Afghanistan leave-taking

The New Neo Posted on by

Sunday is usually my day off, but there’s so much Afghanistan news I thought I’d do a very short post on the subject. I expect to have more to say later, and at any rate the fog of war is operating right now and it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening there.

Maybe it’s always hard to know exactly what’s happening there.

But there is no question that we’re abandoning the country precipitously, and that the sanguine predictions of Joe Biden and some of the generals were a travesty. Just to take one small example (there are plenty others), here is a statement Biden made on July 8. That’s about five weeks ago:

But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

In addition, he said, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” But that has apparently occurred, as well.

Biden wanted out, and fast. There doesn’t appear to have been much of a plan for doing so – or, alternatively, the generals had been planning for something slower and that wasn’t allowed to happen. I believe that it would have been a debacle any way it had been done – that’s why three previous presidents didn’t do it – but Biden may just have maximized the confusion and carnage.

I usually write “Biden or whoever is in charge,” but in this case I believe that Biden actually was taking the lead and giving the order, and no one was successful in overruling him. We don’t know, of course.

There’s a lot we don’t know.

There’s plenty of coverage of what is apparently happening. Go to any news outlet or blog and you can find it.

I’ll skip the Vietnam analogies for now, but they’re there. There are differences, but for those of us who were around during the pullout from Vietnam, there are strong similarities. Here’s a post I wrote in 2007 on the fall of Saigon.

On pop music fame, families, fashion, and too much fame: the Bee Gees

The New Neo Posted on by

Regular readers here know about my recent rediscovery of the Bee Gees, and my new fascination with them. Many of you find this quite boring; others are interested. I am so surprised myself by the experience that I keep trying to analyze it – their music, what the special attraction is for me – and I find I have so much to say I could write a book.

That’s – strange. But that’s the way it is. So if you think I’ve written too much lately on this topic, just know that I’m actually holding back.

Another thing is that this interest has opened up a more general interest in the creative process in music. In the past, I’ve thought a great deal about that topic in connection with writing and in dance, two fields where I have some experience. But although I’ve always appreciated and loved music, I’ve never shown a particle of skill at singing, playing an instrument, or composing. I suppose I might be able to write lyrics – a form of poetry – but otherwise I am strictly a consumer. But now I’ve become quite fascinated by why some people are gifted in music and drawn to performing and writing it, and one thing I’ve definitely noted is that it often seems to run in families.

Just to take one example, there’s Cissy Houston:

Emily “Cissy” Houston (née Drinkard; born September 30, 1933) is an American soul and gospel singer. After a successful career singing backup for such artists as Roy Hamilton, Dionne Warwick, Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin, Houston embarked on a solo career, winning two Grammy Awards for her work.

Houston is the mother of singer Whitney Houston…aunt of singers Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick, and cousin of opera singer Leontyne Price.

Quite a family, isn’t it? My guess (a pretty safe guess, I might add) is it’s both nature and nurture that’s responsible. But nature definitely plays a huge role.

All of this is a segue into this video interview of the Bee Gees, who are brothers and who talk about certain aspects of the music business, post-disco. This video was from 1987, after they had taken six years off from performing and releasing their own records, and instead had been engaged in writing huge hits for others (Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Kenny Rogers’ and Dolly Parton’s “Islands In the Stream,” and Dionne Warwick’s – Cissy Houston’s niece’s, that is – “Heartbreaker,” for example). Even to this day, most people have no idea that the Bee Gees wrote those songs and wrote and produced the albums on which they appeared.

The video starts out with a TV performance that I think may be lip-synced (that was often the case for TV shows at the time), but I’ve cued it up for the interview portion, which is fairly short:

Is the Biden administration worse than you expected?

The New Neo Posted on by

I was reading a set of comments somewhere at a blog on the right where a lot of people were saying this administration is worse than they had expected. The topic at hand was the incompetence of the withdrawal from Afghanistan – in particular, the reports that one of the first rules of the military, that one destroys the weaponry one leaves behind rather than have it fall into enemy hands – was being violated and no one seems to quite know why. Then the discussion segued into a general discussion of the administration as a whole, not just Biden but whatever person or persons are in charge.

My opinion? I didn’t anticipate every detail. But I expected every single thing they did to be absolutely terrible and very destructive. And it has pretty much worked out that way so far. It’s a distressing thing to watch, assimilate, and chronicle. I wrote a post on February 3, 2021 about the phenomenon of what the administration is doing, which I called “The Unraveling.”

And a lot has been unraveled since then.

