Category: Political Commentary
Lessons unlearned

Lessons unlearned

By | | Comments 0 Comment

By now the world knows what happened on October 7 in Israel. The gruesome details and the jarring, terrible images have been broadcast on television and across the Internet worldwide. It is not my purpose to repeat those here. Rather, my intent is to focus on the human toll and to look at what brought us to this catastrophic place.

To trace the roots of what led to the events of the 7th we need to look back to the Obama administration and its appeasement of Iran and the forces in the Middle East that are supported, trained, and funded by Iran. For anyone who has been tracking things over the years what is happening now is, at best, only mildly surprising.

It’s important to understand that the current crowd in the White House are, for the most part, Obama administration recycles. No one with even minimal powers of observation believes Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge or calling the shots. It is the ideological bent of the people on the President’s security team that leads them to believe that appeasement of Iran and downgrading of relations with Israel results in peace in the Middle East when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. What is currently under way is visible proof of the error of this belief system, but their ideology and misguided understanding of Middle East dynamics prevents them from choosing another course. And now they’ve led us into the very mouth of the beast and how things will shake out, not ruling out a globally catastrophic result and one that almost certainly will come to do damage at home both in America and Europe, is very much unknown at this point.

I warned of the dangers of this approach of appeasement going back years before I started this blog. On Sept. 12, 2012, during Obama’s first term, I published The Trap Into Which We’ve Been Led. The dangers of appeasement were evident even then, in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, though they’re obvious to anyone who has studied or is conversant with the history of appeasement in world affairs. And then on Aug. 14, 2014, in the middle of Obama’s second term, I published Let Them Eat Hamburgers, describing the aloof and uncaring attitude Obama and his team displayed at that time in the face of the cruelty being inflicted on the Yazidis. Most of that piece could be written today, simply substituting Biden for Obama. In the face of the barbaric attack inflicted on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden waited Saturday until it already was late night and the end of a day of terror in Israel, to make a pathetic three-minute statement. And then Sunday he was silent, hosting a barbecue — at which they certainly ate hamburgers — on the White House lawn, and on Monday he took a holiday as the carnage continued both in Israel and in Gaza. It took him until Tuesday, three days after the barbarity had commenced and more than two hours later than scheduled, to stumble his way through a speech ostensibly supportive of Israel but without a single mention of the power behind Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I know most people don’t click on the links in my pieces, but I strongly urge you to click on those and the ones that follow and read the linked pieces. You will gain greater understanding of how all these things tie together.

Funding Iran’s Support of Terrorism

Much has been made, as it should be, of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that the Biden administration has unfrozen, part of a deal to exchange five Americans held by the Iranians for five Iranians in U.S. custody. Given that this is just the latest in a string of disproportionate concessions this administration made in exchange for Americans held by other countries, so much for the long-standing principle that we don’t pay ransoms to free people held hostage. The most predictable result, of course, is that such payments just encourage more hostage taking. But the other result, in this case, is that it frees up funds for Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, to support more terrorism. Such as what is going on in Israel right now. Never mind the blather coming out of the administration that Iran isn’t allowed to use the funds for other than humanitarian purposes. It frees up $6 billion for the Tehran regime to spend on its extraterritorial adventurism.

Regardless the argument over the $6 billion, it’s chump change compared with the other funds this administration and the Obama administration handed to the Iranians, no strings attached. In my piece Dancing With the Devil posted in March of last year, I noted this as an adjunct to Biden taking America’s energy independence, as fostered by Donald Trump, to going hat-in-hand to some of the worst actors on earth to once more meet our energy needs after restraining domestic oil production:

“But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

“All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.”

In the intervening time, the Biden administration’s decision to ignore the sanctions Trump imposed on Iran allowed the terrorist state to sell its oil to the Chinese and elsewhere, yielding at least another $60 billion to Tehran. The country’s foreign currency reserves, which the Trump sanctions had dropped to just $4 billion in 2020 from $122.5 billion in 2018, had recovered to $41 billion in 2022 and could be as high as $100 billion now. Good work, Joe.

Proving the Naysayers Wrong

While Biden and Obama courted the mullahs of Tehran in the misguided belief that they could be dissuaded in their quest for a nuclear bomb and somehow act as a responsible nation among nations, Trump understood the reality and pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He understood well how peace is achieved through strength, not shows of weakness, and when he took out Iran’s chief architect of terrorism, Qasam Soleimani, in January 2020, the naysayers and handwringers predicting dire consequences were definitively proven wrong. That was then and this is now, and Tehran, like the Russians and Chinese, sees the weakness in Washington, drawing a direct line from our shameful surrender from Afghanistan under Biden’s hand, and the three feel free to exert the bellicose power they had restrained during the Trump years, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or — holding our collective breath — Taiwan.

