This is kind of fun:
Biden the Unifier makes a prime time speech
He must have thought his “MAGA folks are facists” speech the other day in Philadelphia was so fabulous that he decided (or someone decided) he should repeat it to the entire nation.
Just a little unifying pep talk to declare holy war on Emmanual Goldstein, the Kulaks, anyone who ever wore a MAGA hat or voted for Trump, and all other related destroyers of our democracy – otherwise known as non-Democrats.
By the way, I did not watch the speech. I generally don’t watch political speeches anyway, I pretty much knew already what would be in this one, and I was actually at a bona fide social engagement during it.
Some excerpts to warm the cockles of your heart:
MAGA Republicans…embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies.
Kind of like cockroaches. Shine a light on them, and they scatter.
More from Biden’s speech:
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our Republic.
Apparently the speech’s lighting and setting was red and black – “blood red.” See some thumbnails and clips here.
Biden has always been a corrupt and mendacious opportunist, and a nasty one at that. There was something creepy about him that I perceived even back when I was a Democrat – and that I think America perceived as well, because until 2020 all his previous efforts at running for president were abysmal failures. Back then, even the media was willing to expose him as a plagiarist. But now they need him, and so whatever he does it’s okay with them – that is, until the left manages to find a replacement to run in his stead.
Just now, looking up the exact year when the plagiarism scandal derailed his presidential bid, I clicked on this NY Times article from September of 1987. Lo and behold, what an apropos headline: “Biden Admits Plagiarism in School But Says It Was Not ‘Malevolent’.”
Malevolent. That is the perfect word for Joe Biden.
From the 1987 article – Biden’s defense was pretty much “I’m not evil, I’m just stupid.” As you read this, understand that this isn’t about something he did in grade school or in junior high, when he really might not have been expected to know any better. This was in law school, after he had graduated from college:
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ”a mistake” in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school.
Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing ”malevolent,” that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully. And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports of his using material from others’ speeches without attribution, was ”much ado about nothing.”
Doesn’t that sound just like Joe?
More:
The news conference [defending the plagiarism] was held just before he presided over the third day of hearings on the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court.
To buttress his assertions of sincerity and openness, Mr. Biden released a 65-page file, obtained by the Senator from the Syracuse University College of Law, that he said contained all the records of his years there. It disclosed relatively poor grades in college and law school, mixed evaluations from teachers and details of the plagiarism.
One of Biden’s previous finest hours: the borking of Bork.
And do you recognize Biden’s usual m.o. here?
Mr. Biden also suggested that the recent damaging information about him had originated with other campaigns, which he did not identify, and that it had emerged now because he was enjoying a chance in the limelight with the Bork hearings.
”Look, I’m a big boy,” he said. ”I’ve been in politics for 15 years. This is not my style. If they want to do it this way, so be it.”
Speaking of style – I certainly recognize his style of referring to himself, present even thirty-five years ago.
Oh, and the plagiarism? According to the article, Biden maintained that as a law student he had just “misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully.” I imagined that the quotes were a couple of lines from something, and he had failed to footnote them. But guess what? It was a mite more than that:
The file distributed by the Senator included a law school faculty report, dated Dec. 1, 1965, that concluded that Mr. Biden had ”used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had submitted the 15-page paper.
He copied five pages of a law review article and included a single footnote to the article. That was in the days before Google, and I wonder how many other times he submitted plagiarized papers, including in college, and people didn’t catch it. I would not be at all surprised if it was a regular thing, although we’ll never know.
More:
In a letter defending himself, dated Nov. 30, 1965, Mr. Biden pleaded with the faculty not to dismiss him from the school…
…[T]he young Mr. Biden said that ”if I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?”
…The faculty ruled that Mr. Biden would get an F in the course but would have the grade stricken when he retook it the next year. Mr. Biden eventually received a grade of 80 in the course…[and when he] graduated from the law school in 1968, was 76th in a class of 85.
The rest of that 1987 article details other times Biden failed to attribute quotes to others, or lied about his participation in events. It contains the following quote from Biden:
It’ll all be dependent on the American people looking at me. They’re going to look at me and say, “Is Joe Biden being honest with me, or is Joe Biden not being honest with me?”
