It’s Friday, January 8th, 2021…and here’s The Gouge!*

*Though we apologize in advance for this edition having grown like Topsy.

We lead off the day with a disclaimer: nothing we write or include in this post should be misinterpreted to mean we in any way, shape or form support or approve of the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday.

However, we’re also obligated to point out the hypocrisy of anyone condemning it who failed to express similar sentiments about the Black Lies Matter and Antifa riots.  After all, if this was…

…a mostly peaceful protest, certainly this…

…was peaceful as well.

Seriously: if this…

…was truly “insane”, or indeed the “craziest thing” this fellow’s ever seen in his life…

…what about the longest-running regular evening riots in history, which premiered immediately following George Floyd’s self-administered fentanyl overdose?!?  Speaking of Portland, here’s a real shocker:

Portland erupts with riots after Kenosha cop not charged in Jacob Blake shooting

 

Which is different from any other night in Portland…how?!?

By the way, though you’re likely aware no charges were brought against the Kenosha officer who justifiably shot Jacob Blake, how many of you knew…

…no charges were filed against the convicted felon, capped in commission of yet another violent crime and in possession of a weapon?

Next, what follows is our reaction to these four expressions of self-righteous, impotent indignation:

Biden Says Rioters Who Stormed Capitol Were Domestic Terrorists

Pelosi Calls for Trump to Be Removed by 25th Amendment or Be Impeached

Schumer Says Trump ‘Should Not Hold Office One Day Longer,’ Calls for 25th Amendment or Impeachment

Facebook Bans Trump ‘at Least’ Until He Leaves Office

 

Sorry, but has Louis Farrakhan likewise been banned from Facebook?  What about Maxine Waters?  Al Sharpton?  Jim Comey?  Stacey Abrams?  We rest our case.

Since we’re on the subject of gross mischaracterizations and selective moral outrage, Slate purports to report…

Trump Tells Rioters He Loves Them, Urges Them to Go Home in God-Awful Statement

 

“God-awful”?  Based on what standard?  You’ll never know, as both Twitter and Facebook have removed the video, though a transcript remains available at NPR.  We state for the record Trump’s words were neither “God-awful” nor deserving of censorship.

And you’ll forgive us if we harp on the point, but we can’t recall Slate using similar terminology to describe certain ill-advised, inflammatory and outright inaccurate statements by Trump’s predecessor, including, but far from limited to, the following:

Not to mention this unforgettable classic:

Still, the WSJ‘s Kim Strassel makes has some valid points as she recounts how no President in history, with the possible exception of JFK, had a worse afternoon than Trump on Wednesday.  The difference being The Donald’s injuries were largely self-inflicted, while Kennedy’s pain and suffering were at least, by comparison, mercifully brief.

In a related item, as KULR TV in Billings, Montana informs us, the…

Woman killed after being shot in the Capitol identified as Air Force veteran

 

“The Washington Post says the woman was unarmed a law enforcement official said, but the officer who shot her did not know that.“

Really?!?

Funny, no such dispensation was granted the four Minneapolis officers when George Floyd died in their custody from an unobvious over-ingestion of fentanyl.

Submitted for your perusal, two separate videos of the shooting:

Editor’s Note: YouTube already scrubbed the copy of the video we initially posted, so in the event it happens again, there’s a different version available at the New York Post.

This is a tough call, as the videos raise as many questions as they answer, including these: (1) Mrs. Babbit was clearly unarmed and not threatening anyone, which should have precluded the use of deadly force; (2) The second video clearly shows the presence of a sizable law enforcement contingent immediately prior to the shot being fired, so we’re more than a little perplexed as to why deadly force would have been required when a team of heavily armed officers were just on the scene; (3) Likewise, if the group of trespassers posed any real threat, why would the team shown coming up the stairs, along with those already on scene, have retreated?; (4) If he truly felt threatened, why would the officer not have fired a warning shot or used pepper spray?  Hells bells, there’s a guy in a suit shown nonchalantly strolling across the hallway immediately prior to the shot being fired; (5) We have eyewitness testimony indicating the Capitol Police were curiously disorganized and seemed ill-prepared for the protest, which again begs the question “Why?”; (6) As another friend noted, one thing Washington doesn’t lack is police presence, so why weren’t more of them on the scene?  Mayor Muriel Bowser had called up 300 members of the National Guard, so where were they?; and, (7) If this is the best the Capitol Police can do against unarmed amateur interlopers, what’s their plan if Al Queda executes an armed assault?

After all…

And while the two parties with the most to gain from such a confrontation were obvious to our eyewitness…Progressives handed the opportunity to paint every Trump supporter as an insurrectionist, and Joe Biden by virtue of the fact Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and others were immediately reduced to explaining why they were not supporting the rioters rather than contesting the election results…nothing’s certain.  