Commenting on what precipitated the carnage in Israel, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump during the Soleimani affair, succinctly stated the reality: “What has created war here is American weakness, American appeasement.” To prove Pompeo’s point, we now have a State Department that called for restraint on the part of Israel, whose citizens were being slaughtered on a scale, proportionately, mutliple times greater than 9-11, before being forced to retract the statement.

Instead of the clarity that came of projecting American strength in the interest of world peace and stability, we have an administration that, for all intents and purposes, has lost its mind. We have an open border policy that — by design — has allowed something like 7 million illegal immigrants into the country with little to no idea who they are. Agents so far, in the three years of the Biden debacle, have identified 264 individuals on the terrorist watch list — by far a new record — but have no idea how many terrorists were among the 1.5 million “gotaways” — the ones who just snuck across the border without apprehension. It would be beyond Pollyannish to believe hard-core terrorists were not among them, intent on setting up sleeper cells in the country, waiting for instructions to strike. Even with its tighter border controls, the same is true in Europe, and elsewhere. Terrorism doesn’t just exist in some far-off land, something we watch on television. It exists among us, too.

Hearing representatives of this administration one can be excused for thinking one is watching an episode of Saturday Night Live rather than the performance of serious public servants. Tracking the moronic statements of their boss, we have once honorable people like Admiral John Kirby, NSA spokesperson, saying with obvious seriousness that global warming and a 1.5-degree gain in global temperature would be a worse outcome for the human race than nuclear war, or that white supremacy is a greater danger to the country than terrorism. Baghdad Bob has metastasized across Washington and we all have to fear for our very survival in the face of such institutional delusion.

Before I entered the Foreign Service in 1988 I made an agreement with myself. I decided that I’d stay in the Service as long as it felt right. But if it stopped feeling right, or if I was asked to do something I had serious qualms of conscience about, I’d resign. I pretty much followed that compact with myself when, in 1999, I drafted my resignation letter to then SecState Madeleine Albright. One wonders how much their pay check or title means to people like Kirby to so debase themselves before the public they are charged with serving that they prattle such nonsense and not tender their resignation. Whatever their motivation, it is clear that no lessons have been learned by this administration and the future, not just of Israel or the Middle East, but America and, indeed, all the world, lies in serious jeopardy.

Featured Image: Women kidnapped by Hamas, Israel War Room via NDTV. Used under Fair Use.

Noa Argamani kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Avi Nathan, boyfriend of Noa Argamani, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Bodies of 260-some people murdered by Hamas terrorists at music festival, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Don’t believe your lying eyes

Don’t believe your lying eyes

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 

Don’t believe your lying eyes. That’s the message from this bungling and utterly dishonest administration. And from the lying and corrupt State Media that allow them to try to pull the wool over the country’s eyes.

Bidenomics — the misguided but unintentionally descriptive term for Biden’s disastrous economic policies — are working just fine. Don’t believe your lying eyes that tell you something rather different whenever you check out at the grocery store or gas station.

The border is secure. Never mind that new records of illegal border crossers are broken on a nearly daily basis now and illegals are creating true crises for blue cities, from New York and Boston to Chicago and L.A. Pay no attention to hordes of illegals walking across our alleged border and camping out on a sidewalk near you. Or those 100,000+ Americans killed by Fentanyl carried across the Southwest Border or the 82,000 children “lost” by this administration. Don’t believe your lying eyes! The border is secure and everything is just fine!

Crime isn’t on the rise. The statistics say otherwise, as do the experiences of ordinary people in virtually every city of any size. But don’t believe your lying eyes. If there is more crime it’s undoubtedly the Republicans’ fault and, besides, those criminals are probably just hungry.

The president is fit as a fiddle, right on top of his game. Ignore that his stumbles, verbal, mental, and physical, have been happening with such alarming regularity that White House staffers are charged with overriding his impromptu policy statements and keeping him from falling since his competency to serve as President is seen as just one fall away from serious challenge. Don’t believe your lying eyes (or ears, either, in this case).

