The case for a Biden impeachment
I’m not usually in favor of impeachment when it’s a foregone conclusion that there will never be a conviction. But Margot Cleveland makes a good case for impeaching Biden nevertheless:
The evidence of President Joe Biden’s corruption during his time as vice president is now so overwhelming and the implications so serious, the disparate investigations underway in the House and Senate can no longer suffice. Nor can the Department of Justice and the FBI — even under the auspices of a special counsel — be trusted to oversee the investigation given the overwhelming evidence that they obstructed the probe into the Biden family.
There is only one option left that can deliver truth and transparency to the American public, and that is an impeachment inquiry that investigates not just President Joe Biden, but Attorney General Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney David Weiss, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In other words, because the MSM, the DOJ, and the FBI are in corrupt collusion with the Bidens, all of them need to be bypassed in order to get the word out to the American people.
A special counsel won’t do, either:
A belated appointment of a special counsel is untenable because, beyond interfering with congressional oversight and delaying a transparent accounting to the American people, the necessary investigation includes both the DOJ and FBI, the heads of both agencies, and, at minimum, one U.S. attorney. Thus the attorney general’s control over any special counsel appointment creates an untenable conflict of interest.
I think that reasoning is quite convincing. However, I’m not at all sure that even an impeachment inquiry would get the word out to enough people. Would the MSM cover it? And wouldn’t it just be framed as “Republicans pounce!” and “Republicans are just acting to avenge the impeachments of Trump, which of course were completely valid whereas this one is not.”
I still think it needs to be done.
NOTE: I just saw this article, “Speaker McCarthy Warms Up to Impeaching Joe Biden.”
Jonathan Turley on the media’s protection of Biden
The media’s desire to “move on” from the scandal is reaching an almost frantic level, as millions in foreign payments and dozens of corporate shell companies are revealed, and incriminating emails are released.
The same plaintive demand was made in congressional hearings.
What was most striking about the last hearing involving two respected IRS whistleblowers was how Democratic members avoided virtually any specific questions…
…Any question would now trip a wire on the Bidens, so most avoid the allegations in favor of talking about Trump or other shiny objects…
Now, Archer is expected to testify that Joe Biden participated in actual telephone calls with them…
No matter the severity of the revelations, the liberal media calls the investigations a “clown show.”
Others have continued to tell the public that there remain no alleged ties from Hunter to President Biden despite emails, pictures and witness testimony.
Yet it is becoming harder and harder to avoid these details.
I agree with what Turley wrote, and I suggest you read the whole thing. But although, as Turley says, it’s become harder for them to avoid those details – and I’ll add that it’s also become more outrageous and ludicrous – I believe that the Democrats are fully up to the task. Helped by an MSM which echoes their message as well as ignores the details that implicate the Bidens, and instead makes the story into “Republicans pounce!” And “Republicans malign our glorious FBI and DOJ!” as well as “evil Trump this and evil Trump that,” they might be quite successful in continuing to minimize and/or coverup the biggest US political scandal of my lifetime.
NOTE: The Federalist has two articles on much the same topic: this and this. From the latter:
The lead stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post, however, are not focused on the credible allegations of bribery, the more than 200 alleged interactions between Joe Biden and his son’s business partners, or the bombshell testimony from veteran IRS whistleblowers who testified publicly. Instead, Monday’s lineup included a story in The New York Times about how the pair of IRS whistleblowers were prepped by former Grassley staffers (who’ve also worked for Democrats) and a column in The Washington Post about Republican efforts to “impugn Biden.” On Tuesday, readers had to scroll to the politics pages of each paper to find anything about the president’s Ukrainian scandals. Even then, readers were met with skepticism of Republican charges instead of the pro-impeachment coverage that defined the corporate media’s approach to the Trump administration.
On political affiliation as a birthmark
Commenter “Jamie” writes: “My father-in-law is utterly convinced that he’s a Democrat and that Republicans are, minimally, bad people,” and then she lists a set of beliefs he holds that seem very consistent with being on the right. She adds:
Doesn’t he sound center-right? But there is NO convincing him that he might consider voting for a (California!) Republican for ANY office, including dog catcher.
