The Hunter Biden Pardon: Politics Produces Hypocrites (Or Hypocrites Produce Politics)

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Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan

Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics.  Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son.  Are you surprised?  If so, stay off the cable buying channels.  Someone else should handle your finances.

Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump.  Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail?  The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses.  My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.

We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan.  FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes.  But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life.  He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty.  Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit.  Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.

1960s Pop Culture: Lyndon B. Johnson: The Most Interesting & Crazy of Them All
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.

Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed.  Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point.  A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class.  Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture.  It’s a form of social incest.  Power and money have always had a potent attraction.  You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen.  Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.

So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream.  No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal.  She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children.  Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy.  La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels.  The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.

Nancy’s Vacay On Taxpayers Dime: Shows Off 2 Huge Fridges & Tons Of Ice Cream | Opinion
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.

These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough.  So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons.  For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more.  The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt.  Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.

The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy.  Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points.  It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them.  So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”.  In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like.  It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media.  They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media.  Why don’t they just come out and say it?  They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).

They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public.  There’s too much out there to turn your stomach.  Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”.  The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.

They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket.  As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it.  People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence.  Who wants to raise their kids in that?

The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds.  Fewer want what they’re selling.  It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape.  And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”.  They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities.  “Joy”, joy about what?  Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”.  When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth.  Who’s the real danger to democracy?

Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government.  More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks.  Now that’s the real scandal.

In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow?  That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/

The 1990s Mass Psychosis

McMartin Preschool Trial on emaze
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung

Was there something in the water during the 1990s?  Episodes of mania abounded.  Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity.  Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.

Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis.  The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example.  Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”.  The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness.  Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.

From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse.  Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1).  It was a disaster all around.

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he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centers
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Janet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco inferno
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The inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993

Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing.  Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3).  In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later.  Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.

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Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth.  Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science.  Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.

Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996.  The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”.  Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution.  The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers.  If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions.  Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.

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On Netflix

Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents.  Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.

Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago.  Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism?  What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex?  It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation.  Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)

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The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.
George Floyd protests: crowds gather in Washington, DC
Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”

MAGA has its own fancies.  Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin.  Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland.  They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them.  It doesn’t get much more insane than this.

There’s more.  Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition.  Think about it.  To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia.  The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.

Will any of the so-called remedies do any good?  For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant.  Ditto for India.  Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well.  Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.

Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever.  Don’t go around holding your head high.  Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA.  Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure.  It’s proven to be an accelerant.  The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.

RogerG

Sources:

1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443

The Race Hustle

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BLM co-founders from left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Pictured at the Glamour of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood, 11/14/2016. (photo: Jordan Strauss, AP)

Preface:

I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”.  He stole my thunder.

After viewing the film, there are two takeaways.  First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”.  They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology.  Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning.  How so?  They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven.  It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.

The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations.  The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.

And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population.  Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd.  They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair.  Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions.  At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation.  They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves.  Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep.  Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?

So much for the “wisdom” of the American people.  It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.

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Well, here it comes.  I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career.  If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.  Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.  Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

And to think that he wrote it in 1911.  He was way ahead of his time.  He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era.  Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed.  That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.

And the hustle certainly pays well.  The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs.  Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home.  No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.

No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020.  What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom.  Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed.  It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.

These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling.  They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil.  Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates.  Who’s he?  Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire.  A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit.  He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.

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Kristen Fry, left, and Hashim Coates, right (Photo courtesy of Kristen Fry, (Screenshot via Hashim Coates for County Commissioner/YouTube)

Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face.  Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle.  Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris.  “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.

Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him.  He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry.  The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates.  Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.

Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver.  Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims.  Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars.  Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.

Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”.  Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.