The “Big Guy” didn’t profit from his son Hunter’s overseas business imbroglios. All that money didn’t get to him in any way and didn’t influence his actions as an alleged “public servant.” Don’t believe your lying eyes! Or what your brain tells you (oh, you have a brain? Turn it off immediately! No logic or thinking is allowed!)

Biden didn’t retain pallets of classified documents from when he was a senator and vice president and had no right to them. No! Look away! It’s Trump who is your culprit, not Biden! Those papers were all safe there in that unlocked garage with his Corvette and Hunter. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Of course we have a system of equal justice. The administration would never think to skew things its way nor persecute the president’s main opposition candidate. The horror of the very thought! We rend our garments! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Our respect on the international stage has returned. Don’t for a moment believe that other heads of state, friend and foe alike, have noticed the bungling senile fool that serves as our head of state and haven’t taken note of his mental and physical debasement. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

And perhaps the most glaring and critically important thing of all: Clearly the president is in charge of everything and it’s not true that he is just a figurehead for a ruling junta, where the real power resides and is exercised. No, no! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

The term for this process is gaslighting, one of the Left’s pet terms they like to level against the Right. It’s hard to imagine more blatant examples of the process, defined by Merriam-Webster as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes!

The Emperor has no clothes

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to compare the current state of affairs in modern-day America to Hans Christian Andersen’s Nineteenth Century folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But these are cliche times in which we live and few comparisons apply as well to them as Andersen’s 1837 parable. Sadly, we lack that astute child who noticed that the emperor had, not a resplendent new suit, but no clothes on at all.

I don’t know if it’s unique to America to have political charlatans masquerading as medical or psychological doctors, but the other day I heard one such charlatan wax enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s great condition and how fit he has kept himself. This about the guy who falls off his bike, repeatedly falls up stairs going on Air Force One, and can barely move his flimsy little lawn chair on the beach where he goes to fill the 40% of his term that he’s spent on vacation. Meanwhile, this same Dr. Charlatan had the temerity to call Donald Trump “a heart attack waiting to happen.” Now I’m not prepared to predict who might or might not have a heart attack — it’s a pretty imprecise science, as far as I can tell. But I do have a set of still fairly good eyes and a functioning brain that tells me, were I to put my money on who was more physically and mentally capable and astute, Biden or Trump, I wouldn’t move my chips to Biden’s spot on the board. Sorry, but I will believe my lying eyes!

On the border, I recently saw a leading member of the State Media try to shut down a guest who had been to the Southwest Border and saw with his own eyes how it’s wide open by insisting — in verbatim lockstep with the liar at the White House’s podium — “the border is secure.” The smirk on the face of the interviewee was priceless. Like me, he was willing to believe his lying eyes, even in the face of derision from the State Media spouting the official and 100% false administration line. And then I heard another minion of the State Media explaining how your dollar is going further now than it was a year or two ago. Whether she is a shameless liar or a total moron lacking in any knowledge of basic economics with no understanding of inflation, how does such a person get through J-school, let alone get hired by a major media company? And how many of her viewers buy into the nonsense she peddles? Hopefully they’re believing their lying eyes.

A little bit of background is called for. While the examples cited here don’t arise directly from members of the White House Press Corps, that’s where the official party line from the administration begins and then propagates through the system. When I was a practicing journalist my colleagues and I largely saw the White House Press Corps as a band of journalistic whores (actual word we used). That was nearly four decades ago, and compared to the current White House Press Corps, its members in those days would be nuns or monks in relation to today’s travesties. Daily White House Press Babler KJP stands before the corps and tells the most bald-faced and easily disproven lies and, with a couple of exceptions, the whores in the corps of alleged journalists nod their heads, take their notes, and go forth, with their colleagues, to lie to the American public. This is what passes for journalism in contemporary America. And you’re not supposed to believe your lying eyes?

Twisted up in their own petards

I’m not sure what a petard is, but I have to admit it’s becoming increasingly amusing to watch as those in the State Media who, for the past three years, carried water for the Biden fabrication machine and crime family suddenly to become unsure of what their mandate is. This confusion has arisen as Dem power brokers, to whom the State Media are largely beholden, begin to express their doubts about whether Jell-O Joe is capable of a second term. Never mind that most of us didn’t think he was capable of a first term, the issue now has become the potential second term and whether he’ll finish his first term.

One recent poll showed that 72% of Americans, including 79% of independents and 48% of Democrats, don’t want him to run again. Some polls have shown as many as 75% of Democratic and Dem-leaning voters don’t want Jell-O Joe to run again. Apparently more people are believing their lying eyes and the State Media is in a quandary how to deal with that inconvenient fact.

