It’s Monday, January 2nd, 2023…but before we kick off the new year, our high opinion of Joe Concha notwithstanding, when did THIS type of coarse discourse…
…become acceptable as part of purportedly serious television journalism? “Knocked up” versus “pregnant” or “expecting”: Seriously?!?
Now, unexpectedly, here’s our inaugural 2023 edition of The Gouge!
“President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House Republican majority over his ongoing destruction of the southern border.
Yes, I know, the votes for a conviction are not there at the moment, and probably won’t ever be: The Constitution requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority to convict and remove an elected official from office, and Biden’s Democratic Party will hold a two-seat majority in the upper chamber for the next two years.
Yet there must be an impeachment investigation and, if Biden fails to change course, articles of impeachment. That would forever stain him, which he deserves; more significantly, it would force the Senate to shut down other business and conduct a trial that would expose the depth of our security catastrophe and the fact that Democrats have willfully caused it.
If Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell don’t fancy that prospect, here’s a suggestion: Fix the friggin’ border. Oh, and stop ramming through omnibus boondoggles that spend billions on processing and sheltering illegal aliens but explicitly forbid shifting American taxpayer funds to protect Americans by securing the border.
The president’s dereliction of duty has abetted a foreign invasion of, so far, approximately 6 million illegal aliens. A large number of these aliens are released into our country in violation of American law. And mind you, we haven’t even faced the onslaught that awaits the rescission of Title 42, the Covid-era restriction on immigration that the courts have blocked Biden from lifting since May. As I detailed in a column earlier this week, although the Supreme Court has temporarily kept Title 42 in place, its rescission is inevitable because it is a pretext, not a policy. Once it is lifted, the current rate of illegal immigration — an eye-popping 6,785 apprehensions per day, with another 2,000-odd “got-aways” who evade capture as they enter — will grow to somewhere between two and three times as high as it is now.
To provide some perspective, during the Obama–Biden years, the Department of Homeland Security regarded it as a crisis if the number of illegal-alien encounters inched up to 1,000 per day, which computes to 365,000 per year. “A thousand [per day] overwhelms the system,” Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, acknowledged in a 2019 interview. At the time, the Trump administration was dealing with four times that amount due to a surge in border arrivals by alien family units and unaccompanied alien minors. (The surge was caused by the refusal of congressional Democrats to cooperate in Trump’s signature border-security priority; it was quelled, as Rich Lowry related, because Trump induced cooperation from other countries.)
Thanks to Biden’s wholesale adoption of transnational-progressive radicalism, we are now at seven times the number that Johnson conceded would constitute a crisis. Post–Title 42, we could find ourselves at 18 times that amount, or perhaps even more — and remember, that’s just the apprehensions, not the got-aways.
By what multiple must a president intentionally metastasize a crisis, for the benefit of foreigners and to the ruin of the American people, before he is impeached?
…We’re talking here not merely about a border-security crisis. We’re leaps and bounds past that. This is an invasion — millions of aliens rushing our border in a manner that is illegal, and thus hostile. (How remarkable that Democrats, who never hesitate to describe a five-hour riot that posed no serious threat to the republic as an insurrection, scream bloody murder when someone uses the word invasion to describe millions of foreigners lawlessly storming our border, with tens to hundreds of thousands more currently staging to storm the gates the moment Title 42 is lifted.) Biden’s refusal to secure the border is potentially an existential crisis for the United States. It already is an existential crisis for border states, which are expected by their federal overlords not just to accept the onslaught but to bear the ruinous costs of public education and health care, in addition to exorbitant supplemental law-enforcement expenditures at a time when crime is already surging nationwide.
Without a border, we won’t have a country…
…By destroying the border, President Biden is destroying the country. That’s a bracing assertion, but I am not engaging in the habitual hyperbole with which our competing political parties customarily frame each other as monstrous. This is common sense. Defended borders are an ineliminable element of national sovereignty. A nation is a nation only if it has internationally recognized territory over which it exercises dominion and control. A rudimentary component of dominion and control is the power to exclude intruders — those who lack lawful authority to enter and to be present. One of Biden’s jobs, which he swore an oath to perform faithfully and in a manner consistent with the Constitution, is to defend the border. And he is violating that oath, exploiting the power of the presidency on behalf of non-Americans to strip the United States of its sovereignty. A clearer case for impeachment there has never been.
