It’s Wednesday, April 17th, 2019…but before we begin, though it fortunately appears damage to Notre Dame was not as extensive as initially feared…

…and efforts to restore one of the world’s most recognized landmarks are already underway, we remain deeply saddened by the devastation, accidental or otherwise, inflicted on this beautiful, iconic structure.

Still, we don’t know which was worse: the calamity itself…

…or The Donald’s tweet in response to the tragedy:

Seriously, when a simple, “America grieves with France in the tragic loss of this irreplaceable piece of history” would have sufficed, Trump felt obliged to not only offer Paris first-responders advice on combatting the blaze, but urge them to haste.  This from a man whose only experience with fire has likely been lighting a cigar; he literally cannot help himself!!!

In a related item…

Trump tweets he’ll give Tiger Woods Presidential Medal of Freedom after Masters 2019 win

Holy “Birds of a Philandering Feather Flocking Together”, Batman!  Hey, Tiger’s The Donald’s kind of guy.  As Daniel Francis Feeney so insightfully noted, this is just another sign of where we’re at as a country; we’re not serious.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, Dennis Prager casts the aforementioned conflagration in a different light:

“The symbolism of the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss. It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning — and with it, Western civilization.

Every major Western (and one major non-Western) social and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the civilization it produced.

Within the Western world, the French Enlightenment — the intellectual basis of the French Revolution and the modern West — sought to replace Christianity, and religion in general, with secularism rooted in reason. No God, Bible, or Ten Commandments are necessary for morality or meaning: Reason (and science) will replace them.

The two final deathblows to Christianity in Europe were the world wars. World War I ended most Westerners’ belief in the nation-state and the West. Christianity, already weakened by the Enlightenment, was further weakened by World War I. German Christians were killing millions of French and English Christians, and French and English Christians were killing millions of German Christians. So the argument and sentiment against Christianity went. Then World War II saw even more death on the Christian continent as well as the failure of Catholic and Protestant churches in Nazi Germany to offer even minimal noncompliance with the Nazis’ Jew-hatred.

…Even without tens of millions of Muslims, post-Christian Europe has not produced a pretty picture. This was predicted in 1834, a hundred years before Hitler’s rise, by the great German poet Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew (who later converted to Protestantism, “the ticket of admission into European culture”):

Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman (the cross) is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then…a play will be performed in Germany that will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.

European Christians persecuted European Jews, often brutally. But it took a post-Christian ideology, secular Nazism, to produce Auschwitz — just as it took post-Christian Communism to produce the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Ukrainian and Cambodian genocides.

Moreover, Nazism and Communism aside, the Left’s belief that secular reason can replace God and the Bible turns out to be completely wrong. The alleged citadels of secular reason — the universities — are the most irrational and morally confused institutions in the West.

I don’t know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set fire to Notre Dame Cathedral (as they have to scores of other churches around Europe). In terms of what the fire represented, it doesn’t much matter. What matters is the omen: Europe is burning, just as Notre Dame was.“

Since we’re on the subject of infernos, as the great Victor Davis Hanson also records at NRO, while the EU may be afire, America isn’t far from bursting in flames:

“…Socialists and hard progressives believe that they already have won about three-fifths of America, defined not by population, polls, or political office, but by cultural clout. They assume that such control will inevitably end in final victory in the Congress and presidency, the same way that that there’s no longer a Republican party to speak of in California and not a single statewide officeholder who is not a Democrat. Seven of 53 House seats are Republican in the California of Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.

Entertainment and Hollywood are mostly all left-wing and missionary in their progressive zeal. The network news, PBS, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC outnumber talk radio and Fox News.

Most of the major newspapers are progressive. Silicon Valley is harder left still and more audacious in baking ideology into its products from Twitter and Facebook, which censor conservatives, to Google, with its progressive bias in formatting and searches.

