It’s Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019…but before we begin, a Texas jury has tendered its verdict:

Dallas Police Officer Who Walked into Wrong Apartment and Killed Neighbor Found Guilty of Murder

We frankly don’t believe Amber Guyger’s crime rose to the level of murder; some degree and form of manslaughter seems far more appropriate.  But in the best tradition of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, the powers-that-be in Dallas were playing to the mob, along with the MSM which reported the shooting, its aftermath and Guyger’s trial, as this snippet from The New York Times courtesy of Matt Vespa reveals:

“A former Dallas police officer who shot her unarmed black neighbor in his own apartment was found guilty of murder on Tuesday, in an unusual and high-profile case that dealt with issues of race, policing and mistaken identity.

The former officer, Amber R. Guyger, who is white, was charged in the death of her 26-year-old neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, after she said she accidentally went to the wrong floor of their apartment complex, entered the unit directly above hers and fatally shot him last year.

…The shooting and its aftermath in September 2018 ignited protests and calls for justice, with demonstrations outside Police Headquarters and inside City Hall. At a time when other police officers have been cleared of wrongdoing in the deaths of unarmed black men, Ms. Guyger was arrested several days after the shooting on a charge of manslaughter, then released from jail the same day. (i.e., she made bail!) After weeks of community tensions and accusations of preferential treatment for the police, a grand jury came back with the charge of murder.

…Though the issue of race was not mentioned explicitly in the courtroom, the trial unfolded against the backdrop of a diverse city that is 24 percent black, 29 percent white and 42 percent nonwhite Hispanic. The mayor of Dallas, the police chief and the Dallas County district attorney are all black, as is the judge presiding over this case. Of the 12 jurors and four alternates, seven are African-American, four appear to be white and five are of other races and ethnicities…”

In other words, as Matt Vespa noted, though race was never brought up in the trial by either side, the Times knows better, and without a single shred of evidence Mr. Jean’s race had ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Guyger pulling the trigger, chose to MAKE IT an issue.

As to what on earth constitutes appearing to be white, only the Times can tell.  Until an explanation is forthcoming (we won’t hold our breath!), we’ll assume this to be the Old Grey Nag’s new standard for “appearing to be white”… 

…their individual claims to the contrary notwithstanding!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at NRO, Andy McCarthy suggests something Congress consider:

How about a Bipartisan Treaty against the Criminalization of Elections?

Setting aside Hunter Biden, there was no impropriety in President Trump’s asking Zelensky to assist the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

“…I mention all this because it is a commonplace for the government to seek assistance from foreign counterparts for ongoing federal investigations.

Indeed, as Marc Thiessen pointed out this week in an important Washington Post column, (and as previously featured in The Daily Gouge), Democratic senators pressured Ukraine to cooperate with the Mueller probe — notwithstanding the obvious potential electoral ramifications and the specter of “foreign interference in our democracy.” These requests for assistance often occur at the head-of-state level. When I was a federal prosecutor in the mid-nineties, for example, the FBI and Justice Department asked President Clinton to intervene with Saudi authorities to assist the investigation of Iranian complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing.

There is nothing wrong with our government’s requesting the assistance of foreign governments that have access to witnesses and evidence relevant to an ongoing Justice Department investigation. The president is the democratically elected, constitutionally empowered chief executive: There is nothing his subordinates may properly do that he may not do himself (it is his power that they exercise). And the president is never conflicted out of executive branch business due to his political interests. There is no legal or ethical requirement that the Justice Department be denied potentially probative evidence because obtaining it might affect the president’s political fortunes.

There was no impropriety in President Trump’s asking Ukraine’s president to assist the Justice Department’s investigation of Russiagate’s origins. Okay, you say, but what does that have to do with Biden?

Well, Biden was the Obama administration’s point man in dealing with Kyiv after Viktor Yanukovych fled in 2014. That course of dealing came to include Obama administration agencies leaning on Ukraine to assist the FBI in the investigation of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman. So, Biden’s interaction with Ukraine is germane: The fact that he had sufficient influence to coerce the firing of a prosecutor; the fact that, while Biden was strongly influencing international economic aid for Kyiv, a significant Ukrainian energy company thought it expedient to bring Biden’s son onto its board and compensate him lavishly — although Hunter Biden had no experience in the industry.

