Category: Media and Journalism
Covering up the cover-up

Covering up the cover-up

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That’s a photo of Attorney General Merrick Garland. If he looks like a rabid weasel, that’s because he is exactly that. Ever embittered for being denied a place on the High Court in the dying days of the Obama administration, Merrick Garland now takes out his resentment on all the country not aligned with this ever-more-unpopular regime and the Democratic Party more generally. Any thought of maintaining a modicum of equal justice by the DOJ he heads has been long jettisoned, despite the AG’s high-sounding rhetoric. This was never more in evidence then when Garland made his bogus appointment Friday of David Weiss as a “special counsel” in investigating Hunter Biden’s various crimes.

If there is a more clear case of the fox — or in this case, the weasel’s minion — guarding the hen house, one would be hard-pressed to think of it. Here are the simple facts that illustrate the relationship:

  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who has been dragging his heels in his supposed “investigation” of Hunter Biden for nearly four years, ever since Hunter’s now infamous laptop came into the FBI’s possession in December 2019.
  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who allowed the statute of limitations to run on Biden’s failure to file taxes from 2014-2016 and then let him skate for years of not filing timely returns on millions of dollars of income by turning all that into two misdemeanor charges (try that stunt yourself and see what happens to you).
  • Weiss, again, turned a gun charge against Hunter — a charge that, in virtually 100% of other cases, results in jail time — into an agreement to let him go into a diversion program and exactly zero days behind bars. So much for this administration’s bleating about guns.
  • In an unprecedented move, Weiss also was willing to forego prosecution on other criminal matters still under investigation, such as Hunter’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Besides the obvious conflicts of interest, the first provision of the Special Counsel law states that the special counsel shall — not should, not could, not be preferred to, but shall — come from outside the government. Someone who supposedly doesn’t have any vested interest in the outcome of an investigation. Instead, Weasel Garland dug deep into the very guts of the beast he heads and pulled out Weiss. Weiss, who Garland — previously, under oath, and quite untruthfully — asserted already had the same powers as a special counsel.

But wait! you shout. The nation’s top law enforcement officer can’t be allowed to get away with violating the statute! Well, dear naive reader, the statute ends by stating there is no mechanism for remedying a violation. Don’t you just love how those in power write statutes that benefit them and no one else?

By the way, don’t be led astray by those who claim Weiss was a Trump appointee. Yes, technically speaking, he was. But he was put forth into nomination by Delaware’s two Democratic senators and its Democratic Party structure, all part of the First State’s political snake pit of which Joe Biden has been a leading member since God was a boy, and Trump simply rubber-stamped the appointment. Not his finest act.

Unraveling the sweetheart deal

That’s not a weasel in the photo above. It’s U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika who was expected to approve — but didn’t — the DOJ’s sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden. And that explains why now, after all this time, after making the sweetest of sweetheart deals in the history of sweetheart deals, with the President’s son, Merrick sees the need to officially give Weiss special counsel powers.

We need just go back a couple of weeks to when Noreika, also in Delaware, saw through all the holes in the deal offered Biden by the DOJ and sent it back to the drawing board. Judge Noreika was expected to just pass her blessing on the deal, as would be expected of one of the Delaware political morass dwellers. But much to everyone’s surprise and both sides’ dismay, the judge — to quote Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacre — “wasn’t going to look at the eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was,” and it was an (un)typical case of “American Blind Justice.” Noreika actually read the text of the deal and she picked out a paragraph in it giving Biden immunity from prosecution forever and ever. Aren’t there some things still under investigation, she had the utter temerity to ask? Wouldn’t this be unprecedented? Uh, yeah, well, yes, your honor, the government lawyers had to admit. So, of course, there’d be no immunity for them.

Biden’s and his attorneys didn’t like that idea, which they said they hadn’t agreed to, so they pulled out of the deal right there in the courtroom — even though they effectively were on the same side as the government on it — and Biden pleaded not guilty to the implied crimes alleged in the deal. The DOJ would have to take the charges to trial and Hunter would have a chance to defend himself against them. But you see, dear naive reader, that’s about the last thing the government, doing the bidding of Hunter’s daddy in the White House, wants. So now what was called for was covering up the cover-up represented by the sweetheart deal, and that is where Garland’s appointment of Weiss as special counsel comes in.