This bit about plagiarism may seem like a digression, but it’s not. The extent of the plagiarism and the form his excuses took in 1987 tell us how consistent Biden has been in his duplicity and his bombast. The reference to the Bork hearings reminds us that even back then he was interested in demonizing the opposition and lying about it.
And no, Joe Biden is not being honest with us.
Palin loses – what does it mean?
I tend to think there are too many special things about this special election to come to many general conclusions.
The first special thing is Palin herself: my sense is that she’s no longer all that popular in Alaska, somewhat of a has-been. Her quitting the governorship probably didn’t sit all that well, either.
The second special thing is that the winner only has a few months in office before this election repeats itself and the voters will get another chance at essentially the same election, only this time for the full Congressional term.
The third special thing is ranked choice voting. That is very special indeed, and I’d like to keep it as rare as possible. Here’s how it works in Alaska:
Elections in Alaska now start with an “open” primary, in which candidates of all parties compete and all voters are allowed to participate, casting their ballots for the one contender they prefer. The top four vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election.
Then, in the general election, instead of just voting for one of the top four candidates, voters rank their preferences in order. They are allowed to rank candidates one through four, but are not required to do so — voters could instead choose only to rank their preferred candidate, or only rank their top two.
If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-place votes, then the ranked-choice system is used to determine the winner.
First, the Alaska Division of Elections eliminates the candidate with the least amount of first-place votes. The votes that had gone to that candidate are then assigned to the second choice listed on those voters’ ballots.
If no candidate has topped 50% of the vote at that point, then the Division of Elections would go through a second round of tabulation. The fourth-place candidate would have already been eliminated, and in the second round, the third-place finisher would also be eliminated.
Those who ranked the third- or fourth-place candidate first would have their votes assigned to the highest-ranked remaining candidate on their ballots.
It is too much like a game of “Survivor,” and much too susceptible to misunderstanding by voters, as well as to winners who are not really favorites.
Whether the voters in Alaska were just sick of Palin, or whether ranked-choice voting made the difference, is unclear at this point. For two divergent views, please see this from Bonchie at RedState and this from Scott Johnson at Powerline.
Happy Birthday, Barry Gibb
Fangirl here, wishing Sir Barry Gibb a very happy birthday number 76 and wedding anniversary number 52.
In honor of the occasion, I offer the following video of Barry singing “Stayin’ Alive” at Glastonbury in 2017 at age 71 . He’s understandably lost quite a bit of his voice quality and some of his high notes. But this song was always extremely difficult to sing live, even with his brothers. It’s so fast, with so many words, and the breathing can be tricky.
Notice, though, how happy everybody in the audience is. If songs were measured in the amount of joy they bring, this song would be number one or close to it (yeah, I know some of you may hate it, but you are very heavily outnumbered). His son is the bearded guy with the tattooed arm playing the guitar. Note that while singing at such a fast clip, Barry also has to keep up a frenetic rhythm guitar. Not bad for an old guy who’s stayin alive.
And here’s the same song in his handsome-as-all-getout heyday:
Close to two years ago I heard that a biopic was in the works for the Bee Gees. I’m still waiting. I hope they don’t muck up the story and change the “narrative” like they did with Queen. I also can’t imagine who would be good-looking enough to play Barry, or charismatic and charming enough to play any of the Bee Gees or their brother Andy. The singing they always can lip sync. But the rest? Much more difficult, and in my opinion probably impossible.
Fascism, real and fake
“Fascism” and “fascist” are popular epithets that have come to mean anything people want them to mean, but they always mean “bad.” Lately Biden and his minions have taken to calling the half of America that doesn’t agree with them – and that supports Trump – fascists. A very dangerous move, and a very purposeful one.
Among other things, “fascist” is not the same as “Nazi,” although most people are more familiar with the latter group than the former, and most people probably equate the two. If you want to know more, here’s an excellent article from 2020 by Angelo Codevilla on the subject of fascism. Fascinating and instructive.
How many people know a thing about this history? Few. How many care? These days, probably very few.
