Tag: Joe Biden
Democracy Dies in Darkness

Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Democracy dies in darkness. If you care at all about the very survival of American democracy, you should be absolutely terrified of what is happening right now with the cold-blooded and utterly partisan repression of information being perpetrated by the social media giants, bolstered by the mainstream media. Unprecedented in the nation’s history – in the world’s history – it is not government carrying out this bald-faced censorship, but private enterprises, arguably the most powerful corporations on the face of the earth.

This frightening trend toward non-governmental repression, whether it is from the social media giants, cancel culture, or militant forces on the left such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, was the subject of my recent posting on Banned Books Week: Canceling of Thought in 2020 America on my Stoned Cherry blog. In just two weeks, its prescience has come to the fore in what I would assess to be the single biggest threat facing our democracy.

When the New York Post broke the story confirming what many of us have long suspected, that former Vice President Joe Biden had used his official position to favor the business and financial fortunes of his son, Hunter, and, worse, may have himself gained vast financial benefit, not just in Ukraine but in China, the social media giants Twitter and Facebook immediately shut down the story. They then went even further, and blocked any attempts to repeat the story, such as through retweets, and even shut down the accounts of the Post itself and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The mainstream media, in lockstep, hardly even mentioned, or downplayed, what the Post reported, and Biden and his campaign have been virtually silent on the story, and has not been pressed on it. You can be excused if you feel you’re in Belarus, Russia, China, or even North Korea, and not in the United States of America, with the concerted attempt to keep the public from even knowing about this story.

What we are witnessing is the utter crushing of the free flow of information in this country, and it is coming from private, but extraordinarily powerful, actors. And it is coming entirely from one side of the political spectrum. This is something I have been warning about on this blog for years now, but it has now reached a critical state.

Keep in mind that the Post is not some frivolous journal. Depending on the method and time of calculating circulation, its readership ranks anywhere from No. 1 to No. 6 nationally, and, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, it is the oldest continually published newspaper in the country. Despite allowing dubious stories negative about President Trump to appear and remain on their platforms, including stories based on anonymous sources and illegally obtained (and never verified) information, Twitter and Facebook justified their actions based on these very grounds, as well as the untrue grounds that the Post‘s information had been “hacked.”

This piece isn’t intended to deal in detail with what the Post found and reported about the senior Biden’s involvement in furthering his son’s business dealings, but rather with the egregious repression of the information to keep it from reaching the voting public. I’d direct you — and strongly urge you – to read the actual stories (we, not being Twitter or Facebook, are happy to be a medium for the free flow of information), which, if accurate, confirm in detail what I previously opined about Biden’s abuse of his office while he was Vice President in the Obama Administration:

The initial Oct. 14 story reporting on emails that reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father

The Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

The Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

The Post stories

In brief, the stories report what some 40,000 emails – as well as thousands of texts, videos, and photos, some showing Hunter in “very compromising positions,” including having sex with an unidentified woman while smoking crack cocaine – to and from Hunter Biden reveal about his personal life, business dealings, and the leveraging of his father’s position to further his business interests and prodigious income, both in Ukraine and China. The emails were on a water-damaged laptop left in April 2019 with a computer repair shop in Delaware, and which was never picked up. While the shop owner couldn’t identify the customer as Hunter Biden, the laptop bore a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother, and the email address was that of Hunter Biden at that time.

The shop owner, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at contacting the customer, eventually informed the FBI of its existence, and the agency seized the laptop in December. Meanwhile, the shop owner had made a copy of the hard drive, which he turned over to Robert Costello, attorney for Trump legal advisor Rudy Giuliani. In due course, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon informed the Post about the emails, and on Sunday Giuliani turned the drive copy over to the Post.

While it is true that the authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed, the Biden campaign initially did not deny their existence or authenticity, pointing only to the action by the social media platforms to block stories concerning them as “proof” they weren’t true. Subsequently, the campaign painted them as promoting some sort of “conspiracy theory.” The Democratic smear campaign went into full “Russia conspiracy” mode, with California Rep. Adam Schiff, Liar-in-Chief in the Congress, hauling out that now long-debunked theory to attempt to delegitimize the emails. That there are people foolish enough to continue to believe that sort of nonsense is indicative of the deliberate failure of the media to propagate truthful information in this country.

As further confirmation of the clear media bias that has taken hold, moderator George Stephanopoulis did not ask Joe Biden a single question about the Post reports during Thursday night’s townhall on ABC, and neither did any of the voters posting their softball questions. How this is not considered journalistic malpractice eludes me. Meanwhile, on NBC, moderator Savannah Guthrie, sounding more like a petulant high school girl than a professional journalist, hurled accusatory statements (often inaccurate) at President Trump who, to his credit, responded to them, and the often challenging questions put to him by voters, with grace and directness. Given that NBC came under attacks both from without and within even for hosting the townhall with Trump, can there be any residual doubt that there is almost no fairness or honesty left in the mass media?

There are so many things wrong with this whole state of affairs it leaves one grasping for what to include and what to leave out, so as not to confuse the issue or wind up going on for thousands of words on the topic. With some 20 million people reported to have already voted in this critically important election, how can it be considered a democratic process when virtually all the powerful levers of information are working to suppress reports that, in earlier times, would have been considered crucial to determining the outcome of an election?

Applying the Twitter standard used to suppress the Post stories, the American public would not have known about the Pentagon Papers (hacked), COINTELPRO (stolen), Watergate (unidentified sources), or the revelations of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (hacked and unidentified soures), or Edward Snowdon (also hacked and unidentified sources). Would America be a different country today were those revelations suppressed? Undoubtedly. Would it be a better country? I doubt many would even attempt to make that argument. Further underscoring the issue, news of the trial of Assange has been largely ignored in the same media that relies on the First Amendment to defend its egregious actions, posing a further threat to freedom of expression, even more under attack in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Pushing back

There are some efforts going on to bring the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, all tech giants, to heel before things go further down the rat hole of Chinese-style repression. Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley have called for a subpoena to haul Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 23, and Hawley – a key advocate for limiting the power of social media to suppress ideas they don’t like – is calling for the Committee to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Hawley also has joined senators Marco Rubio, Kelly Loefler, and Kevin Cramer in seeking a clarification of the Section 230 rules which protect platforms from civil liability when third parties post false or misleading information. The argument is that the platforms are abusing the special protection Section 230 gives them and, if they are going to censor third-party posts, then they should be subject to the same liability as any media source not given such protection.

Additionally, the RNC has filed a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Elections Commission, alleging that its censorship of the Post stories amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.