Covering up the cover-up

The photo above portrays two other weasels. They may look like Joe and Hunter Biden, but they’re weasels through and through. So, if you want to know the real objective of any of this chicanery, it’s to keep all the blow back of Hunter’s misdeeds from reaching his daddy, the “Big Guy” mentioned in Hunter’s own emails that were found on his laptop. The Big Guy, who increasingly can be, has to be, seen as the real head of the Biden crime family. So to understand how Garland and the administration think this will work, consider that:

  • There have been no indictments nor any charges filed against Hunter. The most critical violations expire with the statute of limitations in October, just two months off. If there are no indictments, no charges, Hunter is off the hook for them and he can walk away unscathed.
  • Weiss can take his case anywhere in the country, which means he can judge shop to have venue changed away from Delaware and from Judge Noreika and get a judge more amenable to the whole corrupt plan and who will approve a new but equally sweet sweetheart deal.
  • By avoiding a trial, the administration also avoids the discovery and testimony that can definitively tie Joe to Hunter’s illicit overseas business deals. Again, keep in mind that this concerns Hunter only to a trivial amount. The real objective is protecting the Big Guy, his father, the President.

Of course, in a country with a fair and unbiased media none of this would fly. It would be considered the biggest political scandal of half a century, if not forever. But those in power know we don’t have that kind of fair and unbiased media, and the official state media — compliant to the wishes of the Democratic Party — are doing their utmost to cover the whole affair up. In fact, some readers may be seeing some of this for the first time if the likes of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and some other reliably biased outlets, are the sources for what passes for their news. A democracy starved of truthful coverage of its alleged leaders cannot function nor survive. And that’s where we are at today.

But even as the state media does their best to bury this story, there are things underway in the (barely) Republican-controlled House of Representatives. This latest move by Garland, combined with the evidence being uncovered through banking records showing tens of millions of dollars funneled from overseas sources to the entire Biden family through a maze of 20 shell companies, as well as the revelations made by Hunter business associate Devon Archer to Congress that directly tie Joe to Hunter’s deals, are pushing things closer and closer to Speaker McCarthy declaring an impeachment inquiry against the President. And with that comes subpoena and discovery power that will bring the whole sordid matter into the limelight. Even the state media will find that hard to ignore.

Note: No weasels were harmed in the writing of this piece. Also, no insult was intended to the actual animals. It’s the human weasels we’re referring to derogatorily.

Featured Image: Omniverous, FotoEmotions, via Pixabay. Used with permission.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, U.S. District Courts. Public domain.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. Photo by Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

 

 

 

 
Nothing to see here, folks

Nothing to see here, folks

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That’s become the not-so-hidden message coming from what is supposed to be our government: Move along, folks, go on home, nothing to see here.

The most recent example of this is how the discovery of a baggie of cocaine in the White House has been handled (or mishandled) and information related to it squelched. Never mind that the White House is supposed to be “the People’s House.” You’re just expected to pay your taxes and shut up. You have no right to know whose coke it was, why supposedly no culprit has been found, and likely won’t be, or even where it was found. Right from the beginning we were told no fingerprints or DNA swabs were taken of the baggie — which, if that is true, is nothing short of investigatory malpractice — and then that part of the story quietly disappeared from the news.

First, we were told it was found in the White House Library. No, it was near the West Wing Lobby. No, no, it was found near the  Situation Room (described as “the most sensitive single location in the US government”). Wait, stop the presses! It was found near the West Wing Executive Entrance, an area described by the evil elf, Karine Jean-Pierre, who pretends to be the President’s Press Secretary, as “a heavily traveled area” (translation: Gee, it could be anyone. Maybe a little old lady from Wichita. Who knows?) We also were told, as if we’re a bunch of rubes who believe the world is flat, that there are no cameras in that area that might have captured the act of placing the coke baggie, wherever it was found.