Here are some timely quotes (and remember, this was written back in 2020) [emphasis mine]:
But the fascist state’s legacy proved durable. Fascism had fathered the modern administrative state’s omnicompetent bureaucracy… fascism had habituated Italian politicians to think of power in fascist terms—in terms of control of all that bureaucratic power and patronage…
…[A] little attention is enough to separate Italy’s fascism up to 1935 from Hitler’s National Socialism. Whereas the former understood itself as bound by Italy’s characteristics going back to Roman times, as well as by the Church, and aiming at concrete improvements in the lives of Italians, Nazism was always a purely revolutionary movement, hostile to Germany’s history, reality, and welfare. The race that it purported to represent was a myth that abstracted from real Germans. Nazism’s gods were its own invention. Hitler’s last statement may have been his most telling: “The German people were not worthy of me.” That is not nationalism. The Nazis never called themselves fascist. The fascists wanted a place in the sun for Italy. The Nazis acted as if they were the sun…
In short, fascism was a reality limited to Italy. But fascist Italy was first to enact the disempowerment of legislatures and the empowerment of the administrative state that is now the Western world’s standard of government.
That’s something to mull over.
As is this, in terms of the Biden administration’s offensive against the right:
Stalin elaborated the doctrine of “social fascism” which, verbiage aside, meant that Communists should consider all to the right of them—essentially all who were not under Communist discipline—as “fascists.”…
For that claim to have force outside of the Stalinist canaille, for it to migrate into modern Western society’s bloodstream, it had to be translated into pseudo-academic form. The book The Authoritarian Personality (1950), by the Communist Theodor Adorno and researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, began doing that by popularizing a test that purports to correlate personality traits with fascism—that is, Adorno’s F-scale (F for fascist)… The test’s fraudulence is based on the presumption that its author—not the historical record—may rightly define a historical phenomenon. The moment you have assumed the power to say what fascism, or anything, is—the moment you have taken it upon yourself to redefine reality—you may then correlate the work of your hands to anything else. And it helps if you also define that something else. The scam’s circularity is obvious—unless you’re part of it.
And this from Codevilla’s 2020 essay is a reminder – if anyone needs reminding – that the use of “fascist” by Democrats to describe and define and label the right for both silencing and retribution is nothing new (“Bushitler,” anyone?):
…[E]stablishmentarians, confident that nobody wants to be governed by fascists, now justify their claim to power and privilege just as orthodox Stalinists do: “it’s us or the fascists!” Wanting to de-legitimize their conservative opponents, they call them fascists, then define what conservatives think and do as fascism. Or they run the scam in reverse: define fascism in terms of the things their least favorite people do, and then define those things as fascism. Conservatives are fascists. Get it?
Got it.
Open thread 9/1/22
The whistleblowers and Wray
FBI agents have been coming forward to talk about Wray:
Kurt Siuzdak, a lawyer and former FBI agent who represents whistleblowers at the bureau, said agents tell him that Mr. Wray has lost control of the agency and should resign.
“I’m hearing from [FBI personnel] that they feel like the director has lost control of the bureau,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘How does this guy survive? He’s leaving. He’s got to leave.’”
I find it hard to believe that FBI agents are that naive. Who’s going to get rid of Wray? Biden?
Tell me another one.
Traitor Trump
The DOJ has put out more information on the supposed rationale behind the MAL raid.
Jonathan Turley has this to say about it:
The arguments raised by the Justice Department are not just familiar but transparently weak. The government argues that Trump lacks standing because the records belong to the United States, not him. However, that is the point. The court is trying to determine who has a right to these documents. The Justice Department itself recognizes that it may have gathered some attorney-client privileged documents in this ridiculously broad search. It allowed the seizure of any box containing any document with any classification of any kind — and all boxes stored with that box. It also allowed the seizure of any writing from Trump’s presidency…
…[T]he court itself has ample authority to appoint a special master to help sort through such material…
The Court has the inherent authority to seek such assistance in an independent review of material. Special masters are fairly common helping courts establish the record for ruling on the merits of motions. It may turn out that most or all of this material is properly held by the government, but a Special Master can help establish the record for that decision, including the status of material acknowledged as potential attorney-client material.
The Justice Department also makes the same type of arguments used to oppose the release of a single line of the affidavit in redacted form. It claims that both its investigation and national security would be harmed. That is even less compelling here. A special master would be reviewing documents in a secure facility and would presumably have a clearance. Many of us who have handled national security cases have been cleared for TS/SCI material.
How exactly would a special master review materially undermine national security as opposed to the same review conducted by the Justice Department’s own taint team? The special master is an extension of the court. This is simply a court review in camera of documents….