That aside, I do not understand why there has not been more public discussion of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in light of the instances of Hunter Biden conveniently cashing in with foreign firms while his dad was shaping American policy toward those firm’s governments. As we saw with the collusion caper, it does not take much evidence of any crime for the FBI and the Justice Department to open an investigation and scorch the earth in conducting it. And if it would have been legit for the Justice Department to open an FCPA investigation of one or both of the Bidens, then it was appropriate for President Trump to ask President Zelensky to help the Justice Department determine if an FCPA crime took place – even if doing so could have affected the 2020 fortunes of Biden and Trump.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not rooting for Joe Biden or his son to be subjected to investigation and prosecution. I agree with Attorney General Barr that there has been too much politicization of law enforcement and intelligence. In the absence of a concrete, patent, and serious violation of the criminal law, I want the Justice Department and the FBI out of politics – which would be better for them and for politics. If you think there is an indecorous heavy-handedness to the way Donald Trump and Joe Biden conduct foreign policy, that’s fine – go vote against them on Election Day. We don’t need creative prosecutors deciding elections by testing the boundaries of abstruse statutes.

Neither, however, do I believe in unilateral disarmament. There is at least as much basis for opening an FCPA investigation against the Bidens as for opening campaign-finance investigations against the Trumps. If I had my druthers, all of this nonsense would end. But as I detailed earlier this week, we have one candidate for the presidency — a once-serious legal scholar and practitioner — who publicly and straight-faced says Trump’s call with Zelensky could rate the death penalty. As we saw in the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton got to experience the independent-counsel statute up close and personal, maybe it takes Democrats being hoisted on their own petard before we finally say: This has to stop.“

In a related item, also writing at NRO, Jim Geraghty offers…

Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline

From being appointed senior MBNA vice president (two years out of law school), to a gift of a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese energy tycoon, to Burisma Holdings…

Trust us, it’s well worth your time to read, as it’s MOST informative and illuminating.  Like the Clintons, the Bidens aren’t a political dynasty, but rather a criminal cartel.

That being said, we have to confess a certain amount of confusion regarding the validity of the latest Progressive impeachment effort, about which John Hirschauer wonders whether “Perhaps the seventh time will be the charm.”  After all, that’s one more try than it took Vincent LaGuardia Gambini…

…to pass the bar!

Yet we are inundated with plaintive pleas from Progressive politicians, their MSM shills and sanctimonious, self-serving members of the Never-Trump right seeking to convince us not to believe our eyes when we read the transcript of The Donald’s Ukrainian call, and not believe we’re intelligent enough to understand the nuanced code words Trump the Neanderthal is suddenly smart enough to employ.

This brings to mind one of our favorite SNL skits from the days the show was still funny, as Phil Hartmann brought to life the dichotomy of Dimocratic depictions of Ronaldus Maximus: he was either an evil genius…

…or a hopelessly befuddled septuagenarian.

The same is true of Trump.

Here’s the juice: when the likes of Mike Mukasey, Kim Strassel, Derek Hunter, Holman Jenkins, Rich Lowry and Andy McCarthy all arrive at the same conclusion from different perspectives, far be it from us to object to their collective wisdom.

Not to mention the Socialist subterfuge at every level of government which preceded The Donald’s rather ham-fisted hijinks.  Nor that which has followed it.

Next up, again courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson details why…

“Perhaps the strangest utterance of Barack Obama’s career in public office — a career that was full of utterly bizarre pronunciations of many kinds on many subjects — was his 2008 claim that raising taxes on the wealthy is a moral imperative, even if the tax increase in question ended up reducing overall federal revenue.

Which is to say, Obama argued that it did not matter whether a tax increase hurt the Treasury, so long as it also hurt, at least in theory and on paper, certain wealthy people. That wasn’t a one-off: In his crackpot speech in Osawatomie, Kan., during which he tried to reanimate Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” cult (this was back before progressives had decided that to use the word “nationalism” in public was akin to shouting “Sieg heil!”), he took a similarly moralizing approach. “Our tax code must reflect our values,” he proclaimed.