The Secret Service, charged with guarding the safety of the President and the White House and once a highly regarding organization, is leading what passes for an investigation. And in true “nothing to see here, folks” style, the Service has announced it will wrap up its investigation this week. When you don’t want to find something, you don’t find it.

Now I’m not going to say that the coke belongs to Hunter Biden, the President’s once crack-addicted son supposedly now in recovery. That’s supposed to be the point of an investigation, to find evidence of who the guilty party is. But applying Occam’s Razor, which says the most obvious explanation usually is the correct one, that might make him at minimum a prime suspect. Fingerprints, DNA, security cameras could easily either rule him in or rule him out. But if it is him, there goes that sweetheart deal he negotiated with his father’s Justice Department, and it be prison, not diversion, in his future. So, nothing to see here.

Nothing to see at the Justice Department either

It’s not just in the White House where we’re told there is nothing to see. The FBI, another once respected organization, has been in possession of Hunter’s now famous, or infamous, laptop since 2019, a year before we were supposed to believe that it “had all the signs of Russian disinformation,” and it confirmed the laptop’s authenticity in very short order. Hunter documented his own crimes — cocaine usage, influence peddling for his dad, lying about his drug usage on a gun application, possession of child pornography — and his many non-chargeable sexual peccadillos on the laptop.

Further, the IRS uncovered evidence of his tax evasion on income of multiple millions of dollars going back as far as 2014, and his gun was found in a trash bin across from a school after his former sister-in-law, his deceased brother’s widow, whom Hunter had been boffing, along with her sister, disposed of it there.

Let’s face it. It doesn’t take more than three years to investigate crimes when the evidence is right in front of you. That is, if your last name isn’t Biden. But if it is Biden, it’s another case of move along, nothing to see here, folks, and offenses that would have landed (and routinely do) mere mortals, lowly citizens, many years behind bars, resulted in a couple of misdemeanor charges and a divergence program that will result in no jail time at all for Hunter. Well, unless of course the coke in the White House belongs to the first son, which would be a violation of the terms of the agreement before it is even accepted by the court. So is it any wonder, given the depth of corruption of this administration, that the Secret Service investigation is likely to come up empty-handed?

Keep in mind — when the beast wants to find someone, it does. Consider, in contrast, how the FBI and DOJ have gone after every single person who pranced through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, rooting them out nationwide. And the kinds of judicial abuse, pretrial detention, and excessive sentencing imposed on those people. And then we have pro-life activists raided and bullied and arrested by the FBI when the lame Attorney General, Merrick Garland, claims the people who have firebombed and vandalized pro-life care centers can’t be found since, gee whizz, they did those things at night and it was dark. I wonder if it was “dark” in the White House, too, when that coke was left.

Nothing to see at the Supreme Court

This “nothing to see thing” is getting to be a habit. More than a year ago the Dobbs decision, which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was leaked from the Supreme Court weeks before its planned release. Something like that had never happened before, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among High Court watchers and pundits. Chief Justice John Roberts vowed the guilty party would be found and and he launched an investigation. Unlike the two-week wonder of the Secret Service’s investigation, that one is supposed to still be under way. And what is the result of that investigation? If you guessed nada de nada, go to the head of your class.

A tradition of nothing to see

As discouraging as all these recent “nothing to see here” situations are, this is not the first time our government pulled this kind of gaslighting. For instance, for 60 years we’ve been waiting to find out the facts behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For 60 years the real truth has been kept classified and hidden from the American public, even though all the facts were supposed to be released, but weren’t, by 2017. Many of us suspected all along that the CIA was behind the assassination, which explains why the facts have been kept secret so long, by administrations of both parties. And earlier this year someone who knows what those documents say told then-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson that it was, indeed, the CIA who masterminded the assassination. According to Carlson’s source, when asked if the CIA was involved with the assassination, replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

