It’s Wednesday, May 27th, 2015…but before we begin, a brief note on blogging.  On occasion, TLJ will question the efficacy of our missives; and frankly, we cannot quantify the aftereffects of our offerings.  What can categorically state is the number of people we now count as friends who otherwise would have remained strangers.

So to Stilton Jarlsberg, unquestionably the most wickedly-funny mind we’ve ever not actually met, Carl Polizzi, who’s thoughts regarding the complicity between the two political parties seems more and more believable with every Boehner/McConnell misstep, Bill Meisen, perhaps our most frequent contributor and our good buddy and fellow Boat School alum Tom Bakke, who suggested we name this blog The Gouge, to name only a few, this Bud’s…

…for you!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of George Lawlor and NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson observes The Obamao’s literally innumerable…

Disasters at Home and Abroad

From ISIS at Ramadi to riots at home, nothing is going right.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

“…What is unique about American foreign policy today is not just that it is rudderless, but how quickly and completely the 70-year postwar order seems to have disintegrated — and how little interest the American people take in the collapse, thanks to the administration’s apparent redeeming message, which translates, “It’s their misfortune and none of our own.”

…Then there is the strange populism of Hillary Clinton. It is hard to know why she rails about growing inequality and the lack of fairness in American life. After all, Barack Obama has been president for over six years, an administration in which she served for four. Did she ever visit the Oval Office to decry her own administration’s failure to use its House and Senate majorities in 2009–2011 to help the poor?

Is she now running against Obama’s economic policies, which she never publicly objected to before? And how can an unjust country be so fair to Bill and Hillary, who just made $30 million in the last 16 months, or about, on average, $62,500 per day — their speaking fees predicated on the likelihood that she would soon be a candidate for president and, as secretary of state emerita, had already enhanced the pay-to-play modus operandi of the Clinton Foundation?

…The center of this culture is not holding. Even a few Democrats are worried that Hillary Clinton’s mendacities are unsustainable. More Americans privately confess that American foreign policy is dangerously adrift. They would agree that the U.S. no longer has a southern border, and will have to spend decades and billions of dollars coping with millions of new illegal aliens. Some Americans are starting to fear that the reckless borrowing under Obama will wreck the country if not stopped. Racial tensions, all concede, are reaching dangerous levels, and Americans do not know what is scarier: inner-city relations between blacks and the police, the increasing anger of the black underclass at establishment America — or the even greater backlash at out-of-control violent black crime and the constant scapegoating and dog whistles of racism.

Whatever liberalism is, it is not working. Our country’s policies overseas are falling apart, while at home our society stagnates and turns tribal — with a growing and embittered underclass, a shrinking and angry middle class, and a plutocratic and apartheid elite who, as absolution for their privilege, are desperate to praise in the abstract what they so studiously avoid in the concrete.“

Case in point: a Dear Misleader who continues to peddle, in the face of reams of irrefutable evidence to the contrary…

The Rational Ayatollah Hypothesis

If President Obama can forgive us our trespasses, he can forgive the Ayatollah Khamenei’s, too.

“…Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a man with an undergraduate’s enthusiasm for moral equivalency (Islamic State now, the Crusades and Inquisition then) would have sophomoric ideas about the nature and history of anti-Semitism. So let’s recall some basic facts.

Iran has no border, and no territorial dispute, with Israel. The two countries have a common enemy in Islamic State and other radical Sunni groups. Historically and religiously, Jews have always felt a special debt to Persia. Tehran and Jerusalem were de facto allies until 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and 100,000 Jews still lived in Iran. Today, no more than 10,000 Jews are left.

So on the basis of what self-interest does Iran arm and subsidize Hamas, probably devoting more than $1 billion of (scarce) dollars to the effort? What’s the economic rationale for hosting conferences of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, thereby gratuitously damaging ties to otherwise eager economic partners such as Germany and France? What was the political logic to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s calls to wipe Israel off the map, which made it so much easier for the U.S. and Europe to impose sanctions? How does the regime shore up its domestic legitimacy by preaching a state ideology that makes the country a global pariah?

