It’s Wednesday, August 1st, 2018…but before we begin, here’s a snippet from Jim Geraghty’s Wednesday Morning Jolt:

Mercy, Mercy Me *

* a trait Eric never showed The Obamao’s political opposition!

Former attorney general and potential 2020 presidential candidate Eric Holder weighed in on the issue of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents at the border again, an image of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the quote, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

It’s a powerful statement from the former president, as long as you avert your eyes from the 120,000 Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during the Second World War…

…or the thousands of Jewish refugees turned away and forced to return to Europe.

It’s time for government to be kind, says the attorney general whose Department of Justice oversaw the Fast and Furious scandal, subpoenaed the phone records of reporters, named reporters co-conspirators in leak cases, and approved a drone strike on a U.S. citizen. (Anwar al-Awlaki had it coming, but using military force to execute an American citizen without a trial is a pretty dangerous precedent to set.)

We offer this tweet from Jack Posobiec in response to Holder’s self-serving, hypocritical revisionist history:

Oh,…and chalk up yet another cop sacrificed on the altar of Obama-inspired Liberal advocacy for illegal immigrants:

The Man Accused of Killing a Florida Police Officer is an Illegal Alien

If this sorry tale sounds familiar, it should:

‘I will break out soon and I will kill more’: Illegal immigrant who killed two cops LAUGHS in court as he promises to do it again

Though, in the interest of fairness, we must note the inexplicable idiocy integral to the protection of immigrants who’ve committed crimes isn’t a problem peculiar to America, as this forward from George Lawlor and FOX News proves:

Afghan migrant whose deportation was thwarted by ‘hero’ Swedish student was actually sentenced for assault

“And, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I have no clue whatsoever what I’m talking about!”

Nowhere have we read the benighted Ms. Errson has expressed either regret for her actions or concern for the victim of the unnamed Afghan’s assault.  Then again, why should she be different than any other Progressive social justice warrior whose unthinking actions produced adverse consequences they’ll never have to suffer?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Since we’re on the subject of the blind leading the dumb, courtesy of Speed Mach and NRO, we kick off the month of August with the source our Quote of the Day at the top of the page, a commentary in which Charles W. Cooke correctly identifies…

“When, last Thursday, she was asked an elementary question about spending, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez struck her best Cobra Kai pose. “I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week,” she exclaimed, contorting her face into Jack Nicholson’s and attempting to shoot webs from her fingers. “I can’t believe I can say that,” she added. “It’s really weird!”

Alas, nothing from this brush with greatness appears to have worn off on her. Mere seconds elapsed between the boast and the disaster that followed. Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. If anything, she was worse this time than she had been during her appearance on Firing Line a few days earlier, on which newly revamped show she demonstrated her obliviousness to the fact that the United States economy exploded during the 1990s, to the manner in which unemployment numbers are calculated, and to even the most obvious facets of the Israel–Palestine question about which she has assured her supporters she is so passionate.

“It’s really weird!”

It is, yes. Especially given that, before her two interviews aired, Ocasio-Cortez had taken to exhibiting that jealous penchant for credentialism that so stains the world’s wannabe socialists, and to boasting about her intellectual prowess. (Gee,…wonder from who she could have learned…

…that?!?) At the beginning of July, she tweeted with self-satisfaction — and a noticeably premature use of the word “other” — that she was “Wondering how many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?” Two days later, she upgraded that claim: “If you think the GOP is terrified of my politics now,” she threatened on Twitter, “just wait until they find out about public libraries.” Just wait, indeed! From a BA from BU to the embodiment of all human knowledge in just 48 hours! At this rate it can’t be long before she gives it all up and becomes an honorary Krassenstein Brother: “We are the way, the truth, and the light. Retweet if you love Love and hate Trump!”

Ocasio-Cortez will almost certainly fail to improve when her honeymoon eventually concludes, for she is suffering from that curious form of auto-immune disorder that afflicts so many insurgent politicians. Mocked for her performance on Firing Line, she swiftly insisted that she was being criticized only because she threatened the powers that be. As a person seeking “substantive change,” she insisted, she was bound to be told “you’re crazy” or “you don’t know anything.”

Perhaps she was. But do you know who else is told they’re crazy and don’t know anything? Crazy people who don’t know anything.

