THEY’RE NOT DOING JOURNALISM, THEY’RE DOING CHEERLEADING: The liberal media’s gushing over Kamala Harris is an embarrassment to journalism.

Donald Trump and his allies are missing the point. Yes, of course liberal media outlets in the US are biased towards Kamala Harris. They’re always biased towards the Democrats’ candidate. Nothing new there.

What makes their behaviour right now so remarkable is not that they’re being partisan. It’s that they’re willing to be partisan even though the object of their adulation has been giving them absolutely nothing in return. They’re cheerleading for someone who won’t even speak to them.

But at least she isn’t publicly insulting them and locking them in closets, so Vice President Harris is certainly a step up in that regard from the (p)resident. What we’re seeing from the DNC-MSM is what they’ve been doing in election cycles since arguably 2004:

At least in 2008 and 2012 they had a candidate who had much better skills as a politician, and was unknown enough so that the rock star treatment could seem warranted to the uninitiated.

Exit quote:

Even if liberal US media outlets no longer care about journalistic scrutiny, surely they should, at bare minimum, be motivated by their own commercial interests. Interviews with the woman of the moment would cause clicks and sales to surge. So they might at least have demanded she offer them something in exchange for their gurgling sycophancy. Yet here they are, giving it away free of charge.

Still, I suppose they deserve some credit. Nowadays it’s fairly common for journalists to quit the media for PR. Yet some, impressively, have the energy to fill both jobs at once.

Oh they’re definitely doing PR. They just like having the J-word on their business cards, for legacy reasons.

UPDATE: Seven Theories of Press Complicity with the Harris Campaign.

By dumping their unpopular incumbent nominee midstream, a coup apparently masterminded by the aged former speaker of the House, and seamlessly substituting a new nominee and then unifying their party behind her and subduing the press into prostration, Democratic power brokers have indeed played the inside-the-Beltway game very well the past month. If your concept of political journalism is simply to cheer those who wield the knife well, that yields good coverage. But it’s not what a free press is for in a free and democratic republic.

I miss the idea of a “free press…in a free and democratic republic” — but that notion died 50 years ago during the Watergate hearings.

MORE: Kamala Harris’s media gambit is working. “[T]here is an extensive record, much of it on video, of Harris making her views clear on issues like taxes, healthcare, immigration, energy, and others. Since she has never renounced or changed those statements, don’t they remain her views, at least until she says otherwise? As far as many of the nation’s top journalists are concerned, though, there’s no need to hear it from the candidate herself. For Kamala Harris and her admirers in the media, saying nothing is enough.”

WATERGATE? AS ZHOU ENLAI NEVER SAID ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, “TOO EARLY TO SAY:” Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned.

What have I learned in the 50 years since? Although we are a long way from the summer of 1974, the Watergate pieties haven’t changed, and the media retrospectives this week will likely be repeating all the clichés about saving America: “The system worked.” “No man is above the law.” But a genuine retrospective of Nixon and Watergate needs to be shorn of cant and caricatures, unburdened by the clockwork bromides of “crook” or “resigned in disgrace.”

I hope new generations are open to some different thinking—or at least a balanced treatment that goes beyond the story of bungling burglars and political damage control. It must include how the “Watergate affair” was also the culmination of Nixon’s political opponents’ long-yearned-for goal of destroying him. Nixon had a political target on his back from his congressional days of vanquishing the communist Alger Hiss, a favorite of Washington’s intellectual left. Through his entire presidency, Congress was controlled by opposition Democrats, with confrontation aggravated further by Nixon’s determination to end the Vietnam War he had inherited from the Kennedy and Johnson administration planners at the State and Defense departments.

Sen. Edward Kennedy set up the Senate Watergate Committee. Three months later John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign director of opposition research against Nixon, Archibald Cox, was hired as Watergate special prosecutor with a staff seeded from the ranks of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. The subsequent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, expressed concern in an internal memorandum that his chief deputy reflected “an attitude I discussed with you before—the subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost.”

Watergate scholar Geoff Shepard has unearthed further damning evidence that the special prosecutors had several unethical private meetings with Judge John Sirica in the absence of attorneys for Nixon and Watergate defendants—each violating the most basic legal protections. Nixon’s adversaries weren’t looking only for the truth. They were looking for a scalp.

As Glenn wrote last year, “Recent events have made me doubt the entire Watergate story.” Much more on that topic from him here: Nixon’s Revenge.

UPDATE: “Reconsidering United States v. Nixon,” from Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Watch Out for August! Think July was historic? History says: beware the eighth month.

August isn’t just a month for natural disasters. Some of the biggest international crises have hit in the eighth month. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bush 41 recovered quickly and formed an international coalition that went on to oust Hussein from Kuwait. The next August, Bush faced another international crisis, as old-guard Soviets unhappy with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms placed the general secretary under house arrest. When Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft told the president about the coup, Bush complained that U.S. officials were surprised by the development. Scowcroft had the perfect retort: “Yes, so was Gorbachev.”

The final kind of August surprise has been scandal. Neither the Watergate burglary nor the original revelation of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky happened in August, but the denouement of each scandal did. Nixon resigned in August 1974, elevating his unelected vice president Gerald Ford to the presidency. Clinton, faced with DNA evidence of his affair with Lewinsky on her infamous Gap blue dress, finally ended his repeated denials of the affair. He addressed the nation from the Map Room and confessed that “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Here, for once, August proved a respite. Clinton went to Martha’s Vineyard with his family in an attempt to repair the relationships damaged by his admission.

