I watched the film the other night. It’s good, although it’s a reminder of how deeply awful the whole Russiagate episode was. However, one problem is that in an hour and a half it’s basically impossible to cover the events with complete thoroughness – although I’m aware that if the film were any longer and more thorough, it probably wouldn’t be watched by more than a handful of viewers.
So you might want to watch it and recommend it to any persuadable people you know, because the fact that this happened in America is horrific. And yet enormous numbers of voters are unaware of how it went down, or even still believe that Trump is a Russian tool. That latter group may be unreachable, or they may simply be low information voters propagandized by the general drift of MSM reporting on this. So I think it’s worth a try, anyway.
Here’s a good article on the subject of polls and how difficult it is to do them or to analyze what they mean.
I have stopped even trying. And yet I still read articles on the subject, some giving hope, some taking it away, and I try to maintain a semblance of equanimity. I try – but I intermittently fail, big time, because this is the first election about which I’ve ever felt a fair amount of what I’d call terror.
I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve never missed voting in a presidential election since my first one in 1972. Until 2004 I always voted for the Democrat, and I always took a calm approach to losing. I preferred that the Democrat would win, but I was never afraid of the opponent.
Maybe that was because the opponent was a Republican – always a patriot and certainly never a leftist (even back then I was for the first and against the second). But I also think it was because all the candidates were people who were competent at the very least, and who really weren’t all that ideologically apart – not compared to today, that is.
In 2004 there were three new factors operating for me. The first was that I was on the right. The second is that I was more politically active and aware than before. And the third was the candidacy of John Kerry, whom I detested and had detested from the time he came on the political scene in the early 70s, when I was still a Democrat. That’s how much I detested him – it predated my political change.
So I wasn’t calm in 2004. I was nervous, anxious, frightened, and then relieved when Kerry lost and Bush won. And then in 2008 my level of fear was high, as well, because I recognized Obama as a very smooth and yet hidden leftist, and I sensed that his promised fundamental transformation of America (details largely unspecified when he was campaigning) would be a lot more fundamental and leftist than he was letting on.
2012 was similar. I feared Obama would be re-elected, and sure enough he was. Then in 2016, my fear shifted to the primaries, when I watched with growing alarm as Donald Trump, of all people, became the nominee, and I thought that meant that Hillary Clinton would become the next president. I feared the election of either of them, although for very different reasons. I probably don’t have to explain why I feared Hillary becoming president, but my fear of Trump was predicated on the sense that electing him would be a plunge into the unknown and that he would be a dangerously loose cannon in way over his head.
So on Election Night in 2016 I was resigned to a bad outcome. Either outcome would be bad, the known bad versus the unknown bad. That was my assessment, and I’m pleased to say that I was wrong about Trump and later pleasantly surprised.
But that only ups the fear quotient this time around, because I see this battle as the most important one of my lifetime, and the most bizarre as well. So that’s why I now use the word “terror” for the feeling that washes over me from time to time, and which I try to beat off.
Joe Biden, like John Kerry, happens to be another politician I’ve always disliked, starting when I was a Democrat. Even back then Biden seemed mendacious, corrupt, and on the wrong side of most issues. But Biden has now turned a cognitive corner and is not even up to his previous level of functioning, so that makes it even worse – and Harris is a leftist hack and laughing loon.
So that’s one factor. Another is that I have grown to think Trump does know what he’s doing and I like a great deal of what he’s done. But both of those things pale beside my conviction that this is far more than a battle between these two men, or between the Democrat and Republican parties of old. The Democrats have gone off the far left deep end, and they are deadly serious about it, and way too much of the populace seems either ignorant of this fact or approving of it. In addition, the MSM and most other cultural and even financial institutions are completely onboard. That is disturbing beyond my powers to describe.
It’s a lonely fight for Trump and the Republicans. But even if Trump wins, that’s just a finger in the dike. We’d better figure out what to do about the threatening floods.
…because they have proven them wrong about Israel, Palestine, the Arab World, and the path to peace.
Have you noticed a pattern here? For decades, leftist experts who presented themselves as caring about achieving a certain outcome – whether it be increased economic prosperity for black people, or peace in the Middle East – were really only interested in that outcome if it was achieved by the efforts of the right people (themselves) in the right way and not the wrong people in the wrong way.
The Arab-Israel conflict isn’t supposed to end this way. For 50 years, the “experts” have all agreed that the road to peace goes through Ramallah. So long as Israel doesn’t make peace with the Palestinians, it cannot make peace with the Arabs…
…But even if Trump and Netanyahu are forced off the stage, the Abraham Accords will not go away. The peace that is bursting out from all quarters is real. It reflects the real desires of the people who live in the region. And it turns out their desires are far different from the sacrosanct anti-Israel catechisms taught and internalized by the peace processors of the West.