A couple of further points about the Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper confrontation in Central Park last year

The New Neo Posted on by

I already wrote about the topic yesterday – and strongly suggested that you listen to this podcast about it. The discussion in the ensuing thread raised a bunch of interesting questions that I wanted to address, so here’s one more post about the deeper story of what happened that day in Central Park, and in particular its aftermath.

Commenter “huxley” notes that Bari Weiss, the interviewer in the podcast and former Times writer, writes in a Substack article that she only recently learned that Christian Cooper had written a Facebook account shortly after the incident, indicating that he threatened Cooper (“look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it”), and tried to lure the dog with a dog treat that he carried for “such intransigence.” [Correction: although the URL of the substack article says “bariweiss.substack.com, it was actually written by someone named Megan Phelps-Roper, so for the rest of this post I’ve substituted Roper’s name for Weiss’s when referring to the author of the substack piece, and eliminated a reference to the author of it being a reporter. Weiss is still the person in the podcast interview about the incident.] Phelps-Roper writes:

He threatened her, I thought, stunned. He says himself that he approached her — a woman alone in a wooded area. He tried to lure away her dog. How was this the first time I was reading these details? Had I just missed them in the other stories I’d read?

How had she missed them? I think it’s quite simple: first of all, they weren’t heavily covered even on the right. Although I didn’t write about the Cooper vs. Cooper incident – I was busy with the death of Floyd, which was contemporaneous, plus I felt from the start that there was something fishy about the Central Park story – I read early on (unfortunately, I no longer remember where) about that Facebook post of Christian Cooper’s. Thing is, a person had to read a lot to find it, and also had to read not just the MSM or blogs on the left, but had to dig into blogs on the right as well. The information was available, but it wasn’t easy to find.

But what’s more interesting to me is why (at least, if I’m remembering correctly) relatively few outlets on the right covered Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions either. I recall that I didn’t cover the story because, as I said, I was thinking the facts were murky and so I would wait, and then I got distracted by the extreme furor around the death of George Floyd and pretty much forgot about the Coopers. But plenty of other bloggers wrote about it and didn’t really get into the details that might have explained Amy Cooper’s behavior.

I tried to search old articles about this in order to test whether my memory about the nature and content of the contemporaneous coverage on the right is correct, but it proved surprisingly difficult to locate and I didn’t have time to spend many hours in that quest right now. So at this point I’ll just say that’s the way I recall it, and if I’m correct about the avoidance of discussion of Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions at the time, I think the general avoidance was because defending Amy Cooper seemed very risky and the video seemed to implicate her so strongly. And especially in the wake of the Floyd furor, not many people – even on the right – wanted to touch it.

Another point I’d like to make is that, according to Amy Cooper in that podcast, it was only when Soledad O’Brien tweeted about the Central Park video featuring Amy – a video that had been posted by Christian Cooper’s sister – that the story went truly viral and Amy Cooper began to get multiple and serious death threats. It happened quickly because O’Brien picked up on it very quickly and had “a million” followers (she has 1.3 million now).

O’Brien is a long-time and well-known journalist. Why did she think this story was one she should spread far and wide? I would guess she recognized at once that it had viral potential. Guilt by video has become a big journalistic approach, especially with incidents that involve supposedly racist actions or speech. So in my opinion it was really O’Brien, a newscaster, who was most responsible for the video getting such wide coverage.

O’Brien is of mixed racial background: her father is white (from Australia) and her mother is of what’s called “Afro-Cuban” descent, meaning that her mother is of mixed race including black. According to Wiki, when O’Brien’s parents wanted to be married, Maryland still had laws against miscegenation (an interesting map can be found here), and so her parents had to move to DC to marry. That’s certainly a searing history for O’Brien, and it wouldn’t be surprising if O’Brien became especially sensitive to racial issues in part as a result of that.

Even now, as I go to O’Brien’s Twitter page, I see this at the very top:

And so my guess is that O’Brien felt the need to “call out” Amy Cooper by posting that video, even though Cooper’s behavior was as a private citizen rather than a public official in the course of his or her work duties. Whether or not O’Brien knew Amy Cooper’s name at that time, O’Brien had to know that her identity would be discovered and revealed in short order.

But O’Brien didn’t stop with that initial tweet. She kept up the pressure on Amy, stoking more anger and ridicule on her with a tweet such as this one.