There likely isn’t an American alive who could imagine a month more tumultuous than this past July for presidential politics. By all rational odds, things will calm down from here. Still, history warns: don’t bet on it.

Read the whole thing.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Remarkable GOP Convention.

There’s never been a political speech like Donald Trump’s address to the 2024 Republican National Convention. The former president’s narration of the attempt on his life was gripping television. When he kissed the fireman’s helmet of Corey Comperatore, the husband and father who was killed during the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend, he created an indelible image. The Trump who appeared on stage was humble, gracious, contemplative.

Then, a half hour into the speech, Trump began to improvise. He talked. And talked. He was the Trump we are used to seeing on the campaign trail: garrulous and sarcastic, cracking jokes, championing his record, describing goals for a second term. At length. The speech must have set a record for longest convention address. If Trump wanted to prove he could speak with greater passion and for a longer period of time than President Biden, he did so. He also left this television viewer exhausted.

The Trump who spoke for 91 minutes on Thursday evening was a slightly more subdued version of the man who has been at the center of politics for almost a decade. Yet much of the convention was spent trying to convince Americans that Trump is more than the person they’ve watched on the news since 2015.

* * * * * * * *

By the time the red, white, blue, and gold balloons fell from the rafters of the Fiserv Forum, there was no doubt that Donald Trump has revamped the Republican Party in his image. This united and energetic party believes that it is on the verge of a great victory. It left Milwaukee in a state of excitement. While, in a basement in Delaware, the Democratic Party is in a state of crisis.

As Jim Treacher writes, “Joe Won’t Go:”

He’s been in Washington since before Twitter. Before CNN. Hell, before Watergate! He was lying to reporters when Obama was still popping his zits in Honolulu.

The old man is a damn barnacle. They’re gonna have to scrape him off, and it might just put a hole in the hull.

Joe Biden doesn’t know much anymore, but he still knows how power works. My money’s on the old bastard giving everybody two middle fingers till they close the casket.

Me? I choose to remember the happier times:

Now watch him drop out 10 minutes after I post this. It would serve me right for acting like I know what I’m talking about!

Heh, indeed. That video is a reminder of why Joe won’t go. He’s spent his entire career climbing the greasy pole, then having to suck up to Barry for eight years to get to where he is now. No wonder he’s so reluctant to throw it all away.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: If Biden is smart, he’ll follow Nixon’s example.

As the nation’s capital broiled in the summer heat, the president found himself increasingly isolated in the Oval Office.

During his decades in politics, he had charted a career from the Senate to the vice presidency, though after two terms in the nation’s second-highest office, most believed his political career to be over. Even so, he shocked the political establishment by winning the presidency, largely by promising to return a sense of calm following a time of crisis and public protest.

Suddenly, however, the president found himself fending off calls from members of his own party to step aside, as the media monitored his every word for signs of what he may be thinking.

Yes, 50 years ago this month, Richard Nixon faced a remarkably difficult choice. (Who did you think I was talking about?)

Bill Maher believes that Biden should really make history rhyme: Bill Maher predicts the EXACT date Biden will step down for historic reason… before making hilarious comparison.

Bill Maher predicted the exact date that he believes Joe Biden will step aside in the presidential race as he issued an optimistic look at who could replace him.

The comedian, 68, rattled through possible replacements including Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, as he insisted that ‘Biden is toast.’

He joked that ‘when’ the 81-year-old bows out, he will pick August 9 as the date – the same day that Richard Nixon became the only president to resign in 1974.

After Democrats transformed impeachment as something they originally sold the public in the mid-1970s as a once-in-a-lifetime punishment for the eeeeeevil Nixon (whom some on the left later came to grudgingly respect) to something to routinely deploy against presidents simply because they have an “R” after their name, Biden resigning 50 years after Nixon would add an excellent sense of symmetry to DC’s otherwise completely dysfunctional politics.

Related: Joe Biden, at a Dead End, Faces Richard Nixon’s Choice. “Like Nixon, Mr. Biden must now write his last chapter — for one way or another, he’s reached the end of the book.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

SCHADENFREUDE:

Good.

We all warned them. We told them over and over he was senile and that it would blow up in their faces. They called us liars and went full-steam ahead.

Now, they get to learn what consequences are. https://t.co/H2JfQTBkKl

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 10, 2024

What I’m waiting for is just one head to roll at any of the major news outlets for four years spent sitting on the biggest presidential news since Watergate.

I’ll be waiting a good, long while, it seems, because none of the major news outlets give a damn about their credibility.

JIM GERAGHTY: The Biden Family Tries the Ralph Northam Strategy.

Every now and then, some elected official gets caught in a serious scandal and then attempts to just wait out the storm. Sometimes they hang on because enough time passes between the revelation and their next election; sometimes they hang on because their state or district strongly prefers one party over the other; and often they survive because they’re incumbents who have been around forever, know where all the bodies are buried, and bring home the bacon. Think of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Barney Frank, David Vitter, or Charlie Rangel. Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig rescinded his resignation and finished out his term.

And in my home state, we had the egregious embarrassment of former governor Ralph Northam. As I wrote at the end of Northam’s term:

It’s no big mystery how Northam remained in office. If Northam had resigned or the state legislature removed him from office, the lieutenant governor would take over – and the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was facing two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus argued that “the allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious,” and also that the state legislature should not investigate the allegations.) If Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state attorney general Mark Herring would be governor — and Herring admitted he had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.

