OPEN THREAD: Enjoy every sandwich comment.
Archive for 2020
October 21, 2020
THEY’RE NOT WRONG: 76% Of Voters Believe Big Tech Has Too Much Influence On Political News.
Related: Unanswered questions for Big Tech. A week on from the New York Post story, we deserve answers.
THE SCIENCE IS NEVER SETTLED: Astronomers claimed galaxy was 98% dark matter. They were wrong.
Plus, from the comments: “Trump would win 40 states if the media merely treated him neutrally. 45 states or so if the media treated Biden / democrats neutrally.”
And that’s why they don’t do that.
QUESTION ASKED: Biden Yelling at Reporters Is Okay?
Over the weekend, CBS News producer Bo Erickson asked a very mild question on what is apparently supposed to be a forbidden topic, his family’s financial wheeling and dealing: “Mr. Biden, what is your response to the New York Post story about your son, sir?”
Biden lashed out like the CBS guy was somehow from Fox News: “I know you’d ask it. I have no response. It’s another smear campaign. It’s right up your alley. They’re the questions you always ask.”
This is remarkably similar to last fall, when Fox’s Peter Doocy dared to ask about Hunter Biden’s gigs: “Mr. Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?” Biden claimed: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” That was implausible then, and it’s ridiculous now. The New York Post report puts Joe Biden in a meet-and-greet with Hunter’s client at Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian oil company.
When Doocy continued, Biden yelled at him: “Trump’s doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum. And he’s using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.” Biden claimed “Everybody looked at this, and everybody’s looked at it and said there’s nothing there,” and then yelled at Doocy “Ask the right questions!”
Translation: “The right questions” means never unspool a question about anything having to do with the Biden clan’s lucrative and suspicious lobbying based on their government connections.
Long before Biden started “slowing down,” he’s had quite a history of lashing out at reporters, most of whom who take it, because they’re Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and don’t want to upset their boss. He’s also lashed at voters as well:
● Biden Snaps At Reporter For Asking About Bombshell New York Post Reports, Does Not Deny.
● Biden calls woman ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’ at N.H. campaign event.
● How Joe Biden Gets Away With Calling A Voter A Fat, Dumb, Liar.
● Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deploy the Charlottesville hoax to stir up racial pain and anger.
● ‘Classy:’ Joe Biden Snaps At Reporter After Being Asked About Hunter’s Paternity Test.
● Bullying Biden Yells at Fox’s Doocy: ‘Ask the Right Questions!’
● Biden Accused of Sexism After Remarks to Female Moderator.
● Biden Explodes When Confronted On Lying About Charlottesville. Video Proves Biden Wrong.
● Joe Biden Says There Are Three Genders; Grabs Student’s Arm When She Asks ‘What Are They?’
And these classics from the Obama era:
● VP Biden’s Office Apologizes For Locking Reporter In Storage Closet During Fundraiser.
● Vengeance: Biden’s Office Seeks Investigation Into Unfriendly Journalist.
And of course, ground zero, from 1988: Why Joe Biden’s First Campaign for President Collapsed After Just 3 Months.
Last month, the New York Daily News quoted Biden as saying “‘Presidents of the United States should be presidential and lead by example as well as make clear exactly where they stand. Getting down in the gutter where the president does…that’s not the job of the president,’ Biden said. ‘If we were behind a barn somewhere it would be a different thing.’”
Between Biden’s evasiveness over the court packing question and anger at both journalists and reporters, he’s failed at both of his self-stated goals.
FAMILY BUSINESS: Photo shows Joe Biden meeting Hunter’s alleged business partner from Kazakhstan. “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.”
ANN ALTHOUSE: What if a woman had been caught — like Jeffrey Toobin — masturbating on camera during a Zoom business call? “I think if a woman mishandling her computer camera exposed herself accidentally, there would be tremendous sympathy and an immediate understanding that it would not be talked about — about like what you’d do if you walked in on someone using the toilet. If the circumstances indicated that she was intentionally exhibiting herself — could that have been the case with Toobin? — then I think people would regard her as having a very serious mental problem and would close ranks around her and try to protect and help her. In either case — accidental or intentional — I don’t think a woman would have been as badly treated as Toobin — who has been ruthlessly ridiculed and humiliated.”
