidential campaign.  He says he knew about the hacks months ago.  Yet he didn’t think they were worth mentioning until his hand-picked successor and his policies were rejected at the ballot box.

Now he fires a salvo of impotent sanction at the Russians.  Putin laughs them off as the ineffective flailing of a lame duck.

Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona told MSNBC President-elect Donald Trump was the real target of the sanctions, which booted 35 Russian intelligence operatives out of the U.S. and shut down Russian intelligence complexes in New York and Maryland. “This administration somehow has the notion that this would change the election. They’re really trying to delegitimize the election itself. That’s the main motivation here,” said Franks, a member of the House Committee on Armed Services. “And I think it’s just unfortunate that this president forgets that most of these e-mails came from WikiLeaks, who claimed they got them from disgruntled DNC staffers.”

In addition to being misdirected, they were ineffective and merely showed the impotence and ineffectiveness of the Obama Administration.  According to former UN Ambassador John Bolton, Putin showed utter contempt for Obama in his measured response to President Obama’s better-never-than-late response to the accusations of Russian hacking.

Kellyanne Conway, who will serve as Trump’s counselor to the president, told CNN Thursday, “I will tell you that even those who are sympathetic to President Obama on most issues are saying that part of the reason he did this today was to quote ‘box in’ President-elect Trump.”

Personally I would like to echo an astute observation by Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst: “The perception that an outgoing U.S. president is trying to box in and sabotage the foreign policy of his successor hurts the global reputation of America’s democratic system.”

We also have BHO’s stunning reversal of American policy allowing the condemnation of Israel to go forward.  After protecting Israel with our veto power since 1949, in the waning days of his soon to be repudiated and reversed Progressive regime BHO ordered his team at the UN to abstain from a key vote.  Thus the anti-Jewish UN was finally able to condemn Israel and add fuel to the flames of hatred.  Not only did the Obama administration refuse to block the move, they are accused by Israel of helping to write the resolution and for pushing others to vote for it.

The blizzard of economically strangling regulations continued to pour out of the Obama White House even as it slowly sinks beneath the political horizon.  President Obama poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at a rate of 18 for every new law passed, according to an analysis of his team’s expansion of federal authority.  While Congress passed just 211 laws, Obama’s team issued an accompanying 3,852 new federal regulations, some costing billions of dollars.

The 2016 total was the highest annual number of regulations under Obama.  The proof that it was an overwhelming year for rules and regulations is in the Federal Register, which ended the year Friday by printing a record-setting 97,110 pages, according to the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

We only have one president at a time.  We all get that.  And until January 20, 2017 that is still BHO.  Unless he does an abrupt U-turn, ends his attempts to undermine his successor, thwart the will of the people, and show a little class to his everlasting shame, he may well be remembered as the lamest duck of all.

If not the lamest, perhaps simply the worst; which is really…

…saying something!

In a related item, the WSJ chronicles…

The Obama Legacy

A Presidency of great promise ends in rancor and disappointment.

“President Obama once said that as President he aspired to be the progressive Ronald Reagan, and as he prepares to leave office he has succeeded in fundamental if ironic ways.

While Reagan left behind a calmer, more optimistic country, Mr. Obama leaves a more divided and rancorous one. While the Gipper helped elect a successor to extend his legacy, Mr. Obama will be succeeded by a man who campaigned to repudiate the President’s agenda. Barack Obama has been a historic President (only by virtue of his father’s skin color) but perhaps not a consequential one.

Mr. Obama was always going to be a historic President by dint of his election as the first African-American to hold the office. His victory affirmed the American ideal that anyone can aspire and win political power. This affirmation was all the better because Mr. Obama won in large part thanks to his cool temperament amid the financial crisis and his considerable personal talents. (Yeah…and pigs have wings!)

Even on their own terms those achievements look evanescent. Congress has teed up ObamaCare for repeal, and Donald Trump will erase the climate rules. The global climate pact is built on promises without enforcement, and Mr. Trump ran against and won in part on the slow economic recovery. Authoritarians are on the march around the world as they haven’t been since the 1970s, and perhaps the 1930s.

These results flow both from the progressive agenda he pursued and the way he tried to implement it…”

Not to mention he’s an Islamofascist appeaser of the first order.

As to several of the WSJ‘s assertions, Your Honor, we object.  No, Your Honor, we strenuously object…

…to these dubious assumptions the Journal editors offer as facts:

(1). The Great Divider’s presidency ever offered “great promise”: only if you ignored everything in the man’s background.

(2). The Obamao’s possessed of a “cool temperament”: only if you overlook his repeated fits of pique which make The Donald’s tweets look presidential by comparison.

(3). Barry’s a man of “considerable talents”…that’s “talents“…plural…with an “s”: only if one counts the ability to read a teleprompter as exceptional skills. 

Sorry, but we’re not inclined to grant this most anti-American of misleaders the faintest benefit of the doubt; cuz there…

…ain’t any!!!  Everything about the man bespeaks treason!

Next up, in a forward from G. Trevor, witness perhaps the only time we’ll ever agree with the despicable Piers Morgan:

Sorry, Meryl but that hypocritical anti-Trump rant was easily the worst performance of your career (apart from that time you gave a child rapist a standing ovation)

That’s Streep to the left of DeGenerate.