The biggest foundations that most fund activists and academics are mostly left-wing. No one believes that the campuses are balanced or even disinterested. Most academics believe that they can be legitimately biased leftward to balance the supposed prejudices of the family, community, and church — noisome cargo that too many of their naïve students bring with them on arrival, which is why they need “cleansing” and “awakening.”

Sports events and reporting are liberal and increasingly avenues to peddle political messages. Corporate America tries to emulate popular culture and thus must adopt left-wing tropes, so it’s trigger-happy in its readiness to shoot down conservatives who are deemed hostile to our shared fated progressive future.

What we are seeing in the Democratic party’s movement to the hard left is not the beginning but the end of a long march. Socialists and progressives believe that control of the Congress, the presidency, and courts is the final missing tessera from their already expansive socialist mosaic.

They believe that the future is theirs. They no longer need to apologize for pushing government-sanctioned redistribution. And with an administrative state that nearly pulled off a coup in the past two years, with 21 trillion dollars in national debt and the courts as de facto progressive legislators, and with an open 2,000-mile border, they may well be right.“

Speaking of those determined to destroy the greatest nation ever to exist, courtesy of Frontpage Mag via Jeff Foutch, David Horowitz reveals the reality behind…

“Pete Buttigieg is the latest star to emerge from Democrats’ 2020 pack, which is no surprise since he exhibits all the tropes we have come to associate with this party in the era of its Trump derangement. On the evidence just of his attacks on Vice President Mike Pence, Buttigieg is a shameless liar, a calculating character assassin and an anti-religious/anti-free speech bigot, motivated by a virulent hatred of his political opponents, especially those who have been good to him like Pence.

Buttigieg’s chosen target is one of the most decent human beings in politics, who was supportive of Buttegieg both before he revealed he was gay and after. Indeed, when Buttigieg made his public announcement, Pence, then governor of Indiana went out of his way to praise his achievements as mayor – a bit of political hyperbole since Buttigieg’s city, South Bend, is a violence-ridden mess.  Yet, even after Buttigieg’s outrageous attacks, Pence has not had an unkind word to say about him.

…Like his Democrat comrades – Booker, Harris, Warren – Buttigieg dons the shield of martyrdom, portraying himself as a persecuted minority whose suffering absolves him of responsibility for his aggressions and bad behavior. In fact, in the short time since Buttigieg announced he was gay, far from being persecuted as the member of a “marginalized” group, his political fortunes have taken the form of a minor miracle – an obscure mayor from a violence-ridden city of under 100,000 catapulted into the national limelight as a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. Far from hurting him, it is the fact that he is gay that has powered this rise, and he knows it. I can promise you that I am more persecuted every day by slanders and lies leading to lost opportunities for being a conservative than Pete Buttigieg will probably ever be for being gay. And unlike him I cannot capitalize on my marginalization by leftwing universities, publishing houses and media organizations for the crime of disagreeing with their political prejudices…”

As has been observed before, most recently by Tomi Lahren, the election of Donald Trump didn’t create The Left’s unbridled hatred and intolerance, it just exposed it.

If you’ll forgive the pun,  here’s the “bottom” line: Pete Buttedge…Buttegg…Pete the Butt Pirate is no different from the rest of the lawless, surly, Socialist crew of which he’s a part.

And in the George Santayana Memorial Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It segment, writing at AEI, Nicholas Eberstadt pens an introduction for Richard Lawless’ recounting of the…

Shootdown over the Sea of Japan

Remembering 31 Americans and lessons learned or not

“I have convinced my friend and colleague Richard Lawless to contribute this essay to AEIdeas to commemorate the 50th anniversary this week of the North Korean shootdown of an unarmed US recon aircraft, an attack that killed 31 US crewmen. Nixon and Kissinger chose to do nothing — a fateful inaction that in my honest opinion helped to set on course the events we now have to contend with in the never ending North Korea crisis.

Mr. Lawless is one of the greats — a longtime USG Korea hand. One of the few cool American heads at the 6 Party talks back in the day. He will not tell you this, but he was inter alia the officer assigned to shut down the South Korean nuclear weapons program in the 1970s — and he did.