One thing is certain: The headline-dominating reaction which would have literally exploded from every organ of The Left had the victim been Black and wrapped in a BLM banner.

That having been said, while Ashli Babbit needn’t have been shot, let alone deserved to die, she should never have stormed the Capitol in the first place.  Her untimely demise brings to mind this scene from Cool Hand Luke:

While there’s a part of us which understands her actions…understands, not condones…there’s a larger part which believes she needlessly put herself in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the first heads on Capitol Hill have rolled, though we found The Hill‘s reference to both the presence of a “mob” and “mobs”, as well as the use of the plural “riots” rather curious, not to mention this inaccurate yet damning observation:

“Most of the insurrectionists were not wearing masks despite the COVID-19 pandemic and attacked police officers with metal pipes and chemical irritants.“

Oh, NO: they WEREN’T WEARING MASKS!!!  This reporter may be the same Millennial melting down on an elevator over an incorrectly positioned mask Michael Knowles featured on a recent video: 

Two other thoughts immediately come to mind: First, no one with the slightest modicum of common sense believes these…

…were “insurrectionists”; and second, if only the Capitol Police had responded in kind, Ashli Babbit would still be alive.

As for claims these yahoos were part of Antifa…

…our sources say otherwise, as, upon closer examination, the hammer and sickle tattoo becomes a video game logo…

…and Hagar the Horrible…

…turns out to be Jake Angeli, a QAnon member from Phoenix, and evidently a close friend of our 46th* President:

This is not to say Antifa wasn’t present; there’s no doubt they were. Three pipe bombs were found at the offices of both the RNC and DNC, and for all their faults, Trumpeteers don’t plant pipe bombs.  And though there are fringe elements in every movement, Antifa is far more in The Left’s mainstream than Mr. Angeli is in The Right’s. 

In a related item concerning those solidly in the Socialist mainstream, it appears…

Rashida Tlaib’s New Office Neighbor to Fly Israeli Flag

GOP Rep. Kat Cammack: ‘It’ll be very helpful as she walks past it every day‘

 

Turning now to our continuing analysis of The Great Election Heist of 2020, here’s some interesting analysis from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt:

The Trump Era Ends in Disaster in Georgia

 

“…In 2014, the last major midterm election before Donald Trump descended the escalator and ran for president, Republicans won the gubernatorial election by more than 200,000 votes, and the lieutenant governor’s race and the down-ticket races by margins close to or exceeding 400,000 votes, while Perdue won the Senate race by more than 197,000 votes. In other words, up until very recently, Georgia was a really, really Republican-leaning state.

When a president goes nuts and spends two months insisting that his reelection victory was stolen by a vast conspiracy that “moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts” his party is not likely to win the close ones.

Back in July 2016, Chuck Schumer could see that in Trump, the Republican Party had a nominee who had much more appeal among blue-collar whites than usual and much less appeal among suburbanites than usual. Schumer was convinced this was a good trade: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” That was the key miscalculation of the 2016 cycle.

But by 2018, that trade didn’t look as good for Republicans, as they lost control of the House; 38 of the 41 congressional seats that flipped from red to blue were suburban. Trump’s blue-collar voters just didn’t turn out as much in those midterms. Those blue-collar Trump voters didn’t show up in the numbers that Republicans needed in gubernatorial or senatorial races in Wisconsin and Michigan.

In 2020…that trade-off worked somewhat better for Republicans, but not quite good enough. It’s important to note that Republicans won back a bunch of suburban congressional seats, driven in large part by candidates who were women, minorities, veterans, or some combination of those: Michelle Steel, Young Kim, Carlos Giminez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Burgess Owens.

You know what suburban voters do? They show up and vote. Year in, year out, presidential years, midterms, off-year elections, special elections, non-November local elections. They must rank among the most easily overlooked, underrated, and underappreciated voters, those allegedly wishy-washy, milquetoast, not-fond-of-Trump, minivan-driving moderate suburban soccer moms and white-collar dads. They’re not exciting. They’re rarely looking for anything revolutionary. They’re not looking to “burn it all down”; they’re the ones who built the things that would get burned down.

You know why it makes sense for a political party to target its messaging and appeal to this voter demographic? Because you don’t have to do much to get them to the polls. They do it out of habit and civic duty. As John Bragg put it last night: “They always vote, just like they always file their taxes, pay their bills, mow their lawns, send their kids to college. The question is, which party appeals to those people in 2020?”

As for those blue-collar Trump voters…Republican grassroots turnout was down last night. Republicans will be arguing about why it was down for a long time. You can argue that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are less than thrilling candidates; they are not, as I like to say, whirling dervishes of raw political charisma. But recall that back in November, Perdue beat Ossoff by more than 88,000 votes; he just fell three-tenths of a percentage point short of that 50 percent threshold.

