The story of cocaine found at the White House has been changing rapidly, and now it’s been declared a non-story of sorts:
Again, there are cameras everywhere in the non-residence areas of the White House. There are security checks and various other means to track who goes in and out. Yet, the Biden administration is pretending this is some unsolvable happening. Why are they not helping the Secret Service? Why is the Secret Service not going over the tapes to see who stashed the coke there? None of this adds up.
One reporter pointed that out by noting that according to Jean-Pierre, anyone can apparently just walk into the White House with anything.
The current story is that there’s just no way to find the perp (unlike, let’s say, every single person anywhere near the Capitol on January 6th):
But one official familiar with the investigation cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely to be determined given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing…
Asked what the chances were of finding the culprit, the official said that “it’s gonna be very difficult for us to do that because of where it was.”
“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught” by the cameras, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given that it’s an ongoing investigation. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”
And yet earlier there were successive reports about where the drug was found and what form it was in, and they don’t conform to this latest one. There’s no particular reason to trust any of the reports, either. But my guess is that, although authorities actually could find the culprit if they wished to do so – or may already know who it is – the public will never learn the answer. The obvious suspect is protected darling Hunter Biden, but he is by no means the only possibility.
We previously have covered the lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration regarding collusion with big tech platforms to silence mostly conservative voices.
After extensive pre-trial proceedings, the federal District Court has issued a Preliminary Injunction prohibiting further collusion. The Memorandum Decision is 155 pages. Most of it consists of extensive findings of fact and evidence of the collusion.
I believe that the most important aspect of the case is the participation of the government in the suppression. From the Memorandum:
The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature.
Not only that, but it seems that most of the suppression of factual information was suppression of truth. In fact, here’s another quote from the decision: “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,'” and that this represents an “almost Dystopian situation.” Actually, I’d eliminate the word “almost” there.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out in a trial. I would imagine if the decision goes against the Biden administration there will be an appeal, and possibly more fodder for leftist hate towards SCOTUS if the Court renders the decision I think it will.
The left has become accustomed not only to controlling government, education, entertainment, the press, and social media, but it’s become used to controlling most federal court decisions and even SCOTUS till now (with recent supposed “swing” justices often swinging to the left). Not only has the left become used to these things, but it thinks that this dominance is the way things should inevitably be, and any deviation from it is an abominable and illegitimate outrage.
Get a load of this BBC “reporter,” whose name is Anjana Gadgil:
First she fences with words, calling armed terrorists between 16 and 18 “children” and implying that gives them some sort of dispensation to kill. Then she cites “the UN definition,” as though that matters. Then she tries to not answer Bennett’s question involving a personal hypothetical. And then she falls back on a meaningless moral equivalence in a cycle-of-violence argument that ignores reality. All with a serious demeanor, as though she’s not spouting nonsensical propaganda – because she knows plenty of people will swallow her argument.
The whole discussion on this video was of interest to me because it’s about how “affirmation therapy” is not actual therapy, and how therapists have been pressured into not offering real therapy for people identifying as trans or presenting with gender dysphoria. But I’ve cued up a two and a half minute segment that I think encapsulates something very basic about trans medicalization:
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, it seems almost archaic in certain ways.]
I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.
When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is the city.
And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.
I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.
All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.
The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.
In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.
As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.
I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.
The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.
NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:
Please read this article by Caroline Glick about recent developments in the Netanyahu trial. Whether or not you’re especially interested in Israel or in Netanyahu himself, you will probably be impressed by the similarities to the actions of Donald Trump’s prosecutors in this country. In some ways, what they tried to do to Netanyahu may even be worse – although we have yet to see the full flowering of what is to come for Trump.