“…Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump.

She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’. At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.

She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.’

Wow. I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. For your information, Ms Streep, tens of millions of ordinary Americans love football and the MMA and would be quite happy watching their favourite sports at the expense of the next Woody Allen film.

Her real target, though, was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do. (Or, in our humble opinion, tried to do.)

‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back.’

Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble. ‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’

Hmmm. Really, Meryl? For starters, the incident to which she referred didn’t happen last year, it happened in 2015. There’s even been another Golden Globes in between then and now, at which it was never mentioned.

Second, Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter – he was mocking the reporter’s disability, and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them. (See here and decide for yourself)

But putting all that to one side for a moment – and if Trump WAS mocking a man’s disability then I agree it was disgraceful – let’s move to what Streep said next: ‘Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.’

At this point, I laughed out loud with incredulity. Not at the words themselves, which are laudable. No, it was at the hypocrisy.

You’d be hard-pushed to find an industry that encourages more disrespect and violence than Hollywood. A place where rich powerful people make billions of dollars by regularly pandering to the lowest common denominators of sexism, racism, homophobia and misogyny. And happily exploit ever more hideous, graphic violence to make a fast, easy buck. And seethe from every tinsel-encrusted pore with the very kind of nasty, power-based bullying that Meryl Streep claims to be so incensed by in Trump.

So great though her censorious words indisputably are, they would be perhaps better directed at her own back yard.

To highlight just one example of Streep’s shocking hypocrisy, what about the 2003 Oscars when she leaped to her feet and gave child rapist Roman Polanski a standing ovation after he was announced as winner of Best Director for The Pianist?

At the end of her speech, Streep launched a passionate defense of the press. ‘They’ll need us to safeguard the truth,’ she said. Now, I’ve been a journalist for over 30 years. I love my industry, warts and all, and I welcome any support. But when it comes to the truth, many parts of America’s media were found severely wanting in this election campaign.

Frankly, a lot of the coverage was a fact-starved partisan disgrace as they fought to see who could sink deeper into the tank for Hillary Clinton. (Including the obstreperous Ms. Streep!) The mainstream US media, having gleefully fueled Trump’s candidacy for months to suit their own self-serving commercial interests, then turned on him like spitting cobras when he looked like he might actually win.

It’s also a fact that no president in modern times has been so anti-press, or so intent on attacking press freedom, as Barack Obama, one of Streep’s heroes. Under his administration, the US government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests. Obama’s also used the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to journalists more times than all previous administrations COMBINED. (While conveniently declining to prosecute those who flaunt Chicago’s vaunted gun-control statutes.)

So yes, the stench of hypocrisy throughout Streep’s speech was putridly pungent…”

Which is to say, Streep’s about as savory as the Oval Orifice door jamb following one of Bill’s late-night consultations with Monica.

Then there’s this from the great Victor Davis Hanson, as he attempts to answer the perplexing question…

What Exactly Is Trumpism?

Except, he said nothing of the kind!

“Donald Trump is hated by liberal Democrats because, among other things, he is likely to reverse the entire Obama project. And, far worse, he probably will seek fundamental ways of obstructing its future resurgence — even perhaps by peeling off traditional Democratic constituencies.

The proverbial mainstream media despise Trump. Culturally, he has become a totem of their fears: coarseness, ostentatiousness, flamboyance, and the equation of big money with taste and success. His new approach to the media may make them irrelevant, and they fear their downfall could be well earned.

The Republican Washington–to–New York establishment is alienated by Trump. It finds his behavior reckless and his ideology unpredictable — especially given his cruel destruction of in-house Republican candidates in the primaries and his past flirtations with liberal ideas and politicians. That he has now brought them more opportunity for conservative political change than any Republican candidate in a century only adds insult to their sense of injury.

Note the common denominator to the all these hostile groups: It is Trump the man, not Trump the avatar of some political movement that they detest. After all, there are no Trump political philosophers. There is no slate of down-ballot Trump ideologues. If Trump were to start a third party, what would be its chief tenets? There is as yet neither a Trump “Contract for America” nor a Trump “First Principles” manifesto.

Nonetheless, from the 2016 campaign and from President-elect Trump’s slated appointments, past interviews, and tweets, we can see a coherent worldview emerging, something different from both orthodox conservativism and liberalism, though certainly Trumpism is far closer to the former than to the latter. Here may be a few outlines of Trumpist thought…”

Here’s how we view Progressives’ interpretation of anything remotely Republican, which includes Trump.  We recently dined at the home of a couple with who we are very close.  The following morning, both TLJ and I were struck with intestinal distress, whereupon we phoned our hostess to ask if her husband or she were similarly symptomatic.

We were only curious to know if our friends had suffered the same malady; TLJ and her Venusian counterpart took our question to mean we were blaming our infirmity on the friend’s cooking.

So also The Left and their MSM acolytes misinterpreted everything and anything The Donald had to say about illegal immigrants and improperly-vetted Muslim refugees.  And remember, we’re no fan of Trump.

TLJ and her friend acted instinctively, in accordance with their gender; The Left and the MSM deliberately misrepresented the meaning of Trump’s pronouncements for purely political purposes.

Which puts them on level lower than…

…the Obamas.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Magoo