It’s Thursday, August 15th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, if the Commander-in-Chief didn’t have either the attention span or stomach to watch Seal Team Six going after Usama…

…is it any wonder he was MIA during Benghazigate?!?

For more on the subject of Liberalism Achilles heel, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger details why…

The Soft-on-Security Issue Returns

Can liberals be trusted to fight the real world’s threats from urban crime and overseas terrorism?

Sometimes the planets of politics align. Within days of President Obama’s decision last week to appoint a civil-liberties “adversary” inside the U.S.’s antiterrorism surveillance program, a federal judge created a “monitor” to oversee the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk anticrime program. Both these decisions, if allowed to take full effect, run a significant risk that violence will return or increase—as the terrorism of al Qaeda or as murder and assault in New York City.

If that happens—and don’t bet against it—a liberal president and a liberal federal judge will have brought back to life one of modern liberalism’s worst nightmares: the belief that Democrats can’t be trusted with national security or the control of violent crime. They’re soft on security.

In New York City a handful of Democrats—canaries in the party’s mine shaft—are competing to succeed Mike Bloomberg. For months, New Yorkers of all political persuasions have been asking sotto voce if the city’s 20-year miracle of urban tranquility under Rudy Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg will vanish if a left-wing Democrat (the city allows no other kind) becomes mayor.

The subject can’t be avoided because the city’s irrepressible, activist left made weakening the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies a litmus test for winning the Democratic primary next month. All the Democratic candidates have saluted the movement to downgrade stop-and-frisk.

A liberal Democratic mayor is unsettling for New Yorkers who’ve lived in the city long enough not to have to Google the meaning of “Bernhard Goetz” or explain the legendary New York Post headline—”Dave, Do Something!”.

Mr. Goetz was the vigilante who shot several muggers on a subway train in 1984. “Dave” was Mayor David Dinkins, who in the early 1990s presided over a city in the grip of civic disorder.

A totemic figure from this dystopian period was an Upper West Side mental patient named Larry Hogue. I’ve always thought that Larry Hogue got Rudy Giuliani elected. Hogue, a deinstitutionalized psychotic, prowled the famously liberal Upper West Side streets off and on for 20 years, hurling concrete at car windshields and once shoving a girl in front of a truck. The city couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about him. There’s no way former federal prosecutor Giuliani could have become mayor in 1994 unless a lot of Upper West Siders voted for Rudy—then walked outside to tell their friends, “Of course, I voted for Dinkins.”

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin decided not to wait for the November mayoral election to bring back the 1980s, or even the 1960s. That’s when criticism of liberal belief on security matters emerged, notably in Richard Nixon’s victorious 1968 “law and order” campaign. This critique argues that when liberals weigh the reality of physical threat to home and hearth against hyper-abstract interpretations of constitutional rights, abstraction wins. The Scheindlin decision, handed down Monday, is a classic of liberal abstraction on security.

New York has its lowest murder rate since the early 1960s, a big reason for the city’s 50 million meandering tourists last year. This tranquility of pedestrian life is presumably one point of an effective policing strategy. Ask Chicago. Not so for Judge Scheindlin, who discusses murder in footnote 210. She describes a “17% drop in index crime reports between 2003 and 2012, and a 30% drop in reported murders.” No matter. “I emphasize again,” the judge insists, “that this Opinion takes no position on whether stop and frisk contributed to the decline in crime.” And why is that, one might ask? Judge Scheindlin explains: “This court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool.”

That’s a cue for the umpteenth citation of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s dictum that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But why bother? This divide between liberal principle and life on the street—or foreign danger —will never be bridged. Rather than strike a balance, a modus vivendi, liberals compulsively pull back too far on security. That’s what Judge Scheindlin has done on urban crime and what Mr. Obama now looks to be doing on terror.

First came the president’s May speech at the National Defense College, of all places, which next-day reports described as winding down the war on terror, specifically by suggesting an end to Congress’s formal 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorists.

Then, in last Friday’s announcement on surveillance, Mr. Obama said he would work with Congress, civil libertarians, a privacy advocate and an outside task force to achieve “constraints” on the surveillance program and the Patriot Act. As if commanded by DNA, a liberal president’s takes his inevitable plunge into national-security abstraction (with random conservative philosophes hanging on for the swan dive).

Except at the far left and right, people believe security is government’s first obligation. In the 1990s, New York City’s voters tossed out Democrats ideologically unable to provide security. Voters know that crime and terror are real. And that unopposed, violent crime and terror always return. Judge Scheindlin and President Obama have answered the liberal siren song of a world without violence. Come 2016, the last thing voters may be looking for is a Democrat, no matter who she is.

Unless of course, the “she” in question has been battle-tested!

“Sleep deprivation”; yeah…

Just the person America wants taking that 0300 phone call!

In a related item, as Conn Carroll reports in the Morning Examiner, while a certain affinity for criminals and terrorists of every stripe has long been a Progressive pattern, lying remains their forte:

Obama taps admitted perjurer to lead ‘expert’ domestic spying review

Whenever conservatives hear any politician, but especially the most liberal president in a generation, say they are going to solve an issue by appointing a panel of experts, they laugh. Nothing better demonstrates the folly of progressive governance than the blind faith liberals have in “outside experts” to solve America’s problems.

That is why it is so fitting that, after President Obama promised to form “a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies” in the wake of hacker Edward Snowden’s NSA domestic spying leaks, Obama named Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to head the expert panel Monday.

The Least Credible Expert Available

Not only is Clapper in no way “outside” of the Obama administration or Washington’s intelligence community (before joining the Obama administration in 2010, he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency as far back as 1992), he has also recently admitted that he intentionally gave false and “clearly erroneous” testimony to Congress.

On March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, asked Clapper, “So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper responded definitively, “No, sir.”

When Snowden’s leaks later exposed Clapper’s testimony to be false, Clapper first told NBC News, “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner.” Clapper also later wrote a letter to the committee admitting that his testimony that day was “clearly erroneous.”

Just Another Lawless Day at the White House 

It takes a certain amount of confidence, or arrogance, to announce that you are appointing a panel of “outside experts” to hold your administration accountable on domestic spying, and then turn right around and appoint an admitted liar from your administration’s own ranks to head that panel. But Congress has shown no willingness to stand up to any of Obama’s abuses of executive power recently.

Obama unilaterally rewrites immigration law to give amnesty to select illegal immigrants? Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Senate Democrats reward him with a full amnesty bill. Obama unilaterally scraps the employer mandate? Republican leadership has no stomach to fight Obama through the CR on anything related to Obamacare. Attorney General Eric Holder announces he will unilaterally rewrite the nation’s drug laws? Bipartisan applause.

Either conservatives, and the rest of Congress, take the Constitution and the Separation of Powers principle at its heart seriously or they don’t. Over the past year, Congress has proven itself all but irrelevant. Which makes Obama decision to tap Clapper Monday not all that surprising after all.

Speaking of a once-powerful and esteemed elite willfully aiding in its own decline, courtesy of Balls Cotton, Army Times offers an opinion we only wish was shared by those with the power to affect change:

Lt. col. urges firing of unaccountable generals