All of it is disturbing and chilling, although in Netanyahu’s case there seems to be a major pause in the proceedings for now, because the case is so very weak. But his enemies are very very determined, so don’t count them out, not by a longshot.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning, but I suggest you read the whole thing:
On Thursday night, with sunken faces, Channel 13’s legal correspondents delivered the news: The judges presiding over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial for bribery and breach of trust had told the prosecutors and defense attorney last week that the prosecutors have not proven their charge of bribery, and are unlikely to succeed in doing so, since all their major witnesses have already testified.
The implications are earthshattering. For the past seven years, two forces—the state prosecution and the media—have pushed Israel to the brink of civil war in their effort to criminalize Netanyahu and demonize his supporters.
Their goal was never hidden. They seek to oust Netanyahu from public life and disenfranchise his voters by disqualifying and demonizing their elected leader.
Beginning in 2016, through criminal leaks to reporters from every major newspaper, radio station and television channel, state prosecutors, police investigators, journalists and editors invented and shaped a narrative of criminality surrounding Netanyahu and sold it to the public on a daily basis.
Much of France is a mess right now, and there is that déjà vu feeling from memories of the US during the George Floyd summer of 2020 [comments in brackets are mine]:
Paris and other French cities resemble war zones, with burnt homes and streets littered with charred cars, as the nation reels under the sixth night of violence triggered by last week’s police shooting that killed a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent.
“In just six nights, over 5000 vehicles were set on fire, whereas around 3300 persons were arrested, according to a report from the Ministry of Interior on Monday,” French newspaper Le Parisien reported. Rioters damaged more than 1,000 buildings, the daily added…
The establishment media in the U.S. and Europe tried to pin the entire blame on French police for causing the riots, first by shooting an innocent teenager and then using “heavy-handed tactics” against protesters.
“The shooting of the teenager, identified only as Nahel, bears some similarity to traffic stop deaths involving people of color in the United States,” USA Today concluded.
If you are only following the mainstream media, you won’t know that the 17-year-old victim of a tragic police shooting reportedly had prior convictions…
The big media seems to have great sympathy for these marauding gangs of migrant [that is, people from predominantly Muslim countries] men ‘trapped’ in a lifestyle financed by a generous welfare system. “Many of the very young rioters may have a sense of besieged Muslim identity,” Politico commented. “Young men of African and North African origin are much more likely to be stopped by French police than young white men,” the U.S. news outlet complained.
Perhaps there’s a reason for the difference in rates of traffic stops, and perhaps that reason is not racism.
From what I’ve read about the killing of Nahel, it seems that he was almost certainly driving a stolen car and trying to evade the stop. But it also seems that he was not in the act of threatening or attacking the officers, nor was he brandishing a weapon, when he was shot and killed. Therefore I’m with Theodore Dalrymple on this:
The pretext for the mayhem was the shooting dead by a policeman of a young man named Nahel. It seems likely that the officer was unjustified in his action, though the president of the republic has in effect abrogated the presumption of innocence by all but pronouncing him guilty…
Because Nahel was perhaps unjustifiably killed by an agent of the state, he is already in the process of secular canonization, à la George Floyd. The French press has been remarkably reticent in emphasizing or enquiring into certain of the circumstances before the killing. Nahel was driving a stolen car without a license and therefore without insurance; he had been admonished several times before for doing the same thing; the car had Polish number plates, and it is well known that cars stolen in Germany, taken to Poland, and given such plates, are used by drug dealers in France…
Of course, Nael was only 17 and did not deserve to be shot dead just because he was driving a stolen car and was an admirer of and participant in one of ugliest subcultures known in the world. He might well have grown out of this subculture that glorifies criminality and violence, especially toward women.
Dalrymple adds that the seriousness of the rioting in city centers “implies a weakening of the state’s capacity to control and repress.” The rioters seem to have become more emboldened, and why not?
If the MSM ever does decide it’s finally “time” to get serious about Biden’s brain, it would be because (a) the fear that the public will reject Biden as obviously suffering from dementia has increased, and (b) the left has decided on his replacement and is satisfied with the prospects of that person.
