It’s Friday, February 17th, 2017…but before we begin, The Donald finally provides what a majority of Americans have wanted for a long, long time:

And the recipients of his rightfully righteous indignation still cannot comprehend their complicity in the crimes he chronicled:

Sorry, Chuck: but as the Twitter trail in response to your asinine observations clearly indicates, the only laughing matter is you, along with your pretensions of impartiality.  Seriously, the only partisans who need to remove their hats…as well as their blinders…are you and the rest of the Dimocratic disciples in the MSM.

As The Boss observed:

Todd’s comments cause us to recall a scene from The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone refutes what was, at least heretofore, the common thinking of the time:

Just as Captain McCluskey (portrayed by the talented Sterling Hayden, aka Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Strangelove fame) surrendered any claim to the protection of his office through his corruption of the honor thereof, the Fourth Estate long ago allowed the corrosive effects of personal bias and political favoritism to eat away at the heart of its once unrivaled position of non-partisan prominence.

The Press began its descent into the abyss on the heels of its halcyon days of Watergate with its malicious mistreatment of Ronald Reagan…followed by its deliberate refusal to accurately recount Der Schlickmeister’s innumerable indiscretions…then the sycophantic servitude to The Dear Misleader…and finally, the benighted blindness with which it treated Hillary’s uncountable and obvious lies.

Sorry Chuck: but Dan Rather’s propagandizing protestations notwithstanding, news reports are either fake or accurate; they cannot be both.  And by now, pretty much everybody whose anybody…possessed of half a clue…knows in which category yours fall.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at PJMedia, Charlie Martin offers the most accurate explanation of Flynngate we’ve encountered thus far, as he provides the answers inquiring minds want to know:

General Flynn and Colonel Mustard: Let’s Piece Together Clues About the Leak

“…But the point for now is simply that this stuff must be classified at least CONFIDENTIAL//SI, which puts it under the Espionage Act; revealing it without authorization is a violation of 18 USC 793 (and some other sections. Again, the link is to the containing chapter). This is the same chapter that would have been used to indict Hillary Clinton if she hadn’t had friends in high places.

Finally, let’s ask the question that should be on every critical thinker’s mind at all times: Cui bono? Who benefits? Add to that: who could have been involved?

Probably not the Trump people (plus they wouldn’t have known to have access to it). Not the Russians. Decisions involving this kind of material are made in the executive branch (CIA, FBI, NSA are all in the executive branch). What’s more, very few people are going to have need to know on this stuff, even if it’s only CONFIDENTIAL: we don’t want to let the Russians know exactly what conversations we’ve actually intercepted.

The final piece of the puzzle here is that we know these calls were intercepted before the inauguration. Which means they were authorized during the Obama administration.

So now, like Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe in the library, pieces have come together: this has to have been authorized under the Obama administration, by someone pretty high up (or else they wouldn’t have access to the compartmented information), and leaked by someone pretty high up, also, almost certainly, either a civil service permanent employee held over from the Obama administration or a political appointee very high in the intelligence community. One who was pretty confident they also have friends in high places.

Why? It seems it must have been to make trouble for the incoming Trump administration.

This is going to get a lot more interesting.“

And it just did; for as the WaPo reports, at least one very influential Republican on Capitol Hill is keeping his head whilst those around him are seemingly losing theirs:

FBI needs to explain why Flynn was recorded, Intelligence Committee chairman says

“The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that the most significant question posed by the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn is why intelligence officials eavesdropped on his calls with the Russian ambassador and later leaked information on those calls to the press…”

As Tony Schaffer observes, an independent investigation into what is far more likely than not the result of the real conspiracy to subvert American democracy…

…threatens those behind the intelligence leaks far more than it does their intended targets.