If Northam, Fairfax, and Herring had all resigned simultaneously, then the speaker of the House of Delegates at that time — Republican Kirk Cox — would become governor. And Virginia Democrats believed that a Republican governor was much worse than blackface, wearing a Klan hood, or allegations of past sexual assault.

We are witnessing the Biden inner-circle attempt the Ralph Northam maneuver. Sure, the president had an abysmal debate, didn’t do a sit-down on-camera interview until a week later, and his staff is telling radio interviewers what questions to ask. But Biden has all the delegates he needs to stay the party’s nominee in 2024, and it’s exceptionally difficult to remove a president who doesn’t want to leave office. Eric Felten contended in the Wall Street Journal last week that the current circumstances are proving that the 25th Amendment “is practically useless when a president is incapacitated and won’t admit it. . . . Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the president and serve at his pleasure. What politician is going to kick to the curb the man who gave him his high office?”

Ralph Northam was a Democrat governor, whose party, as Geraghty wrote above, decided was the least worst choice of all their options. So it was relatively easy for his state’s media to simply go to ground shortly after the scandal around him broke. The implications of a single state’s media being in the tank for him weren’t as noticeable to the general public as the blob of journalists who cover Capitol Hill. Or as Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.

Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.

Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.

So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.

Earlier: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: One memorable speech can turn around a faltering campaign − how Nixon did it with his ‘Checkers’ talk.

In the immediate aftermath of the speech, Robert Ruark, a syndicated columnist, wrote that Nixon had effectively “stripped himself naked for all the world to see, and he brought the missus and the kids and the dog … into the act.” Nixon had aligned himself with mainstream Americans in what Wicker described as a “political masterstroke.”

Nixon closed by inviting viewers and listeners to help decide his political fate by sending letters and telegrams not to Eisenhower but to members of the Republican National Committee. Tell them, Nixon said, “whether you think I should stay on or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.”

Americans responded by the tens of thousands, expressing support for Nixon. Members of the Republican National Committee voted without objection to keep him on the ticket.

The outcome was perhaps encouraged by less-sensational disclosures at the time that Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee, had supported supplementary income funds for appointees to state positions in Illinois and that his running mate, Sen. John Sparkman, had kept his wife on his congressional payroll for 10 years.

The day after the speech, Eisenhower met Nixon in West Virginia and declared his running mate vindicated. “Why, you’re my boy!” the Herald Tribune quoted the general as saying.

A political disaster had been averted. Nixon served two terms as vice president in Eisenhower’s administrations and twice won the presidency before resigning in August 1974 over the Watergate scandal.

Nixon’s rescuing himself in the 1952 election was notable and perhaps instructive, suggesting that a creative, high-profile and timely response can prevent sensational allegations from overwhelming a beleaguered candidacy, much as they nearly did to Nixon.

Nixon was 39 when he delivered the Checkers speech. Biden is a quite fossilized 81. How is his equivalent media experience going today, on the safest of safe leftist venues? Watch: Joe Biden Goes on Morning Joe, Appears to Read From a Script and Starts Screaming Incoherently.

And given Brandon’s recent foray into spray tans, there’s a weird sense of déjà vu going on here:

Calling into his favorite show to say all the polls he sees have him winning, brag about his crowd sizes, rail against "the elites," and dares anyone to challenge him at the convention. What year is this? Who is the president?

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) July 8, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

—The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, 2004.

The New Hotness? WaPo Editorial Board Took the Liberty of Writing Biden’s Drop Out Speech (Not That She’ll Allow It).

—Twitchy, today.

Democracy dies in some serious gaslighting:

Four years ago, the pandemic was raging. More than 10 million Americans were out of work. Many businesses and schools were closed. People were exhausted by Mr. Trump’s chaos. Today, our economy is the envy of the world, thanks to 15 million new jobs, extraordinarily low unemployment and a start-up boom. Record numbers of Americans have health insurance, and we have made historic investments in our infrastructure and in the fight against climate change. Our allies respect us again, as we have rallied the free world against Russian aggression.

What exactly would Biden have done differently? In 2021 the White House Christmas message to unvaccinated was: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families, with then-President Klain tweeting:

Back then, Clay Travis asked if Biden would follow his own advice:

Belatedly, the Post is answering that question for Biden.

JAWS: You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Theater.

Every summer arrives with at least a half dozen hopeful blockbusters grasping for our dollars, like beggars in designer clothes. And I’m old enough to remember before films presented themselves with such audacity; a time when movie studios assumed that we preferred to spend our summers on vacation, at the cottage or the beach, when the weeks before and after Christmas were when you booked big budget productions in every movie palace and neighbourhood theatre that would show them.

It was a long time ago, and it all ended with a movie about a fish.

But what was happening at the beginning of the summer of 1975 that made us so desperate for distraction? Well, the Watergate trials were finally ending with sentencing and imprisonments, and that episode would get capped with the release of All the President’s Men in theatres a year later, freeing baby boomers to forget Nixon and start thinking about real estate and the stock market. South Vietnam was conquered by North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, but since Nixon ended the draft two years earlier nobody but veterans seemed to care much, and the “domino theory” was yesterday’s political rhetoric.

When June began, Israel removed its tanks and troops from the Suez Canal, the UK voted to stay in the European Community, the Soviets sent the Venera probes to Venus, Pelé signed with the New York Cosmos, the first crude was pumped from the North Sea oil fields and Sam Giancana was shot before he could testify in front of Congress.