As I’ve opined before, and will continue to since it’s the absolute 1,000% truth, the real threat to American democracy lies not within the government nor any given administration nor even within any insidious social or political movements, but with the lack of a free, fair, and unbiased news media. As I recently said, repeating sentiments frequently expressed over the years, “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.”

So now that the cat is out of the bag, anyone with two functioning eyes, or two functioning ears, combined with one functioning brain and the willingness to look beyond the official party line, can see that Joe Biden is incapable of being president. The quandary now for Dem power brokers, deep-state actors, and their media client sycophants, has become who will replace him on the ticket. This is largely an existential question for them since they are looking down the barrel of a deeply embittered Donald Trump, currently beating Biden in the polls by as much as 9 points, who is determined to finally and definitely clean out that swamp that Washington and the federal establishment has become. And even in the highly unlikely event that Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, the other leading candidates on that side of the divide also have strong inducement to do the same.

Faced with an opposition party with a deep bench of qualified candidates, the Dems have a dearth of possibilities that could effectively fill the seat. They also have to deal with the Kamala Problem, what to do about the vice president who was put in as a poison pill to keep Biden from being removed from office and who has proven to be even more unpopular than her boss. Can she be bypassed without raising a storm among the Democratic Party’s various constituencies in its divide-and-rule strategy based on racial and sexual politics?

The party, I’m quite sure, would have no issue with another figurehead candidate while pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. But are voters willing to accept another such sham and insult to democracy? Already the Dems are rolling out their dirty tricks to make another go at stealing the 2024 election if they can’t win it through fair and legal means, and their hope is that voters won’t believe their lying eyes for another 12 or so months, when early voting begins.

Don’t be one of those gaslit voters. No matter what anyone tells you, believe your lying eyes. There is plenty there to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Featured Image: Eyes, Noelle Otto, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Retina: Basila Vlad, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Iris: v2osk, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

Back Posting: The Myth of the Independent Voter

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 

In this early lead up to the 2024 presidential election we hear a lot about the role that independent voters will play in the outcome. According to some analysis, independents — voters who are not adherents of either of the two major parties — will likely determine the outcome of the election. There also could be a major impact that results from a determined third-party movement, itself formed by candidates and voters disaffected with the two-party system. But the question I ask is the same one I raised 13 years ago, in the second year of Barack Obama’s first term: Is there really such a thing as a truly independent voter?

I am putting up now the piece I wrote then to look into this question. While there have been some significant shifts on the national electoral scene — substitute, for instance, “Maga Republicans,” Joe Biden’s derisive and divisive term of artifice for adherents to Donald Trump’s version of electoral independence, for the Tea Party movement of 2010 — I think the overall question remains a legitimate one. I offered a possible way forward in my original piece. I still think the approach presented then might still be a viable one, though I’m somewhat more skeptical today that a sufficient number of voters could coalesce around the tenets I posit as the “LCD” principles that could bring most independents together.

While actual party registrations, in states that allow voter registration by party, don’t necessarily reflect it, surveys of voters show an ever greater trend toward those who see themselves as independent — 49% versus roughly 25% who identify either as Democratic or Republican — and so that key element of my initial piece remains valid, if only more so.

Read the piece and draw your own conclusions. I’d be interested in knowing readers’ views on the question.

Originally published on May 3, 2010

In America today the largest group of registered voters is neither Democratic nor Republican. It is independent – no party affiliation. It is how I have been registered my entire voting life.

Independents form the plurality – plurality, not majority – of voters in this country today. That would appear to give independents huge political power and a force in their own right to be reckoned with.

To some extent, that is what we have seen, whether in the power of independents to elect Barack Obama President, or their power to defeat Obama candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently, Massachusetts. They have held the “swing” power, and are likely to hold it in the mid-term elections in November and very possibly in the next presidential election in 2012.

Some of the biggest proponents and promoters of this trend, such as economic and political commentator Lou Dobbs, author of the book “Independents Day,” see it as the future wave in American politics. And to some extent, Dobbs and others of like mind are right. But there are serious flaws and limitations to this theory and to the real long-term effect of the independent force in America.