And this brings us to the real “Netanyahu Dilemma.” The real dilemma embittering the lives of the foreign policy elites is not whether to give the Nobel Peace Prize to men they hate. It is how to react to the peace these men have achieved.
Here’s an essay that says some things similar to what I’ve been thinking lately. I can’t say I was especially familiar with the term “Omertà,” but I’m familiar with the idea that Orwellian lies and inversions of truth have become incredibly common.
An excerpt:
…President Trump is hated and feared even by many in his own party. He is not of that ilk. He is much more than a “Public Servant”. He is an authentic individual who has no need to rig his position for “Self Service”. He has promised to exposed the racket that public service has become and he has made a fair start at it. He is not pretending to be bland and folksy while making out like a bandit as Joe Biden has done. He is not, like Kamala, a pampered daughter of College professors pretending to be a “down-with-it” African American who erupts in hollow laughter at nothing funny. Everything he says is open and sincere and thereby dangerous to the phony “servants” around him and their confected personae. He is the Omertà Buster.
He explodes media pretense with every thing he does. His advisors have been consistently wrong in advising him to change his style. He doesn’t care if you see the real Donald Trump because he is real- not servile.
At the beginning I thought a lot of politicians hated Trump mostly because he was advocating conservative policies they didn’t like, and because of his abrasive personality. I knew they also hated him because he might stop the enormous gravy train they had set up for many decades, and after a while I began to perceive that motive as paramount. It’s recently been highlighted by the overwhelming protection and promotion they are giving Joe Biden, the totally naked emperor who is as deeply or much more deeply into the DC corruption as they are.
So Trump’s promise to drain the swamp may indeed be the most potent motivator of all for their hatred and the strength of their desire to take him down at all costs, including the destruction of the republic – a republic about which many of them are not all that keen, anyway.
An email Hunter Biden received in April 2015 from a Burisma executive discussing an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden, which lies at the heart of a New York Post investigation, is unquestionably authentic, a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday.
The DCNF obtained a full copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday. The DCNF provided Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, with a copy of the email and its metadata for forensic analysis.
Graham, who has been cited as a cybersecurity expert in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Wired, Engadget and other news and technology outlets, told the DCNF that he used a cryptographic signature found in the email’s metadata to validate that Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, emailed Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.
In the email, Pozharsky thanked Hunter Biden for “inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
During the Obama years, I often would try to figure out what Obama (or a high-up in his administration) could possibly do to make the MSM turn on him. But I never could figure out what it would be, because they seemed all in, and willing to make excuses for any and all behavior.
But at least the MSM really did love Obama and think him a fabulous, intelligent, suave guy – one of them – who would implement the policies of which they approved and who also would make them feel very good about themselves for supporting him.
None of this is true of Biden. All that Biden offers is the continuation of the dominance by the left that began with the Obama years, many of the same people put in power, an open ruthlessness that was somewhat more hidden during Obama’s time, and the end of Trump.
Once you look at that list, though, you realize that it’s more than enough to make the press willing to debase themselves to an even greater degree than before. And this time they’ll do it for a deeply corrupt, cognitively challenged, and not especially intelligent old man of whom they’re probably ashamed.
A Justice Department official confirmed to journalist James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting Group that in 2019 the FBI “opened up a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money laundering and remains open and active today.”…
Bobulinski told Rosen he was interviewed by the FBI on October 23, 2020, for about five hours, with up to six agents present at one time. He made three cell phones available to the agents, who “carefully examined the digital evidence” contained on the phones.
So the FBI interview of Bobulinski was only recently, after Bobulinski had gone public with his role in the Hunter and Joe Biden story.
And I hope the interview was not merely for the purpose of Flynning Bobulinski at some future date, if you know what I mean. Because I would not put it past them.
So, what was the FBI doing with the laptop in the meantime? Perhaps Toobining themselves?
Whatever they were doing, they kept mighty mum about it, as President Trump was impeached by the Deomocrats for daring to suggest that the Ukrainians look into the Biden corruption allegations, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.
Perhaps the laptop was being saved as an insurance policy for Kamala.
You may have noticed more sarcasm than usual in this post. But so many events have transpired lately that have elicited in me a very bitter and cynical (and perhaps not all that funny) humor.
A number of people wondered if the video I featured yesterday of Joe Biden bloopers from a speech he made recently in Pennsylvania was authentic or whether it had been doctored to make him sound worse. I became curious, and decided to check, a process which is simple but time-consuming.