If I’m not mistaken, this is O’Brien’s first tweet on the subject (Melody Cooper is apparently Christian Cooper’s brother, who had posted the video on social media of the confrontation):

So Amy Cooper was immediately described by O’Brien as a woman desiring to risk Christian Cooper’s life and essentially framing him (by “lying about the threat”), and being brazen enough to do it knowing she was being recorded. O’Brien doesn’t appear to have been the least bit curious (even though she’s a reporter) to know the whole story. She was apparently content to let the video fragment speak for itself and assumed she could interpret it to the world.

Which she did – and O’Brien’s truth about the incident, and about Amy Cooper herself, became The Truth for most of the world.

[NOTE: One relatively minor issue is whether Amy Cooper was at fault for letting her dog go unleashed in a part of the park that requires leashes. Yes, she was – but that hardly is an offense that should destroy a person’s life. In addition, if I’m recalling Amy Cooper’s story on the podcast correctly (I haven’t listened to it again to make sure, because I don’t know at what point she addresses the issue), she says that she had been in a part of the park that does allow unleashed dogs and then took a shortcut on a path that entered an area that requires leashes, but she didn’t realize that.]

Exculpatory evidence is being hidden from those arrested for January 6th activities

The New Neo Posted on by

The legal machinations illustrative of the prosecution of many of the January 6th defendants is demonstrated in the case of Cuoy Giffin. For Giffin, those actions include the government’s charging him although he never entered the Capitol at all and damaged no property or people, nor did he even attempt to do so. His crime was essentially trespassing (for which he was overcharged) and wrong-thinking:

Griffin was arrested on January 19, 2021, and as with many of those who were merely present at the Jan. 6 melee…the government prosecutors sought to detain him without bail for the duration of his criminal prosecution.

In its motion for pretrial detention of Griffin, the government argued that Cowboys for Trump [Griffin’s group] “advocates for fun rights” and that Griffin “is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election.” According to the government, Griffin’s “inflammatory conduct, repeated threats, delusional worldview, and access to firearms makes him a danger to the community.”

Unlike some of the defendants who have been detained indefinitely so far, Griffin was released after three weeks. But the process that could lead to a trial (unless there’s a plea bargain) goes on. And here is the important part about exculpatory evidence [emphasis mine]:

After explaining [in a court filing] that the government possesses “[t]housands of hours” of video footage from a variety of sources, they conceded these materials include recordings of Capitol Police Officers allowing protesters to enter the so-called “restricted” area into which Griffin is alleged to have trespassed. The prosecutors stated [my additions in brackets and my emphasis]:

“[W]e are not in a position to turn over the universe of information we possess for Defendant to review. Although we are aware that we possess some information that the defense may view as supportive of arguments that law enforcement authorized defendants (including Defendant) to enter the restricted grounds, e.g., images of officers hugging or fist-bumping rioters, posing for photos with rioters, and moving bike racks, we are not in a position to state whether we have identified all such information.”

Let’s underline that point: federal prosecutors have evidence – which so far they refuse to provide to any of the Jan. 6 criminal defendants – that Capitol Police Department officers moved obstructions to allow protesters to enter locations that prosecutors are now calling “restricted areas.” And more than that, the government possesses evidence that the officers were taking photos with, hugging and fist-bumping many of those who they allowed to enter those areas.

We on the right have long known, through early reports from news outlets and blogs on the right that showed amateur videos about the January 6th incursion, that a lot of people were let into the Capitol that day, acted like tourists and were treated like tourists, and then left of their own volition. But if this information ever comes out in court, it probably will be news to our liberal friends – if they even hear about it then.

The government case looks weak, but even if the prosecution ultimately fails to convict, they have already won. They have won in the court of public opinion to a great extent, and that was always the point. A later revelation of the weakness of the cases, if it occurs, will be hushed up or twisted in some way by the MSM. The right has been served notice that the left is playing hardball and that any defiance will be met with the threat of arrest and detention without bail. Plus, even a weak case may end in convictions given the political climate of DC, its judges, and its juries.

January 6th was very very useful to the left, and will continue to be useful even if convictions never happen.

The deeper story of the confrontation between the “Central Park Karen” and birdwatcher Christian Cooper

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually recommend long podcasts, but I listened to this one last night and found it extraordinary and well worth a hearing. It’s a detailed exploration of what happened last year in a story that went viral.

You probably recall it – the woman shrieking, holding her dog, threatening to call the cops on an “African-American man” (her description) named Christian Cooper (who made the video), and the results: she was doxxed, threatened, and fired from her job. Since I read a lot of news, and because in particular I read news both in the MSM and outside of it, I already knew some of the things on this podcast that the MSM failed (I believe purposely) to report, things that would have changed the thrust and meaning of the story quite a bit. Therefore I would guess that, for the vast majority of people these details would probably all be new if they listened to this podcast (which they most likely won’t).

