It’s Monday, July 18th, 2016…but before we begin, two eerie entries which presaged recent events.  Writing for the March 21st edition of AEIdeas, Michael Rubin wondered “Could there be a coup in Turkey?”:

“…The situation in Turkey is bad and getting worse. It’s not just the deterioration in security amidst a wave of terrorism. Public debt might be stable, but private debt is out-of-control, the tourism sector is in free-fall, and the decline in the currency has impacted every citizen’s buying power. There is a broad sense, election results notwithstanding, that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is out-of-control. He is imprisoning opponents, seizing newspapers left and right, and building palaces at the rate of a mad sultan or aspiring caliph. In recent weeks, he has once again threatened to dissolve the constitutional court. Corruption is rife. . . .

Erdoğan long ago sought to kneecap the Turkish military. For the first decade of his rule, both the US government and European Union cheered him on. But that was before even Erdoğan’s most ardent foreign apologists recognized the depth of his descent into madness and autocracy. So if the Turkish military moves to oust Erdoğan and place his inner circle behind bars, could they get away with it?“

Thus far, as the Turkish equivalent of The Dear Misleader uses the coup as an excuse to further consolidate his already-unlawful powers and lead Turkey further down the path pioneered by the Iran mullahs, the answer is an emphatic “no”.

Meanwhile, far closer to home, we cut and pasted this from our last edition:

Three People Arrested in Louisiana in Alleged Plot to Kill Police

A manhunt was under way for a fourth suspect, police officials say

The plotters ranged in age from 23 to…12…TWELVE!!!  THIS is the kid who, had Obama a son, would be the spittin’ image of his father.

And how does The Great Divider, whose every word and action heretofore have been intended to break the country down into warring tribes, react to the latest fruit born by the seeds he’s sown?

“We don’t know the motive of the shooter”; yeah,…riiigghht!  But we sure as shootin’ know YOUR’S Barack!

Along with the Baton Rouge shooter’s, in his own twisted words:

Talk about closing the barn door after you let the horse out!

As for the two presumptive candidates to replace this most Islamofascist of Manchurian candidates:

No, Hillary: the only people turning their backs on anything are you and your former boss; and it’s the rule of law in America, both through your words and actions.  And THAT, Donald, is what we need, not law and order.  Rule by an impartial application of the law and order will naturally follow as surely as night does day; whether in the realm of violent crime, immigration or government email security.

But as race relations seem the appropriate subject for discussion on the domestic front, we offer a few thoughts inspired by Peggy Noonan’s latest WSJ column.

First and foremost, any way you slice it, they’re worse than when Obama took office, and it’s our position said deterioration is the direct result of deliberate action and policy on his part.

Second, consider Peggy Noonan’s take on the perceived experience of South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who, we trust all of our readers will know, is Black:

“…He was not looking to grind a political ax. He wanted to explain that what you hear about being treated differently because you’re a black man is true. He has felt the “humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.” During one of his six years on Capitol Hill he was stopped by law-enforcement officers seven times. “Was I speeding sometimes? Sure. But the vast majority of the time, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood…I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell—no matter their profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life.”

Last year a policeman stopped him on his way into a congressional office building, wearing his Senate pin on the lapel of his suit. “The officer looked at me with a little attitude and said, ‘The pin I know, you I don’t. Show me your ID.’ ” Was the assumption he was “impersonating a member of Congress, or what?”

That night he got a call from the officer’s supervisor, apologizing. Sen. Scott said it was the third such call he’d received since he entered the Senate in 2013…”

Were we a defense attorney, we’d be objecting…

…”Counsel is offering facts not in evidence!”…precisely because that’s exactly what Noonan and Scott unfortunately are doing.

In no particular order, consider the following questions any good attorney would raise in a court of law; not a court of feelings or perceptions, but law:

(1). Does anyone think Yours Truly, attempting to pass through heightened Senate security with only a lapel pin, would be waved through without any additional inspection?  To Senator Scott’s knowledge, have any newly-elected White Senators or staffers been subject to similar requests for additional identification?

(2). If the reason Senator Scott was stopped by law enforcement was that “sometimes” he was speeding, yet the “vast majority” were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood”, what percentage of seven is “sometimes” versus what constitutes the “vast majority”?  What neighborhood was the “wrong neighborhood” and why?  How did Senator Scott determine the intent of the officers involved? Not to mention how many White drivers were pulled over in similar circumstances, and did the good Senator experience such racially disparate treatment back in South Carolina?