Well, Toobin is a self-righteous hypocrite and we seldom go easy on those. Also, I think a woman would be treated just as badly, if she were, you know, a Republican woman.
NO, HE’S WOKE: Is the Pope Catholic? Francis’s new encyclical reads like a UN mission statement. He demonizes capitalism, and his ecological fundamentalism is more pagan than Catholic.
BUT IF IT SAVED JUST ONE LIFE: Lockdown’s Lethal Toll. The Daily Mail tallied up British casualties from the lockdown. The findings are summarized at the Lockdown Skeptics website:
- Delays in treatment are set to cause a 20% rise in deaths among newly diagnosed cancer patients in England – 6,270 excess deaths this year
- Treatment for strokes fell by 45% during lockdown and there were more than 2,000 excess deaths in from heart disease
- More than 50,000 operations for children were cancelled
- Organ transplants fell by two thirds, with the number of those who died on the transplant waiting list almost doubling
- Total waiting lists for routine orthopedic and eye operations are at record levels
- Calls to child abuse helplines rocketed
- As rates of depression and anxiety doubled, thousands of recovering alcoholics have relapsed.
Andrew Cuomo is no doubt too busy selling his book to comment. But he’ll surely give the British a run for their money.
WHO MEMO WARNED AGAINST LOCKDOWNS’ ‘CULTURE OF FEAR’ IN 2011: More from inside the World Health Organization (WHO) by Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
90% IS MEDIA-INDUCED: Nearly 8 in 10 report pandemic is causing mental health strain.
A BIZARRE AND REVEALING BIDEN INTERVIEW: Biden Discusses His First Wife’s “Playboy” Body, Money and Ambition In Resurfaced 1974 Interview.
Another weird detail is that Biden referred to Neilia as “my beautiful millionaire wife.” Biden brings up money repeatedly: Kelley alludes to “the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help” because Biden admitted “that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.” Biden added, “I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the ramrod character of my Scotch Presbyterian wife.” He had been in office for only eight months before he started complaining about being underpaid. “I don’t know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt,” he said on the Senate floor. ($42,500 is about $249,000 in today’s dollars. Biden was 31 when he made these remarks.) Biden’s evident belief that he deserves to be wealthy stood out in a 2008 New York Times story that explained how a man living on a public servant’s salary was able to live like a Bourbon king: “Biden has been able to dip into his campaign treasury to spend thousands of dollars on home landscaping,” the Times explained, and also rich businessmen filtered their support of Biden through other means: “the acquisition of his waterfront property a decade ago involved wealthy businessmen and campaign supporters, some of them bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home.” He sold the house he had bought in 1975 for top dollar to — get this — the vice-chairman of MBNA, who gave Biden $1.2 million for it. MBNA has showed its gratitude to Biden’s support in a number of ways: by giving over $200,000 to his various campaigns, by hiring Hunter Biden, by flying Biden and his wife to a retreat in Maine, etc. Mother Jones dubbed Biden “the senator from MBNA.”
In the 1974 interview, Biden also apparently brought up unprompted his ultimate goal: “I know I can be a good President.” Neilia, he said, would have been an asset with respect to this: “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia.” One of his associates told Kelley of any future wife: “He also needs to find a First Lady, a woman who enjoys politics and will help him get to the White House.” His then-girlfriend, a reporter named Francie Bernard, was considered appropriate: “I do know that the woman he marries will he as rich and as pretty as she is,” the Biden associate told Kelley. What a strange place to bring up money.
Kelley notes in passing that while riding an elevator with fellow senator Tom Eagleton, “Biden tells him a joke with an antisemitic punchline and asks that it be off the record.”
You stay classy, Joe. (Needless to say, read the whole surrealistic thing.)
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Meet the Bidens: What happens after the world’s most expensive introduction?
