It’s Wednesday, June 26th, 2017…but before we begin, as recounted by Leah Barkoukis at Townhall.com, the MBBA (Most Boring Basketball Association) has given us yet another reason not to watch the overpaid, overindulged performers of their product:

It’s Come to This: NBA Commissioner Drops the Term ‘Owner’ Because It’s Racially Insensitive

Yeah, whatever…ya bald-headed, jug-eared, four-eyed, pandering douche pump!

And here’s another one of those pictures worth far more than a mere thousand words, this time courtesy of AfterMath‘s Rich Terrell:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty details…

The 2020 Democratic Candidates and Their Redefinition of American Citizenship

The 2020 Democrats Want to Redefine Citizenship

“Sometimes our political debates are furious and deeply divided because of demagogues, clickbait media, and hype. But sometimes our political debates are furious because they reflect a conflict of fundamentally opposed worldviews, where no compromise is feasible. (For example, supporting a self-declared enemy of America against her duly-elected President, or the legalized murder of babies, before or after birth.)

Many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates want to fundamentally redefine who is American — that is, if you show up from another country and want to be here, you ought to enjoy the full rights of citizenship and all of the benefits provided to American citizens.

Bernie Sanders put it clearly: “We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and open that to the undocumented.” In other words, if are a citizen of another country and you want a free college education, all you have to do is show up in the United States and get accepted at any one of the 1,626 public colleges in the United States.

Needless to say, if enacted, this would bring a flood of people from all around the world, eager to enjoy the benefits of a college degree, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. (In case you’re wondering, there are a handful of other countries in Europe that offer very low or nominal tuition rates to American students, but at most of those schools, competition for the limited slots is high.)

It is not only Sanders. Beto O’Rourke says that the United States should contemplate eliminating the citizenship exam because it is a structural barrier to immigrants. Indeed, it is meant to be a structural barrier to those who lack English proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing, and civics knowledge. There was once a broad consensus that English proficiency and civics knowledge were required to be a good American citizen. The 2020 Democrats no longer believe this to be true.

Ten candidates, including Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren believe that crossing the border or entering the country without permission should no longer be a crime…

…Booker, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang believe the federal government should NOT require the use of E-Verify to check the legal status of all hires by private employers. Another nine candidates said they only support that idea as part of a “compromise” on immigration reform.

Sanders contends that adding the question “Are you a U.S. citizen?” to the 2020 census would constitute “absolutely bigoted language.” Amy Klobuchar contends that if the question is included, she would, as president, require a “recount” and O’Rourke threatens that if it is included, he will re-do the entire census a second time without the question. Even John Hickenlooper, allegedly one of the centrists in the swarm of candidates, contends that asking the question on the census for is “ corrupt and illegal.”

We all have our notions of what constitutes an injustice. To many Democrats, the longstanding practice of enforcement of immigration law — policies in place throughout the Obama administration — is an inherent injustice. In their minds, being an American citizen is simply a matter of wanting to be here.“

We can only hope and pray Progressives continue to support such suicidal positions…right up until the first Tuesday in November of 2020.

In a related item courtesy of American Greatness via Tom Bakke, Victor Davis Hanson relates the inevitable…

Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality

“Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples.

Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy—or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters. The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq.

How does the relative victimhood work politically? Progressive elites (oddly often white, but “woke,” males) serve as umpires who adjudicate familial spats and intersectional fractures. Like good cowboys, they ride herd, directing the squabbling and snorting flock in the right direction without losing too many strays on the way to the election booth.

…In the end, the only logical survivor of intersectionality is the multifaceted Smollet-like victim, not just black, but black and gay, not just a homosexual African-American, but a hip and left-wing victim, and not just black, hip, gay, and leftwing, but a young woke activist courageously on the barricades, and not just all that but also master of martial arts put only in the service of the oppressed.

The 2020 Democratic primary is a showcase of these intersectional Balkan wars—race, sex, class, and comparative claims on victimhood that cannot be reconciled by comparative set-asides, quotas, and reparations, much less by a self-appointed, supposed all-knowing, all-powerful old white guy like Biden, playing the role of Alexander among the squabbling city-states and Macedonian tribes, or Napoleon both channeling and transcending the bloody factionalism of the French Revolution, or Tito suppressing tribalism by an all-encompassing authoritarian leftist dogma.

Intersectionality ends not by compromise, but by implosion through its own utter nihilism that sees humans as collective cardboard cutouts rather unique individuals who transcend their superficial appearances.“

It’s life imitating art; though in this case, rather than simply involving anything as relatively unimportant as…

…it involves the havoc wreaked upon Progressivism when its respective special interests unavoidably occupy the same space and moment in time.

Next up, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins describes what he believes to be…

Trump’s Finest Hour

Even his supporters appreciate that he’s not a president for all seasons.

“You go to war with the president you have, not the one you might like to have.