The main flaw and limitation has to do with the source and driving motivation of these non-aligned voters. Many – perhaps most – are just disenchanted with and disabused of both the major political parties. Some are fed up with the state of American politics in general. Some just have not decided to pick a party (and in some states this allows them to pick which party primary in which to vote), some just want to keep their options open while still being mostly inclined to vote for one of the major parties. Or, as in my case, remaining unrecorded with any party enables us to maintain an appearance of being truly independent and unaligned, as much as the reality of our actual voting patterns might indicate otherwise.

Now this is where the theory of the independent movement is flawed and ultimately breaks down, and why I call it a myth. It is because the motivation of the independent voter is so varied and, in fact, is neither monolithic nor ideologically driven. Some have come out of the Left, believing the Democratic Party has not gone far enough in pursuing a leftist-liberal agenda, as well as others who believe it has become too liberal. Others have come out of the Republican Party, believing the G.O.P. has lost its way, has become too liberal or, for others, too conservative. And there are others – perhaps the truest of independents – who despair of both parties and the very political process and system and who want to see an overhaul of the process.

Given this diversity of origin and opinion and, ultimately, objective, this is where the theory of the power of the independent all comes unglued. Independent voters may help vote in an Obama or vote out a Corzine, but they are like an unruly herd of buffalo galloping back and forth between the fence lines of the political pasture. On closer examination, there is no given trend or makeup, whether political or ideological, to this vast herd of independents. And this is a key reason why there is no, nor can there be, any viable “Independent Party.” If we consider the two major parties fractured, so much more so would be this mythical “Independent Party.”

What we have seen are movements – or more precisely, one movement in particular – emerge from this larger movement (trend would be more accurate), and that is the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party adherents clearly derive from a range of more mainstream political views, the bulk one can say are from the right-of-center persuasion, primarily the Republican Party. And this is the issue, that there is no one center of political thought around which independents might gravitate.

Were the Tea Party movement, for instance, to congeal into a Tea Party Party, it almost certainly would be doomed to fail and, in effect, would in most cases likely serve to elect those liberal left-of-center candidates the Tea Party people would most like to unseat. No, with all due respect to Lou Dobbs and his persuasion, the independent trend as it currently stands is not a viable political force and, as such, is a myth.

That said, there may be one way and one way only to move this independent trend (I resist calling it a movement) forward into a viable and cohesive political force. And that is to distill and draw upon the points of the LCD – Least Common Denominator. Not in the pejorative sense of that term, but in the sense of getting to the very basics upon which most independents either already base their independence or to which they can be drawn.

Admittedly this is open to some argument, discussion, even disagreement, but the two that I would propose as most basic core values and to which the greatest number of independents of all origins might be drawn are adherence to Constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility. I believe that for a majority of those who now consider themselves independent, these two values are those they can most likely get behind. There might be some wiggle room in how these principles are interpreted, or how strictly they might be adhered to, but I think these are the LCD core values that would form the basis of any viable independent movement that might lead to significant electoral victories.

This would not be a third party, which I think the facts still indicate would not be viable in America, but rather would represent a shift in voting patterns that would elect candidates, regardless of party affiliation or ideology, who at least adhere to the two LCD core values.

Eventually this would result in profound and ostensibly lasting changes in the two major parties. Though what is truly needed, in the words of educational philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, is a state of continual revolt and not revolution which, in the end, just returns things to where they started. With this pressure of the independents and their insistence on adherence to the two core principles, we might then expect to see a real paradigm shift in the politics of this country and perhaps – though it is a lot to expect – a diminution of the political polarization we now see.

Ideally the two core principles might be expanded on with two additional principles – those of individual responsibility and limited government – but then one risks losing some of the adherents who can agree on the two most basic core values. These added values, however, might draw in those independents who, like me, are of a more libertarian bent. It is when things are pushed into the realm of social legislation – a range of issues that include anything from lifestyle choices to abortion – that cohesion again begins to break down. But here adherence to Constitutional principles might limit the push for such social legislation and hold things together.

In other words, you might not approve of some of my lifestyle choices any more than I might approve of yours, but the Constitution, notably the First Amendment, gives us both the right to believe and act as we wish provided we do no harm to anyone else. My desire to reach out my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Even such a recognition would mark a major step forward from where we are now with polarization of the political dialogue and everyone trying to run everyone else’s life.

Featured Image: Cutting an Independent Path, Stephen Leonardi, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Different Folks, Different Votes: Cotton Bro Studio, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Read my other essays and commentaries on this site.

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

 
Covering up the cover-up

Covering up the cover-up

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 

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.