(3). Does the good Senator know any Caucasian-Americans subjected to the similar interdiction by law enforcement?  (Hint: we do…and it would be us!) 

Here’s the juice: anyone’s perception is their reality.  But as we’ve learned through the hypocritical history of the Dimocratic Party, that doesn’t make their reality right!

And as G. Trevor noted last Friday, the problem isn’t gun violence anymore than it is truck violence or vest violence.  After all, there’s no such thing as an “assault” rifle, anymore than there is an “assault” truck or an “assault” vest.

Whether in Dallas, Nice, Paris or Baton Rouge…San Bernadino, Brussels, Munich or Entebbe…this is human beings willfully and wantonly killing other human beings…with whatever means on which they can lay their blood-soaked hands.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, looking forward to November 2016…and ignoring all The Donald’s demonstrable foibles…writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg explains why…

Why Both Clintons Are Such Unapologetic Liars

When you’re guided by nothing but a lust for power, why bother with the truth?

“…The amazing thing about Hillary and Bill Clinton is that they are united by no central idea, no governing philosophy that doesn’t — upon close inspection — boil down to the idea that they should be in charge.

Yes, I know. That’s not what they would say. They would argue that with the right experts in charge, the government can do wonderful things to help people. But what the government should do is constantly changing, according to both of them. Bill once declared, “The Era of Big Government is over.” He didn’t mean it. He certainly didn’t want it to be true. He just said it because that’s what he does: He says what he needs to say. I don’t approvingly quote Jesse Jackson all that often (though I do find myself saying, “Keep hope alive,” a lot these days), but I think he had it right when he said Bill had no core beliefs, he was all appetite.

Hillary, in her own way, strikes me as even worse in this regard. Can you name a single substantial policy that she hasn’t flipped on — or wouldn’t change — if it were in her political self-interest? Gay marriage? Free trade? Illegal immigration?

Strip away all of the political posturing and positioning, and their “philosophy” that government run by experts can do wonderful things should really be translated as “government run by us.”

Clinton’s defenders argue that her changing policy approaches are just signs of her “pragmatism.” And don’t worry, I won’t rant about pragmatism again, either. But liberal pragmatism begins and ends from a single first principle: Liberals must be in power to decide what is “pragmatic.” And when conservatives are in charge, the only form of acceptable pragmatism is . . . compromising with liberals.

That is why both Clintons are such unapologetic liars. Pragmatism bills itself as being beyond ideology and “labels.” Well, if you don’t feel bound to any objective ideological or even ontological criteria — labels, after all, are the words we use to describe reality — why not lie? Why not wax philosophic about the meaning of “is”? If attaining and wielding power is your only benchmark, the ethical imperative of telling the truth is no imperative at all. It’s just another false ideological construct.

It’s kind of interesting when you think about it. Since the Clintons respect only power, the only power they respect is that of the law. Which is why the only times they can be counted upon to tell the truth is when the law absolutely requires it — or may require it down the road. Of course, as lawyers, they are artists at telling only the minimum amount of the truth absolutely required of them. The flipside is that because they are lawyers, when they resort to legalistic language, it’s a tell that they’re lying.

For instance, when Hillary Clinton went on the Today Show in 1998 to address the growing Lewinsky scandal, she blamed it all on a vast right-wing conspiracy. When asked what it would mean if the allegations were true, she said:

Well, I think that — if all that were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense. That is not going to be proven true.

Note: She didn’t say “if it were true.” She said, “if it were proven true” — twice. She had every intention of concealing the truth. It just turned out that this time her cover-up skills weren’t up to the task. This is the same tactic we see in the e-mail scandal. “There is no classified information.” We’re constantly told, “There is no smoking gun!” Which is just another way of saying, “You can’t prove it!” Not, “I didn’t do it.” Again: The server is the smoking gun.

This is the meaning most people already associate with “Clintonian,” and I’m fairly confident that meaning will last a long time. But I don’t think it goes far enough. So what would be the definition of the verb form — “to Clinton” — be? I’m thinking something like “to say whatever the moment requires, with an eye to being able to defend the statement under oath.” As in, “I clintoned the Hell out of that deposition.” Or “they asked her if she knowingly violated the law, but she clintoned her way out of it.”