My point being, he begins with an unexamined belief in something that doesn’t hold up to even a little scrutiny, because it’s core to him. He is a Democrat, his father was a Democrat, his father before him… To challenge that “truism” is to challenge his sense of identity.
That is extremely true for a lot of people I know. They are consistent Democrat voters and believe people on the right are mean-spirited, bigoted, money-grubbing, ignorant and/or stupid. And yet, when one actually speaks with these Democrats and explores their beliefs – which I sometimes do – it seems they are far more conservative than their voting records would indicate.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said to such a person, “You know, you’re actually a closet conservative.” And I meant it. They sometimes have chuckled in response. But still, they would never ever vote for a Republican.
I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2005 in this post entitled, “The birthmark: an identity is a difficult thing to change.” An excerpt:
So, the groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.
An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.
Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.
Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate…
That’s because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.
My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.
As I said, that was written in 2005. What’s changed about the phenomenon during the ensuing years is that the gulf is now even wider and the feelings more entrenched for the vast majority of people. Democrat pundits, politicians, and activists realized quite some time ago that their strongest appeal was to this phenomenon of virtue-signaling and demonizing of the other side, and so over the years that’s become an especially prominent part of their campaign tactics.
It works.
Open thread 7/25/23
“Barbie”: another movie I don’t plan to see
Pity. The ads made me think that it might be something like the movie “Enchanted,” which I enjoyed. The latter was a charming film about a character from a fairy tale who’s transported to the real world and has to function there. It was made in 2007, which seems like a century ago in some ways.
“Barbie” is also about a pretend character living in a fantasy world – in this case, the doll Barbie – transported into the real world for a while. But the ads lied. It’s rather short on the charm, to say the least:
The plot of the movie is that Kens are second-class citizens in Barblieland. but then they see in the “real world” that there’s a thing called “the patriarchy,” where men are on top (and routinely sexually assault women), so they make Barbieland into a patriarchy.
The plot then becomes all about returning the Kens back to their rightful place, on the bottom of society.
The plot isn’t about making men and women equal — it’s about fixing society so that women are on top, as they should be, and men are slaves again.
And this is the Feminist view of the ideal state of the world.
Let’s not limit this to modern feminism. It’s the case with the leftist viewpoint in general, and/or postmodernism. If there is no truth except that we belong to identity groups and the only thing that matters is power, the only solution is to be a member of the group in power. Turning the tables is fair game, and in fact it’s the only game.
A nasty and reductionist point of view. But that’s the way it’s been playing out in many areas these days, as the Gramscian march keeps charging forward.
Sagan on changing one’s mind
The other day, commenter “AesopFan” offered the following quotes from astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
…
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.”
…
“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know, that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again […] I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
I’ve seen these things play out prominently in my life, so the quotes really got my attention.
For example, I recently had a conversation that demonstrated the first two, and it’s certainly not the first time. The form such conversations take is that the person states an opinion that is based on some things that I have found to be untrue, but also tells me that I shouldn’t offer any rebuttal. Sometimes the person says there is nothing that would act to change that person’s mind. In the recent conversation, when I tried to say that perhaps what I would add would actually make that person feel better about things, or at least understand what the other side thinks and believes and why, the response was that I don’t understand that person’s feelings.
Depressing.
For Sagan’s third quote, I couldn’t help but think how outdated it was. Nowadays, I don’t think it often happens that scientists change their minds, at least not in any field that has become politicized – and a great deal of science has become more politicized. And of course, I (and others) have changed my mind in politics – or at least, my political designation, although not really my basic principles. That change was based in large part on evidence and arguments by conservatives such as Thomas Sowell.
And surely people change their minds regarding religion quite often – there are converts, for example, or people who come back to the fold of their original religion, or people who lose their faith. But Sagan is correct, I think, in indicating it doesn’t usually happen as a result of someone presenting a good argument about religion.