For those of us who have litigated cases against the Justice Department, it was an all-too-familiar claim by a department notorious for over-classification and over-redaction arguments…
The Department also makes other incomplete or dubious arguments. For example, it asserts that no executive privilege claim can be made by a former president: “The former President cites no case—and the government is aware of none—in which executive privilege has been successfully invoked to prohibit the sharing of documents within the Executive Branch.” That is because this issue has not been fully litigated. It has been a long debate over the ability of former presidents to claim privilege. Indeed, under the Presidential Records Act, such assertions are honored over documents in its possession.
What is clear from this filing is that Merrick Garland will not change his refusal to seek modest steps to assure the public that this investigation is neither pretextual nor political. Instead, he is “all in” on these sweeping and untenable claims of the need for absolute control and secrecy.
There’s a lot more at the link. But Turley’s article, thorough as it is about the legal issues, doesn’t even begin to get into the larger issues here, which are political rather than legal.
First, there is the context. I have little doubt that the DOJ can find a reason to indict Donald Trump – or certainly Joe Biden and especially Hunter Biden – or any politician or you or me. The problem is that they don’t want to indict certain people – people of the Democrat persuasion, for the most part – and are laser-focused on getting Trump for something. That’s what this is about; it’s not about national security or classified papers issues; those are the MacGuffins.
They have been trying to get him from Day One, and they have been lying through their teeth right along. The right knows this and many independents know this. Even some Democrats know this, and mostly seem to think it’s fine because Trump is Evil Incarnate and the ends justify the means. They’ve come to that conclusion because (a) he’s a Republican, and Republicans are semi-Fascists or even Fascists (b) he has a big brash mouth; and (c) the media has been telling them he’s evil and he’s been accused of so many nefarious things that where there’s smoke there’s got to, got to, got to be fire.
Another element of the context for the MAL raid is that, arcane interpretations of arcane statutes and controversial disputes over the power to classify documents aside, it is truly unprecedented to try to indict a former president, and if the DOJ wants to do it, they’d better have an ironclad case of offenses so egregious that even the right sees that he positively had to be stopped.
This is quite clearly not that case here; not even close. And it feeds very strongly into the idea that Trump is being persecuted, and even makes it seems more plausible, not less, that the 2020 was stolen by fraudulent means. It certainly was influenced by lies and coverups, such as the one involving the Hunter Biden laptop.
These are not all separate issues; they form a cohesive attack. One of the assertions in that attack is that Trump is a traitor or a wannabee traitor, and the noble DOJ and FBI had to stop him. That was the leitmotif of Russiagate, the premise of which – that Trump was in Russia’s pocket – was always absurd on the face of it. He was actually one of the tougher presidents in his Russian dealings, but apparently the left, the Democrats, and the MSM either failed to notice that (unlikely) or purposely ignored it (likely) in order to drive their preferred “Trump is a Russian puppet” narrative.
Those behind the MAL raid are trying to make people believe that Trump was going to do something nefarious with these papers, something possibly approaching treason. That is especially absurd because, like Trump or not, his love for this country is obvious. The more likely explanation for the raid – that Trump had some papers with the goods on the DOJ or the FBI, and they wanted to get them back – isn’t mentioned by the DOJ, or course.
I have no idea whether that was the DOJ’s motive, because I think the desire to criminally charge Trump would have been motive enough and was motive enough. They saw a technicality on which they thought they could indict him or at the very least discredit him further than they already have done, and they went for it.
And in my opinion, that is what this is all about.
ADDENDUM: Bonchie at RedState believes they won’t actually charge Trump with anything. As I wrote in the last paragraph of my post, that may be the case and they may just be doing this as further propaganda, because making an actual case that stands up in a court of law is so much harder. But propaganda has worked quite nicely for them in the past.
Bonchie points out that the photo of classified documents scattered about and not in boxes – that was put out by the DOJ – is propaganda that has so far had its intended effect. The usual Trump-haters think this was some sort of bad action by Trump, and haven’t realized that the documents had been in boxes and it was the feds doing the raid who removed them from their containers, spread them out that way, and photographed them.
I believe that encouraging such a misperception was the intent of releasing the photo in the first place.
I also believe they may actually indict him. I can’t even give odds, so I’ll just say 50/50.
Oz pounced!
