It’s Wednesday, October 10th, 2018…but before we begin, if you thought Lisa Murkowski’s reason for giving Brett Kavanaugh a thumbs-down was specious, consider why Heidi Heitkamp voted “no”: his body language!

We had no idea the soon-to-be ex-Senator from North Dakota…

…was so skilled in the art of non-verbal communication.  Hells bells, she’s the Mandan, ND equivalent of Marge Gunderson:

And as the great Stilton Jarlsberg noted, by her own admission, Heitkamp judged Kavanaugh solely on his body language; when will Liberal women start viewing men as something more than just a body for them to ogle and interpret?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We kick off the mid-week edition with a brief bit of commentary resulting from an intriguing conversation we had Monday afternoon with an elderly friend of TLJ’s (for those new to The Gouge, “TLJ” is The Lovely Jenny, our wife of almost 40 years).

TLJ, along with Lola and Moses, two of our Pomeranians, works with our church’s Comfort Pets ministry, visiting the elderly and infirm at area nursing and managed care facilities, as well as special-needs students in local schools and community colleges. 

Christina, shown above with Lola and Moses, is TLJ’s favorite, and as our bride’s in Memphis visiting her eldest sister and two grand-nephews, we stopped by to visit Christina and drop off a tube of hand lotion TLJ had bought for her.

Christina was in her wheelchair with her head down when we entered, so we thought her asleep.  Instead, while viewing a FOX News report on the Kavanaugh character assassination, she’d been led to bow her head in both sadness and disbelief.  Sadness, as she was truly brought to tears over the premeditated destruction Dimocrats wreaked on a good man and his family; disbelief, because she would never have thought it would or could happen here.

It was her next comment which truly piqued our curiosity (and we paraphrase): “Sure, it happened over there, where, if they didn’t like the way you thought, you’d just disappear…but not here!”

Thus did a woman who actually lived under Hitler draw a direct comparison between the politics of Nazi Germany and the conduct of Senate Dimocrats in the Kavanaugh hearings.

For as we learned, Christina had been born, her accent-less English notwithstanding, in 1928 in the small town of Eislingen, Germany, some 25 miles east of Stuttgart, the fifth of five children, and the only girl.  Her family came to the United States in 1948…but only after her mother lost three of her four sons in the service of the very type of totalitarian tyranny The Left would impose on the United States today.

Two were killed during Operation Barbarossa somewhere in the Soviet Union, while the third died somewhere in Poland during the Wehrmacht’s retreat back into Germany.

Though her flesh is weak, her mind is completely sound (she remains fluent in German).  Thus, when she listens to the patent propaganda of Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Sheldon Whitehouse and their shills in the MSM, she recognizes their deliberately divisive politicking for what it is…and can say in opposition, with the authority of someone who’s heard and seen it all before…

Since we’re on the subject of the Kavanaugh ambush and the nature of totalitarian regimes, writing last week at the Weekly Standard and as quoted in the WSJ, Chris Caldwell remarked how…

“The grounds for rejecting Kavanaugh have shifted steadily…Finally, it was whether his outburst at the committee showed a partisanship that was evidence he lacked the “judicial temperament” to serve on the Court…The question is not “whether he’s innocent or guilty,” said Cory Booker…This amounted to saying that Brett Kavanaugh lacks a “judicial temperament” because he objected to being summarily executed following a show trial. If you permit the criteria of culpability to shift, then you have the circular logic typical of totalitarian regimes. Just as there are people famous-for-being-famous, now there are people guilty-of-being-accused.“

Though it’s worth viewing in its entirety, fast-forward to the 4:42 mark of the following video…

…then tell us who just turned their back…

…on righteousness and women?!?

This meme, courtesy of Balls Cotton, puts Progressives into proper perspective:

Next up, prior to Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote, the editorial board of the WSJ detailed the true nature of the war in which we’re engaged, as they correctly identify The Left as…

The Never Conservatives

The Kavanaugh fight isn’t about Trump. We’re all deplorables now.

“…Democrats were so worried about Senate norms that they hid Ms. Ford’s name from Republicans for six weeks, found her a lawyer, midwifed a lie detector test whose results they still haven’t fully disclosed, and then orchestrated the rollout of her accusations. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is too often divisive and dissembling, but no action in his Presidency comes close to matching the partisan viciousness of the Senate ambush of Brett Kavanaugh. These are today’s Democratic norms.

The other Democratic targets here are Paul Ryan (they can have Ryan!), Mitch McConnell and the conservative GOP majorities in Congress that have cut taxes, eased crushing regulations and confirmed a record number of appellate judges. Democrats claim to want to be a “check” on Mr. Trump, but good luck with that.

Their real goal is to retake Capitol Hill, roll back tax reform, expand the entitlement state, taunt Mr. Trump like a dancing bear, and set up 2020 for a return of the Obama agenda under the identity-politics leadership of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

The media sometimes profess to be puzzled that more than 80% of Republicans across the country tell pollsters they support Mr. Trump despite his personal flaws. The Never Conservatives are the reason, and the assault on Judge Kavanaugh is the latest showcase of their methods. Republicans have figured out that if the left can willfully, even gleefully, destroy a man as distinguished as Brett Kavanaugh, they can and will do it to any conservative who threatens their grip on power.

Republicans are well aware of Mr. Trump’s excesses and falsehoods. But they have also come to understand that the resistance to him isn’t rooted in principle or some august call to superior character. They know Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her history of deceit. Voters know this is about the left’s will to power by any means necessary.