Bari Weiss is the interviewer and the man being interviewed is Kmele Foster, who did some in-depth research on the story and also interviewed Amy Cooper (the “Karen”of the tale). She is now in hiding and has been since a short while after the incident. Part of Foster’s interview with Amy Cooper appears on the podcast, as well. I salute Foster for his fairness, thoroughness, and even for his courage, because touching this story is something that took bravery. Kmele Foster is a black man, by the way.

Here is the link again.

One element of the story that didn’t surprise me and won’t surprise most readers here is the way in which the MSM shaped their coverage to sensationalize what happened and to make Amy Cooper the clear villain and Christian Cooper the innocent victim. Distortions by the MSM are old news, but it seems that Bari Weiss is still learning how duplicitous and misleading the paper for which she formerly worked, The New York Times, often is, and how destructive this can be.

My rather dry recitation doesn’t really convey the intensity of the podcast, in particular what Amy Cooper has to say.

Remember that Indian study about the viral loads of vaccinated people?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been revised:

Ravindra Gupta, the director of the team at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases that conducted the study, confirmed to The Fact Checker that the article had been initially rejected during peer review because a reviewer “was not happy with certain aspects.” The paper is now on its fourth revision — Research Square only shows the first version — and Gupta said that the “high viral loads” cited by the CDC essentially disappeared in the current version as more information was obtained from a third hospital. He said that revised paper is still under review for publication.

But hey, it served its purpose, right?

I criticized the study already here, although I didn’t yet know about this additional flaw. So much of what we read about COVID turns out to be untrue, and it’s hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Is it any wonder people have become distrustful as the MSM, many medical authorities such as the CDC, blue state officials, and the Biden administration try to whip up further fear?

Afghanistan: the end game

The New Neo Posted on by

Afghanistan has long been a terrible place to go to war, as Kipling knew:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

So now we’re getting out of Afghanistan. Some commentary from Mike Rogers, House member:

For months, I have pressed President Biden for a plan to avoid the very situation that is now happening in Afghanistan. Now, American lives are at risk because President Biden still doesn’t have a plan. Weeks ago, President Biden promised the American people that we would not have a Saigon moment in Afghanistan – Now, we are watching President Biden’s Saigon moment unfold before us.

“The turmoil happening in Afghanistan is a surprise to no one. Unfortunately, I believe the worst is yet to come.

“Our allies are watching as Afghanistan rapidly deteriorates and President Biden still claims he does not regret his unconditional withdrawal. Make no mistake, the consequences of President Biden’s haphazard withdrawal will be felt for decades.

Among other things, I think the way this is playing out is a sign that the military has become confused and incompetent.

The prognosis is not good:

“The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday…

The Taliban captured a strategic provincial capital near Kabul on Thursday, the 10th the insurgents have taken in a weeklong sweep across Afghanistan just weeks before the end of the American military mission there.

…[A] resurgent Taliban estimated to now hold some two-thirds of the nation, and thousands of people have fled their homes…

I have read that they now have 17 capitals, and counting.

There’s no dearth of opinions on this, so I’ll add mine. I trust that the Biden administration and the current “woke” military will do this in an incompetent way.

As for what should have been done in the first place, I thought then and I still think now that we were between a rock and a hard place. Afghanistan was harboring Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and large training camps for terrorists. We gave the government at the time (the Taliban, that is) an ultimatum: surrender Bin Laden or we’ll go to war. They didn’t, and we did. We took over the country in a military sense, but what should we have done then?

Afghanistan is recalcitrant to change. Nation-building there has always been an iffy proposition, to say the least. But it always seemed to me that if we were going to make that gamble, we needed to be prepared to pretty much take over the country for a long long time. If we lacked the will to take over for the long haul, then it was a waste to have attempted it.

We did lack that will and that commitment, and yet we did attempt it. So it was almost certainly doomed to failure.

And yet could we have kept some troops there just to fulfill our original goal, which was to discourage the setting up of major terrorist operations there? I don’t have the answer, but I think that was the only reasonable solution at this point. As commenter “TJ” wrote today:

Afghanistan will remain the base for renewed Islamist terror mayhem. The costs of attempting this project in an urban area are now way too low for them not to work towards this aim and the money supporting it too much and too available for it not to go on again…

I don’t like this at all. But there it remains – a threat wielded by Islamic zealots. Against the US and the world

I don’t know whether the prognosis is as bad as TJ states. But I do know that it is a distinct possibility, and that it is the reason we went there in the first place. When people say nothing was accomplished in the Afghan war and all the occupation years after that, I believe they are forgetting that it may have discouraged many more terrorist attacks, and particularly well-organized ones (such as 9/11) at that.