In form, if not in substance, Ocasio-Cortez’s much-favored “you’re scared!” approach tracks closely with the peculiar insistence of the modern Republican primary voter that if an outlandish candidate is widely reviled, that must mean he’s onto something good. (Which doesn’t describe us!) For all the hype surrounding her, she seems to lack even a modest helping of guile — and, worse, to exhibit no signs whatsoever of embarrassment or self-awareness. There is only one thing more awkward than the guy who hasn’t read the book his book report is supposed to be dissecting, and that is the guy who hasn’t read it and who doesn’t know he’s embarrassing himself by pretending that he has. That’s Ocasio-Cortez…”

In…if you’ll forgive the phrase…SPADES!!!

From where we sit, like the Jelly-of-the-Month Club, Ocasio-Cortez is…

And the GOP should ride her until the earlier to occur of (a) she stops, or (b) November 6, 2108.

Next up, again courtesy of the WSJ, we’re with Sean Bigley as he suggests…

Trump Is Right About Clearances

Preferential treatment for former officials doesn’t improve national security. It creates a caste system.

“…It’s hard to argue with courtesy, but security clearance is meant to be a tool for temporarily serving the American people, not a portable fringe benefit for intelligence officers. Indefinite security-clearance retention creates a castelike system: The political elite are buoyed by the legitimacy and knowledge conferred upon them by continued access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. How does this serve the public? More important, at what point does such an arrangement cease to look like a fiduciary relationship and begin to look more like a shadow government?

Yes, the White House targeting some of its most vocal critics for security clearance review looks bad. But the president has legitimate points about the monetization of classified knowledge and the extent to which the practice is no longer consistent with the interests of national security.

The men singled out by Mr. Trump are not the intelligence officials of yesteryear: studiously apolitical patriots who shunned the spotlight and retired to pursue other endeavors. John Brennan, Michael Hayden and James Clapper have all obtained roles as paid television pundits. James Comey is aggressively hawking his “tell-all” book, although he claims to have relinquished his clearance upon departing government.

Mr. Brennan, accused by Republicans of leaking information designed to harm then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election, is an unabashedly political actor and a prime example of this disturbing digression from principle. The former CIA director regularly issues hyperpartisan tweets, including one recently accusing the president of “treason.” The fact that President Obama trusted Mr. Brennan does not require President Trump to do the same. This is why the U.S. regularly holds elections…”

And as the MSM/self-acclaimed Smartest Man in the World once so eloquently observed, elections have consequences!

Moving on, as forwarded from American Greatness by Balls Cotton, Victor Davis Hanson poses this rather rhetorical question:

Just How Far Will the Left Go?

“…There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.

There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. (Not that we watch any of them!) Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump.

…Is the anger, then, that we are in a depression, war, or plague?

Actually, no. The economy is growing at rates that we have not seen in over a decade. Unemployment, especially minority joblessness, is at a historic low. Even the stock market is at record highs. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil, natural gas, and coal. Consumer and business confidence is at a near all-time high.

NATO is re-calibrating its military contributions to increase defense spending. North Korea has stopped talking about nuking our West Coast. The Iranian theocracy is panicking after the end of the Iran Deal. There have not been any incidents this year of Iranian hazing of U.S. ships. China is scrambling to find ways to readjust its lopsided trade surpluses induced by commercial cheating and dumping. Never has a Republican president appointed and had confirmed more conservative and stellar judges. The National Security team of Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, and Haley is perhaps the most skilled since World War II.

Why then the hate, the furor, the sheer mania?

The Left lost what it thought was a sure-thing election. There is now no assured 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum that would complete what the Obamas had called the final “fundamental transformation” of the United States. It cannot accept that it blew certain victory. A huge fundraising advantage, a toady media, massive defections of Republican establishment intellectuals and pundits, the lack of prior military or political experience of candidate Donald Trump, and a popular vote plurality all proved for naught. The unimaginable then became all too real.

And fantasy was substituted for reality as smears, slurs, and denials ensued. Think of the 2000 election cubed.

Trump is not a George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney. He knows no etiquette. He is no gentleman. He is a bruiser, brawler, exaggerator, and performer (As well as, in an actual fight, unquestionably a pussy!). What created President Trump was not just “The Apprentice” or the Manhattan real estate market (such a résumé only honed his (faux) pugilist skills).

Rather, half the country was tired of Republicans grimacing as they were portrayed as throwing grandmothers off cliffs. They were tired of seeing political commercials of bodies of the murdered dragged behind trucks, or charges that Republicans cruelly put their pets on their car roof. They were tired of the anti-Semitic and racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a presidential candidate’s personal pastor, being off limits, but not the supposed senility of John McCain who in 2008 was pilloried as a doddering multi-millionaire who forgot how many houses he had owned. In 2012, it was Mitt Romney’s wife whose sins were wearing equestrian clothes.