A day later Jaws opened nationwide. It made its budget back two weeks later and by the first week of September it had outgrossed The Godfather, and it would sit at the top of the all-time box office records (unadjusted for inflation) until Star Wars unseated it two years later. The film’s production woes had been in the news for much of the previous year, with stories about malfunctioning mechanical sharks, plus budget and schedule overruns. (A 55 day shoot schedule ballooned into 159 days.) It was presumed that Jaws would tank and probably end the career of its young director, Steven Spielberg – best known for a hit TV movie (Duel) and a modestly successful crime picture (The Sugarland Express) – before it had really begun.

That alternate future died with the film’s opening scene.

Read the whole thing.

Exit quote:

Although as Rick McGinnis writes, “The problem with this meme is that there’s every reason to believe that the Mayor was reelected because everyone did vote in November. I live in Canada, you see…”

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Bob Woodward brands Biden debate performance a ‘political h-bomb.’

Watergate reporter and long-time Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward said President Biden’s debate performance was a “political hydrogen bomb” and the public deserves to know what really happened.

Woodward joined MSNBC’s Air Melber on Friday following the debate, where he said the performance was “so bad, so awful” that reporters must be looking for some explanation from his staff.

“I think the answer here is in reporting, in seeking very aggressively, an explanation — what happened here?” Woodward said. “We don’t want it to come out in some book or some memoir in a couple of years or a decade. We’d need to know now.”

That’s nice, Bob. But why didn’t we get aggressive reporting on Biden’s condition in the run-up to the debate?

More Woodward:

“I sat there and watched it and I could not believe it. I said, not only is this a political hydrogen bomb for him and the Democratic Party, it, you know — what happened? What happened?” he said.

Calls for the president to drop out are not hasty, Woodward said, but more energy should go toward seeking an explanation behind the debate performance.

“Look, let’s step back. If a building blows up in downtown of some city, the story will be what happened and then the story will be how did this happen, why did this happen? And that’s where I’m very, very curious because this was a mega disaster,” Woodward said.

Any thoughts on why so many DNC-MSM stenographers ran with the White House’s “cheap fakes” talking points about Biden’s lack of mental acuity the week before the debate, Bob? As Ed Morrissey wrote yesterday: Debate Disaster: Dems And Media Defrauded America on Biden. Make Them Pay.

None of the people on that panel understood the scope of the disaster last night. Biden just exposed a vast cover-up, nearly universal among elected Democrats and almost as much within the US national media, designed to keep people in the dark about the president’s mental capacity.

They spent the last four years foisting a near-senile old fool onto a nation at a moment of dire crisis. That includes Axelrod. It includes Bedingfield. It includes Van Jones. It includes the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and practically every other establishment media outlet. It also includes Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, every Democrat governor and member of Congress (except Dean Phillips), and most especially Jill Biden, who had to rush the stage to pull Joe off of it:

No one who watched this debate could possibly believe that Biden was "relying on minutiae" and "over-prepared." Biden could barely babble out platitudes in between his verbal tics ("the idea!", "here's the deal", etc). He wasn't over-prepared; Biden is incompetent for the task. https://t.co/0jGuqYZD0a

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) June 28, 2024

Democrats now want to pull a switcheroo and hope everyone forgets all about this breathtaking cover-up and corruption. That includes all of those Democrats who voted for Biden in primaries this year on their word that Biden was up to the task — and whose votes will count for nothing in any scenario that changes the ticket. Talk about betrayal!

We’ll game that out separately, but that won’t solve the appalling credibility destruction that took place and which applies to all of the above. Elected Democrat officials from Kamala Harris on down participated in a scheme to defraud American voters, not once but twice, and the media aided and abetted it both times.

How and why the media spent years protecting Biden is the real story, not just what happened at the White House, but the guild will do its best to protect its own.

Beyond covering for Biden, as Mike LaChance writes at Legal Insurrection: Democrats and the Media Have Spent Years Pushing Real ‘Cheap Fakes.’

CONVICTED BY THE ‘RATIONAL STATE:’

Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in New York last week must be understood in terms of a political war that has been going on since Watergate. This 50-year fight—between the American people and an increasingly powerful ruling class—is the last stage of a project that began over a century ago, when progressive intellectuals imported German political science into America with the explicit aim of transforming the Constitution. In place of a representative government chosen by the sovereign American people, a new ruling class claimed superior intellectual authority, derived from “rational” empirical science and its methodology. The Constitution may continue to exist in name, but it has mostly been replaced by an administrative state of bureaucratic experts.

Trump is the greatest threat to this ruling class since Richard Nixon. He has therefore aroused more raw political passion than anyone in recent memory. Making him a convicted felon is a calculated gamble to keep him from returning to the White House. There is a risk it could backfire. But the ruling class knows that Trump is entirely alone in the political establishment. He has the support of millions of voters—almost certainly a plurality of the American people. But he is opposed by virtually all of the influential social, economic, political, and cultural interest groups that determine the outcome of elections.

When most elected Republicans and conservatives accepted the legitimacy of the globalist interpretation of the 2020 election, they abandoned the rule of law for hundreds of American citizens. These citizens were called insurrectionists and were denied basic rights by a Congress and courts that funded and conducted what was clearly an elaborately staged hoax. The first, and still the greatest, political hoax in American history was Watergate, which first confirmed to the expert class that it could rule without consent. The official interpretation of Nixon and his legacy has dominated public opinion for the last half century. To this day, the delegitimizing of Nixon has given powerful support to the “rational structures” in government which have replaced the Constitution.