David Perdue is the same guy he was in November. His opponent is the same. The state’s demographics didn’t change. So, what changed?

What made this runoff election particularly unusual is that the president of the United States, the state party chairman, most of the state’s GOP congressional delegation, and other GOP figures spent the past two months arguing that Georgia’s recent presidential-election results were fraudulent and that mass-scale vote fraud and hacking of voting machines changed Trump votes to Biden votes. Shockingly, that consistent messaging did not increase the enthusiasm among Republican voters to cast ballots again. If only someone had warned them!

It is unlikely that many Georgia voters were deeply familiar with Lin Wood or Sidney Powell before the November election. But by December 2, the pair’s profile as unofficial Trump-allied lawyers had given them the stature to draw a huge crowd to a press-conference-turned-rally, where Wood urged Georgia Republicans to not vote for Perdue and Loeffler.

“Don’t you give it to them,” Wood said. “Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election for God’s sake? Fix it! You gotta fix it!” The event turned into an anti-get-out-the-vote rally. It was a keep-the-vote-home rally…”

And as Guy Benson records at Townhall.com, the keep-the-vote-home strategerie appears to have worked:

We certainly don’t agree with everything Geraghty wrote, but he makes some very good points, particularly regarding the relative dependability of rural blue-collar versus suburban white-collar voters.  However, our biggest disagreement arises not from what’s in his commentary, but rather what isn’t: namely, the impact of what very likely rampant electoral fraud.  As G. Trevor stated, there’s a reason heavily-Dimocratic counties are always the last to tally their votes: you can’t submit the number of votes necessary to win ’til you know how many you need to manufacture.

And there’s no doubt in our military mind, as this must-read article from The American Conservative via Daniel Francis reveals, the fix was in: 

Memorandum: How The 2020 Election Could Have Been Stolen

 

Following up on the revision we made to the Wednesday edition, Joe Manchin just became the most powerful person in Washington:

Please let us know your thoughts about him by casting your ballot in our latest poll, located near the top right of the page.  Sure, Jon Tester may be a swing vote on certain issues, but Trump only carried Montana by 16 points. 

He carried West Virginia by 40! 

Here’s the juice: if all Manchin does is keep his powder dry to take aim against radically higher taxes and any additional gun control measures, he may well save the Republic until 2022 puts Nancy Pelosi into retirement.  Meanwhile, nothing can prevent Biden from enacting anything he wants via executive action…nothing other than Amy Barrett!

Almost Heaven…?!?

Then there’s this from Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich, who relates how…

Senator Tim Scott Introduces Election Integrity Bill

 

“...“My bill will establish an Election Integrity Commission that would study the merits and administration of the November 2020 election and make recommendations to State legislatures to improve the security, integrity, and administration of federal elections. It is absolutely critical that every American has faith in our electoral system and that their vote is counted. As President Reagan said, ‘Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction,’ and now more than ever before is it our duty to regain the trust of the American voter,” he continued…”

Gee, another commission which would make non-binding recommendations to states who made last-minute, illegal changes to their own election laws.  In other words, a complete waste of time and effort designed to placate the people and give Senators of both stripes cover.  Besides, it isn’t the votes of individual, living American citizens we distrust; rather it’s the multiple votes of dead and non-citizens that has us worried…along with the Dominion software.

Since we’re on the subject of those really not interested in uncovering the truth, also courtesy of The American Conservative, this time via Tom Bakke, Rod Dreher offers the straight skinny on the ongoing efforts of the politically-correct to amend a long-standing and honorable tradition:

West Point & Critical Race Theory

 

Unless, of course, the cadet in question is of color…and more importantly, a football player of color!

Which brings to…The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this from Balls Cotton, who bids us…

…along with two more from Monogamous…

…and this related meme from Brendan Clark:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of an unlucky career criminal, as a…

Florida burglar is killed by falling window

 

For the record, this choir boy was a convicted felon whose arrests included a 2014 bust for his involvement in a murder.  And protestations as to his innocence and character by Mr. Hernandez’s loved one and acquaintance notwithstanding, when a convicted felon is found hanging from the window of a house he didn’t own…

Magoo

Video of the Day

Michael Knowles correctly assesses the situation.

Tales of The Darkside

Again courtesy of Michael Knowles, some on The Left finally grasp why men who “identify” as women shouldn’t be allowed to participate if female sports. Spoiler Alert: It’s why Shaq, even in his current state, would totally DOMINATE the WNBA!

On the Lighter Side

Tucker explains the urgency of every Carl Bernstein utterance.