Given the growing furor over half the country as demonized clingers, deplorables, and crazies, if Trump did not exist, a don’t-tread-on-me street fighter would have had to be invented. Progressives have gone [so] ballistic that any opponent would reply to them in kind. Think of “Caddyshack,” when uncouth Rodney Dangerfield burst into smug Ted Knight’s country club.

…The Left did not just lose the 2016 election, it lost the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. And it lost them all to a rash, uncouth Queens-accented Manhattan billionaire reality TV star, who systematically planned to dismantle eight years of Obama Administration executive-orders. And unlike almost all prior politicians Trump when in office kept his promises and systematically went about to halt the supposed progressive future. Think of a liberal nightmare something akin to Sarah Palin as president in 2012.

The Obama apparat and the proverbial deep state never imagined Trump could win and thus to ensure that he would not just be defeated but humiliated, vied to use the power of government to destroy the Trump candidacy.

So, for now, they rant, they rave, and they stew, accepting that they cannot do what might save them and therefore they only do more of what is destroying them. Out of that lose-lose dilemma was birthed Trump hatred. Without a persuasive argument, progressives came up with the mantra that Trump is a traitor, and that all they needed to do was to explain to supposedly dense voters that their current economic renaissance was actually jackbooted National Socialism.

How far will the Left go? I fear that we have seen nothing yet.“

Again, in response we’re reminded of Hitler’s infamous March 1945 ‘scorched earth’ directive to Albert Speer, declaring Germany be made one vast wasteland: “We will not capitulate – no, never!  We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us – a world in flames“.

Cue contemporary Progressivism!

Then there’s this report from NRO‘s Jack Crowe, who details another…

STUDY: ‘Medicare For All’ Would Cost $32.6 Trillion Over Ten Years

“The single-payer health care system advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.) under the tagline “Medicare for all” would cost the federal government $32.6 trillion over the next decade, according to study released Monday by George Mason’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian-leaning policy center.

Extending Medicare benefits to the entire population would require a massive tax increase as the government assumes the entirety of the health care costs currently born by individuals, according to the study, which aligned precisely with a similar analysis performed by the Urban Institute.

The single-payer plan would reduce prescription and administration costs by streamlining operations (“Streamlining operations”…in a government bureaucracy…seriously?!?), but those savings would be far outpaced by the cost of covering some 30 million uninsured Americans and eliminating copays and deductibles for all consumers.

In fact, the government could double all corporate and individual income taxes and it would still lack requisite revenue to fund the program, the study found.

…Sanders, who has long advocated a universal health care system wherein consumers pay no deductibles or copays, impugned the study’s credibility, citing the funding the Mercatus Center receives from the Koch Brothers…”

And if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast lines.  Not to mention what inquiring minds want to know: is the Urban Institute also funded by the Koch brothers?!?

Then there’s this item from the WSJ detailing yet another example of craven Progressive capitulation to The Mob…and The Left eating its own:

A University of Georgia professor issued an apology to those he had “offended” when he congratulated an old friend on becoming the state’s Republican candidate for governor. Charles Davis, dean of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at UGA, sent the offending tweet shortly after Brian Kemp won the GOP primary Tuesday night, noting that he had been friends with Kemp since childhood and considers him a “nice guy.”…

Liberals quickly denounced him for having something nice to say about a Republican, declaring that Kemp is a “racist” who “spews bigoted and dangerous rhetoric,” and insinuating that Davis must therefore be no different. “You’re a straight white man. Of course he was nice and kind to you. Racists are generally nice to their own kind,” one user replied. “Why don’t you say what you really mean. Politics be damned. You’d never vote for a black woman and would much rather vote for the white racist.”…

Davis denied facing any backlash from colleagues or administrators to apologize for the tweet…

Three days after his initial tweet, though, Davis posted an apology to those who had been “offended” by it, assuring his antagonists that he had “learned” from their feedback and “will endeavor to be more thoughtful” in the future.

First, Charles Davis is a coward.  Second, whatever Davis “learned”, it’s wrong!  Third, why on earth do people continue to cast personal pearls before the swine of social media?!?

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with this pointed yet accurate depiction of current events forwarded by Shannon Wood, the pride of The Lone Star State:

Magoo