P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”.  What exactly does?  A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what.  I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/

Fani Willis, An Indictment of Populism

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Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks at a press conference next to prosecutor Nathan Wade after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former president Donald Trump in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)

* Populism, a common definition: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

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Other definitions exist, the term being so fuzzy and susceptible to gross generalization.  Today, it’s all the talk among devotees of Donald Trump.  Realistically, though, it also can be applied to deep blue jurisdictions who would like nothing better than to hang the aforementioned Donald Trump.  In Georgia, and pertaining to Atlanta, DA’s and judges are elected, not appointed.  Fani Willis and the judge ruling on a defense motion for her to be removed from the case must face an electorate in a far-left fever swamp.  You can’t get any more populist than that, can you?  Fever swamps and populism go together.

Understanding Populism - Fact / Myth

And we’ve got a circus going on. It’s what happens when popularly-elected demagoguery is confused with justice.  Willis, and her love interest, Nathan Wade, her chosen special prosecutor targeting Donald Trump, may have committed perjury regarding their ongoing tryst.  The judge, facing the same electorate, ruled on a defense disqualification motion to keep Willis but send Wade packing.  As a layman who didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn, the ruling seems puzzling.  They both stink of graft.  But, then again, that’s populism.  Not much is bound to make sense.

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Atlanta Judge McAfee

Trump’s populism is his particular form of political theater that appeals to a certain crowd.  Fani Willis and the judge have to face voters – the ones that can be cajoled to the polls, that is – who prefer legal buffoonery and corruption to good governance.  Both Trump and Atlanta’s crowd favorites in power have their “populisms”.

Voices: Is Trump a demagogue?

All the talk of RINO, establishment, elites from Trump fellow-travelers is their lingua franca for anyone who opposes their demigod, Trump.  Atlanta’s carnival barkers in power know how to gin up their base in monotonous cries of “white racism” or “white privilege”, etc.  Go for the rich white guy and you’re well on your way to a lucrative book deal, fame and fortune, elevation up the political greasy pole, maybe becoming the next Stacey Abrams and unlimited appearances on MSNBC.  It’s all populism.

Let’s plow through the muck of Willis’s case against Trump – populism meets the legal system.  Well, let’s not scour too deeply that septic tank.  See #1 below if you have the sensory fortitude.  Suffice it to say that a broad, ill-defined RICO case without an alleged major crime is reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Beria’s fawning retort to Stalin, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”  Atlanta’s brand of populism is showing the way to banana republic, just add a jury that is drawn from the city’s mob to a DA and judge appealing and having to face the same mob.

Trump and Willis, with the judge playing along, deserve each other.  Populism is a political rats’ nest.  The less we see of it, the better off we’ll be.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. Thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy for his stellar work on Fani Willis’s case against Donald Trump. His columns on the subject can be found at:
* https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-and-georgia-defendants-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
* https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-trump-indictment-of-democrats-dreams/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/why-the-fani-willis-case-is-ill-conceived/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/fani-williss-flawed-rico-charge-against-trump/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/fani-williss-monstrous-trump-case/

Oppenheimer, Hollywood History

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Cillian Murphy wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., March 10, 2024. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture.  Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture.  Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides.  It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates.  It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.

The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés.  Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted.  The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk?  A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist.  As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line.  Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.

Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects.  The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.

At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow.  Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions.  Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts?  After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II.  The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s.  The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.

Cracking the Code: The Venona Project
U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.

Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code.  The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.

Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges.  If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism.  For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism.  The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories.  It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.

Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right.  Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them.  The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on.  The affection sometimes translated into espionage.

The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos.  What’s up?  How’d they get it?  Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall.  Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991.  From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.

Four Spies
Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.

As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration.  Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.

Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists.  Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs.  All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man.  Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.

Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad.  There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been.  Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism.  The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain.  So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.

One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives.  He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser.  He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it.  Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.

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Gordon Gray

The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment.  There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations.  It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great.  He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.

The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people.  Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC.  An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state.  All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.

President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.

Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history.  There’s enough out there to know better.  You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available.  They’re out there.  But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen.  It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.