Devon Archer’s impending testimony on Joe Biden
For many years Joe Biden has claimed that he never spoke to Hunter about his business dealings. That was never especially believable, and there were even photos of Joe with some of the people with whom Hunter did business. The MSM didn’t care to look into the matter, of course.
Now that the GOP-controlled House is looking into the matter, the MSM is still showing a lack of interest in what would be a Watergate-squared type story if only the perps were Republicans:
The Democrat hacktivist media had their priorities last week, and it seems that the shock hit The Sound of Freedom was more important to them than a host of other news . . . like the whistleblower hearings that blew the lid off the Biden family corruption and influence peddling.
Now reports are that Hunter Biden’s previous business partner Devon Archer will be testifying to the House on the subject of Joe Biden’s involvement while he was still VP:
Hunter Biden put then-VP dad Joe on the phone with business associates at least 2 dozen times, ex-partner Devon Archer to testify https://t.co/HPo9m9JCTE pic.twitter.com/DBCD9XlnbE
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) July 24, 2023
Also:
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said, “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.”
If Archer’s testimony turns out as predicted, I still don’t think it will matter, except to the right and some smattering of Independents paying attention. Democrats will not pay attention, or if they do they will not care, or if they care they will say that Trump (or whichever random Republican manages to be nominated in 2024) is worse.
Watergate mattered for two reasons. The first was that the press hyped the story because it allowed them to make themselves out to be heroes as well as because Nixon was a Republican – and one they especially disliked. The second is that many Republicans were outraged at what Nixon had done and abandoned him, indicating to him that they would vote to impeach and convict him.
In later years, it occurred to me that if Nixon had been a Democrat, Watergate would have been a small footnote. The press would not have hyped it and the Democrats would not have abandoned one of their own for something as piffling as principle.
Open thread 7/24/23
You can’t keep a good song down:
Desperation, love, cars, and song
[NOTE: I wrote about the “Fast Car” brouhaha involving the Luke Combs cover version two days ago. That sparked further thoughts – thus, this post.]
The strength of the song “Fast Car” is due in no small part to its lyrics’ powerful evocation of hope, desperation, and despair. Sometimes things just don’t work out, even for those who are doing their best to do what’s right. Sometimes the deck really does seem stacked against them – and that’s true whether the song is sung by a black woman back in 1988 or a country-type white guy in 2023.
Some of the lyrics:
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something
Me, myself, I got nothing to prove
You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
By the song’s end, the singer seems trapped, although of course we don’t know the ultimate trajectory of her life. There’s also this lyric:
So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder…
In America in particular, the car isn’t just a form of transportation. It’s often seen as a way to express oneself, especially for the young, and a means of escape to freedom. Speed is part of this, as is lovemaking – or at least it was back then. The very first kisses, the very first touches, and the very first sex often happened to teenagers in a car.
My second boyfriend, whom I met when I was seventeen, came from a place that was more like the world about which country singer Luke Combs might be singing – rural, depressed, mostly white. It was a world in which the young men all had guns and hunted with them, and they had fast cars or fast motorcycles. At nineteen years of age, my boyfriend had a lot of friends who were already lying in quiet graves, the victims mostly of those fast cars plus alcohol. And the survivors like my boyfriend were already living lives of not-so-quiet desperation.
I had met this boyfriend freshman year at college, and as you might imagine we were a bit of an odd couple. He had somewhat of a Steve McQueen vibe, was smart but troubled, and had earned a scholarship to the far-off college where we’d met. But he didn’t last long there – it was a foreign world to him – and he dropped out just a few months after starting.
He went back to that small town where he’d grown up, and as far as I know he never left. I visited him there briefly a few months after his return home; he’d bought a motorcycle, and we went riding on it. Fast, with my arms wrapped around his waist.