I don’t think the Biden administration has a clue how to manage the fallout. Biden himself certainly doesn’t and I wouldn’t have expected him to have known what to do even if he were still in full possession of his wits. And the generals? There’s this:

That is by design, not by accident. The priority of the Obama administration regarding military personnel was cooperation with the leftist political agenda, and Trump was unable to reverse that.

[NOTE: The parallels with Vietnam are obvious, although hardly exact. But I’m going to link to one of my previous posts about the way our involvement in South Vietnam ended.]

Ballot adjudication in Fulton County, 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The November 2020 election seems like it took place a very long time ago. Slowly, ever so slowly, more of the details are emerging about how absentee ballots fared. We may never know whether or not the problems they raised actually changed the results of that election, although it’s certainly very possible. However, the rules that were in place in many states were highly vulnerable to both error and fraud, and truly negligent in terms of trying to prevent those things.

For example, let’s take Fulton County, Georgia, and the subject of ballot adjudication. That occurs when a paper ballot is marked in such a way that it confuses the machines reading it and gets rejected. There are rules about what happens next, but they are confusing and subject to exploitation.

The link I’ve just given is to a highly informative article, and I suggest you read the whole thing; it covers more than adjudication. But here’s an excerpt on that subject:

Welcome to the arcane process known as adjudication, where human judgment is substituted for machine scanning in cases where voters incorrectly filled out a paper ballot. Election officials and official observers have dealt with it for years, with everyday citizens mostly oblivious to the process.

But in 2020, adjudication played a much larger role in states like Georgia, which allowed hundreds of thousands of additional citizens to vote absentee for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia’s largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County by Just the News under an open records act request.

The [Fulton County] adjudication ballots alone are not enough to change a Georgia election in which Biden and Trump were separated by less than 13,000 votes. However, they reveal an imperfect system vulnerable to chaos, subjectivity, or political dirty tricks, especially in a county like Fulton where state officials documented widespread irregularities and misconduct and now want to take over election counting.

Adjudication hardly represented the only problem. But it represented a sizeable wild card introduced into the process, and even if the people doing the adjudicating had been trying desperately to be fair and evenhanded, the rules were so confusing that it would have been difficult. For example:

…[I]n Georgia,…election regulations create two conflicting imperatives. One regulation, which is quoted on each absentee ballot, emphatically declares that a paper ballot should be deemed “spoiled” and uncountable if a voter makes any mistakes or unauthorized marks.

“If you make a mistake or change your mind or change your mind on a selection do not attempt to mark through the selection or attempt to erase. Write ‘Spoiled’ across the ballot and across the return envelope” and get a new ballot, language on each ballot reads.

Just the News reviewed hundreds of ballots that met the “spoiled” definition — ballots that voters had in some way altered, defaced, or corrected — that were still allowed to count after adjudication. The reason? Another Georgia regulation gives election officials broad discretion to try to determine the intent of a confused voter, and actually encourages them to find a way to make flawed ballots count.

The Georgia code stipulates that voting tabulators must be programmed to “reject any ballot, including absentee ballots, on which an overvote is detected,” with those ballots to be “manually reviewed” by a review panel following their rejection.

If a voter “has marked his or her ballot in such a manner that he or she has indicated clearly and without question the candidate for whom he or she desires to cast his or her vote,” the state code says elsewhere, then the ballot “shall be counted and such candidate shall receive his or her vote.”

Yet state law also directs that a ballot should be considered “spoiled” if, in part, a voter has used it to “cast more than the permitted number of votes.” A spoiled ballot “shall not be reinstated,” the code states, suggesting that any ballots deemed as such should not be counted.

…Some counted ballots even had the word “spoiled” written across them and still were counted.

You can find examples on some pictured ballots at the link.

More:

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said it did not have an immediate response on whether such spoiled ballots should have been allowed to go to adjudication, saying it was studying the matter. Raffensperger has said, however, Fulton County’s election processes are so flawed he believes the state of Georgia should take it into receivership.

Oh, so now he tells us.

There’s a report on this and other voting process problems in that county alone:

Raffensperger’s handpicked election monitor for Fulton County compiled a 29-page report identifying voting irregularities that occurred in the Atlanta vote counting center, including documented problems with spoiled and adjudicated ballots.