Republicans across America can see, and certainly their Senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.“

As Ben Franklin so insightfully noted in support of signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”  Indeed, for in an eerie reprise of one of our favorite Dirty Harry scenes, The Left presents us no other option, having already concluded…

In a related item, writing at The Hill, Clinton operative/acolyte Mark Penn opines on what he terms the…

Kavanaugh lesson: Resist the ‘resistance’ or lose

“…As we entered this nomination fight, Trump was floundering and things were running in favor of the Democrats. Filled with overconfidence, some Democratic senators pledged to oppose the Supreme Court nominee even before he or she was announced. After he was announced, potential 2020 candidates vied for nightly sound bites taking whacks at Kavanaugh, culminating in the laughable “Spartacus” moment of Senator Cory Booker. Demands went out for millions of documents.

Then we came to the leak of the Christine Blasey Ford letter, which Senator Dianne Feinstein had referred to activist lawyers months earlier instead of sending it to the Senate Judiciary Committee for investigation. Not a single Democrat had trouble with the lack of corroboration nor praised the very FBI report they had asked for. It became clear the Democrats had their own “get Kavanaugh” operation.

As this further devolved to unrestrained media reports of gang rapes, thrown ice cubes, and secret high school yearbook marks, even Republican moderates, the only potential votes to defeat Kavanaugh, became incensed. Senator Lindsey Graham called the Democratic actions a “sham.” Senator Susan Collins called it “gutter level” political campaigning. Nearly 70 percent of the public called the hearings a “national disgrace.” These Republican moderates, each of whom have supported Democratic causes in the past, are indicative of the national weather vane and, at that moment, it flipped against the Democrats.

The resistance is in full boomerang mode now. But the fired up movement appears to have no “off” switch. Feinstein, in the election fight of her life, has, with her statement after the confirmation, decided to impugn the Supreme Court rather than appeal to national unity. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) has said he would launch hearings if the Democrats take over, threatening an unprecedented investigation by the House of the advise and consent process of the Senate. Americans like investigations, but they vote for issues such as health care, jobs, and education.

If you think I’m exaggerating the potential downside of the resistance, recall the last time the left took over the Democratic Party. It was in the late 1960s after Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) toppled President Johnson, with Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern serving as the next two presidential nominees for the party. The results were disastrous. From 1968 to 1992, with the exception of four years of Jimmy Carter, Democrats typically lost almost the entire electoral map. Even in 1988 they lost 40 of 50 states. They came back only when Governor Bill Clinton ran as a “different kind of Democrat” and brought the party back to the center…”

While we cannot find fault with most of Penn’s comments, leave it to a true Clintonista to omit the fact the only reason Clinton was elected was H. Ross Perot siphoning off almost 20,000,000 votes from George H. W. Bush, allowing Slick Willy to win by a margin of just under 6,000,000 votes.

That…and Bush I’s inexcusable breaking of the most infamous presidential promise prior to Barack Hussein Obama’s “If you like you healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan:

BZ to John “Jabba” Sununu, the New Hampshire RINO who not only talked George I into new taxes, but also recommended David Souter for the SCOTUS. 

Meanwhile, as Mitch McConnell stated Tuesday on the floor of the Senate in response to Hillary’s latest contribution to national unity, “the madness hasn’t stopped“.

Not to be outdone by his erstwhile rival, Bernie Sanders weighed in with another demonstration of his detachment from reality:

Bernie Sanders Calls for New World Order of ‘Shared Prosperity‘

“It is time for us to stand up and say there is a better way to use our wealth,” Sanders declared. “In closing let me simply state, in order to effectively to combat the pluses of global oligarchy and authoritarianism, we need an international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists not only in wealth, but in political power…”

Uhhh,…they tried that, Bernie: and it was a colossal failure, having cost hundreds of millions of humans their very lives.  We’d have thought you’d heard of it: it’s called…

…”Communism”!

Note: Bernie’s not so detached he expressed any willingness to part with his three…count ’em, THREE…homes as part of his “shared prosperity”!

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of the WSJ, Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports…

Why Central America Stays Poor

Environmental activists succeed in closing a silver mine despite no violations.

“The July 2017 idling of the Escobal silver mine in southeastern Guatemala displaced more than 850 workers and endangered the livelihoods of thousands more whose jobs are indirectly supported by the project. The loss of family income has harmed communities in the municipality of San Rafael Las Flores and in some cases sent the unemployed north to look for work in the U.S.

Nature can be cruel in underdeveloped countries. Yet it wasn’t fire, flood, mudslide or volcano that served this economic gut punch. This is a man-made travesty, courtesy of Guatemala’s Constitutional Court. It is a saga worth recounting because it goes to the heart of the country’s intransigent poverty…”

Involving graft, corruption and other critical aspects of enlightened Latin American governance…picked up, no doubt, from American Dimocrats. 

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with Another Stupid Story Intended to Fill the 24/7 News Cycle, and this just in from the Pine Tree State:

Maine hunter aiming for turkey, shoots another man in chest

“A Maine hunter who intended to shoot a turkey on Monday morning accidentally hit a passer-by in the chest instead, authorities said. William E. Penley was turkey hunting with his grandson when he fired a 12-gauge shotgun at one of the birds. A stray round struck Richard Hannibal in the chest, according to Maine’s Lewiston Sun Journal.

Apparently, Hannibal was watching the same group of turkeys as Penley. The single pellet did not break through Hannibal’s skin, but it gave him a welt, the report said, citing police scanner reports. He refused medical treatment, authorities said…”

A welt…a WELT?!?

Thus doth life once again imitate art:

Magoo