That boyfriend died a long time ago. I know because now and then I’d Google his name, and the only mark he seemed to have made was when he died, because the first sign I ever found of him in all those years was his obituary. It was two sentences long. There didn’t seem to be a family; no wife and children. There was no mention of accomplishments. I don’t know what happened and will never know. But I don’t think it was a happy story.
“Fast Car” makes me think of him.
It also makes me think of another set of lyrics from another great song: Dire Straits’ “Telegraph Road.” It’s a lengthy song that tells some of the story of America’s history. It’s set in Detroit and came out in 1982, a few years before “Fast Car.” Here are the lyrics I’m talking about:
Well, I’d sooner forget, but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But just believe in me, baby, and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
‘Cause I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again
From all of these signs saying, “Sorry, but we’re closed”
All the way
Down the Telegraph Road
And to put these words I’ve been writing about to the music that goes with them, here’s Tracy Chapman herself singing the original “Fast Car.” She’s got such an evocative voice with that fast vibrato and resonant timbre:
This is Luke Combs’ version, very faithful to the original:
And here’s Mark Knopfler the great, singing about roads, cars, love, and despair in Detroit along Telegraph Road – or anywhere (the part I discussed starts around 7:42, but the whole song is wonderful):
COVID lab leak coverups, then and now
The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.
As these [COVID lab leak discussion] documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it.
I think I stopped completely trusting scientific authorities quite some time ago, and probably you did, too. And by “quite some time ago” I mean way before COVID.
But in another sense Taibbi is correct about the effect of COVID on my sense of trust, because if I really try to remember my attitude at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, I probably thought that the authorities would be at least a little more honest and forthcoming than they ended up being. However, quite early on I realized something was very amiss, and that there was a lot of panic-stoking going on, both by scientists, journalists, and government officials. It was pretty easy to see just by crunching the illness and death numbers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship – remember that? I do, because I wrote about it at length. I also reflected on those early musings in this post.
And so, because these things were relatively easy to see if a person actually looked at what was happening, I figured some sort of deception plus/or stupidity was going on in a lot of the reporting on COVID.
And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of the subject I could find on this blog is from April of 2020, which is pretty early. Here’s what I wrote back then:
You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.
But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.
Then I quoted this piece by Jonathan Turley:
When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.
Turley is not a research biologist, nor am I. But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political. One didn’t have to be a scientist to see that – plus, there were other scientists who said that the virus had a structure that made it likely it was the result of bioengineering.
So if reporters were fooled it was because they wanted to be, or were simply stupid, or both. Or perhaps not so many were actually fooled.
But back to the more recent revelations about what was going on among some scientists towards the beginning:
The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”
The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?
The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.”…
The scientists were responding to “higher-ups.” Although the identities of these “higher-ups” remain to be further investigated, the new documents and Congressional interviews suggest that the “higher ups” may be Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome trust, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, government agencies, and/or the intelligence community.
I haven’t read the source material of the original communications among the scientists, but you can find links to the fuller materials here.
Not really so weird
From commenter “AesopFan” on the thread about the two versions of the song “Fast Car”:
It is profoundly weird that people who claim to be standing up for gays and lesbians are actually the ones erasing the history and achievements of homosexual people.”
It does indeed seem weird, but it’s really not. It’s completely logical and is actually required for leftist activism on certain topics today. It the argument on the left is that bigotry has kept a certain group or groups down in a certain field, and that such bigotry continues to the present day, the existence of earlier achievements by too many members of that group undermines the argument. Oh, one or two might be allowed as stellar examples of success against all odds. But if there are more than those one or two, the whole edifice of the argument begins to collapse.
That phenomenon is also the impetus for the proliferation of fake hate crimes in the last decade or so, although that has a many-decades-long history as well (see Tawana Brawley, for example). Real persecution and real hate crimes – which of course have actually existed and were more numerous historically – don’t need manufacturing.
But the narrative of continuing systemic oppression requires a steady diet of hatred directed at the victim group. If there isn’t enough evidence of that hatred, the evidence must be faked.