The Daily Gouge Archive, Monday, November 13th, 2017

On November 14, 2017, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, November 13th, 2017…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the WSJ, we for one are glad Kim Strassel remains intent on…

Lifting the Steele Curtain

The Fusion GPS dossier was one of the dirtiest political tricks in U.S. history.

“The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI…”

Hey, the fact Hillary’s still lying about it and the MSM continues to misreport it tells you all you need to know about who’s telling the truth.

In other words, think:

Benghazi
Fast & Furious
Lois Lerner
Hillary’s private email server
Solyndra
The Stimulus
Cash for Clunkers
ObamaCare
Eric Holder, a sitting Attorney General, being held in contempt of Congress
Spying on James Rosen
The NSA scandal
The Pigford pork
The Bowe Bergdahl trade
Bradley Manning’s pardon
The Iran Nuclear deal and ransom payment
Uranium One
The inexcusably irresponsible mismanagement of the VA
The complete and utter emasculation of the U.S. Military

Just to name a few! Seriously, since its inception, the Clinton/Obama/MSM Axis of Evil has been devoted to deliberate deception, disinformation and dissimulation…all in the cause of advancing a Progressive political agenda no one would buy if they knew, or understood,…

…what they were actually being sold. Hence originated, as we’ve pointed out so many times before, Progressives’ premeditated dumbing-down of America’s system of public education.

Since we’re on the subject of how to discern who’s telling the truth, here’s the latest from NRO’s David French on the Roy Moore sexual harassment story:

“…Moore is vigorously denying the accusations, claiming they’re “fake news” and a “desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post.” Conservatives, be careful. Don’t dismiss the claims. While I don’t know if the allegations are true, I’m deeply troubled on a number of grounds.

First, these women didn’t seek out the press. According to the Post report, its reporters reached out to them after hearing that “Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls.” So far as we know, they weren’t put forward by the opposing campaign, and the woman who made the most serious allegations against Moore says that she voted for Trump in 2016. None of the women have donated to Moore’s primary or general-election opponent.

Second, if you read the report, it includes validation from a number of witnesses who say that they were aware of the relationships at the time. While this isn’t proof of guilt of course, it bolsters the credibility of the accusers.

Third, the youngest accuser’s explanation for her decision not to come forward earlier rings tragically true. She told the Post that “she did not share her story about Moore partly because of the trouble in her life. She has had three divorces and financial problems.” It’s a sad and terrible truth that childhood abuse can have catastrophic effects on young lives — effects that last for years…”

In a related item, there’s this from Jonah Goldberg, also a man who, like David French, we deeply respect:

“Forget the people who refuse to even give the heavily sourced and corroborated Washington Post account a fair reading on the tired and predictable pretense that inconvenient facts are simply proof of the conspiracy against them.“

Sorry, but the WaPo could tell us the sky is blue and we’d question their reporting…along with that of most any other MSM outlet.

Case in point, courtesy of Matt Vespa and Townhall.com.

Then again, here’s a completely reasoned analysis from Townhall.com’s Guy Benson, hardly the Never-Trumper which Goldberg and French are.

Regardless, we’re down with the observations of Rod Martin, one of the few Conservative Christians left in Silicon Valley:

More on Moore: A friend posts that though he doesn’t believe the allegations against Roy Moore, he thinks it right to at least consider them. And that’s fair, so far as it goes.

But from where I’m sitting, I’d be quite a lot more interested in these allegations if they didn’t happen to show up 33 days before a general (actually a special election) election in which almost every single person in the District of Columbia — in both parties — would bash this man’s brains in if they could.

For instance:

1. If it was one woman, not four on the same day.

2. If the main woman wasn’t a Democrat operative.

3. If the “investigation” wasn’t from the Washington Post.

4. If it hadn’t come out oh-so-conveniently just after Moore’s name can’t be removed from the ballot.

5. If it had come out during the primary, which by the way was the most expensive U.S. Senate primary in American history: there was plenty of money and op research to find whether the man had so much as stolen a cookie in first grade.

6. If it had come out during his most recent campaign for Supreme Court.

7. If it had come out during the primary for his most recent campaign for Supreme Court.

8. If it had come out during his race for Governor.

9. If it had come out during his previous general election for Supreme Court.

10. If it had come out during his previous primary for Supreme Court.

11. If it had come out during any of his races for judge.

12. If it had come out not during an election, but as an ethics complaint to the state bar, at any point during a multi-decade legal career.

13. If it had come in the form of a lawsuit, before (again, conveniently) the statute of limitations on all possible crimes had run out, thus ensuring no one has to prove anything. (Let alone testify under oath!)

14. If it had come in the form of a criminal complaint (see above).

Etc.

We have jury trials in this country in part because we believe people innocent until they are proven guilty, but even more so because we want 12 normal people to look at the accuser and look at the accused and decide who they think they trust more. And if there’s any reasonable doubt at all, the accused walks, because unlike a lot of Christians, our legal system knows that people make stuff up every single day.