I would contend that the time for hearings and testimony has past, and it’s time for action. In any event, note that all the concerns are being raised by Republicans. If you think the Democrats are concerned about protecting free speech, you would be seriously mistaken. When they have the weight of what amounts to state media on their side, they remain unmysteriously silent. Partisanship and the pursuit of power supersedes basic American and human rights, as far as they’re concerned. In the one-party Democratic state of California, for instance, an Orwellian-style “Ministry of Truth” has been proposed to seek out and block what it determines to be “fake news,” and a similar measure has been introduced by a Dem in Congress. They see themselves as the arbiters of what is “truth,” and the less you know about what is really going on, the better for them, they reason. But is that better for you?

How would you feel to learn that Joe Biden used his influence and public funds to have a Ukrainian prosecutor, who was investigating the company on whose board his son served, fired? Or that he lied to you about not meeting with a top executive of that same company? Or that he sold out American interests to companies and institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to benefit his son, and very possibly himself? Who, you might wonder, is the “big guy” referred to in one of the reputed Hunter emails, promised a carve out of 10% of a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with China’s largest private energy company? Might it be Papa Joe himself? And have you ever wondered how Biden got as wealthy as he is, living off his government salary for 47 years?

Read the Post stories and see what you think.

If it’s up to Big Tech, the majority in the mass media, and the Democratic Party, you won’t ever find out answers to these, and many other, questions. And you should be very terrified, indeed. Democracy dies in darkness, and night is closing in all around us.

Featured image: Candle in Darkness, Rahul, Pexels. Used with permission.
The Entertainment Event of the Year: The First Presidential Debate

The Entertainment Event of the Year: The First Presidential Debate

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Debate, n.: “discussion or argument about a subject”

                                                                             — Cambridge Dictionary

By now, if you’re not doing 40 years in solitary in a maximum-security prison, you’ve probably heard more than you want to hear about the Entertainment Event of the Year, the first Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Maybe you were one of the 29 million or so people who actually watched the brawl that went on at the Cleveland Clinic on the evening of Sept. 29, in which case you have your own views on the proceedings.

It’s worth noting that, based on viewership numbers, the effect of the debate in terms of electoral support for one candidate or the other is probably minimal. It’s reasonable to conclude that most voters have already made up their mind which candidate they support, and many voters have already cast their votes in early voting. The preliminary numbers are down 36 percent from the first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, when those numbers were 45.3 million. The numbers will go up as other means of viewing the debate are figured in, as they did in 2016 when the final tally rose to 84.4 million, besting the previous record of 81 million set in the Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan debate in the pre-Internet days of Oct. 28, 1980. But it is doubtful that they will reach the 2016 numbers.

Words used to describe the countretemps – there’s one word right there – between the candidates include “brawl,” “travesty,” or, as CNN’s Jake Tapper put it, “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck” (come on, man – using one of Joe Biden’s favorite expressions when he’s at a loss for words – how did you really feel about it?)

There are links at the conclusion of this posting where you can see a replay of the debate or read a transcript of it.

I guess it largely depends on what you were expecting, how you reacted to the proceedings. Me, I was calling it the Entertainment Event of the Year long before it actually happened. Given Trump’s flair for showmanship and his relentless pursuit of rolling over his opponents, whoever those opponents might be, and Biden’s utter contempt for the President, who would expect anything less? The biggest unknown variable was whether Jell-O Joe would hold-up to the pressure, much as he did in the last Democratic debate against Bernie Sanders, or if he’d collapse before our very eyes into a mass of babbling protoplasm. In the end, he managed to hold up pretty well, clearing the very low bar that had been set for him, while sacrificing the truth on the altar of political expediency, knowing most of the media and his own ill-informed followers would let him slide on his deceits.

When all was said and done, I’m inclined to agree with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie – one of Trump’s debate coaches – who said in the aftermath that Trump’s performance was “too hot” and he often stepped on his own message, while calling Biden’s performance “very shaky.” There were times I wished Trump would have kept quiet and just let Biden hang himself, which he came precariously close to doing more than once before Trump cut him off and spoke over him.

On the other hand, there was the view of Fox News commentator Dan Bongino, who felt Trump’s strategy was to solidify his base to assure the largest voter turn-out in Republican Party history, and in that he won big in the debate, Bongino said.

While he says he will participate in the next two presidential debates planned, it remains to be seen whether Biden doesn’t yet bow out of the remaining debates.

A debate or a brawl

I’ll confess, I like the idea of a free-flowing, open format debate, adhering to the definition of the word as a “discussion or argument about a subject.” Almost out of the gate I thought that’s what we’d get as Trump and Biden went after each other, shouting over each other, and completely ignoring the pre-agreed debate rules. Shouting between the candidates isn’t exactly unknown, as anyone who watched the Dem primary debates is aware, but the debate moderator, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, didn’t seem inclined to let things go as they might.

Before the debate had gone on eight and a half minutes, Wallace was cutting into the fray, saying, “All right, we’re gonna jump in right now. Mr. President. Mr. President, there’s a moderator,” trying to quiet Trump.

At times it seemed Wallace was conducting a journalistic interview more than moderating a debate, and he appeared put-off when the candidates sidestepped his questions. Some commentators later expressed sympathy for Wallace, but my feeling is, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. I doubt Wallace, a seasoned journalist, is looking for any sympathy, but from my perspective it would have been more useful if he just shut up and let the brawling go on. A presidential debate isn’t just about the issues, but it’s also about how the candidates handle themselves and deal with criticism.

Anyway, that was just the beginning. By the end of the full hour and a half, the debate had become one between Trump and Biden and another one between Trump and Wallace. Given the extent to which Wallace let Biden slide on key issues of fact while pressing Trump to state things he’s already stated repeatedly, I think there was good reason for Trump to feel put upon. And it wasn’t all Trump pushing the limits of decorum. At thirteen and a half minutes in, Biden, already seriously flustered as Trump tied his opponent to Socialist Bernie Sanders, said, “Folks, do we have any idea what this clown is doing?”

“Clown?” An appropriate way to refer to the President of the United States? In any case, I, for one, did recognize what Trump was doing, getting Biden to separate himself from the far left of his party, the wing that had agreed to allow Biden be the candidate in trade for accepting their far-left agenda, and getting them to see whom they had signed off on.

Two and a half minutes later, Wallace pressed Biden to say whether he supported packing the Supreme Court or doing away with the Senatorial filibuster, which Biden refused to answer, instead babbling nonsensically, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue — the issue is, the American people should speak. You should go out and vote. We’re in voting now, vote and let your senators know how strongly you feel. Vote now, in fact let people know it is your senators. I’m not going to answer the question.”