Then, a year after the Kennedy assassination, we had the Tonkin Gulf incident which was used as a pretext for amping up our involvement in Vietnam. And when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the country how the North Vietnamese had attacked our naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, he knew the story was bogus. As did President Lyndon Johnson when he announced new troops to be sent to Vietnam and a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

We wouldn’t know the truth about the Tonkin Gulf incident or the many other lies we were told during the Vietnam War were it not for the Pentagon Papers, leaked by now deceased former Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. And we wouldn’t know what those papers — 7,000 pages, photocopied page-by-page by Ellsberg on an old-style copy machine — had The New York Times and Washington Post and close to two-dozen other newspapers not defied the government’s attempt to squelch the information they contained and published the papers. And that is the essence of the dilemma we are facing today.

The real problem

Instead of calling truth to power and defying the power structure, most of today’s mainstream media and Big Tech are doing what they can to protect this administration, this corrupt president, and are blindsiding the American public about these stories that, in more normal times, would be considered major scandals. It’s bad that the government and politicians try to deceive the citizenry. But worse, is when the news media covers up official misdeeds and doesn’t call the government out on them. And that is where we are today. What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.

Featured image, cocaine and a rolled hundred, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden in the bath, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, via Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

U.S. Supreme Court, David Dibert, from Pexels. Used with permission.

JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after, Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Share the piece and subscribe, here and there.
One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

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This piece initially appeared a year ago following the biggest surrender and debacle in U.S. history, all overseen by Joe Biden. It is important we don’t forget this event which long will live in infamy, both for the damage it did to the reputation, prestige, and credibility of this country and to its security and that of other countries. We also need to remember the needless deaths of 13 U.S. service members and hundreds of Afghans due to the incompetence of this administration. That number has now been eclipsed by the deaths of many other innocent Afghans and those who assisted U.S. and allied efforts over 20 years, unconscionably abandoned by Biden, and still more deaths in Ukraine resulting from the Russian invasion which was encouraged by the U.S. failure in Afghanistan and the abject weakness of this administration.

In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please comment and share the piece and subscribe here, and there.
Nothing Matters Anymore

Nothing Matters Anymore

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Now we know, as if we had any doubts before: Nothing matters anymore. That might be an odd conclusion to come to for me, who has a Substack called Issues That Matter. But it’s consistent, actually. That nothing matters anymore is an issue that matters. Or should. Unfortunately, there is bloody little anyone can do about it except grin and bear it and suffer the consequences, or look for a way out of the madhouse that the United States has turned into. That’s the option I’m once more looking at.

So Jell-O Joe Biden, the Grifter in Chief, unilaterally has “forgiven” big chunks of student loan debt. Never mind that he has no legal power to do so. Even the Queen of Grift, Nancy Pelosi says so. But who needs laws any more? Laws are for the pissants, not for the Big Guy. Certainly not for the ruling elites (provided they’re of the right party). Whether it’s allowing people out of their contractual obligations to pay their debts or allowing now more than 2 million — heading toward 4 million — illegal aliens and border crashers to enter with impunity into the country, or using his official offices to further his family’s corrupt enrichment, law and the Constitution are irrelevant. If you haven’t noticed that, you haven’t been paying attention.

If you had student loans that you struggled to pay off, if you saved and scrimped so you didn’t need student loans, or maybe you never got to go to college, why would you mind paying off some rich kid’s loan? Are you really that selfish? Maybe you went in the military and risked, or even gave, your life or your limbs. Maybe you were counting on the GI Bill to pay for your education. You don’t think this was a fair deal, what Biden did? You self-serving bastard!

You pay your taxes and are distraught about our record $30 trillion-something national debt, and now you’ll be asked to contribute your share — estimated at $2,000 per taxpayer — to pay off the $300 billion (which is just a guess, no one can say how much this lawless act really will cost because no one has a clue how many people will be affected) this give-away will cost. You must not understand your role as a taxpayer, which is to support without question every mindless and insane thing your government does. Add the increase to inflation all this extra money going into the economy will bring, and the costs are likely to be even more. Who’s problem is that? Why, yours, of course!