* * * * * * * *
Yet the authority of the rational bureaucracy remains insecure until the threat of Trump can be neutralized. He threatens to unite the country around an understanding of the older America—an understanding that denies the authority of the rational bureaucracy. What they have done to Trump, and his response, has now made the problem political in such a way that it cannot be resolved without a fight.

As America’s Newspaper of Record notes, the left are fully prepared to have it out in the name of, err, democracy:

Democrats Vow To Arrest As Many Political Opponents As It Takes To Defeat Fascism https://t.co/aUrQnbJZn3 pic.twitter.com/5ReqjNoegT

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 3, 2024

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

What has happened in the last century and a quarter to make anyone think Democrats aren't a war party? They've definitely been a diehard war party at least since WW1 forward. https://t.co/MKOqfkqssl

— John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn) May 25, 2024

The DNC-MSM crucified GOP vice presidential candidate Bob Dole in October of 1976 when he referred to the “Democrat Wars” of the 20^th century:

“It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it’s not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World 11 or World I or the war in Korea—all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”

Mr. Speakes was asked to inquire why the candidate would have denied using the phrase.

A few moments later, Mr. Speakes returned and said:

“He said you have to look in context at the whole thing. He did not recall this specific quote.”

He also quoted Mr. Dole as having repeated that “If it’s fair to blame Ford for Watergate, then it’s fair to blame the Democrats for the wars.”

Regarding Dole’s quote, in 2013, Michael Barone wrote: Not So Hawkish: Republicans after the Iraq War.

Only two Democrats (and no Republicans) voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Lyndon Johnson used as his license to send up to 550,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam. But by 1968, opposition to that war was welling up, primarily but not entirely within the Democratic party. LBJ was opposed for renomination by antiwar Eugene McCarthy and dropped out of the race. In 1972, Democrats nominated the dovish George McGovern. For nearly half a century, they have been the party less supportive of military intervention.

Not that Republicans have invariably supported it. Ronald Reagan aided the Nicaraguan Contras and intervened in Grenada but withdrew from Lebanon. He built up the military but didn’t find much occasion to use it. George H. W. Bush got approval from the United Nations before asking Congress to authorize the Gulf War. George W. Bush sought U.N. approval for Iraq, too.

Democrats remained obsessed with Vietnam. Their speeches opposing Contra aid and the Gulf and Iraq wars were full of arguments more relevant to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution than to the issue at hand. Some Democrats disagreed. Bill Clinton used force (without U.N. approval) in Serbia and Kosovo. Almost all Democrats supported intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11.

But almost all congressional Democrats tried to stop George W. Bush’s successful surge strategy in Iraq. Hillary Clinton found cause to question the veracity of General David Petraeus. The surge came too late to salvage the reputation of the Iraq War. Polls now show majorities think the war was a mistake. Most Republican politicians seem disinclined to suggest we should intervene anywhere else.

World problems loom: North Korea, Iran, Syria, North Africa. Barack Obama may choose to respond militarily. He has just beefed up missile defense in response to North Korea. If he follows up on his threat to attack Iran’s nuclear program, we could have a 2016 presidential race in which Republican Rand Paul criticizes military action and Democrat Hillary Clinton defends it.

That would be a political turnabout as stark as the one in the 1960s. Could it happen?

Over to you, Sean!

UNEXPECTEDLY! Fund manager: Jim Biden was in business with Qatari officials.

New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.

The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”

One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.

The second company provided financial backing for a series of loans that a hospital chain paid Jim Biden to arrange, according to documents and testimony Lewitt submitted in the course of the federal bankruptcy proceedings.

If substantiated, the alleged arrangements would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government.

As “Deep Throat” never said during Watergate, follow the money:

BEN SHAPIRO: America Is Now in the Business of Losing Wars.

Blinken stated, “If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.” He then added, “Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance, and ensuring the security of those who provide it.”

Of course, there is a higher priority for Israel: victory.

But America is no longer interested in victory.

The pattern of every American war since the end of World War II has been simple: we jump to involve ourselves in military conflicts when we feel a surge of moral outrage at the evils of our enemies; we then begin to question ourselves when we see hideous pictures on our televisions; we then surrender or cut an ugly deal. That is the pattern in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Sometimes, we simply abandon our allies without any sort of serious opposition, as with the Kurds or the people of Hong Kong.

Obviously, America ought not involve itself in foreign conflicts in which we are unwilling to stay the course. American interests dictate pragmatism. But we’ve gone far beyond that. Now we’re telling our allies that they can’t win victories in conflicts in which they are willing to stay the course and in which they can win.

We will actively step in to prevent victory.

And so our enemies grow stronger. They have no such Hamlet-like moral qualms. They push where there is mush. Should Israel accede to America’s request to leave Hamas in place in Rafah, Hezbollah will challenge Israel in the north; Iranian proxies will challenge Israel in the West Bank; Iran will up the ante in Yemen and the Red Sea. Israel and Saudi Arabia will be forced to search for new allies and new weapons. The world will significantly become more dangerous.

In his March 2001 review of Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, Orrin Judd wrote:

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that :

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

So what happened?

Over to you, Watergate Congress!