Trump continued to press him on the issue, saying, “Why won’t you answer the question — radical left — well, listen.”

That was when Biden made perhaps the most disrespectful comment of the night, saying directly to the President: “Would you shut up, man?”

Trump continued to press Biden to release his Supreme Court nomination list and, rather than let Biden state clearly he would not do so, Wallace cut in, sounding the allegorical bell ending the round. Even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the flustered Biden, and he went on, “That was a really productive segment, wasn’t it. Keep yapping, man.”

Later in the debate, Trump managed to tie Biden to the Green New Deal and its $100 trillion price tag, leaving Biden to deny his support for the radical plan, co-sponsored by his running mate, Kamala Harris, as well as its cost.

Not funny, but laughable anyway

I have to say that numerous times during the debate I broke out into laughter, as unfunny as the reality was, mostly listening to the bald-faced lies and blatant absurdities Biden uttered at several points during the debate. Not the least of which was when Trump pressed him on the corruption allegations involving his son Hunter, and Biden had the audacity to say those claims had been “totally discredited.” Totally discredited, by whom, I had to ask? By Mitt Romney, Biden offered. Oh. That’s explains everything, doesn’t it?

Wallace failed to push Biden on the issue and he cut off Trump when he tried to, and went on to offer cover to Biden when he said, “We’ve already been through this, I think the American people would rather hear about more substantial subjects. Well, you know, as the moderator, Sir, I’m going to make a judgment call there.”

I can’t speak for all the American people, but this member of the American people thinks corruption and abuse of power is a substantial subject, Mr. Wallace, particularly as it involves someone who wants to be president.

Other absurdities were Biden’s claim that Trump had brought about the recession – ignoring the fact that he had created a booming economy with the lowest unemployment rate in history prior to the coronavirus pandemic – and then insisting that the Biden plan included shutting down the country until the pandemic was over. Does anyone do any logic tests, much less fact checks, on these things?

Perhaps the best and most quotable line of the night came from Trump when he said to Biden, “Let me just say, Joe, I’ve done more in, in 47 months, I’ve done more than you’ve done in 47 years, Joe.”

Much has been made about Trump’s response to Wallace’s call for him to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, something Trump has frequently already done, and he responded, “Sure, I’m prepared to do it . . . I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace . . . You want to call them – what do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me . . . “

That’s when Biden threw in, “The Proud Boys,” and Trump, trying to think on his feet, foolishly took the bait, and answered, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem . . . “

Biden then made perhaps the most outrageous statement of the night, saying, “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.” To which an astounded Trump (echoing what I was thinking at that moment) responded, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.” Instead of pressing Biden on what amounts to an absurd claim, Wallace again rang the bell on the segment and went on to the next topic.

While Biden accused Trump of being a racist, at no point did Wallace challenge Biden on any of his racist statements, such as when he recently told a radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” or his previous opposition to desegregation or his support of the crime bill that led to millions of incarcerations of blacks.

There were two points on which Trump scored and left Biden with no realistic comeback. One was how every endorsement made by law enforcement agencies have gone to Trump due to his support for law and order, and then saying to Biden how “China ate your lunch.”

Trump also made a key point of how he has been politically harassed his entire term, saying, “So when I listened to Joe talking about a transition, there’s been no transition from when I won. I won that election. And if you look at crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition. Because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started on the day I won and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with the First Lady, they were a disaster, a disgrace to our country. And we’ve caught them. We’ve caught them all.”

In the closing statements, I again had to laugh at how Biden had been coached to look directly into the camera and speak to the audience, pretending he was one of them, while uttering the usual Democratic blue sky claims how life will be so good and Paradise will descend to earth if only he and the Dems are elected. Are there still people so naive to believe that jive? Apparently so.

In the aftermath

In the aftermath, both CNN and Fox News interviewed members of focus groups they had assembled to watch and react to the debate. In both cases, when asked for a show of hands, almost no one’s opinion had been changed, and (as hard as it is to believe at this point in the game) most undecided voters remained undecided. Based on the one or two hands raised, Trump might have had a slight edge with both groups, though nothing statistically significant. What was perhaps most interesting, though, was how Telemundo’s poll of its Spanish-speaking viewers showed that 66 percent thought Trump had won the debate, compared with 34 percent who said Biden did. Perhaps the forcefulness exhibited by Trump influenced that outcome, and it has to send shivers down the spine of those running Biden’s campaign.

Meanwhile, wherever you come down on the debate or the politics, it’s clear we’ve come a long way – and not necessarily a good way – from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Those debates wound up helping to change the course of history in the United States, and form the basis for debate among student debaters more than a century and a half later. I don’t think the Trump-Biden debate just held will have a similar impact, though this election might well determine the future course of the country.

To see a replay of the debate, go here.

To read a transcript of the debate, go here.

Featured image, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, historical image, source unknown.
Replacing RBG: Why the Dems Have No Case

Replacing RBG: Why the Dems Have No Case

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It was not a huge surprise when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died recently at the age of 87. Named to the high court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, her tenacity in overcoming health conditions that would have killed many less ferocious fighters was remarkable. Given her more recent health issues, I think it’s a reasonable conclusion to draw that she wanted to hold on at least until after Jan. 20 when there might be the chance of a new president, one more receptive to her brand of liberal political views.

We usually can’t plan our deaths, and of course that was the case for RBG, too. While the time and date of her demise could not have been predicted, what was predictable was how, no sooner than she had taken her last breath, that the Democrats would immediately raise a ruckus about how the current president should not name her replacement but should leave that to the winner of the upcoming election. Equally predictable, the word they hauled out to apply to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was “hypocritical” if he proceeded with consideration of any nominee named by President Donald Trump. This because it was McConnell who refused to consider the naming of Merrick Garland to the court by former President Barack Obama to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in the last year of Obama’s term.

The Dems’ wholly owned toadies in the media, as well as the rabble in the street, quickly picked up the same refrain. McConnell wouldn’t give Merrick Garland a hearing, so he shouldn’t give whomever Donald Trump names a hearing, either.

The problem with that line of argument is that it completely ignores long-established precedent, the actual basis for McConnell’s refusal to take Garland up for consideration, and such delicate niceties as the U.S. Constitution. Leave out the details and the facts – something the Dems and their media acolytes have gotten rather proficient at – and it sounds like they have a case. Add in those details and facts, and it becomes clear that they don’t.