RogerG

Sources:

1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/

A Banana Republic of the Execrable

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Jack Smith, Special Counsel

“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].”  Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)

Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia?  Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law.  The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny.  Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.

Stalin And Beria | Russian history, Soviet union, Joseph stalin
Beria and Stalin
22 novembre 1954 - Muore Andrey Vyshinsky, procuratore di Stalin | Massime dal Passato
Andrey Vyshinsky

Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang.  To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters.  If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst).  Execrable potentates produce execrable government.

As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.

“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime.  Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits.  Ask them.  Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process.  If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them.  But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.

But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party.  In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump.  Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.

In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain.  In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president.  What a thin reed to hang a political rival.  Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?

Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity.  Hogwash.  Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals.  Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump.  Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety.  If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.

The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe.  We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices.  We should be under international observation, not be the observers.  And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.

The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything.  Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible.  Reprehensible behavior is impeachable.  For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary.  Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.

The documents indictment similarly has legal legs.  But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places.  It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia.  Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?

Are we a banana republic or something worse?  What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us.  Is this the best that we can come up with?

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RogerG

Oppenheimer, A Man Torn

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J. Robert Oppenheimer is back in the news with the movie “Oppenheimer” hitting screens across the country.  As a movie, I give it “thumbs up”.  It was well-scripted, acted, and moved at a captivating pace.  Hats off to Christopher Nolan.

As history, I have my doubts.

Oppenheimer’s place in the period before, during, and after World War II is a much more contentious topic and should be.  Was he a man of dubious loyalty, maybe even going so far as to engage in espionage?  More interestingly, could his philosophical sympathies cloud his judgment in managing Los Alamos?  These questions cannot be answered in a movie.  Sympathy for the man abounds, possibly richly deserved, but some aspects of the real story are missing.  One thing is glaringly clear: nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned, or in any way referenced, of the Venona project and its WWII decrypts of Soviet communications from the US to Moscow, or the confirmatory information gleaned from the briefly opened Soviet archives after the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer

PBS added to the Oppenheimer lore with a recent American Experience documentary, “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, with the same blank spots as the movie.  Number one, the “trial” wasn’t a trial.  It was a panel to determine whether to pull Oppenheimer’s security clearance.  Step back one moment from the Hollywood-made aura about the man, however, and look at the facts.  Fact number one, no evidence has come to light of Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage.  So, as a matter of law and logic, the claim of alleged treason is simply a suspicion at best.  On the other hand, the raw insights gleaned from Venona and Soviet archives presents a more complicated picture.

American Experience | The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Season 21 ...

For a clearer assessment of the period,  PBS ironically came to the rescue some years back with Nova’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies” which was primarily based on the historical work of John Haynes and Harvey Klehr (watch it below).  The documentary and the book, “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, point to serious Soviet penetration of the US government and the Manhattan Project.  The movie mentions the espionage of Klaus Fuchs, but the reality is that the illicit activity didn’t end there.

Amazon.com: Nova - Secrets, Lies & Atomic Spies [VHS]: Nova: Movies & TV

Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes (1999 ...

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Arlington Hall, Va., where the decrypting took place.

Americans acting as Soviet agents were littered throughout Roosevelt’s administration.  Lauchlin Currie, FDR’s chief economic adviser, Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Alger Hiss at the State Department, and a smattering of others in intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies were identified in Venona decrypts and later confirmed in Soviet archives as sources of America’s most important secrets.  Some 300 Soviet cover names were identified in the decrypts with only about 100 attached to specific individuals.  One of the unidentified was “Quantum”, and he was clearly somebody very, very important at Los Alamos.

The movie to its credit mentioned Klaus Fuchs, but there was more at Los Alamos.  One such person was Theodore Hall and his friend and Harvard confidant, Saville Sax.  Fuchs and Hall, independent of each other, provided sketches and descriptions to the Soviets of the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki.  Shortly after the successful Trinity test in July 1945, the Soviets and the head of their nuclear effort, Igor Kurchatov, had in their hands what we had achieved and how.  Possibly this explains Stalin’s nonchalance when informed by Truman of this “super weapon” at Potsdam.