…The objectives of impeaching Biden and perhaps other administration officials would be to illuminate the profound threat to our country, to place the blame for it squarely where it belongs, and to force Democrats either to reverse course or to publicly own their radical position that the United States should not have enforceable borders and that the government should prioritize the desires of aliens over the security of Americans. The Framers believed impeachment was indispensable not because they thought we’d make a habit of removing presidents but because the credible threat of impeachment and removal — the historical stigma and the prospect of losing power — would encourage presidents to honor the constitutional oath and execute the laws faithfully.
The crisis at the border is the direct result of President Biden’s impeachable dereliction of duty. That dereliction is a direct result of the Democrats’ core positions that our country should not have a border, and that illegal aliens are entitled to enter, remain at liberty, and exploit public services at the expense of American taxpayers. These matters need to be exposed and confronted. The way to expose and confront them is to impeach Biden. Otherwise, he will stay the course, Democrats will continue undermining border security, and the crisis will become existential.“
We’re in the Hill Country west of Austin, and here the response to the crisis thus far has been limited to lending resources to jurisdictions along the border, as well as helping pay the tab to cope with the increasing flood of illegals. To the lovely Shannon and others in close proximity to the problem, it’s already all too real.
“The members of the Capitol riot committee, disbanding because voters removed Democrats from majority power in the U.S. House, seem determined to show that they are just as partisan and ideological as they appear. Americans who had come to suspect that the committee was pursuing agendas other than simply gathering facts about the disgraceful events of January 2021 received further confirmation last weekend from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.).
Readers will recall Mr. Raskin as one of the committee’s sore losers who have refused to accept presidential losses by Democrats but cast themselves as the stalwart defenders of the U.S. political system when the sore losers are Republicans.
Sunday on CBS, Mr. Raskin made clear how far he has wandered from the alleged investigative mission of the committee when he attempted to use the riot to promote his long-term campaign to eviscerate the U.S. Constitution’s Electoral College. Rather than defending the U.S. political system, he sees this as his moment to try to change it.
On Sunday on CBS Mr. Raskin said, according to the network’s transcript:
I think that the Electoral College now, which has given us five popular vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone, has become a danger not just to democracy, but to the American people. It was a danger on January 6th, there are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College, that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief. We should elect the president, the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else, whoever gets the most votes wins.
Mr. Raskin presented no evidence that the Electoral College had anything to do with the riot, nor did he explain how the institution’s “nooks and crannies” threaten Americans…
…If electoral colleges are rare in the world, so is the success of the United States. Many countries have modeled their constitutions generally upon ours, but whether or not they choose to copy our system exactly, certainly Americans should be hesitant to restructure a political order that has allowed the creation of the most prosperous nation in history and a worldwide champion for liberty.
Mr. Raskin wants to end the practice of U.S. presidential campaigns competing in each state to accumulate the 270 electoral votes needed to win and instead move to a national popular vote. But the framers’ decision not to institute a pure democracy wasn’t because of ignorance of human experience but because they understood it so well. They knew from history that pure democracies didn’t tend to last long and could not be counted on to protect the rights of the minority.
…Lest anyone think that the First Amendment and the Electoral College are the only constitutional institutions targeted by Mr. Raskin, he also has a problem with the judiciary when it doesn’t yield the results he favors. He once wrote a book-length screed called, “Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court Versus the American People.” A website for the publisher noted that Mr. Raskin “argues that we need to develop a whole new set of rights.”
Let’s hope we can protect the ones we already have against politicians like Mr. Raskin.“
We should note the problem of Mr. Raskin may soon take care of itself, though in the spirit of Christian charity we must wish him a full and speedy recovery.
Since we’re on the subject of last gasps, courtesy of Nick and the New York Post, the great VDH records…
“In a famous exchange in the “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion.During the 1990s “culture wars,” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal.
Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public — and often enraged alumni. Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition — and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.
But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.
…Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students — an all-time high. Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities. In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation’s universities have fallen by a third.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff — in near one-to-one fashion.
In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism…”
Read 1984, people: Orwell saw all this coming back in 1949.
“Open societies like the United States thrive because free speech and vigorous public debate generally allow the best ideas to win in a competitive marketplace. Closed societies fail because a central authority of political apparatchiks can never be smarter than all the independent creativity of free citizens studying and proposing and testing and trying new ways to solve problems. Faced with the challenge of Covid, too many U.S. government officials not only refused to subject their disastrous lockdown policies to rigorous analysis, but appear to have tried to silence those most equipped to demonstrate the flaws of the shutdown strategy. Government officials opted for closing not just buildings but public debate, at a moment when America most needed the virtues of the open society.
The Journal’s Ben Chapman and Douglas Belkin report on one massive cost of this disaster: a Stanford study showing a possible lifetime earnings decline of $70,000 for children resulting from Covid-era learning losses, especially in math…
…Now the latest release of internal Twitter files reports that the federal government was leaning on the social media company to suppress even well-informed messages from highly accomplished doctors who didn’t toe the government line. Specifically suppressed were those who accurately pointed out that children were not at great risk from Covid.
After receiving files from Twitter, journalist David Zweig recently tweeted:
The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19…
Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech.
But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.
…dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
Exhibit A: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.
Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) will become chairman of the House Oversight Committee in the new Congress, and he’s been busy collecting information on the government’s disastrous response to Covid. Tuesday on the Fox Business Network he told your humble correspondent:
Now we’re learning that the government was very involved in suppressing speech, among other medical experts and other people who didn’t agree with [Dr. Anthony Fauci]… history is not going to be kind to the American response to COVID 19.
Speaking of America’s most famous government disease doctor, this column has been noting since early in the pandemic that his destructive recommendations were offered without any serious consideration of costs and benefits. Given this pseudoscientific approach, which unfortunately seems to have become standard operating procedure among public-health officials, it’s no wonder that the feds didn’t want to subject their plans to a fair and open debate.
University of Chicago economist Tomas Philipson wrote in the Journal earlier this year:
Reducing the incidence of disease isn’t necessarily desirable if excessive prevention, in the form of lockdowns or school closures, is more costly to society than the damage done by an illness. We don’t close highways to minimize accidental deaths, despite the existence of dangerous drivers… The public-health community has proved incapable of quantitatively assessing trade-offs between the harms of prevention and the harms of disease. This has hindered the development of policies that could have minimized the total harm to society from Covid-19.Economic epidemiologists, by contrast, have for decades used quantitative methods to evaluate these harms by looking at them the same way they look at taxes…
In early 2020, University of Chicago economists estimated that about 80% of the total damage from Covid came from prevention efforts that hindered economic activity, and only 20% from the direct effects of the disease itself. This analysis motivated me and others to recommend that initial efforts to stop the spread should focus on older people, who are at higher risk of severe illness and not as active in the economy as younger people. This would allow younger people to keep the economy going while limiting the spread of the disease among those most at risk from it. Some in the public-health community, like the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration…saw the light.
Too many government officials sought to operate in the darkness.“
Moving on, here’s a septet of items specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). The Journal informs us stocks closed out the year with a whimper, as “all three major indexes posted modest losses Friday, capping their worst year since 2008.”
Yes, you demented deviant, you did indeed!
(2). If this story of a mom blocked from taking her daughter to a Radio City Music Hall event as on the basis of of facial recognition and a blacklist doesn’t scare you, the potential for government abuse of the technology…
She was so excited about the convenience of face-scan payment in China…no card or phone needed … 🤡 🌎
Wait until the govt decides your social credit score is too low for not doing what they tell you. No water for you until you receive your 4th booster. 😲
California is now a safe haven for people who give healthy minor girls double mastectomies and give young kids irreversible treatments which permanently stunts their growth https://t.co/5RxRTbSjlt
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