Donald Trump made a good decision for himself and the country by violating yet another norm, this time with respect to Iran’s attack on a U.S. drone. His voters did not elect him to make an irritant like Iran central to his presidency. Likely many of his supporters, even now, don’t consider him a “competent” president, using that word advisedly.

He is good at bringing Trumpian impulses and instincts into every situation, including in deciding which untruths to wrap himself in. He hasn’t “grown” in the job in the traditional sense of increasingly conforming to settled norms and expectations.

But don’t worry—Iran will still be there a year and half from now if America wants a different president.

Let’s also notice that this particular game has gotten pretty stale by now. Keep in mind that when Iran engages in a provocation, Iranian decision makers have in mind an expected U.S. reaction. Iran is playing a weak hand right now. Sanctions are biting. Under the Obama deal, Iran was getting paid for agreeing not to do something it had good reason not to do anyway—engage in a high-risk nuclear breakout.

Iran wants the money turned back on. But without a way to deliver concessions to the Trump administration that would be consistent with regime pride, Tehran is left trying to stoke a sense of confrontation without going over the edge. It wants the U.S. media in a tizzy. It wants Europeans wringing their hands. By some path even Tehran can’t see, it hopes this will somehow reopen the door to negotiations and get the money turned back on.

Here’s what I mean by stale: By employing the alleged logic of escalation, many now fear Iran will be emboldened to launch some deadlier provocation.

Well, maybe. But Iran’s goal is to get the money turned back on, not to keep the money turned off plus lose its power grid or see its air-defense network taken down.

Donald Trump’s “gut” is not the genius he thinks it is. It is not any kind of genius to always do the unexpected thing, or to reject the advice of those around you just because they are advising it. And yet, in a rigadoon like the one the U.S. and Iran have engaged in the past 40 years, chucking out the script is perhaps the only sane response right now.

You go to war—or not—with the president you have.

Mr. Trump was not this column’s enthusiasm in 2016 or since. He in no way embodies my ideal of a president. But every president has a different way of being president. A few pundits, having invested 5½ hours watching the riveting HBO series “Chernobyl,” have written pieces finding a comparison between Soviet lying and Mr. Trump’s lying. This is another kind of staleness—to be witnessing interesting history and not having anything interesting to say about it. There is no connection between the Trump administration in 2019 and the defunct Soviet Union, unless your point is that human beings lie, just like they have arms and legs…”

Frankly, from our perspective, the jury’s still out as to whether Trump should have instituted new, harsher sanctions AND taken out the better part of Iran’s power grid.  Only time will tell the wisdom of his restraint.

Meanwhile, we’re firm in our belief conflict with a suicidal enemy intent on the destruction of both America and her firmest ally in the Middle East remains unavoidable, and thus should be fought when circumstances are most advantageous to the forces of truth and freedom.

Speaking of those antithetically opposed to both truth and freedom, today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment from Real Climate Science courtesy of Jeff Foutch highlights continued…

Tampering Past The Tipping Point

“Yet another round of spectacular data tampering by NASA and NOAA, cooling the past and warming the present.

Going back further, in 1990, the IPCC showed that earth was much warmer 800 years ago, when CO2 was 280 PPM during the Medieval Warm Period.

In 1974, NCAR showed that earth was no warmer than 1870, and was cooling rapidly.

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences showed approximately the same thing.

But twenty years ago, Michael Mann rewrote earth’s history, erasing the Medieval Warm Period, and showing that the planet suddenly started heating out of control when CO2 passed 280 PPM in the late 19th century.

…This data tampering was necessary for propaganda purposes, and serves as the basis for the ongoing attempt to destroy our existing energy infrastructure…”

Data tampering: it’s what Progressives do if their policies prove hugely unpopular when presented honestly.

Since we’re on the subject of intellectual dishonesty, consider this quote from one Amanda Ripley as recorded by Jim Freeman at Best of the Web:

“Education is intended to make us better informed about the world, so we’d expect that the more educated you become, the more you understand what other Americans think. In fact, the more educated a person is, the worse their Perception Gap – with one critical exception. This trend only holds true for Democrats, not Republicans. In other words, while Republicans’ misperceptions of Democrats do not improve with higher levels of education, Democrats’ understanding of Republicans actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn. This effect is so strong that Democrats without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree.“

Which confirms our correctness in regularly referring to Libtards as “educated idiots”.

Turning now to The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a day with a must-read item (i.e., well worth reading in full!) from a friend in Houston in response to our earlier objection to…among other forms of selective government charity…the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund:

Crockett on the Power to Make Charitable Donations

History’s immortals sometimes offer a glimpse of their greatness in events other than those that granted them immortality.

“Mr. Speaker — I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

…There are thousands of widows in the country just such as the one I have spoken of, but we never hear of any of these large debts to them. Sir, this is no debt. The government did not owe it to the deceased when he was alive; it could not contract it after he died. I do not wish to be rude, but I must be plain. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much of our own money as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.“

The spirit of the Honorable David Crockett died at the Alamo, and America has been the worse for it ever since.

Magoo