“The McConnell Doctrine”

Let’s start with McConnell’s reasoning in refusing to bring Obama’s nominee up for consideration while saying he would consider Trump’s nominee. Sometimes referred to as “the McConnell Doctrine,” it wasn’t, as the Dems have asserted, that he wouldn’t consider a SCOTUS nominee in an election year. It’s that the nomination was brought within the context of a divided government: The Democrats controlled the White House, but the Republicans controlled the Senate. That is not the case now, when Republicans control both the White House and the Senate. That is the reason for the different response, not hypocrisy. And McConnell is relying on two centuries of established precedent.

One would need to go back 132 years in American history, to 1888 and the term of President Grover Cleveland, when a Senate controlled by the opposite party considered and approved the appointment of an election-year nominee to the high court. Facing a backlog of cases in the high court, a Republican Senate approved the nomination of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, made by Democratic President Cleveland. There have been 10 cases in American history when an election-year appointment was made by a President of one party to be considered by a Senate of the other party, including six made before the election. Fuller’s appointment was the only one of those to be considered and approved before the election. Of the four made in lame-duck sessions after the election, three were left open to be filled by the winner of the election. Only three nominees of the 10 were filled after election day in a way that favored the elected President, the earliest in 1845, the most recent in 1956.

The Constitution

The Constitution is the basis for all U.S. law and legal precedence. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution gives the President the right to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court, with “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” To wit:

“He [the President] shall have Power . . . and he shall nominate, and by and with Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . Justices of the Supreme Court . . . “

It doesn’t say anything about whether the nomination and appointment takes place in, or not in, an election year. The president is president, and holds the powers of the president, from noon on the first day of his term until noon on the last. And the Senate has the right to advice and consent to the president’s nominations. This isn’t a matter of debate nor is it a matter of interpretation. The Constitution includes no exceptions or qualifications on this point.

Even Justice Ginsburg herself was clear on the subject. In 2016, while offering support for President Obama’s nominee, she said, “The president is elected for four years, not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four.” While urging members of the Senate at that time to “wake up and appreciate that that’s how it should be,” she conceded there is little anyone could do to force the Senate’s hand.

The red herring of RBG’s deathbed wish

The Dems, including no less than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who should know better, have made a big deal out of what has been said to be RBG’s deathbed wish. As reportedly transcribed and released by the late Justice’s granddaughter, Clara Spera, she said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

To which the proper response is a big, so what? As even RBG would have recognized, the hand does not reach far from the grave. All the more so in matters of state, politics, and the Constitution.

Given some of the less-than-judicious things Ginsburg had to say about Donald Trump, before later retracting them, as well as her very liberal views of the law, it’s no surprise that she didn’t want to be replaced by one of Trump’s nominees. But who the person is who replaces her on the court is not up to her, and neither are the conditions of the appointment. That’s just the way it is, sympathy or not for her preferences. Of course at this point we don’t know whether Trump will succeed himself in office or not. We do know he is President now, and has to power to name a replacement for Ginsburg. As he will, and as he should.

Even more irrelevant are the rantings of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Last time I checked, the House plays no part in consideration of or approving a SCOTUS appointment. Nancy says the Dems will “use every arrow in our quiver.” And what arrows are those, Nancy?

The Dems dug their own hole

Until 2013, it took overcoming a Senatorial filibuster – requiring 60 of 100 votes – to approve presidential nominees. That was when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, not happy because he couldn’t muster enough Democratic votes in the house he led, got rid of the filibuster rule for most presidential appointees, including lower court judges. Old Harry apparently forgot, or never knew, the adage, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. In 2017 the Republicans, who had taken over control of the Senate, got rid of the filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominees. Thus, it only takes 51 votes today to approve whomever President Trump nominates. As of this writing, it looks like the votes will be there, even if not a single Democrat votes in favor of his appointment (that in itself goes against what has happened in the past when nominees of presidents of both parties have often been approved by overwhelming, even unanimous, votes of both parties, indicative of how partisan politics have become in recent years).

The new crop of radical Dems seem to have no sense of history, since they are now advocating packing the court with additional members to give them the edge on rulings by the high court. Since it was established in 1789 with six justices, the number of justices has ranged from a low of five to a high of 10. But since 1869 Congress – which has the power to set the number of justices – has set the number at 9, where it is today. Having an odd number of justices is important to avoid deadlocks, and even RBG supported keeping the high court at nine justices. Said Ginsburg in 2019, “Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time.” With more ethical sense than many of her supporters, she pointed out the danger of packing the court to further Democratic Party interests, saying, “It would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

The last attempt at packing the court occurred under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it didn’t end well for Roosevelt. With no sense of, or regard for, history, the idea is again being pushed by the radical Dems. If you can’t win on your ideas, win by forcing your ideas on others. Easy-peasy, but disastrous for democracy and our republic.

The need for a full court now

The idea of nine justices and an odd number of justices on the court is perhaps more critically important now than at almost any time in recent memory. With court challenges already being filed over issues related to conduct of the upcoming election, and with tensions and maneuvering to impact the outcome of the vote running high, it is almost inevitable that electoral outcomes in many places across the nation are going to wind up at the Supreme Court. Should the vote divide 4-4 issues will not be decided in final form, and the faith of the American public in the electoral system and process will be even further undermined than it is already. For the high court to be able to rule definitively, whether one agrees with those rulings or not, is essential to settle crucial issues, possibly even including outcome of the vote for president.

“Burn it down, blow it up”

The very existence and legitimacy of the rule of law is already under attack, and not just by the rabble in the street. None other than members of the mass media and commentators given wide attention are advocating a destruction of our current system and imposition of their will by any means necessary, even if Biden and the Dems manage to regain control of the White House and Congress. If you have any doubt about that, listen to the words of none other than CNN anchor Don Lemon, who makes up with chutzpah what he lacks in brain power:

“We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” Lemon said to fellow host Chris Cuomo. “You’re going to have to get rid of the Electoral College, because the minority in this country get to decide who our judges are and who our president is. Is that fair?” And if you had any doubt about what this rabid segment of the population has in mind, Lemon clarified things for you by saying, “And if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can stack the courts and they can do that amendment and get it passed.”

Some go even further, advocating violence and arson. RBG’s body was barely cold when author Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American scholar of religious studies (sic), tweeted, “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down . . . Over our dead bodies, literally.” Another author, Aaron Gouveia, who claims to know what it takes to raise happy sons, tweeted, “Fuck no. Burn it all down.” And a member of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission – ethics, Dem style, mind you – Scott Ross, writing to Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, said, “Fucking A, Ed. If you can’t shut it down, burn it down.” And those are authors and supposed keepers of the national ethics. What about the mindless anarchists who have taken over the streets?