What kind of meetings can a Chinese tycoon buy for $10 million a year? A full seven days after the New York Post began publishing emails showing Biden family influence peddling, former Vice President Joe Biden still isn’t saying the emails are fake. But Mr. Biden did finally have to discuss his family business on Tuesday, thanks to Milwaukee television reporter Adrienne Pedersen of ABC affiliate WISN.
Ms. Pederson asked if there is “any legitimacy” to the statement by Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) that the former vice president’s son and other family members profited off the Biden name. “None whatsoever,” Joe Biden responded, and said it was part of a “last ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family.”
If Mr. Biden wants to argue that none of the millions of dollars collected from various overseas tycoons or their companies had anything to do with his name, then he’s making an argument that not even his son Hunter Biden was willing to make in 2019. National Review’s Mairead McArdle reminds:
Joe Biden denied that his family has profited from his public offices, appearing to contradict a statement his son Hunter Biden made last year in which he said he thinks he would “probably not” have been asked to be on the board of a Ukrainian energy company if he were not Biden’s son.
The Post’s Thursday follow-up to its earlier email scoop has made it much harder to believe the current argument from Joe Biden. . . . Perhaps at some point the Bidens will choose to offer an explanation. In the meantime, a reasonable person would conclude from this report that the buyer willing to spend this mind-boggling sum was not seeking introductions to former acting assistant agency deputies. And having been introduced, it’s reasonable to assume such a buyer was seeking much more than a pleasant greeting.
Team Biden and much of the press corps would prefer not to have to acknowledge the Post reporting.
Indeed they do.
THE PRESCIENCE OF SHELBY STEELE.
CALIFORNIANS! DON’T FORGET TO VOTE NO ON PROP 16: Here’s the “NO on Prop 16” social media video that I did. (Yes, I know. The camera is a bit too close. Alas, I’ve reached an age where the camera needs to be in the next county. But I hope that the message gets through anyway.)
ONLY DEMOCRATS’ KIDS ARE “OFF LIMITS BECAUSE OF DECENCY.” 5 Big Problems With The New York Times Investigation Of Amy Coney Barrett’s Children.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Jeffrey Toobin and Our Public-Hate Ritual.
Toobin is today’s hate object because he presented himself and because the manner in which he presented himself offers an even-greater-than-usual opportunity for ritualized humiliation. Too good to pass up. I have sometimes written that our public life is dominated by junior-high-cafeteria pecking-order rites, but, upon reconsideration, this is a disservice to the people with whom I went to junior high, who may have been 14 years old and callow but were in the main free from the pettiness and cruelty that characterize public life in 2020. (I had an unusual education, especially for public schools.) In the great junior-high cafeteria of the American public square, Toobin is, for the moment, Waldo. And no matter how miserable Waldo is, there will always be those whose greatest pleasure is making him more miserable still.
“Come hate with us!” comes the call. “He is the enemy! Don’t you want to hurt the enemy? Think of what they would do if it were you!” Hard pass. Toobin’s shenanigans were gross, but not as gross as our public-hate ritual. I’m not nearly as offended by clumsy pudwhackers as I am by people who savor the humiliation of others.
I don’t want to commune with them in hate, or in anything else — I’m embarrassed to be a member of the same species.
“I suspect Jeffrey Toobin will be just fine. He is ‘in the family,’” Williamson writes — and he’s likely right: Jeffrey Toobin will ‘probably’ return to CNN after masturbation scandal dies down, insiders say.
As Stephen Miller tweets, “It’s a wonder how guys like Lauer, Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin were able to get away with it for so long.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Toobin’s getting off a lot lighter than a Republican man in the same situation would. In fact, if a Republican man were involved, Williamson would probably be explaining how morally troubled the entire GOP is.
TODAY AT 3:30PM EASTERN: VIP Gold Live Chat with VodkaPundit, Kruiser, and Preston.
I HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS: #MeToobin Gets Mockworthy: CNN’s Brian Stelter Claims It Was an ‘Accident.’