Maybe all this behavior serves Tehran’s instrumental purposes by putting the regime at the vanguard of a united Shiite-Sunni “resistance” to Western imperialism and Zionism. If so, it hasn’t worked out too well, as the rise of Islamic State shows. The likelier explanation is that the regime believes what it says, practices what it preaches, and is willing to pay a steep price for doing so…”

That, along with the entire underpinnings of the Shia branch of Islam, i.e., the veneration of the  “12th Imam”, the successor to Muhammad (may his image never be depicted in any cartoon!), which dictates the belief his 2nd coming not only will bring paradise on earth, but that Shiites can usher in his return through the destruction of Israel…an inconvenient little factoid neither Barry nor his minions in the MSM see fit to mention.

As CBN correctly notes: 

“In other words, Iran doesn’t fear retaliation if they attack Israel or the United States because a final global struggle against an evil enemy will present them with the privileges of martyrdom as taught in Islam…Death is not a deterrent.“

Anyone still supporting The Obamao’s imitation of Chamberlain at Munich would do well to read up on the Mad Mullahs true convictions.

Speaking of those who should have already been convicted, courtesy of the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery reports on a…

Sad states of affairs

“Does Hillary Clinton wish she’d stayed in the Senate, and politely said ‘no’ to President Obama when he offered his former antagonist from the primary season the exalted position of nation’s top diplomat? At the time, it seemed a great chance to burnish her resume and to be above politics. And when she stepped down at the end of Obama’s first term, her favorability ratings were in the low 60s.

That was then. This is now. And Clinton’s ratings are in the 40s and falling, largely due to what she did and what happened to her and to the world since she left the Senate. All of it was complicated and none of it good.

Were Hillary still in the Senate, there would have been no government server to scuttle, no private server to set up and then scrub free of email, no Sidney Blumenthal sending emails on Libya and no pending hearings upcoming in Congress. And there would be no Barack Obama being put off by these problems, both because of the server, which he said was verboten, and by the return of El Sid. Were she still in the Senate, the Clinton Foundation might still have smelled, but the stench coming off it would have been nowhere as fragrant, because the stakes would have been nowhere as large…”

In the words of the immortal Jimmy Malone, were she a city (for which the size of her hindquarters almost qualifies her!)…

Since we’re on the subject of those who reek like whorehouse at low tie, also from the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney details…

The Great 2014 Cashout: Landrieu lands at oil-rich lobbying firm

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered; except in the case of porculent ex-members of Congress, who continue to feed of the American taxpayer for the rest of their bloated lives.

Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu was a centrist Democratic senator, and so of course she is now working at a lobbying firm. She was also very friendly to the oil industry, and so it’s unsurprising she cashed out to Van Ness Feldman, a firm heavy in the oil and gas industry.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

Landrieu said she will join Van Ness Feldman as a senior policy advisor, working closely with another recent hire, former Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the former top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Like Dicks, Landrieu was an appropriator. Landrieu was also chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Van Ness Feldman’s client list includes energy companies American Electric Power, Warren Buffett’s Pacificorp, Danaher, the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. and utility Puget Equico, among others. Also Van Ness clients: Amazon and Expedia.

Through the revolving door, Landrieu follows her classmates Saxby Chambliss (DLA Piper), Mark Pryor (Venable), Carl Levin (Hongman) and Mark Begich (Brownstein Hyatt). Did I miss anyone?

When it comes to almost every single ex-member of Congress, we’re with Staff Sergeant Barnes in his incomparably eloquent observation:

Next up, in what promises to be a must-read series of columns courtesy of Townhall.com, Dennis Prager explains the…

Differences Between Left and Right: Part I

“…Perhaps the most obvious one is that conservatives blame those who engage in violent criminal activity for their behavior more than liberals do. Liberals argue that poverty, despair, and hopelessness cause poor people, especially poor blacks — in which case racism is added to the list — to riot and commit violent crimes.

…In the conservative view, people who do evil are to be blamed because they made bad choices — and they did so because they either have little self-control or a dysfunctional conscience. In either case, they are to blame. That’s why the vast majority of equally poor people — black or white — do not riot or commit violent crimes.

Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world. Yet, it turns out that most terrorists come from middle class homes. All the 9/11 terrorists came from middle- and upper-class homes. And of course Osama bin Laden was a billionaire.

Material poverty doesn’t cause murder, rape or terror. Moral poverty does. That’s one of the great divides between left and right. And it largely emanates from their differing views about whether human nature is innately good.“

In the words of the the great Ronaldus Maximus:

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to a brief breath of sanity, as well as a timely warning, from Bill Whittle:

Finally, on the Lighter Side…

Magoo