And if recent history is any indication, fraud will take a big part of that money. Like the $100 billion-plus in pandemic relief funds that were stolen by fraudsters, only a very small percentage of which has been recovered or prosecuted. But that’s “official” fraud. Most of the funds will go to the “unofficial” fraud that lies at the basis of this whole thing. Biden’s “generosity” (at your expense) is aimed as a payoff to young voters to vote for Dems in the upcoming midterms, and an even bigger payoff to the colleges and universities that profit off the student loan program.

See those huge tuitions? $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, for at best a spotty education? When the student loan program was taken over by the federal government, it was just an incentive for college administrators to really jack up tuitions, which have risen at rates far in excess of the general inflation rate. Given the huge endowments most of these institutions have — not just measured in the billions of dollars, but in the several tens of billions of dollars — why should they not be forced to bear the costs of this largesse? Because this is really a payoff for all their contributions to the Democratic Party, to which 90 percent of university contributions go. When I lived in Key West 40-some years ago, it cost a six-pack of beer to buy a vote. The stakes have gotten a whole lot higher in the current game of political corruption and vote buying.

Nothing Else Matters, Either

Beat, rape, rob, or car jack someone in some of our biggest cities and at most you might face a misdemeanor charge, if that. You’re likely going to be back on the street the same day or the next one, all set to commit your next crime. Defend yourself against this kind of rampant criminality, and you might be the one who faces real criminal charges. This is not just speculation, but has become a daily occurrence in cities ranging from New York to L.A,. Chicago to Seattle, Philadelphia to San Francisco, and many in between. Is it any wonder that crime rates are rising at the fastest rates since the 1960s, or are reaching record rates in many places? If you’re a law-abiding citizen, just STFU and pay your taxes and take it. You don’t count. You don’t matter. You’re just some freaking racist if you complain about this kind of treatment. You’re getting in the way of remaking America, so move aside or get crushed.

Remember when Trump said there was a plan to do away with single-family zoning and moving urban problems right into your neighborhood? Well, guess what. That’s exactly what is happening. Not far from where I live, the city council of the city where I went to graduate school, Gainesville, Florida — home of the University of Florida and a city mostly of single-family homes — voted to do away with single-family zoning. The future is coming to a place near you, and it’s coming fast. Don’t like the idea? Tough. You don’t matter.

I’ve already opined and lamented what has clearly become a dual standard of justice in this country, and you can read about that here and here and in lots of others of my postings. This is no longer a collection of isolated incidents but has become what is called a pattern and practice. Combined with pervasive corruption, this might be the biggest threat facing our democracy, aside from the repression of any dissenting views and the near-total silence and even complicity on the part of the nation’s mainstream media.

When Nothing Matters Anymore, It Becomes Pervasive in the Society

If you have the stomach to watch the news, you’ll often see images of people being beaten, shot, and otherwise attacked on the streets while onlookers capture the scene on their phones, hoping for their 15 seconds of fame, while doing nothing to intervene or try to protect the victim. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and cowards.

In the 1960s we had the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped, robbed, and murdered on the street in Queens, New York, while onlookers observed from their apartment windows and did nothing. The incident shocked the conscious of the nation at the time. Today, we can’t even muster shock when these things occur. The onlookers that don’t scurry away watch and video the events.

This tendency was brought home to me yesterday. A young man doing some work for me related how he was driving down a busy street in the next town, and there was this little 4- or 5-year-old girl skipping down the center line of the street. Cars just drove by, paying her no heed as if she wasn’t a vulnerable little human but rather some curiosity or maybe even a nuisance to speed by. To his lasting credit, this guy stopped, turned his truck sideways across the road to stop traffic, began to try to get the girl off the road, and to find what careless adults had let her slip out from their attention. Down the road were a couple of guys looking at their boat on a trailer. He shouted at them, and they suddenly “noticed” that the little girl, who belonged to one of them, had gone missing. The damned boat was more important to him then the presence and safety of the little girl. The pair hadn’t even noticed she was missing.