Flash-forward to the 21st century. As Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” To the point where shortly thereafter, Obama and Biden were bragging about what a success Iraq was, before, as Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker noted, Obama unilaterally withdrew all American troops for a reelection talking point, thus throwing it all away and giving rise to ISIS.

And with Obama allegedly back in the White House, 2021 was the perfect time for a repeat. That it took place during the 20th anniversary of 9/11 no doubt added an extra frisson of pleasure for Barry: Biden commemorates 9/11 anniversary with surrender to Taliban.

It’s easy to write off Biden’s “Vietnam” gaffe today as yet another moment of Trunalimunumaprzure. But as David Strom writes at Hot Air, “It is pretty normal for dementia patients to relive their past–visiting their golden age from their golden years–and the Vietnam war dominated the news during Biden’s rise to power. Drifting back from the reality of 2024 to the 1970s should, I suppose, not be unexpected.”

In September of last year, Steve linked to Joe Klein at his Substack: Hidin’ Biden.

For those of us who spent time in Afghanistan, the endgame came as no surprise. I made several visits to a once-crucial town called Sanjaray in Zhari District where a series of American Army Captains learned these truths: that the local leaders were thoroughly compromised by the Taliban, that the local people couldn’t distinguish us from the last invaders, the Russians; that the Afghan civilians were happy—grateful, really—for any help we could give them; and everyone, especially the Talibs, knew we would eventually leave. A mixed message to be sure. But no surprise when the Afghan “army,” which we’d spent billions funding, evaporated in the face of the Taliban offensive. It turned out that almost everybody in the Afghan establishment had made the same calculation as the local warlord in Sanjaray—his name was Hajji Lala: they all had secret deals with the Taliban.

How could Biden not know this? How could he not plan for it? Why did he abandon Bagram, the massive American airbase that might have been a less chaotic staging area for our evacuation than the commercial airport in Kabul?

As the flashback link to Business Insider Steve added noted: Biden in 2010 reportedly told a US diplomat ‘f— that’ when asked if the US should stay in Afghanistan to prevent a humanitarian crisis.

Robert Altman’s cartoonish 1980s parody of Richard Nixon couldn’t have said it any better:

Except of course in the early 1970s, the real life Nixon still held on to the quaint FDR-era notion that America should actually win its wars.

Exit quote:

"Elect me. I'm in the 20th Century." – Joe Biden

If this was your elderly parent or grandparent, you would pull them off the stage.

Not allow them to run for reelection of the most powerful country on Earth.

pic.twitter.com/3wtaasEmWh

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) April 10, 2024

RIP: Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79.

Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.

The cause was complications from covid and renal failure, said his caretaker, Victor Herfurth.

TV critics in New York and Los Angeles traditionally had greater show business clout than one in the entertainment backwater of Washington, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.

As The Post’s chief TV critic starting in 1977, he worked at a newspaper still basking in the cachet of its Watergate glory, his column was widely syndicated, and his stiletto-sharp commentary on TV stars, trends and network executives brought him national attention and influence.

* * * * * * * *

“No one believes this when I tell them, but after writing a column that’s been particularly mean to one poor helpless fabulously overpaid filthy-rich celebrity or another, I always ask editors if I’ve been ‘too mean’ and if the column should be ‘toned down,’” he wrote in a 2002 essay for Electronic Media. “Nine times out of 10 over the years the answer has been along the lines of, ‘No, it’s not too mean. If anything, it’s not mean enough.’ I have almost always been encouraged to be meaner. See, it’s really all the fault of editors.”

With some limits: Tom Shales: I’m Shocked To Be Told I Minimized Roman Polanski’s Crime. Here, Let Me Do It Again! “In Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.”

Related: Shales and his NPR interviewer try to make sense of a new movie called Star Wars, this strange new “complete science fiction fantasy with absolutely no redeeming moral values or moralistic values either” that’s “taking the country by proverbial storm.” Are the special effects any good?, Shales is asked at one point. “Gee, it’s kind of hard to describe the whole universe blowing up in your face.”

ELDERLY SOCIALIST TACITLY ADMITS THAT HER WORLDVIEW IS TO THE LEFT OF STALIN: Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaper.

On Monday, journalist Taylor Lorenz shared a story about The New York Times’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and explicitly stated that the newspaper only allows right-wing opinions to be showcased in its publication.

The piece Lorenz shared blasts the Gray Lady as alt-right for condemning antisemitism and Hamas while noting “the left-wing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous.”

We here at Not The Bee have covered many of these right-wing moments at The New York Times, such as the instance where The Times lamented the lack of “kink” in The Little Mermaid remake.

There was also the story where the NYT promoted the traditionally conservative value of polyamorous sexual relationships.

The alt-right paper is also known for it’s very conservative headline about elections being bad for democracy.

Far more so than Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, we must give credit to the WaPo’s Lorenz for finally exposing one of the greatest and carefully crafted long cons in American history:

● In the 1930s, Timesman Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for whitewashing Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine.

● In 1953, the Times published an obituary for Joseph Stalin which should be in the dictionary as the very definition of “fawning:” Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.

● More recently, then-editor “Pinch” Sulzberger was quoted by New York magazine as saying in 1991, “[A]lienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right.'”

● It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Sulzberger’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down. The following decade, then-editor Howell Raines, who was responsible for serial fabulist Jayson Blair joining the paper’s staff, described his preference towards diversity over a quality product in a classic Kinsley gaffe: “This [hiring] campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

● In 2004, the Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman Daniel Okrent famously wrote, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”

●This past October: NYT: A Week Later, Hamas “Fails to Make Case” that Israel Struck Hospital; UPDATE: “Editors Note”?