Things have sunken so far in this country that when the President and First Lady Melania Trump went to pay their respects to Ruth Bader Ginsburg – whom Trump has called “an amazing woman” – on the steps of the Supreme Court, crowds booed them and chanted, “Vote him out! Vote him out!”

Meanwhile, the cowardly Jell-O Joe Biden, cowering in his Wilmington basement, has once more blown with the political wind. After previously announcing that he would release a list of names of people he would consider for nomination to the Supreme Court should he be elected, he now refuses to, calling it “inappropriate to do so.” While Donald Trump announced his list of prospective high court nominees as he was running for President the first time – it may have been a key factor in his election – and recently added to it, Joe Biden would rather keep voters in the dark.

Asked by a local Wisconsin reporter during one of his rare and brief forays out of his basement – “Should voters know who you’re going to appoint?”– Biden made it clear what he thinks of voters’ right to know whom he supports. “No, they don’t,” he responded. “But they will if I’m elected. They’ll have plenty of time.”

Do you really need to know more than that about where you stand with Jello-O Joe and his Dem power-broker handlers?

Photo credits: Featured image, Ralph Bader Ginsburg, AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin, used under Fair Use
Profiles in Cowardice – Part II

Profiles in Cowardice – Part II

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Yesterday I presented my Profiles in Cowardice 8-5. If you haven’t read that piece, which includes an explanation of the Profiles, you should read it first.

Today we present Profiles in Cowardice 4-1.

4. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

Like with Chicago’s Lightfoot, a reasonable person has to scratch his or her head and wonder, how did this overgrown buffoon get to be mayor of America’s largest city? It’s said that New York City has good water, so there must be another explanation. The answer lies with mindless Democratic Party loyalism and the mental frailty known as liberalism.

Back when I lived in New York I came to realize that most New Yorkers, despite the reverie in which some hold the city’s residents, aren’t terribly bright. But even New Yorkers were fed up with the widespread crime and dirt and deterioration that marked Gotham in the 1970s, when I lived in the city. It took a Rudy Giuiani twenty years later to get things sorted and return New York to the realm of habitability after three decades of decline and decay. But that wasn’t something de Blasio could tolerate, and in short order he plunged New York back into the chaos that preceded Giuliani. And then, in a single week at the end of May, he allowed the forces of anarchy and destruction near-free reign, finishing the job he started, and things have only gotten worse in the months since.

New Yorkers report that the homeless have taken over the subway system – the world’s largest mass transit system – child molesters have taken over formerly upscale hotels, and nude men wielding 2 x 4s roam the streets. Thugs knock over elderly people just because they can, violent criminals are released overnight on their own recognizance, only to return to the streets and commit more crimes, and whole blocks of formerly tony boutiques and shops are boarded up. Along with hundreds of other businesses, looters ransacked Macy’s flagship store on Herald Square (yes, Virginia, there is an idiot in Gracie Mansion), and the murder rate has soared to levels not seen in many years. Is it any wonder that so many people are leaving New York that moving trucks are double-parked as they load the furniture of those who have given up on life in New York ever returning to normal?

After urging people to go about their normal lives at the beginning of the coronavirus fiasco, de Blasio continues to keep the city locked-down, and the country’s most populous city remains a ghost of its former self.

In his latest act of cowardly moronicy, de Blasio has announced he will put all top city employees, including himself, on furlough to help ameliorate New York’s massive budgetary shortfalls. But New Yorkers must wonder, in de Blasio’s case, if they will be able to tell the difference.

3. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

If it seems that I’m picking on New York, it’s because it’s so easy to pick on. Cowardice seems to have taken over the state, beginning right at the top with the Empire State’s chief executive. Or Coward in Chief, if you will.

It’s hard to overplay Andrew Cuomo’s cowardice, even harder to overplay his utter, shameless dishonesty. A shell game conman in Brighton Beach would seem like the epitome of honesty and discretion compared with Cuomo.

While Cuomo made small rodent noises decrying the violence downstate in Gotham – more indicative of the antipathy he and de Blasio have for each other – he didn’t do anything about it. If that were his worst offense, Cuomo might have been spared receiving his own Profile in Cowardice. But Cuomo’s offenses are far greater than that.

This recipient of the white feather yowled about how he needed ventilators, needed hospital beds, needed PPE, needed just about everything to deal with the coronavirus pandemic coming to his state. Never mind that, as governor, Cuomo had taken no action to address a possible pandemic. While it’s a matter of some debate whether Cuomo was willfully remiss or was just doing what his predecessors had (or hadn’t) done to prepare, it’s not a matter of debate that Cuomo got everything he begged Trump for, and then some. In return for receiving every ventilator needed – New York wound up with so may ventilators it started sending them to other states – for getting a U.S. Navy hospital ship, which was hardly used, and a complete Army field hospital at the Javits Center which treated about 1,100 patients before being closed in May for lack of need, Cuomo now has come out and accused the President of having “caused” the coronavirus outbreak in New York. Do we want to talk about ignorance with impudence? One need go no further than Cuomo.

Let’s look at the numbers, Governor. The death rate in New York State stands at 1,703 per million population (it’s significantly higher than that in New York City, but let’s just look at the state of New York). The only higher death rate in all the world is across the river in New Jersey, another Democratic state, where it stands at 1,744 per million. Outside the U.S., the highest death rate is that of San Marino, with 1,237 deaths per million, followed by Peru with 935 deaths per million. The death rate for the U.S. overall stands at 607 per million – about a third of New York’s rate, and eleventh in the world.

If the half-dozen states with the highest death rates – all Democratically controlled states – were taken out of the equation, the U.S. death rate falls to about 362 per million, twentieth in the world, down between The Netherlands and Ireland. Now you probably don’t know that, if you get your news from the mass media, who would have you believe the U.S. is the worst case in the world, but those are the facts, if you’re still one of those increasingly rare people to whom facts matter. But we digress.

What you also might not know, and which secures Cuomo’s place among my Profiles in Cowardice, is that it was his order to send thousands of elderly COVID-19 patients into nursing homes, leading to thousands of excess deaths – estimated between 6,400 and as high as 12,000 or more – among nursing home and long-term care facility residents and staff, ostensibly to save space in hospitals, even as the Comfort hospital ship and the Javits Center field hospital went underutilized. Even as the policy was being questioned, Cuomo doubled down on his decision, despite having called nursing homes a “feeding frenzy” for the virus.