This past week South Korea’s first F-35 fighters arrived in that nation to bolster its defense posture, perhaps coincident with the arrival in Washington of South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in for meetings with President Trump.  Reacting quickly to the arrival of the new fighter aircraft, if not the Moon visit to meet with President Trump, North Korea delivered a stream of threats against all its perceived enemies. Branding the arrival of the two jets a “hostile act that escalates military tension on the peninsula,” Pyongyang warned that “South Korea should ponder the catastrophic results of this stealth fighter introduction.”

Recent history has cautioned us to take North Korean threats seriously as such saber rattling is often a prelude to armed provocations that risk escalation to war. In the wake of the failed Hanoi summit meeting, the US-led international coalition is strengthening the economic sanctions program directed at North Korea. Also, this past week South Korean President Moon Jae-in departed Washington DC a disappointed man when President Trump declined Moon’s proposal that South Korea begin a reengagement process that would include the US backing off the current sanctions regime. In this situation, we should be prepared for the real possibility that a frustrated Kim Jung-un will lash out with a deadly military provocation.

Fifty years ago this week, in the early morning hours of April 15, 1969, thirty-one US Navy and Marine airmen boarded their unarmed EC-121 electronic surveillance aircraft, climbed into the clear skies over Atsugi, Japan and flew west over the Sea of Japan. They were on a routine reconnaissance mission over international waters, a flight that had been performed many times before, over the same track.  Six hours into their flight they and their aircraft, call sign “Deep Sea 129,” were blown out of the sky by a pair of North Korean MIG fighters which had been dispatched to destroy this aircraft.

Not coincidentally, it was the 57th birthday of North Korean dictator-for-life Kim Il-sung.  His regime had decided it was a great day to mount yet another armed and deadly attack against the United States.

This deadly provocation, coming fast on the heels of the North Korean attack and capture of the USS Pueblo and its crew a year before, brought North Korea again to attention of the president of the United States as American crisis planners struggled to cope. In the Pentagon, a decision-making process was undertaken that considered a range of retaliatory options, including both conventional and nuclear strikes on North Korea.

In the end, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger elected to do nothing.  The North Koreans once again concluded (correctly!!!) that they could literally get away with murder and would not be held to account.  The EC-121 incident itself is often overlooked in the greater scheme of the multi-administration attempts at “nuclear engagement” with Pyongyang. But the same regime that dispatched the MIG interceptors that April day fifty years ago remains in place today as a negotiating partner, only now it is a de facto nuclear weapons state. The EC-121 shootdown is therefore instructive and relevant, if not to the memory of thirty-one dead US servicemen, then certainly to our understanding of the mentality that frames the way North Korea makes its decisions today…”

As if the creation of the EPA and the SCOTUS nominations of Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell weren’t enough (Watergate needs no mention), this is yet another reason we despise even the memory of Richard Nixon.

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this string of memes from Mark Foster…

…along with this one from Speed Mach:

And in The Crime Blotter, this item leaves us wondering if law enforcement authorities in Atlanta are serious about catching criminals:

Suspect caught on camera stealing thousands from gambling machine

“Authorities in Atlanta are searching for a gambler they say stole $7,900 in cash earlier this month from a gambling machine at a Shell gas station…The suspect could be seen reaching into what looks like a variation of a slot machine…

The suspect was described by police as skinny with a low haircut. He was wearing a gray dress shirt and gray pants. Authorities are asking the public to identify the suspect and said to call 404-577-8477 with any details.“

Again, do Atlanta police really want to solve this crime?  Or does the omission of the perp’s race in his description simply reflect the assumption, at least in Atlanta, a criminal suspect’s skin color is understood?!?

Finally, TLJ checked in from the Palazzo Vecchio to remind us, even in Florence, Wednesday is still…

…Hump Day!

Magoo