Fulton County refused to answer any questions about the records they provided to Just the News.

But Bridget Thorne, who has worked for years in various election jobs in Fulton County, said officials there did not have clear instructions for handling spoiled or adjudicated ballots last fall.

“According to a Fulton County Board member, there were no written adjudication processes given to adjudicators,” Thorne told Just the News. “Processes were given verbally. In the event the Democrat and the Republican adjudicators could not agree, [county executive] Ralph Jones would decide.

“Based on my experience, it is not surprising that they did not have a standard written process for adjudicators,” she added. “An internal audit financial report that came out on Wednesday also states that they are missing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).”

If I retained my capacity to be shocked at this sort of thing, I would be shocked.

What’s more [emphasis mine]:

The Just the News review shows adjudication judges have the power to “remove marks” and or “add marks” to reflect a voter’s assumed intention and did so hundreds of times in Fulton County alone. They also can reject them. And at least in Georgia last November, they made such decisions one to four days after Election Day had ended, when preliminary vote counts showed who was leading or losing in close races…

Scores of adjudicated ballots ultimately were resolved with the notation “removed mark” next to Trump’s name, in most cases allowing a second mark next to Biden’s name to count. But at times it happened in reverse too, or to the detriment of third-party candidates.

If these problems aren’t eliminated before 2022, the situation will remain highly suspect and vulnerable to error and manipulation.

At least it may be the case that Hunter Biden is now immune to blackmail

The New Neo Posted on by

After all, the myriad awful things we’ve learned about him so far don’t seem to have made a particle of difference.

But this is still disturbing – or would be, in a world where dissipation like that still offended the standards of enough people, and newspapers told the truth:

Hunter Biden claimed Russians stole another one of his laptops for blackmail while he was close to overdosing in a Las Vegas hotel room, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The alleged incident would mean Hunter lost a total of three computers – the first abandoned at a Delaware computer store and the second seized by federal agents – each likely to hold sensitive information on President Joe Biden and the embarrassing pictures, videos and communications of his son.

The third laptop still appears to be missing – and was taken by Russian drug dealers after they partied with Hunter in Vegas, he told a prostitute in a conversation caught on camera.

After filming himself having sex with the woman using his laptop in January 2019, Hunter left the camera rolling as he recounted a Vegas bender in which he spent ’18 days going round from penthouse suite to penthouse suite,’ sometimes costing $10,000 a night.

‘I spent f***ing crazy amounts of money,’ Hunter said. ‘I was with these guys. The one guy was, not like you anyway… each night he’d be like ‘there’s going to be so many people here, crazy f***ing party’ and each night it’s nobody.’

All the people who were horrified by false allegations about Trump’s supposed relations with Russian prostitutes could not care less about Biden’s actual relations with Russian drug dealers and with prostitutes. Just to refresh your memory on how life (Hunter’s) imitates art (the fabrications of those who spread the lies about Trump), take a look (the article is from April of 2019):

Rtskhiladze told Mueller that “tapes” referred to “compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group,” which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, according to the report (the pageant was owned by Trump for years). Cohen told the special counsel that he spoke to Trump about the issue after receiving Rtskhiladze’s text…

BuzzFeed News published the full, unverified dossier that included the infamous claim that Russian authorities had evidence of Trump watching prostitutes urinate in a hotel suite.

There is no indication that such a tape exists and Trump has vehemently denied it. Rtskhiladze also told prosecutors that he was told the tapes were fake, but that he didn’t convey that to Cohen.

The allegation was not just that Trump did this, but that it opened him up to blackmail possibilities and this was why he was in Russia’s pocket. Something like that.

But Hunter and Joe Biden’s actual vulnerability to blackmail is not the concern of the left at all. They are interested only in suppressing the reports and also discrediting them as “fake news” and “Russian disinformation,” in order to protect Joe Biden for the 2020 election and beyond. Now that it is crystal clear that the Hunter laptop stories are all true and even worse than previously reported, most Biden voters don’t seem to care.

Or perhaps they don’t even know.

Biden’s approval rating has been going down, but it is still ludicrously high considering the situation, which is hardly limited to the laptops but includes the destruction of much of the American economy and the triumph of identity politics and leftist influence. And although those polls are probably inaccurate, I am unaware of any of my liberal Democrat-voting friends who don’t still think Biden is a great improvement on Trump. So my guess is that a lot of Biden-approval does indeed remain intact out there.