It also required me to listen to Biden’s entire speech in its official version. I’ve never listened to a speech by Biden that is that long – a little over twenty minutes. That may not be long for a typical political speech, but it’s certainly long for Biden these days.
The speech was easy to find in its official full-length form on Biden’s own YouTube account (here it is, although I’ll also post the full video later in this post), and the errors and slurrings Biden made are all too real. You can find some at minutes 18:20 to 18:38, 20:55 to 21:01, 25:44 to 25:50, 27:07 to 27:11, 31:23 to 31:28, 31:41 to 31:50, 34:07 to 34:10, 34:28 to 34:32, and 34:44 to 34:49. I think that some of those I’ve listed aren’t even included in the compilation video from yesterday.
But what’s worse is the content of the speech itself. Lie after lie after lie (doom-laden stuff about COVID and Trump, Trump called the military “losers”, Biden won’t ban fracking although he said many times that he would, Trump hasn’t delivered on any of his promises), and simplistic and formulaic solutions delivered in a shouting monotone for the most part. For someone who bills himself as the nice guy in the race, this speech has a surprisingly harsh animus.
First, though, I want to highlight two segments that weren’t on yesterday’s blooper video because they’re not bloopers. But I think they’re extremely revealing about what makes Joe run and what has always made him run.
Here’s the first:
And here’s another:
In front of many phrases, he also has a repetitive vocal tic that’s new to me: “Look!” And it’s not the only repetitive phrase he uses. The whole speech has a robotic air, as though he’s memorized some time-worn phrases that he is reciting with what feels like the correct and appropriate affect but is somehow off.
It’s really rather frightening to watch the whole thing, more so than watching the short excerpts. As one person in the chat there said, “Sounds like a senile angry old man.”
Here’s the speech in its entirety. As I said, you can find some bloopers at minutes 18:20 to 18:38, 20:55 to 21:01, 25:44 to 25:50, 27:07 to 27:11, 31:23 to 31:28, 31:41 to 31:50, 34:07 to 34:10, 34:28 to 34:32, and 34:44 to 34:49:
Can this be what America wants? I guess we’ll find out – I was going to say “soon enough,” but of course there may be quite a delay post-Election Day. But I cannot imagine that a single person watching Joe Biden actually thinks he’s a competent person who can accomplish any part of what he says he can. The votes for Biden are votes against Trump and/or for the leftist agenda, period.
[NOTE: By the way, in that first clip Biden says “I’d only be the second guy in this century, in the last century, that in fact didn’t go to an ivy league school.” That’s rather nonsensical; it’s unclear which century he’s talking about. If he’s talking about the 21st Century, there have only been a total of three presidents so far. So he would only be the second of the three; big deal. But he’s not even right about that. George W. Bush went to Yale, an ivy league school. Obama had two years at Occidental, not ivy league, and then finished up at Columbia which is ivy league. So, would Obama be the one predecessor in the 21st Century who didn’t go to an ivy league school? Does half and half count? And what about Trump? Two years at Fordham, not ivy league, and then finishing up two years at the University of Pennsylvania which is ivy league. Just like Obama. So Biden would either be the first who didn’t go to an ivy league school (who didn’t graduate from one, anyway) or he would be the third out of four, depending on how he defines it.
But even that is being too kind to Biden, because what does “in this century, in the last century” mean? Those are two different centuries – 21st and 20th. So, if Biden’s talking about the 20th Century too, a whole slew of 20th Century presidents didn’t go to ivy league schools. George H. W Bush did (Yale). But Bill Clinton went to non-ivy Georgetown (although he later went to Yale Law School). Reagan did not (Eureka College), Carter did not (he went to the Naval Academy), Gerald Ford did not (U. of Michigan), Nixon did not (Whittier College), LBJ did not (Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College), JFK did (Harvard), Eisenhower did not (West Point), and Truman was the last president who did not graduate from college at all. FDR was ivy league (Harvard), Hoover went to non-ivy Stanford, Coolidge came close to ivy with Amherst but no cigar, Harding went to Ohio Central College, Wilson was an ivy graduate from Princeton, Taft was another Yalie, and Teddy Roosevelt had gone to Harvard. So there you have it.]
Of course, this is not new. After all, the media protected Obama for eight years, and has targeted Trump for over four.
But still, what’s going on regarding the Hunter Biden story seems in some difficult-to-define way to be worse. Maybe it’s that Joe is so obviously incompetent, corrupt, and mendacious, and that if the left wins this election they have plans to achieve one-party rule, and that the MSM not only seems fine with it but seems to be actively promoting it in a way that cannot be denied because it’s right out in the open for all to see. Maybe it’s the cooperation of the powerful social media forces in the coverup, as well as agencies many of us used to trust (for the most part, anyway, and perhaps wrongly) such as the FBI. Maybe it’s the enormity of the media blackout and the loneliness of Fox and especially Tucker Carlson.