Ergo: HELL no I’m not believing any of this. It stinks to high heaven. Roy Moore denies categorically that any of this is true, and I do believe he is innocent: the total lack of credibility of these accusers and their accusations is the proof of it.

And lest we forget: not believing slanderers who bear false witness against the innocent IS a “traditional” Christian value.

Anything else to the contrary notwithstanding, we’ve got some real issues with the WaPo story, as well as French’s and Goldberg’s thoughts on the same.

Prior to our receipt of Rod Martin’s missive detailed above, we’d already internally questioned the veracity of the Post‘s report, along with the accuracy of French’s and Goldberg’s analyses, based on the following inconsistencies:

(1). How convenient the effects of the 14-year-old’s trauma wore off some 30 days prior to a run-off election in which the Post endorsed Moore’s opponent.

(2). If these women didn’t seek out the press, how on earth did the reporters find them?!? Should we to assume the corroborating witnesses came forward first?!?

(3). No, Jonah; it’s not a conspiracy against us, but rather a willingness to print anything which will help Progressives regain control of Congress…not that it would be make much difference given the performance of the GOP since January of 2017.

What Goldberg fails to recognize is HE’S part of the Washington elite, inculcated in a culture which still believes when the Washington Post prints a story, “heavily sourced and corroborated” though it appears to be, the rest of us must believe it to be true!

Sorry, but it no longer works that way…hence we don’t believe it!!!

Think about it: we’re to subscribe to the fact the Washington Post, which despite its contacts and investigative journalistic power couldn’t unearth Obama’s birth certificate or his college transcripts, could somehow find women with 35-year memories of sexual abuse by a Republican Senate candidate 30 days before a special election…an election Dimocrats would do ANYTHING to win.

Yeah,…

Next up, courtesy of G. Trevor via Rastus at Topix.com, we learn…

Baltimore Is Now ‘FREE AT LAST’ as Mayor Removes Confederate Statues!

Praise needs to be given to the Mayor of Baltimore.

For years the Black community has been under assault by 4 Confederate Monuments. These monuments were relentless in their destruction of the Black family as over 70% of Black children were born out of wedlock. So terrified by the presence of these monuments, over 60% of Black men in the city could not work a job and found comfort in fathering numerous children with numerous women that they could not feed.

Just knowing that the monuments were there made Black school children have the lowest test scores in the Nation and many turned to drugs to relieve the sting of the monuments presence.

Worst of all, the mere presence of the monuments caused death. Not being able to handle the hate and violence that the monuments represented, the Black males in the city took to killing each other by the thousands. Just in the last 2 years they have murdered 500 of their own.

Praise be to God and the Wisdom of the Mayor. It is a new dawn for Black Baltimoreans! The shackles have been removed and all that can be said is,“Free at last, free at last, Lord God Almighty, we’re free at last.”

And if you believe that, we’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn we’d love to sell you…or promise you if you like your healthcare plan you can keep it…or that the Benghazi consulate attack was inspired by an obscure internet video.

Speaking of indefensible Liberal licentiousness, courtesy of a snippet from “Against Princeton” by R.R. Reno at FirstThings.com via the WSJ‘s Notable & Quotable segment, we learn the truth behind…

Princeton’s Endowment

‘Rise up ye graduates of elite universities and defend the rich!’

“But if the government taxed our endowment, Princeton couldn’t afford my overinflated compensation package!”

The president of my alma mater…wants me to join him in lobbying Congress to block a tax on super-sized college and university endowments. His message was, in effect, “Rise up ye graduates of elite universities and defend the rich!”

George Will answered the call.

In his regular Washington Post column, he penned a defense of one of the richest of the rich universities, Princeton. The fancy-pants university in New Jersey enjoys a monstrous endowment of more than $22 billion. But it is so noble and beneficent, Will tells us. Princeton provides scholarships to nearly one-fourth of its undergraduates who come from families that have difficulty paying its tuition, room, board, and fees, which exceed $60,000 per year.

That sounds generous, but it’s not.Do the math. A modest 5-percent return on $22 billion is $1.1 billion. Princeton has 5,000 undergraduates. That’s $220,000 for every undergraduate—every year. The amount given in scholarship aid is a piddling portion of Princeton’s endowment income. Assume that the quarter of Princeton students who get aid receive full scholarships (which they don’t, of course). That would cost the university around $75 million per year—less than 10 percent of its endowment income.

Meanwhile, these over-educated idiots who, like the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin live off the teat of taxpayer-funded government largesse, have no problem whatsoever beggaring small businessmen like us who’ve seen our health insurance premiums rise from $562 to just under $3,000 in less than four years.

Which is why, with very few exceptions, when it comes to anyone involved in education at the college level…