Marry yourselves to terrorists in haste, repent at leisure? The New York Times has all but redefined ‘leisure’ in this old axiom with its ever-so-slow retreat from its initial report that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza.

A week ago, the NYT and every other American media outlet swallowed that Hamas claim without question while sourcing it from “Gaza’s health ministry. Even after Israel provided video of the failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and radio communications from Hamas confirming the incident as friendly fire, American news media declared that the IDF hadn’t “proven” their case.

Now, a week later, the ‘Paper of Record’ grudgingly admits that the claim came from Hamas and never did have any evidence supporting it. The headline itself is a marvel in the annals of modified limited hangouts (via Power Line):

As America’s Newspaper of Record reported in mid-October: New York Times Patiently Awaiting Zoom Call From Hamas To See What They Should Print Today.

That’s nearly a century of subterfuge, as the Times spent article after article building a nearly impenetrable false front that it was a leftist “Progressive” newspaper. Fortunately, one woman at the Washington Post has finally managed to crack one of the greatest and most brilliantly conceived scams in journalistic history

HOW IT STARTED: Kamala… They Are Coming for You.

If Biden is set to go, Kamala Harris must go first. A half century ago, when the Republican Establishment thought Nixon’s days as president were numbered, they decided they didn’t want VP Spiro Agnew around. So Agnew pled no contest to a felony charge of tax invasion. Gerald Ford became vice president, Nixon resigned, Ford became president, then in 1976 lost to Jimmy Carter. Watergate played a role. Can Biden scandals do it this time?

If they can’t find anything compromising in the past of Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom could fulfill his pledge to appoint a black woman to Dianne Feinstein’s Senate by convincing Feinstein to resign, then appointing Harris to her seat. Better yet, Harris then could displace Chuck Schumer and become the “first woman” and “first black woman” to be Senate majority leader. (She’s relatively young; if she transitions, Democrats might back her for president in the future.)

* * * * * * * *

The powers in the Democratic Party can no more gamble on Kamala than on Joe. If either is on the ticket, more than the White House is at stake. Republicans would expand, not lose, their House majority. And Democrats would certainly lose their precarious hold on the Senate. Their best hope is an election that again is a referendum on Donald Trump; but regardless of who the Republican nominee is, not a referendum on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

Kamala must go before Joe does, certainly before Joe announces he won’t run.

One way or another — Kamala, they’re coming for you, and then Joe.

–Arnold Steinberg, the American Spectator, July 2nd.

How it’s going: It’s Getting Serious Now: L.A. Times Kicks Off the Dems’ ‘Dump-Harris’ Movement.

The Times’ George Skelton knows that the left, unlike the right, never turns on its own, and that a public acknowledgement of Harris’ manifest incompetence would be damaging not just for her, but for Old Joe himself. After all, the putative commander-in-chief has repeatedly praised her and declared as recently as May that she “hasn’t gotten the credit she deserves.”

* * * * * * * *

His plan for doing this involves Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California SSR), who is ninety years old and manages to make Old Joe look as if he’s sharp as a tack. Feinstein, Skelton writes, “is a problem for California because she’s no longer capable of fully representing the nation’s most populous state — a world-class economic power — in the Senate.” And thus the solution to the Democrats’ problems presents itself: “Feinstein could resign from the Senate and Gov. Gavin Newsom could appoint Harris to replace her. Biden then could find a more popular running mate, one more acceptable to voters as a potential successor.”

That successor could be, say, Newsom himself, although the left’s fondness for him as a possible future presidential candidate pays insufficient attention to the fact that he has presided over an unprecedented flight of patriots and other sane people from the Golden State.

No sooner does Skelton raise the possibility of Harris replacing DiFi and clearing the way for the Democrats’ dream candidate (well, the Dems’ real dream candidate would be a gay trans Marxist person of color, but if they can’t find one of those, then a more ordinary Marxist will have to do) than he dismisses it: “A great idea. But it’ll never happen because it would take all of the president’s persuasive and coercive powers to pull off. And he doesn’t seem the type likely to do that.” Indeed, not only has Feinstein said that she is going to remain in the Senate until her term ends, but Harris is unlikely to give up being a heartbeat away from pretending to be president for another Senate gig. What’s more, it’s essentially out of the question that Old Joe could persuade either of them to take this course, as the man can barely formulate a coherent sentence, much less charm two egomaniacs into being humble.

–Robert Spencer, PJ Media, today.

DO TELL: Jack Goldsmith: The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries…. Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work….”

The message of the Trump prosecution is Thou Shall Not Challenge The Establishment. If you do, the rules and conventions go out the window and they do whatever dirty things they can to you. And the usual promoters of “decency,” “civility,” and “rule of law” will back them out of class interest and tribal loyalty.

Does this mean that our government — and media/academic establishment, but I repeat myself — is deeply, perhaps hopelessly corrupt and fundamentally illegitimate? Yeah, probably.

And if only there had been some sort of warning about the downsides of this sort of lawfare.

ELIZABETH STAUFFER: Unlike the Trump indictments, the case against Biden is straightforward.

The average American understands bribery, greed, and lies, concepts that are as old as mankind.

And

The straightforwardness of the Biden family’s influence peddling operation makes it easy for all but the most rabid Democrats to understand.