“It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,” said one person whose elderly father had been in a nursing home where 50 people died, before dying of the ailment at home.

The DOJ is now investigating New York, along with three other states – New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – whose Democratic governors followed similar policies as Cuomo’s.

Cuomo, more than perhaps any other governor in the country, has tried to present himself as the most effective counterweight to the coronavirus, and when you have a brother who is a CNN anchor providing you with journalistic oral gratification, you can try to get away with that. A look at the facts tells a different story, and Cuomo has earned his place on our list.

2. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

We’ve talked about Nancy “Let Them Eat Ice Cream” Pelosi before, and I’m sorry to have to inform you of this, we’ll probably have to talk about her again. Meanwhile, she has earned her place on our Profiles of Cowardice.

If you’re disturbed by hypocrisy, as I am, it’s hard to find a bigger hypocrite than Pelosi. You know when she says she’s praying for Donald Trump, the saints are rolling over in their graves, groaning. When she says she cares about the Constitution while tearing up the President’s speech right up there on the dais, the Founding Fathers are rolling their eyes. When she says she’s looking out for the ordinary people, you can just see her bankers rubbing their hands together as they count her many millions of dollars and her fellow millionaires who are Dem donors doing the same. And when she says she wants to get assistance to the millions of individuals and businesses suffering due to economic dislocation caused by coronavirus shut-downs, if it doesn’t include payoffs to Democractic causes and sacred cows, she’s not in any rush, so suck it up, suckers.

Ice Cream Nancy’s latest display of hypocrisy was another hair styling kerfuffle (what is it with politicians and their hair?) After publicly supporting closure of hair salons to keep from spreading coronavirus, Pelosi was caught on camera trotting maskless around a San Francisco hair salon, which had been closed to the public, so she could get her hair done. After all, she’s Nancy Pelosi, and you’re not. The graceful thing to do would have been to cop to what she did. Even Lori Lightfoot, in her own way, claimed responsibility for her hair salon hypocrisy. But Pelosi is too much of a coward to do that. Reminiscent of the words used by former Washington Mayor Marion Barry when he was caught red-handed snorting cocaine in a hotel room with a prostitute – “Bitch set me up!” – Pelosi used virtually those same words.

“I was set up,” she said.

No one put Pelosi in that stylist’s chair other than herself, any more than the police put Barry in that hotel room. Neither was set up, but both are cowardly liars. Meanwhile, the owner of the salon – it was not her but an independent stylist who let Pelosi in, but it was she who released the security video – has gotten so much hate directed at her that she has to permanently close her salon and leave San Francisco. Not a word of remorse, much less apology, from cowardly Pelosi. No, indeed. It’s Ice Cream Nancy who has demanded the apology from the salon owner.

But Pelosi earned her penultimate place on our list for something much more serious than her hypocrisy. As cities across the country burn, she has blocked every piece of law-and-order legislation that has been brought before the House. If it’s bad for Trump, Pelosi’s arch-nemesis, let ‘er burn. The irony is that Pelosi’s strategy might actually be working in Trump’s favor. It wouldn’t be the first time.

1. Joe Biden

And the winner of the top spot in our Profiles in Cowardice (envelope, please): Jell-O Joe Biden.

If you’ve been watching Joe Biden over the past several months, you’ve seen a doddering old fool babbling nonsensically, almost entirely sequestered in his Wilmington basement. Propped up by his wife, Jill, and his faceless political handlers, an unprejudiced observer would call what is being done to Biden elder abuse, all in the cynical pursuit of political power. It’s painful listening and watching this man as he embarrasses himself on a daily basis. The few questions he answers are softball questions that have been scripted or pre-approved by his handlers. Without a teleprompter, he’s lost, even responding to these cream puff questions. He can barely get by with a teleprompter, mechanically reading statements prepared for him.

As a human being, not as a politician, I have sympathy for Biden. I’ve been around dementia and have seen its debilitating effects first hand, and Biden exhibits all the symptoms of it. It’s a difficult and frustrating stage that afflicts many older people. I can see old Uncle Joe having his Jell-O with other kindly elder folk at dinner in a rest-home dining room. Thus my name for him. What I can’t see is him at the helm of the nation in the Oval Office.

Biden, as we’ve previously documented in several postings on this site, has been mired in various corrupt deals and bad policies for much of his political career, most recently during his stint as Barack Obama’s Vice President. Biden’s corruption goes beyond enriching son Hunter, who leveraged his father’s position to fill his coffers and fortunes in Ukraine and China. As former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi ably laid out in detail at the Republican National Convention, Biden has spent a half century in politics enriching various members of his family, much like a crime family boss. It’s impossible to determine his position on any issue since, if you don’t like what it is today, wait a day or two, and it will change. He is the quintessential opportunist.

It’s pretty obvious that the Dem power brokers know Biden can’t possibly serve out a full term, if by chance he is elected President, and they have installed Kamala Harris – another malleable politician who will blow with whatever wind is beneficial to her – as his putative running mate, but who is the real candidate. Speaking in Tampa on Tuesday, in one of his rare trips out of his basement, a befuddled Biden let the cat out of the bag when he referred to the “Harris-Biden ticket.” Doing a verbal dance around the reality, Harris in a recent speech referred to “a Harris administration,” even if she tried to recover with a closing reference to the “Biden-Harris ticket.” Do you wonder who the real head of the ticket is?

It’s not Biden’s corruption, and certainly not his mental state, that earns him the top spot on our Profiles in Cowardice. No, it’s his willingness to put himself ahead of his country, his willingness to be used and manipulated politically, his willingness to do and say anything, just so he can be President of the United States, even with the full knowledge he is not up to the task. He has as much as acknowledged that fact himself, and that was months before his condition had deteriorated to its current degraded state.

If you were on an airliner and Joe Biden was the pilot, you’d get off that airplane. Joe Biden himself would. Yet, he wants to put himself at the controls of the country, be captain of the Free World. And for that, he deserves the top spot in our Profiles in Cowardice.

It wasn’t always like this in American politics. There was a time when those who would run for high office put their country, and not their own political or vain egotistical interests, first. If you’re of a certain age you might remember, as I do, a former Senator from Missouri named Thomas Eagleton. Eagleton was named to be George McGovern’s running mate in the race for President in 1972. And then it came out that Eagleton had suffered over the years from bouts of depression and previously had been hospitalized and given electoshock treatments. After some hemming and hawing and questions about his suitability to be the next in line to have his finger on the nuclear button, Eagleton stepped down.