…[T]he Iraq/Ukraine gaffes were not an isolated series of incidents. They are simply the latest in a string of bizarre, confused and mostly unintelligible statements from Biden in the much longer string of bizarre, confused and mostly unintelligible statements that have come to define the Biden presidency…
Yet, despite the press’s normal reflex to ask whether the president is up to the demands of the office, we in the media have responded to Biden’s bizarre presidency with little more than a bored shrug…
But if ever there was a time to snap back to attention, to engage on the issue of “presidential fitness,” this is it. There’s a presidential election just around the corner. The time to get serious about “fitness,” and to address it fairly and seriously, is now. Not for the sake of the media’s credibility, but for the sake of the public, which has every right to know whether the leading candidates for president are actually capable of carrying out their dutie
Good luck with that.
When Adams writes that Biden’s recent “gaffes” are “simply the latest in a string of bizarre, confused, and mostly unintelligible statements that have come to define the Biden presidency,” I beg to differ. They also defined his campaign. What’s more, they defined his vice presidency under Obama – and the MSM likewise ignored them, covered them up, and/or rationalized them even back then.
One example you might recall was his debate in 2008 with Sarah Palin. Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the matter, back in the days before he fell prey to Trump derangement syndrome:
But what about Biden? Overwhelmingly, the professional political class proclaimed that he blew her away on “specifics” and “knowledge” and “seriousness.” The New York Times said Biden avoided making any gaffes, “while showing a clear grasp of the big picture and the details.” The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib proclaimed on ABC’s “This Week” that Biden avoided any “verbal excesses or rhetorical flourishes.”
The Associated Press called Biden the “master senator … rattling off foreign policy details with ease.”
And that’s true in a sense. Biden was at ease; he easily rattled off a string of falsehoods and gasbaggeries.
According to the master senator, the U.S. and France “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.” Afterward, according to Biden, “I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’ ” Perhaps Biden meant to say the U.S. and France kicked Syria out of Lebanon. But even this is woefully glib. Syria never fully abandoned Lebanon. And there was no “vacuum” for Hezbollah to fill. The terrorist group was already firmly in control of southern Lebanon and part of the government. No one remembers Biden and Obama fighting for the stupidly impossible NATO move either.
That Lebanon claim of Biden’s was a serious “gaffe” (otherwise known as an error or a lie) – and recall that, at the time, Biden was widely billed by the MSM as some sort of foreign policy expert.
I remember this one:
The [incorrectly self-proclaimed] constitutional law professor [Biden] scornfully mocked Dick Cheney because the vice president “doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president. That’s the executive branch.” Wrong. Article I defines the Legislature, Article II the executive branch. Both define the role of the VP.
The article by Goldberg goes on for some time listing these errors, lies, gaffes, what have you. Towards the end, he writes this:
Biden has no excuse. He’s been in the majors for nearly 40 years, and yet he sounds like a bizarro-world Chauncey Gardner. The famous simpleton from Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” (played by Peter Sellers in the film) offered terse aphorisms that were utterly devoid of specific content but nonetheless seemed to describe reality accurately. Biden is the reverse: He offers a logorrheic farrago of “specifics” that have no connection to our corner of the space-time continuum.
In short, he just makes stuff up. But he does it with passionate, self-important intensity. He’s like a politician in a movie with a perfect grasp of a world that doesn’t exist. He’s not an expert, he just plays one on TV.
No one seems to care. He convinced the focus groups he’s an expert. The media, with a few exceptions, let it all slide.
That was in 2008, fifteen years ago. Biden was 65 years old. The media was already “letting it all slide,” because Biden was Obama’s VP, and therefore he had to be defended and protected. But he was already – what? Stupid? Mendacious? Suffering from mild dementia? All of the above? Whatever it was, it should have been cause for alarm even on the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) back then but of course it wasn’t. They protected him even better twelve years later, in 2020, and they will protect him now until it no longer serves the left to protect him. Then and only then will they abandon him.