Indeed. Read her entire post.

FROM THE COMMENTS: I was impressed with Stauffer’s post and began wondering about Insta-reader reaction. Glad I did. Context: I recall commenting on a couple of Insta-reader comments seven or eight years ago. Googling fact-checkers, check it out. Which leads to this reader comment. I think this comment expresses the media-legal situation succinctly and with the Watergate reference provides relevant historical context: “In the Trump case, vast amounts of resources are needed to “prove” ephemera. Joe Biden’s former allies, like Devon Archer, are at a late-Watergate stage of confession. Only the presence of a man with less legal objectivity than Roland Freisler, aka Merrick Garland, is keeping the Biden regime away from major criminal investigations.” Congrats to the commenter. Garland is a corrupt actor and among fact-based historians will likely go down as one of the worst attorney generals in American history — vying with Eric Holder and Mitchell Palmer. But in the “worst AGs” evaluation I defer to legal historians like Glenn.

QUESTION ASKED: Where Have You Gone Woodward and Bernstein?

“We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the committee chairman.

Remember that for years the Democrats and their media lickspittles have insisted–and Joe Biden has himself stated emphatically and publicly before the last presidential election, that he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s shady overseas business deals. Of course he knew.

He was the muscle. And Hunter, like his Uncle Jim before him, was the bagman. The guy who carried the treasure to “The Big Guy” or “President Ten Percent.”

Those of you who know Chicago know how this works–The Delaware Way is the American Way is the Chicago Way. And how do you keep the suckers from ‘beefing’ or ‘complaining?’ You control the media to suppress problematic facts. And do they ever control it.

Now you understand why the Democrat Media Complex was so furious with voters after the mid-term elections. They would be exposed. All the rocks would be turned over. There were no moist corners in which to hide.

The great heavyweight champion Joe Louis had a saying, “They can run but they can’t hide.” Eventually they’d be trapped and take a public beating.

Joe did it the hard way — he got into the ring with his opponents and actually fought them. The new methods are much easier: ‘Obstruction of Justice:’ DOJ Sends Letter on Archer’s Jail Time Just Before Meeting With House Oversight. “The DOJ is trying to arrest Devon Archer ahead of his bombshell testimony Monday about Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s Ukraine business when he was VP.”

UPDATE: Joseph Campbell on “The hero-journalist trope: Watergate’s go-to mythical narrative.”

MARK JUDGE: The end of the Washington Post.

The Washington Post is collapsing. Once one of America’s great media institutions, the paper lost $100 million last year and has shed 500,000 subscribers. Recent reports reveal that Post owner Jeff Bezos is going to be more hands-on to try and save the paper.

Yet trying to get employees of the Post to do their jobs is like trying to get dogs to play baseball. Dogs just aren’t interested in baseball, and the breed of journalist now at the Post is just not interested in journalism. Always a liberal paper, the Post is now pure propaganda.

Earlier this year, veteran Post reporter Bob Woodward, who of course became famous for his Watergate coverage, blasted the media and the young reporters at his own paper for their falling for “Russiagate,” the hoax that President Donald Trump was working with the Russians. Woodward called the Steele dossier, the basis for that story, garbage, and told the Columbia Journalism Review that the media had to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” Woodward then said this: “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.”

At the Post the problem is not as much a lack of curiosity as much as the desire to push a certain narrative. This is where my personal experience with the paper comes in.

Democracy dies in Democrat propaganda.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? Is the Bible still relevant in America and western societies? Predictions of the demise of biblical influence are common, including, strangely enough, among people who continue to cherish the best-selling book in human history.

But the folks at the Colson Center — the finest legacy of the famous Watergate-Conspirator-Turned-Christian-Apologist — who produce the “What Would You Say” video series, make a compelling case that, if anything, the Bible’s influence is growing. Don’t miss the comments on atheist Tom Holland’s assessment.

MARK JUDGE: All The President’s Men looks very different in 2023. “In 2016 and 2020, it was the Left doing what Nixon’s flunkies once did. Russiagate, as Durham reported, was based on opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton. Fittingly enough, a young Hillary Clinton was a low-level attorney working for the Watergate lawyers. And then there’s the Twitter Files, with its intersection of governmental bureaucracy and high-tech companies conspiring to censor thought they don’t approve of. They also squashed reports about the Hunter Biden laptop, which more than 50 former and current intelligence officials falsely said was fake.”

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When the Bad Guys Became the Good Guys.

Here in 2023, everyone knows that Richard Nixon resigned because he engaged in a massive cover-up of his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, a story revealed by the reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein. But to watch ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is to understand that in 1972 the connection between the break-in and the Nixon Government was never obvious, that the outcome of the story was by no means assured. In the beginning, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have any idea what they had. They started with a weird penny-ante crime story and slowly and methodically followed it all the way to the White House. The result was a best-selling book and one of the greatest movies ever made.

Now compare that with the way our Media Coporations and Big Tech handled the Hunter Biden laptop story. No honest broker would suggest that the details revealed by the release of the laptop’s contents were any less suggestive of massive governmental corruption than was the initial fact pattern surrounding the Watergate break-in. Quite the contrary… the laptop arrived in the Media’s collective in-box with all the dots already connected. But we all know in our hearts that there will never be a big budget studio movie about The Hunter Biden laptop featuring an ensemble of the biggest movie stars of our time, no matter where that story leads.

Because the Bad Guys have become the Good Guys.

Read the whole thing.