But I’m open to other suggestions.“

Oh,…and the apple on the right…

…didn’t fall far from the family tree!

Next up, in an amazing capitulation to the forces of myth and falsehood, a…

Memphis newspaper apologizes for accurate, yet ‘racist’ headline

“A newspaper in Memphis quickly apologize after protestors complained about its choice of headline in the wake of the deadly police shooting in Dallas.

“Gunman targeted whites,” read the lead story headline in the Commercial Appeal, a member of the USA Today network. The headline was accurate, as Dallas gunman Micah Xavier Johnson explicitly talked about wanted to kill white police officers before he was eliminated via robot bomb. That didn’t stop protestors from gathering outside the paper’s office in downtown Memphis on Wednesday to express their displeasure, some holding signs that read “Black Lives Matter.”

The paper’s president, George Cogswell, said the headline, “although not inaccurate, was very insensitive to the movement and we recognized that quickly.”

One of the protest leaders, Pastor Earle Fisher of the Memphis Grassroots Organization Coalition, said following a meeting with Commercial Appeal employees that the situation highlighted “the need for cultural sensitivity training.”

No, it highlighted the need for Progressives to concede command of the narrative to the forces of fable…and lawlessness.

In a related item, Mike Adams notes the real aim of Black Lives Matter, with the active support of this President, appears to be…

Silencing Whitey

“…As a free speech advocate, I can say without equivocation that I have never witnessed a more consistently censorious group than Black Lives Matter. Disrupting speech is not just a sideshow for them. It is the principal political tactic of the notorious uncivil wrongs group. It is their primary method of drawing attention to their cause because they lack the intellectual fortitude to persuade people to listen based on the content of their arguments.

It is difficult to avoid noticing the common thread when Black Lives Matter charges podiums, assaults speakers, and rips microphones out of speaker’s hands. That common thread is not the subject matter of the speeches. It is the skin color of the speakers. The group does not censor its targets because of their political views, or their religion. Nor is their targeting based on the speakers’ sexual orientation. They select people on the basis of their race in order to accost them for their true crime, which is simply talking while white.

Of course, to say that Black Lives Matter is useless is an undeserved compliment. They are far worse than useless. By running the police out of black neighborhoods, they are ensuring that black on black violence increases. Predictably, as the slaughter of black males increases, the problem of black fatherlessness increases. Consequently, every single negative social indicator skyrockets along with it. They are therefore destroying far more than their own credibility with their tactics. They are destroying their own communities and helping to kill their own neighbors.

Watching this whole sad, pathetic episode in progressive black history makes it abundantly clear that the principal problem in their community is not white racism. It is black culture. That is why it is imperative that we keep black racists from hijacking the national conversation and thereby keeping our attention focused on imaginary problems, rather than real ones…”

Since we’re on the subject of traitors worthy of the legacy of Benedict Arnold, writing at the WSJ, Devin Nunes details why…

This Traitor Belongs in Jail, Not Free in Cuba

Montes spied on her own country for Castro, doing much damage, yet Obama may soon liberate her.

“The Obama administration is reportedly in secret negotiations with Cuba that would result in the release from federal prison of one of the most damaging American spies in U.S. history. Such an extraordinary gesture would be preposterous for many reasons.

…Ms. Montes’ release would send a dangerous message that convicted spies may be able to secure a deal through the foreign government that employed them. Potential traitors to this country should know that betraying America will bring harsh penalties, without exception or the potential for a get-out-of-jail-free card…”

All of which would only be in keeping with the policies promulgated by this most UN-American of Administrations!

Speaking of the forces antithetically opposed to the Founders’ concepts of Truth, Justice and the American Way, our old buddy and classmate Jim Gould offers this list of the victims of what B. Hussein, Hillary, and Leftists the world over continue to inaccurately term The Religion of Peace:

List of Islamic Terror: 2016

This is part of the list of Islamic terror attacks maintained by TheReligionofPeace.com.  During this time period, there were 1,272 Islamic attacks in 50 countries, in which 11,772 people were killed and 14,303 injured.

Check out the list; it is far too extensive to feature in full.

Finally, inappropriately enough, on The Lighter Side, we present…

Magoo