Next up, writing at his personal blog, the great Victor Davis Hanson details what an increasingly unreasoned Left, MSM (but we wax redundant!) and their RINO allies refuse to comprehend as the only rational explanation behind Trump’s election: 

The Deplorables Shout Back

“Struggling rural America proved disenchanted with the country’s trajectory into something like a continental version of Belgium or the Netherlands: borderless, with a global rather than national sense of self; identity politics in lieu of unity and assimilation; a statist and ossified economy with a few winners moralizing to lots of losers—perhaps as a way of alleviating transitory guilt over their own privilege.

The full lessons of the 2016 election are still being digested (or indeed amplified), but one constant is emerging that the world outside our bi-coastal dynamic, hip, and affluent culture is not very well understood by those who lead the country.

The doctrinaire Right advises the interior losers of globalization to hit the road in search of good jobs and take a hard look in the mirror and cure their self-inflicted pathologies. Such stereotyped pessimism about rural America are no exaggeration. Recently Bill Kristol, former editor of the Weekly Standard, seemed to dismiss the white working class as mostly played out—an apparent argument for generous immigration that was critical in replacing it: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white, working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?” He went onto imply that poor whites were purported lazy and spoiled in comparison to immigrant groups—a fact not born out by comparative rates of reliance on government aid programs. PBS commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks earlier had suggested the white working classes who were voting for Trump did not exercise independent judgement, but as the less educated were just “going with their gene pool.”

The plight of the contemporary rural America in a word was not due to an epidemic of laziness or of innate genetic ineptness, but more likely the onslaught of globalism, a sort of Tolkien master ring that gave its coastal wearers enormous power to create and manage worldwide wealth, prosperity, and power, but by its very use proved corrupting to those in its midst.

…America’s rural class was gobbled up in a variety of ways. The consolidation of agriculture, the outsourcing and automation of manufacturing, and franchising of retailing created an underclass dependent on social services and low wages. A smaller and mostly younger group got with the plan, left rural America, fled to the coasts or regional big cities, obtained the proper credentials and became successful. Some in between stayed on and went about their old ways, often confused that the familiar but often empty landscapes and infrastructure might still mean that business could go on as usual.

But the rural shakedown did not mean that our red-state interior tuned out from politics, big business, universities, government, popular culture and mass entertainment. Far from it; cable TV, the Internet, and smart phones plugged rural America into coastal culture as never before. And what fly over country saw and heard each day, it often did not like.

…Some object that Trumpism is pure nihilism and a vandal act rather than a constructive recalibration. Perhaps. But red-state America shouted back that if those who demanded open borders never themselves lived the consequences of open borders, then there would be no open borders. If those who proposed absolute free transfers of capital and jobs always expected others to lose money and jobs as the cost of the bargain, then there would be no such unlimited free flows. If the media were continually to stereotype and condescend to others, then they themselves would be stereotyped and talked down to.

For a brief moment in 2016, rural America shouted that the last shall be first, and first shall be last. Before we write off this retort that led to Trump as a mindless paroxysm, remember that it was not those in Toledo, Billings, Montgomery, or Red Bluff who piled up $20 trillion in collective debt, nearly destroyed the health care system, set the Middle East afire, turned the campus into Animal Farm, or transformed Hollywood into 1984-style widescreen indoctrination.

Trump was rural America’s shout back…”

And a far more than just rural Americans were in the chorus.

In a related item, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson offers a somewhat disparate view, suggesting we all…

Help the Poor Move

Americans have often moved to find a better life. It’s part of the American way.

“For the past year or so, I have been involved in an on-again/off-again debate with a number of conservatives of the “paleo” tendency, Michael Brendan Dougherty prominent among them, on the question of what to do about economically stagnant and socially dysfunctional communities. This has taken place in the context of the election year’s attention to what we euphemistically call the “white working class” (its main problem is that it is not working) and its attraction to Donald Trump’s anti-capitalist populism. The answer I have come up with — that people should leave those communities, if they can, and seek better lives for themselves elsewhere — has scandalized some of my friends on the right.