Eagleton had performed well in all the positions he held, including Missouri AG, and he went on to serve two more terms in the Senate. I’d venture that Eagleton would run rings around Biden given their respective conditions at the time of their nominations. But while Eagleton set aside his political ambitions, Biden refuses to acknowledge what is openly apparent, allowing himself to be used as the figurehead in a political ploy that might well be the biggest act of fraud ever attempted in American political history.

I give you my nomination for the No. 1 spot on the Profiles of Cowardice, Jell-O Joe Biden.

May God (or the American electorate) save us.

Photo credits: White feather featured image, Max Braxmeier, Pixabay, used with permission. The following used under Fair Use: Bill de Blasio, Robert Miller, New York Post; Andrew Cuomo, AP Photo; Nancy Pelosi, greatamericandaily.com; Joe Biden, Kevin Lamarque, Reuters
Another Swing, Another Miss Part III

Another Swing, Another Miss Part III

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This is third part of a posting, Another Swing, Another Miss, that I initially put up on Oct. 2. Part II appeared on Oct. 4 and, ostensibly, this will be the final installment in the series. If the points made in these postings aren’t clear to you by the time you’ve gotten through this third part, we’re both wasting our time.

In the first part I predicted that the Democrats’ latest attempt to pin something, anything, on President Trump would fail, as did all their previous times at bat against him. In that part I promised to explain what “there” there is in the Ukraine imbroglio, the latest incarnation of the Dems’ attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election – a “there” not with Trump, but with former VP and current presidential contender Joe Biden. I kept that promise in the second part and then went on to say there is a much bigger “there” in which Biden and his son Hunter are involved.. Now, in this part, I will explain that biggest “there” of all, which involves China.

If you haven’t read the first two parts in the series yet you should now, and then go on to read this part. All this will make much more sense to you if you understand what leads up to it.

A Profitable Family Outing on Air Force Two

On Dec. 4, 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden, son Hunter Biden, and Finnegan Biden, Hunter’s daughter and Joe’s granddaughter, stepped off of Air Force Two into the chill winter air of Beijing. They were greeted by children bearing flowers before being whisked off to meetings with top Chinese leaders. With the trappings of a family outing – all, of course, on the U.S. taxpayer’s nickel – the Bidens had arrived on what turned out to be not just a high-profile state visit, but a most lucrative few days for Hunter.

Hunter, Joe, and Finnegan Biden tour Hutong Alley during December 2013 visit to Beijing. What back alley deals did Hunter make during the visit? Photo by Andy Wong – pool/Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Ten days after the visit, during which Hunter Biden’s meetings with high-ranking Chinese officials went largely unreported, Rosemont Seneca Partners, the hedge fund in which the younger Biden is a principal, concluded a deal, initially valued at $1 billion but later expanded to exceed $2 billion, in which Bohai Capital, a subsidiary of the Chinese government-owned Bank of China, agreed to invest in Rosemont Seneca. Together, they formed a new entity called Bohai Harvest RST.

Remember in Part II of this series I asked you to remember the name “Bohai”? Well, there you have it: Bohai – the name of the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea – represents the Chinese government’s investment in the private fund headed by the son of the then-VP of the United States. The other principal in the fund was Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then Secretary of State John Kerry. Together Bohai Capital and Rosemont Seneca formed Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). The RS stands for Rosemont Seneca and the T stands for the Thornton Group, headed by James Bulger, the nephew of notorious Massachusetts gangster Whitey Bulger. James Bulger’s father, younger brother of Whitey, Billy Bulger, longtime leader of the Massachusetts state senate and ally of John Kerry, serves on the board of the Thornton Group.

So, what you have is the Chinese government making a major investment in a fund headed by the sons of some of America’s most connected officials. While Chris Heinz later denied any involvement with the Chinese deal or with Bohai Harvest RST, Hunter Biden’s role in the fund and the deal has been well documented, largely through the work of investigative author Peter Schweizer. The body of Schweizer’s work has been widely quoted and recognized for its in-depth quality and accuracy, most prominently including his previous book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How Foreign Governments and Businesses Made Bill and Hillary Rich. Now some sources, like Politifact, reported that Bohai’s investment in the fund was much less than originally envisaged, topping at “just” $425 million. But that number comes directly from Hunter Biden’s attorney, George Mesires. It is challenged by another investigative reporter, John Solomon, who says that the BHR web site showed Bohai’s investment in the BHR venture at more than $2 billion, before the fund suddenly took down the site as the Biden controversy emerged recently. So much for the “fact checking” done in this case. But we risk getting lost in the weeds. The point is, a deal worth a significant sum of money coming from the government of one of America’s prime competitors went to the son of the Vice President of the U.S. on the heels of a high-level state visit.

The Chinese venture also comes into play in the Ukraine story since, as we noted in Part II of this series, Burisma Holdings paid a reported $3.4 million to a company named Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC. When you have money behind you, you can cast a very wide net, unhindered by oceans or national boundaries.

One might consider that, just as Hunter Biden had no experience with Ukraine or the energy sector when he made his lucrative deal with Burisma, he had no experience with China (other than a couple of visits preceding the Dec. 2013 trip to meet with top Chinese financial executives) or investment banking when he struck the even more lucrative deal with the Bank of China in formation of BHR. Keep in mind as well the point I made in Part II, that it’s not just impropriety that is the issue, but even the appearance of impropriety that public officials should avoid, an imperative seemingly lost on Joe Biden.

Now here is a little quiz for you: If you think this China deal was completely coincidental and not indicative of Hunter Biden’s leverage of his father’s position and influence, as some members of Congress and of the mass media would have you believe, I’d ask that you rate yourself on a scale of 0-10, where “0” equates to “I am hopelessly naive,” “5” equates to “I am profoundly dense and incapable of connecting the dots,” and “10” equates to “I am a staunch Democratic stalwart and believe only Trump and Republicans can do anything wrong.”

Not Just Some Gaffe: “You Know, They’re Not Bad Folks, Folks”

As questionable as the ethics of Joe Biden might be in allowing his son to leverage his position as VP in the deals Hunter Biden engineered in China and Ukraine, it’s important to consider how his son’s financial pursuits appear to have influenced the senior Biden’s view of global realities, particularly in regard to China. This is particularly critical given Biden’s bid to fill the highest office in the land.

In May of this year, Biden made a statement at a campaign stop in Iowa that boggles the mind of anyone even remotely familiar with the strategic threat China poses to the U.S. and, in fact, the world.