The right often jokes that when Democrats mess up, the MSM story becomes “Republicans pounced!”
Well, in the Pennsylvania race, the NY Times has literally done just that, in an article entitled “When Fetterman Wasn’t Ready to Debate After a Stroke, Oz Pounced”:
It began with a spat over crudités. It has escalated into one Senate hopeful who is openly mocking another’s health after a stroke.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has taunted his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, about his stroke recovery, suddenly thrusting an issue both candidates had tiptoed around into a central theme of one of the most watched races of the year.
The Times is hardly alone. If you do a search on the topic you’ll got article after article with headlines that focus on Oz attacking poor ill Fetterman. Shouldn’t the story actually be that Fetterma’s health is not good and his level of functioning is so subpar that he won’t debate, and yet he forges on? But no, Fetterman gets the Democrats’ pass, and it’s Oz who’s the meanie for attacking and pouncing on Fetterman – which is a pretty funny picture because Fetterman is huge at 6’9″.
As for Fetterman’s actual condition, he clearly has communication issues and it’s not at all clear when and if they will resolve. That’s a bona fide problem. Fetterman claims it’s just a slight verbal glitch that will clear up soon, but he’s lied about his health before:
The Fetterman campaign reacted angrily to the assertion that Fetterman has misled anyone about his health, telling KDKA-TV, “This is exactly what people hate about politics. We’re trying to have an honest conversation about health … while Oz and his team are making mean remarks and ridiculing individuals for their health challenges. … John has been clear about his health,” said Joe Calvello, Fetterman’s communications director.
Keller disagrees, saying, “I think it’s pretty clear that John Fetterman hasn’t been clear about his health problems to voters.”
That CBS article doesn’t really say in what ways Fetterman has previously been “unclear” about his health problems. After his nomination and after his stroke (the stroke occurred several weeks before the nomination), he revealed that he’s had a heart condition for many years which he had ignored for many years:
…Fetterman’s cardiologist, Dr. Ramesh Chandra, said she first saw Fetterman in 2017, after he began experiencing swelling in his feet. “That is when I diagnosed him with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump,” Chandra wrote.
Chandra went on to write that she prescribed Fetterman medications, and advised him to improve his diet and exercise habits but “did not see him again” until June 2.
“John did not go to any doctor for 5 years and did not continue taking his medications,” the doctor wrote.
Chandra added that Fetterman now has a pacemaker-defibrillator and “is doing well.”
And he only revealed that because after he had his stroke, certain anomalies indicated that he was also being treated for previously undisclosed heart disease and some people noticed and pointed that out.
Open thread 8/31/22
I’ve been in houses with most of these things:
My mother said that the house in which she grew up had a horse trough in front, and when she was a child there were still plenty of horses who would take drinks there.
“Two US officials” now saying Thibault wasn’t fired
Word is that Thibault resigned because he was due to retire anyway.
So it doesn’t even seem to me as though he will be the designated fall guy.
Excerpt:
Timothy Thibault, a top-level FBI agent who had been under fire for his role in investigations regarding President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, resigned late last week and was walked out of the FBI, two U.S. officials confirmed. But these officials also said that Thibault had reached retirement age, and they added that all of those who retire hand over their badge and gun and are escorted out of the building.
That’s what the “two US officials” said. As for the FBI, it “declined to comment.”
Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91
RIP:
After taking power in 1985, Gorbachev’s introduction of limited economic and political freedoms – including his “glasnost” policy of free speech – ultimately led to the USSR’s demise.
He refrained from using force to crush pro-democracy protests in the Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe two years prior to the Soviet Union’s fall. The protests ended with 15 republics demanding autonomy from the USSR.
His final hold of power was effectively taken away in an August 1991 coup, after which he watched from the sidelines as Soviet republics announced their independence.
By the time Gorbachev resigned as USSR leader on Christmas Day of 1991, the world’s largest country was already unraveling due to deepening economic woes and secessionist bids…
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts to end the Cold War but was never forgiven by some Russians for the volatility that came with the sudden fall of the Soviet Union.
“He gave us all freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it,” liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda after visiting the ailing former leader in the hospital earlier this summer.
Reagan had a big role, too.
The USSR was held together for so many years by terror at the hands of the government; Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face.” Once the leaders no longer had the inclination for that, the unraveling occurred.