It shouldn’t. And, in the past, it didn’t: No conservative social critic ever blinked an eye or coughed up his cognac when the best advice from the right to the discontented and ambitious poor was to get out of the ghetto or the barrio, get an education, get a job, and start a new life and a new family in some more prosperous corner of the county or country. But the dead and dying and white towns of Appalachia and the Rust Belt are another story. “Why should they have to go elsewhere?” our freshly created populists demand. The answer is, Because the lives they desire are not to be had where they are; their communities, along with their families in many cases, are terribly sick, and the hard truth is that they’d be better off putting some distance between themselves and them. Some of the diseases of poverty are individual, but some of them thrive in congregation (gang violence is the obvious example), and the only treatment for these is dilution. A 2000 Brookings study of Jack Kemp’s famous Moving to Opportunity program found “striking” evidence that poor families who moved out of poor communities with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development earned more, enjoyed better health, and saw their children do better in school than did families who stayed behind.

Mobility works. But Americans’ mobility has been declining since the 1980s. We are, in fact, now less likely to have moved recently than are Canadians. This lack of geographic mobility correlates strongly with a decline in income mobility (the ability to improve one’s financial lot). It is a compound stagnation.

Ronald Bailey offers a helpful contribution to the debate in the January edition of Reason under the headline “Stuck.” Bailey pays a visit to his family’s ancestral home in McDowell County, W.Va., a moribund coal-mining village suffering from all the familiar Appalachian maladies: poverty, unemployment, disease, addiction, short lives. “Why don’t people just move?” he asks. He is partly able to answer his own question, from family experience: They did. Bailey’s family left in his grandparents’ generation, and about 80 percent of the county’s residents followed suit. The same pattern holds throughout Appalachia and small towns in the Rust Belt, but also in major cities and formerly major cities such as Detroit, where the black middle class left the city almost as a unit in the course of a remarkably short period of time, between ten and twenty years. Similar patterns can be seen in cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, where the middle class (black, white, and other) abandoned the cities but did not stray too far, leaving for better schools, lower taxes, and safer streets in the suburbs. The sobering fact is that the story of inner-city Baltimore is a great deal like that of small-town Kentucky: The people who remain are to a very large extent those who lack the resources — financial or spiritual — to leave.

We could do with a great deal less sentimentality about all this. There is something to be said for rootedness and fixedness, and the Burkean critique of modern mass capitalism is not without some merit. But the insights of the Burkean disposition are almost entirely negative. It is good to be reminded from time to time what is in the “losses” column of the ledger, but the question is how to make it balance out a little better. If we are committed to wishful thinking about an improbable return to post-war economic conditions and yet unwilling to maintain Americans in economically marginal communities in public dependence indefinitely, then what can be done to help them become economically self-sufficient and form stable families?

Republicans, or at least a non-trivial portion of them, are for the moment in danger of being seduced by autarkic protectionist thinking and by what we used to call “industrial policy,” as though central planning conducted by right-leaning politicians were somehow immune to the vices of central planning conducted by left-leaning politicians. There is a lot wrong with that view, but for the purposes of the immediate discussion it is sufficient to understand that there is no level of protectionism or industrial subsidy that is going to “bring back manufacturing jobs” to places such as eastern Kentucky, which never had very many of them to begin with, or to attract such antediluvian industries as textile manufacturing and semi-skilled electronics assembly to post-industrial small-town America. The reason for that is simply that there are not enough skilled workers in those places, and especially in their remote communities, to justify large investments in factories and other physical capital. You’d be a great deal more likely to see that kind of work cropping up in facilities on the edges of Houston, Los Angeles, or Nashville, with their large, skilled work forces and ready connections to global markets and transportation infrastructure. It isn’t impossible to manufacture clothing in the United States — Brooks Brothers and Hart Schaffner Marx both make high-end suits in the United States — but there is not much reason to do it in any given small town in West Virginia or eastern Ohio.