“China is going to eat our lunch?” rhetorically asked the former VP and man that would be president. “Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”

It’s a bit ironic that Biden refers to corruption in China, but even that mention is embedded in the bigger muddle represented by those six sentences. And lest you write this off as just another of Biden’s gaffes, consider that, a couple weeks later at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Biden doubled down on his earlier remarks.

“What are we doing? We’re walking around with our heads down, ‘Woe is me,’ ” Biden told the crowd gathered to hear him. “No other nation can catch us, including China. I got criticized for saying that. I’ve spent as much time with Xi Jinping as any world leader has.”

Joe Biden, right, shares the stage with John Kerry, in front of the flag of Singapore. Photo by AP. Used under Fair Use.

There might be some element of truth in that last claim, but the time Biden spent with China’s president certainly didn’t seem to provide him with any clarification of Xi’s intents or those of the country he heads. Criticism of Biden’s comments came from across the political spectrum, ranging from former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders, one of Biden’s competitors for the top office.

“I’ll stick with the language in our national security strategy and our national defense strategy, which identifies China as a strategic competitor,” said Randall Schriver, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia. And FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that China “ . . . in many ways represents the broadest, most complicated, most long-term counterintelligence threat we face.”

Even Trump, who regularly is accused by his detractors of not being fully conversant with global geopolitics, chimed in with the obvious: “For somebody to be so naive, and say China’s not a problem — if Biden actually said that, that’s a very dumb statement.” Indeed.

The issue of Chinese investment in Hunter Biden’s equity group becomes a problem for the U.S. when one looks at some of the investments made by Bohai Harvest RST. These include investment in a technology the Chinese government can use to surveil and repress its Muslim minority, as well as in an automotive firm, mining companies, and various technology ventures. Just one of those investments was the $600 million acquisition of Henniges Automotive, an American automotive supplier developing dual-use technologies with military applications, which was headquartered in Michigan. BHR took a 49 percent stake in the venture, with the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-run military contractor, acquiring the majority and controlling interest in the company.

But c’mon, folks! Why should Americans be concerned about transfer of these kinds of technologies to the Chinese? You know, they’re not bad folks! And why would a $2 billion-plus deal to his son’s benefit color the senior Biden’s view of the Chinese? I mean, Hunter’s other antics and failings (I’m being exceptionally kind not to call them misdeeds – this piece is well worth reading if you want to learn more about those) haven’t affected Joe’s support of his younger son. Why should anything else do that? And after all, the administration Joe Biden was part of didn’t see any problem in delivering $400 million in cold hard cash to the murderous regime in Tehran. So what’s to see here, folks?

Go along to get along might be Biden’s motto. Money makes the world go ’round, doesn’t it?

Pelosi’s Invention

So now, getting back to where all this started, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff want to Impeach Donald Trump for wanting to look into Joe Biden’s role in his son’s profitable business dealings in Ukraine and China. In any sane world this would appear to be beyond the bounds of reason, much less decency. But this isn’t a sane world. Rather, it’s the whack-o and thoroughly corrupt world of U.S. partisan politics.

Actually, while Schiff, who has his own questionable Ukraine connections, has been annointed head of the “impeach Trump” bunch in the House (keep in mind that impeachment usually falls to the House Judiciary Committee, headed by the incompetent Jerry Nadler, not the Intelligence Committee), Speaker Pelosi has held back from actually calling for impeachment. Her solution is to create what she calls an “impeachment inquiry.” Keep in mind that there is no Constitutional provision for anything called an “impeachment inquiry.” Nor is there any law that provides for such a thing. The whole concept is Pelosi’s invention. Ostensibly this is her way of bowing to pressure from within her caucus and to keep up harassment of the President, of continuing to throw whatever accusations, no matter how specious or lacking in basis, at him, all of which will be dutifully reported by the sycophantic mass media, while avoiding putting the whole matter to a vote.

It’s obvious to Pelosi that, lacking anything of real substance, even if the House votes to impeach Trump, there is absolutely zero chance that the Republican-controlled Senate would convict him and remove him from office, especially given polls that show little public support for impeachment. Such an outcome would represent a political embarrassment to Pelosi and a potential disaster to the Democrats, and one that would come in an election year that could not just doom the Dems’ hope to re-take the White House but even their chances of retaining control of the House. It also helps detract from the utter lack of anything of substance coming out of the Democratic-controlled House, leading to public approval ratings of Congress at and below an abysmal 19 percent level. Thus, we have this so-called “impeachment inquiry.”

Joe and Hunter Biden at Georgetown-Duke basketball game with the senior Biden’s boss, Barack Obama. Photo by Nick Wass/AP. Used under Fair Use.

In the midst of the ongoing firefight I think it would be naive not to expect the power-hungry Hillary Clinton from trying to exploit the whole morass and climb back on to the wagon she hopes will lead to her nomination as the Democratic candidate in 2020 and, ultimately, the presidency, which she sees as her birthright. Never mind how this might play out with voters. This is a matter of Hillary’s imperial, even divine, vision she has for her place in history. She already has been making her presence known after relative silence over the past three years. Again, the reality that whether it benefits Hillary or not, the current brouhaha will blow back on Joe Biden is not lost on Pelosi. As I earlier postulated, I think Pelosi and other influential Dems have realized that Biden can’t beat Trump and so are trying to knock him out of the race. It will be interesting to see what is thrown at him by his fellow contenders at the next Democractic Presidential Debate on October 15.

Meanwhile, wrongdoing by Hillary, other Dems, including those highly placed in the Obama administration, as well as by those within the FBI and the intelligence community, are under investigation by Attorney General Bob Barr and federal prosecutor John Durham. It’s entirely possible that Pelosi and Schiff are pushing things forward so they can beat Barr to the punch. And Barr and Durham’s punch looks like it could be devastating to the Dems.

Of course lots of things might change in the coming weeks and months. Little is a given in politics, all the less so in the overwrought atmosphere presently prevailing. But all things being equal, this is how things look at this juncture, and thus my prediction that, for all the hoopla, the current wailing and gnashing of teeth will equate to one more swing and one more miss for the Dems as they flail about in their attempt to bring down the duly elected President of the United States.

Set your alarm for Nov. 3, 2020, and stay tuned to this space meanwhile, if you can bear to watch as more of this pathetic drama plays out.

Featured image: Joe, Finnegan, and Hunter Biden deplane from Air Force Two in Beijing. Photo by Telegraph.co.uk. Used under Fair Use.