Or maybe it’s the fact that at least half of Americans don’t seem to care, or actively promote this news blackout because they think it will help quash the nefarious Trump.
I also wonder just how much pressure is being brought to bear on the MSM (not that they need much pressure to be leftist toadies) by what they see as the incoming Biden/Harris administration (perhaps this much). If the left wins, they will wield unprecedented power: the executive, the agencies, perhaps Congress, the Court if the stacking plans go through, the media, social media, entertainment, sports, academia, many religious groups, corporations. Have I forgotten anyone?
Added [former assistant FBI director] Swecker, who also served as a federal prosecutor: “It’s strange how in this election there is no curiosity whatsoever about foreign influence on a potential president of the United States, especially from this country’s greatest threat — China.”
Nope, not so strange. Easy to understand.
(3) Glenn Greenwald resigns because Hunter Biden stories are being censored by the media site he founded:
Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.
The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.
The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.
Please read the whole thing. Greewald is not a Trump fan, but he does believe in attempting to get at the truth regarding candidates of either party. Big pressure is being brought to bear to stop that.
And the pressure’s not just on Greenwald, of course. It’s almost certainly everywhere.
(4) This story isn’t specifically relevant to the Hunter&Joe Biden story, but it’s relevant to the media lies and propaganda machine against Trump: “anonymous” really was a nobody, but the Times peddled him as a bigshot insider anyway, because it had huge anti-Trump propaganda value.
The French Catholic Church responded to the attack saying that “Christians must not become symbols to be slaughtered.”
The attack took place amid an atmosphere of growing hatred and incitement against France in the Muslim world. Demonstrators in Muslim countries have been staging angry protests over the recent clampdown on Islamist organizations by French authorities following a teacher’s beheading. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused French President Emmanuel Macron of “Islamophobia” for comments following the beheading in Paris. Erdogan was joined in condemnation by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, and other Muslim leaders.
So, if Islamist terrorists murder random people, and the government cracks down on the organizations that foster that sort of thing, that’s a phobia? Hardly. But the terrorist world and the countries that support it have found it very effective to cry “Phobia!! Bigotry!!” and thus to play on Westerners’ kindness, tolerance, and feelings of guilt.
I will add that the French Catholic Church can say that Catholics “must not” become symbols to be slaughtered, but what is the Church prepared to do about it? I doubt the terrorists are taking orders from the Church.
Way back in March of 2020 it was already clear that the Democrats saw the COVID crisis as a wonderful opportunity to ruin Trump’s election chances. I’ve written about that already in this post.
At first, I think the fear of COVID was very real, and the hype was a reflection of that fear. But many months ago the actual statistics were far more reassuring and remain so. However, you wouldn’t know that if you read the MSM or listen to the Democrats, who are still riding the “Trump killed 200,000 people!!” horse for all it’s worth, just a few days before the election.
The continuation of COVID doom talk long past the time when it seemed appropriate had three main purposes for the Democrats. The first was to continue to demonize Trump and thus to hurt him politically. I consider that mission to have been accomplished – and if the talk from my Democrat friends is any evidence, it has been. For them Trump is to blame and almost solely to blame, and he’s not only killing people but the stupid freedom-loving folks who refuse to wear masks are killing people too, and shame on them all. When I have tried to make a few points to counter some of these ideas, I am met with disbelief and even sometimes fury.
The second purpose of COVID – and I believe it’s one that the left also discovered some time last spring – was to change the voting rules to facilitate fraud under the guise of protecting people from COVID. In this case, mission accomplished as well.
The third was to have an excuse for controlling people. And that control and isolation and disruption has, in turn, made many people more unstable and more angry at Trump or at life in general, reactions that also benefit the Democrats. I think the emotional effects of lockdowns may not have been fully foreseen by the Democrats, but at a certain point they perceived that it was happening and they realized it would help them politically and needed to be continued.
Prior to COVID, Trump’s re-election seemed nearly assured, despite the 4-year negative drumbeat of the MSM. But COVID and then continuing COVID propaganda changed all that. I make no predictions about next Tuesday (and beyond, because the election may remain in doubt long after next Tuesday). But I do know that the Democrats got a great windfall with COVID, and they have mounted a vicious and cynical campaign to keep the fear and blame going nonstop at least until Tuesday, when they hope to reap major benefits.