Why?

…When politicians fail at the basics of governance — and ours have failed and are failing — they embrace moral crusades and moral hysterias. That’s why New York City is proposing to put people in jail for using the perfectly accurate English words “illegal alien” to describe aliens whose presence in these United States is illegal — while the trains are failing, the schools continue to fail, the garbage piles up, and the police department continues its long history of acting as an organized-crime syndicate. Etc. One of the reasons you have a more libertarian view in the United States and more support for the welfare state in Sweden is that the Swedes can look at their government and say, “Oj, my taxes are higher than the Norralaån in springtime, but at least I get something for all that money.” People in New Jersey? Not really. We’ve seen veterans dying of preventable causes and pointy-headed little bureaucrats lying about it, and nice progressives getting very, very upset about that — and then saying what we really need is higher taxes on the rich so that we can bring the same model of care to everybody else in the country and make it mandatory.

“Excellent care at low cost,” Paul Krugman wrote of the VA system. Hence the relative libertarianism.

Punitive taxes aren’t about the taxes — they’re about the punishment. That taxation should have been converted from a technical question into a moral crusade speaks to the basic failure of the progressive enterprise in the United States and to the deficiency of American political discourse. Moral hysterias are always a distraction from problems that are, if seemingly intractable, much more ordinary. The specific contradiction in this case is the progressive demand for a Scandinavian welfare state at no cost to anybody they care about, which ends up being a very difficult equation to balance, probably an impossible one. And when the numbers don’t work, there’s always cheap moralistic histrionics.

That kind of hysteria isn’t worth much, but it doesn’t cost much, either.“

Since we’re on the subject of moral hysteria, in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts relates how…

“For [her] defense of the environment, the Swedish church has claimed that activist Greta Thunberg is the “successor of Jesus Christ” at this time.

“Ad! Jesus of Nazareth has now named one of his successors, Greta Thunberg, ” wrote the Limhamns Kyrka church on Twitter…”

“Kungörelse”: that must mean “bat-sh*t crazy” in Swedish!  Or in the words of Pete Groetzinger, “I really didn’t think it could get more perverted, but this is an entirely new level of stupidity.”

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

Then there’s these pearls of wisdom from Ed Hickey…

…along with these two from Fielding Cocke:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with a cross between the Sports Section and Educated Idiots on Parade, courtesy of Townhall.com‘s Tim Meads and a clueless University of Rhode Island kinesiologist, who somehow concluded…

Tom Brady Is Only Popular Because Of White Supremacy

“We live in very unserious times. Believe it or not, a college professor from the University of Rhode Island is being paid thousands of dollars to spout nonsensical theories about Tom Brady, his fame, and white supremacists. Tom Brady, a six-time Super Bowl winning champion and the greatest of all time quarterback, is not popular due to his career with his accolades won with the New England Patriots, but simply because he is white, according to Professor Kyle Kusz. The kinesiologist recently argued in a book titled, “Making American White Men Great Again: Tom Brady, Donald Trump, and the Allure of White Male Omnipotence in Post-Obama America,” that Brady’s GOAT status is due to white supremacy…”

Forgetting for a moment this educated idiot’s cretinous conjecture regarding the winningest QB in NFL history and White supremacy, we strenuously object to the assumption anyone actually LIKES Brady, at least outside of Boston and its immediate environs.

Besides, who gives a flying fart for the opinions of the idiots who repeatedly reelected a man whose career-defining moment took place in a saltwater pond happened on Chappaquiddick Island…

…rather than on Capitol Hill.

Magoo

P.S.  We’ll be making a Left Coast swing starting Thursday afternoon, so likely won’t be back in the saddle until Wednesday, October 16th at the earliest, as TLJ would take great exception to us publishing while vacationing in her company.

So ’til then…

P.S.S.  As this forward from Jeff Foutch recounts, this is one cop…

Sanctuary Police Chief Suspends Officer Who Helped Catch Illegal Alien Fugitive

…who deserves to be taken out.