It’s Wednesday, August 8th, 2018…but before we begin, writing at PJ Media, Matt Margolis reminds us of…

Six Times the Obama Administration Should Have Appointed Special Counsel

“What is a special counsel, and why do we have them? According to Wikipedia, “a special prosecutor (or special counsel or independent counsel or independent prosecutor) is a lawyer appointed to investigate, and potentially prosecute, a particular case of suspected wrongdoing for which a conflict of interest exists for the usual prosecuting authority” — i.e., the perceived conflict of interest of Jeff Sessions to investigate alleged collusion of the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

Anyway, while liberals are holding out hope for Robert Mueller to find evidence of collusion and force Trump to resign or be impeached, it occurs to me that despite the rampant corruption and scandals-a-plenty of the Obama years that there was never a single special counsel appointed. Not one. Obama supporters point to this as evidence that his administration was above board, but in reality, it was just proof of just how corrupt things were. By limiting investigations to their own sham investigations that saw no one held accountable, or to congressional Republicans whose investigations they could simply stonewall and accuse of being partisan, the Obama administration felt they could keep up the ruse that they were scandal-free. Here are six times the Obama administration should have appointed a special counsel to investigate a scandal but didn’t.

6. The Walpin firing scandal

It’s a pretty big deal when the president of the United States breaks the law in order to protect his friend and donor who was being investigated for misusing federal grant money…but Barack Obama did just that for his friend, former NBA star and mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson. Johnson had taken nearly a million dollars in AmeriCorps grant money to his own nonprofit organization to pay volunteers for political activity. While investigating this, Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS),  discovered a cover-up of sexual abuse allegations made by three students against Johnson who were offered some of this grant money as hush money. Walpin recommended criminal charges against Johnson and was quickly told to resign. Walpin refused, and Obama fired him. The firing itself violated a law that Obama co-sponsored as a U.S. senator. Congressional Republicans launched their own investigation, and the Obama White House responded with a smear campaign against Walpin and withheld documents from Congress…”

We must confess, we needed the reminder on #6, as egregious an example of executive excess as Watergate.  But we’re certain you will readily recognize the remaining five: Benghazi, the IRS (the WaPo‘s Anne Applebaum’s ignorance below, deliberate or otherwise, notwithstanding!), Uranium One, Fast & Furious and Hillary’s highly illegal private email server…a debacle in which The Dear Misleader himself was a willing participant.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the Wednesday edition with a question: how can these delicate little snowflakes be expected to comprehend that which they’ve never been taught… 

…and which their leaders, by their own words…

…either manifestly misunderstand or maliciously misrepresent?!?  Submitted for your perusal, further evidence clearly confirming the dumbing down of America’s system of public education…

…was Dimocratic…

…and deliberate!

Next up, courtesy of American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson highlights…

The Elites’ War on the Deplorables

“Recently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

Politico had not employed such a crass journalist since before it fired Julia Ioffe for tweeting, “Either Trump is f—ing his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?” (Ioffe was then snatched up by the Atlantic, which has an unpredictable policy either of excusing or not excusing the controversial expressions of its newly hired journalists.)

I suppose Caputo meant that Trump voters intrinsically lacked either the money to fix their teeth or the knowledge of the hygiene required to take care of them or the aesthetic sensitivity of how awful their mouths looked. Or Caputo was simply rehashing the stereotypes that he had seen on reality TV shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “The Deadliest Catch.”

Or none of the above: the journalist grandee was just stupid.

That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people.” Or rather, in the manner of a cowardly age of social media, he tweeted that slur when safely at a distance.

What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse? And if Caputo had substituted any other racial minority for his slurs, would he still have his job according to the canons of progressive censure and Internet lynching? Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of after an open borders or Black Lives Matter rally and still have his job?…”

Not just “no“, but “HELL no!!!”

Is it any wonder, as this next item from Sam Stein of the Daily Beast via Drudge reports, such hither-to-unknown levels of rank hypocrisy and biased opinion masquerading as journalism result in…  

43% of Republicans Want to Give Trump the Power to Shut Down Media

Assuming the poll is accurate, the results should come as no surprise, particularly when Progressives have been seeking to silence Conservative talk radio for decades, and after Barack Hussein Obama, a sitting President, literally waged war on FOX News, the only source of remotely unbiased information outside of the web, for eight years, going so far as to spy on Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen.

In a related item courtesy of the Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty details another example of either deliberate misinformation of unforgivable ignorance on the part of a supposedly “reputable” reporter:

Ah, That Neutral Civil Service!

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, in a column contending that the Trump administration is harming America’s tradition of a “neutral civil service.”

Think about whether you want your water’s cleanliness to be measured by an expert or by someone’s cousin. Think about whether you want your tax forms read by people looking for information they can use as a political tool against you. There are reasons a neutral, professional civil service, as well as one that is small and efficient, is intimately connected to any definition of good government.

Yes, a bunch of political partisans at the IRS would indeed be terrible! Good thing nothing like that ever happened!

Applebaum also writes, “I was once told of an Asian country in which people pay hefty fees to the foreign minister to become ambassadors,” which seems strangely oblivious of the long, bipartisan American tradition of American presidents making big campaign donors ambassadors. (Is it better if someone writes a check to a presidential campaign instead of writing one to the foreign minister?)

We’ve always contended Progressives seem to inhabit an alternate universe, but Applebaum’s ignorance of the obvious forces us to question her credibility…or intelligence…or wonder what planet she was on for the last ten years!  Seriously…has she ever even heard of Lois Lerner?!?

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

Finally, we’ll call it a day with these bits of Old Testament-related humor forwarded from Steve Boss…

…and last, but certainly not least, this classic meme courtesy of Speed Mach:

Magoo