It’s entirely possible this young guy saved the little girl’s life. But this is what we’ve come to. People can’t take a few minutes to stop and try to save a little girl skipping down the middle of a busy street. A boat takes precedence to a life. We see kids left to die in hot cars and people are advised to put their phones or their purses in the back seat so as not to forget their kid, as if a phone or purse is more important to them than the kid. People watch and look on as criminals attack innocent people, and they and the courts and the law look the other way. You struggle to pay your debts and your bills and your money is stolen and given to those who don’t.

The Romans at least confined their barbarity, their bread and circuses intended to placate and buy off the populace, to the arena. In modern-day America, the entire country is the arena.

When nothing matters anymore, nothing matters anymore.

Featured Image, Factory, Peter Hermann/Pixabay. Used with permission.

Wires, Cottonbro/Pexels. Used with permission.

Scrap Metal, Tom Fisk/Pexels. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Please comment, share this piece, and subscribe here, and there.

 

 

 
Striking Thirteen: Where We’ve Arrived

Striking Thirteen: Where We’ve Arrived

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“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

— George Orwell, opening sentence of 1984

It has taken thirty-eight years, but at last we have arrived in 1984. Lies have become truth, truth has become misinformation, and ignorance has become strength. It may not be a bright cold day in April, but the clocks are, indeed, striking thirteen.

As some of you may have noticed, it has been distressingly long, more than a month, since I’ve written in this blog. The easy, if only partially truthful, explanation is that I’ve been distracted with several other projects, some of a writing nature, some not, and some just to fill the void and, futilely, avoid dealing with the ever increasing absurdity that surrounds us and that seems so difficult to even explain any more.

In my last post I wrote of how Elon Musk planned to buy Twitter, hoping to return some semblance of free speech and thought to the platform. For this, he was viciously attacked and maligned, mostly by those on the political left, for whom free speech would seemingly be a priority. But in the way in which contemporary American life is twisted and mutilated in ways hard to explain, to those on the left, the idea of free speech, of all different views being openly expressed, is like holding up a crucifix to a vampire. It cringes and raises its arm over its eyes, screaming at the very idea. The left has gained the political strength it previously lacked through the use of its own misinformation, crushing and blocking any views that contradict its view of the world, and it is strongly resisting relinquishing that power.

Government becomes a parody of itself

And why should it, considering we now have an alleged president who, through his minions, daily tells the most bald-faced lies in the hope, not entirely without basis given a docile and compliant media, that they will be accepted by the masses as truth. To further its assault on the inconvenient truth, it — through the Department of Homeland Security (itself something of an Orwellian name) — came up with its own version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, suitably dubbed the Disinformation Governance Board.

It turned into one of the rare instances when government becomes such a parody of itself that it can’t be covered up, no matter how diligent and proficient the liars at the White House podium are. We had the department, headed by the monumentally incompetent Alejandro Mayorkas, whose incessant misinformation about the catastrophe taking place on our southwest border is uttered under oath to Congress, appointing a self-anointed “disinformation fellow” and “Russian disinformation expert” — herself a clownish figure and Dem partisan given to spreading massive disinformation — to head its new Ministry of Truth.

If you haven’t been sequestered in a Nepalese rice patty over the past several weeks, you’ve probably seen this clip of the new (and then) Czar of Disinformation, Nina Jankowicz, doing her best (which is not to say good) Mary Poppins imitation on TikTok at least several dozen times. Viewer warning: If you are of weak stomach, or wish to retain any vestiges of faith in what passes for your government, you may wish to skip this short video . Viewer discretion definitely advised.

Aside from being an embarrassment to even herself, Jankowicz is a major purveyor of disinformation, calling the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop a product of Russian disinformation (it’s been well established to be authentic, and in fact was before the 2020 elections, though Twitter blocked any mention of it), and a promoter of the Steele Dossier, which formed the basis for the Russia Hoax that dogged the Trump administration for its entirety, an utter falsehood which has now been definiteively tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

But we can take heart, gentle reader. After just a few weeks on the job, and under cover of claiming she and her family had received death threats, Jankowicz resigned as Disinformation Czar, and DHS put its Disinformation Governance Board on hold. Clock, in this case, pushed back to 1983. But the fight is far from over.