If the work is not coming to the people, then the people have to come to the work. There is not a plausible third option…”

If only the solutions to such problems were as simple as some would pretend:

Okay,…sorry; that was pretty sick.  So please, pretend we didn’t laugh.

And in a follow-up to Wednesday’s item which termed the parlous state of the Oroville dam’s emergency spillway a classic failure of Big Government, we again turn to the great Victor Davis Hanson, who suggests…

The Oroville Dam disaster is yet another example of California’s decline

“A year ago, politicians and experts were predicting a near-permanent statewide drought, a “new normal” desert climate. The most vivid example of how wrong they were is that California’s majestic Oroville Dam is currently in danger of spillway failure in a season of record snow and rainfall. That could spell catastrophe for thousands who live below it and for the state of California at large that depends on its stored water.

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

Oroville Dam, along with Shasta Dam, is the crown jewel of California’s state and federal system of water transfers. Finished nearly 50 years ago, the earthen Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States. The resulting Lake Oroville stores 3.5 million acre feet of snow and rain runoff, and is central to transferring water, eventually via the California Aqueduct, from the wet north to the dry southern half of the state.

The dam was part of the larger work of a brilliant earlier generation of California planners and lawmakers. Given that two-thirds of the state wished to live where one third of the rain and snow fell, they foresaw a vast system of water storage and transference that would remake the face of a growing California by putting people, industry and farms where water was not.

…The water projects created cheap and clean hydroelectric power. (At one point, California enjoyed one of the least expensive electric delivery systems in the United States.) In addition, dams like Oroville ensured that empty desert acreage on California’s dry west side of the Central Valley could be irrigated. The result was the rise of the richest farming belt in the world. Complex transfers of water also helped fuel spectacular growth in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles Basin. Their present populations often do not fully appreciate that their dry hillsides and Mediterranean climates could never have supported such urban growth without the can-do vision of a prior generation of hydrological engineers.

…Yet the California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project have been comatose for a half-century — despite the recent drought. Environmental lawsuits and redirection of critical state funding stalled final-phase construction, scheduled expansion and maintenance. Necessary improvements to Oroville Dam, like reinforced concrete spillways, were never finished. Nor were planned auxiliary dams on nearby rivers built to relieve the pressure on Oroville.

A new generation of Californians — without much memory of floods or what unirrigated California was like before its aqueducts — had the luxury to envision the state’s existing water projects in a radically new light: as environmental errors. To partially correct these mistakes some proposed diverting storage water for fish restoration and re-creating of wild rivers to flow uninterrupted into San Francisco Bay.

Indeed, pressures mounted to tear down rather than build dams. The state — whose basket of income, sales and gas taxes is among the highest in the country — gradually shifted its priorities from the building and expansion of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, bridges and highways to redistributionist social welfare programs, state employee pensions and an enormous penal archipelago.

…State lawmakers spend their time obsessing over minutia: a prohibition against free grocery bags and rules against disturbing bobcats. When they do turn their attention to development, they tend to pick projects that serve urban rather than rural populations — for example, that boondoggle of a bullet train whose costs keep climbing even as the project falls years behind schedule.

The crisis at Oroville is a third act in the state’s history: One majestic generation built great dams, a second enjoyed them while they aged, and a third fiddles as they now erode.“

For more on the bureaucratic abortion which is California’s water program, VDH penned an associated column on the subject.

Same song, different tune: Big Government intruding where it’s neither warranted nor wanted, while utterly ignoring its core duties and responsibilities.

Meanwhile, on The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Bloomin’ Idiots on Parade segment, courtesy today of Bill Meisen and one hopelessly confused Congressman:

Democrat Eyes Law on Removing Presidents

Though the bow-tie and pink bicycle lapel pin should give inquiring minds an understanding why others aren’t jumping on the Blumenidiot bandwagon; that and the fact all Blumenauer needs to “clarify and strengthen” the 25th Amendment is a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, followed by three-fourths of the states.

And a total waste of time and effort, not to mention the taxpayers’ dollars!

Magoo