The Supreme Court Springs a Leak

While the Ministry of Truth story was unfolding, an even bigger story broke lose. Unprecedented in U.S. history, someone — still undetermined nearly a month after the fact — leaked, to Politico, a draft of a majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, in which the 1973 landmark decision of Roe v. Wade was to be overturned. And, no surprise, all hell broke out over this news, and pro-choice demonstrators immediately showed up at the High Court, and then they took to raucous demonstrations outside the homes of the conservative justices after someone “doxed” their addresses.

As shocking as this unprecedented leak was — no one has yet been held accountable for it, despite an investigation announced by Chief Justice John Roberts — more shocking was the Biden Administration’s statement that it did not view the leak as a crime, and its refusal to condemn the demonstrations taking place at the justices’ homes. It seems the separation of powers — the Supreme Court being one of the three branches of government — holds little importance to the administration nor to the Democratic leadership in Congress. The latter should come as no surprise since no less than Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer previously, in 2020, threatened conservative justices that they would “reap the whirlwind” if they went ahead with decisions of which he disapproved.

“I want to tell you [Neil] Gorsuch. I want to tell you [Brett] Kavanaugh,” Schumer shouted out to an abortion-rights rally from the steps of the Supreme Court. “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

As a matter of law, 18 U.S.C., Paragraph 1507 makes the actions and words of Schumer and those demonstrating outside the Supreme Court and the justices’ homes a crime:

“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

But with an administration and a so-called Justice Department for which law means little, you can expect no action to be taken to enforce the statute. Justices couldn’t even get police protection for their homes in the liberal jurisdictions in which they live.

In a country where virtually every aspect of life is swirling down the toilet at an alarming rate, with the blame squarely falling on Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, it would not be cynical to see the leak as a way to try to gin up voter support to keep the party from going over an electoral cliff in the upcoming November midterm elections.

With support for Dems falling to record lows among Hispanic and black voters — upon which the party depends — the last remaining bastion of support was among women. So what better way to mobilize that support than by leaking the Alito decision? Of course, that logic escaped some on the left, including NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, who led the false-flag counter-charge, claiming the “leading theory” was that a conservative clerk leaked the draft. “Leading,” to whom, other than Totenberg and the left?

Driving the school bus onto the tracks

If the domestic mess isn’t big enough, Jell-O Joe decided he needed to bolster his cred overseas, so he went off to South Korea and Japan, fumbling and bumbling as he went. But it wasn’t enough that he addressed the South Korean President by his predecessor’s name, or that he told jokes no one understood, or that he looked like his usual sleepy, disoriented self. No, that wouldn’t do.

Once again going off the remarks prepared for him by his handlers, while in Japan Biden announced that the U.S. would intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan, in a moment reversing decades of U.S. policy. Needless to say, this drew an immediate outcry from Beijing, and Biden’s handlers once more were left walking back his remarks and cleaning up the mess in Biden’s brain. So, in an instant, the guy you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus drove it, with all us kids aboard, onto the railroad tracks and stopped it there, with a train coming.

And then, if all this doesn’t tell you the clocks are striking thirteen in America, we have the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. And all the lessons we should have learned from Colombine and Sandy Hook and Parkland weren’t learned, and we’re back to mourning the dead and asking how these individuals slipped through the cracks when the warning signs were writ large and unmistakable. But that gets into a whole new area. I think I’ve depressed you, and myself, enough at this point, so will end it here.

Listen for those clocks, my friends, that tell us where we’ve arrived, and may they be a wake up call to all of us.

Featured image: Pure Evil’s George Orwell Graffitti Wall, Southwold, England. From streetartsheffield.com. Used under Fair Use.

Nina Jankowicz, from TikTok. Used under Fair Use.

Chuck Schumer reaping the whirlwind, AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.