El profesor Currie cierra serie de EJE 21 - Eje21
Lauchlin Currie
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Theordore Hall

For me, the media productions unwittingly say more about the cultural milieu in our academic communities at that time as well as today.  Already left leaning, the onset of the Depression confirmed Marx’s critique of capitalism for many academics, just like today’s Great neo-Marxist Awakening on our campuses.  Is it all that surprising that Oppenheimer, like many others, was swimming with the subcultural current?

Who was “Quantum” and what role did Oppenheimer’s well-documented interaction with known communists and involvement in communist front activities have on his standing as a possible security risk?  Suspicions were heightened, especially after the Venona decrypts were making the rounds through federal authorities.

Yet, until informed otherwise, sympathies doth not necessarily make a traitor.  Oppenheimer was a man constantly torn between his deep-seated beliefs and his work.  It was probably true for many at Los Alamos.  Some let their sympathies get the better of them.  Fuchs was captured at Heathrow airport trying to escape.  Ted Hall escaped prosecution most likely due to the difficulty of using the decrypts in court and the reluctance of US authorities to expose our decrypting activities.  Many others were fingered but avoided the bar of justice for the same reason.

It’s a story that at the very least would add greater depth to the movie, not only making a good movie but also better history.

Please watch “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies”.  You’ll find it interesting in light of the movie.

RogerG

Debunking “2,000 Mules”

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Dinesh D’Souza

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* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/

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John McCormack

I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election.  I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me.  Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense.  Being a man on the right, access is no problem.  After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.).  The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.

There is a debate here that needs to be aired.  Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020.  His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance.  He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination.  John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.

First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind.  That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery.  There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world.  How is this one any different?  They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy.  The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.

Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.

The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations.  None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot.  Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme.  Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some.  Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.

The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings.  I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out.  Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions.  So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out.  But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before.  The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.

Not that fraud doesn’t happen.  Of course, it does.  It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season.  But it doesn’t happen like this.  When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged.  That’s the real lesson of 2020.

Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person.  Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results.  We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat.  The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.

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RogerG

The Trump Indictment, Part II: King Oedipus Meets Dr. Faustus

Donald Trump
The Shitty Christian Blog: [OE008] The Story: Oedipus
Oedipus, King of Thebes
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Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil

In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.

He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics.  Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are.  They wanted somebody to “own the libs”.  Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr.  And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day.  According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee.  Disgusting.  It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration.  Is this what it means to be a Republican?

He’s embarrassing.  I’m embarrassed.

The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)

The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act.  If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc.  The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law.  That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.

The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris.  I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune.  It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen.  Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it).  In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice.  They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury.  Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle.  Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.

Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right.  The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”.  Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment.  Some of it is silly in the extreme.  Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment.  His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?”  Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it?  Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.

He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers.  In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code.  This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court.  The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it.  If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang.  If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.

One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament.  Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.”  Ruminate on that rant for a moment.  Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law.  It’s ludicrous.  She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us.  She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling.  Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance?  Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated?  Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?

If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders.  The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble.  That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment.  All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.

The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves.  They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one.  The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble.  This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts.  That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes.  For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.

The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles.  They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments.  They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse.  Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil.  So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0

Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy, Like Oedipus, the King of Thebes

A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)
A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)

Well, it’s done.  Trump is officially indicted by federal prosecutors.  Yes, again, but this one may stick.  One thing has always been true about Trump: he’s reckless in his language and behavior.  He’s so provocative that his opponents want nothing more than to bury him.  They tried in bogus impeachments and the outrageous Bragg indictment.  But the Jack Smith indictment may be something different.  Sometimes braggarts have the mental capacity to be stupid.  If you read the indictment, if proven in court before a jury, Trump is not only mulishly stupid but quite possibly criminally so.

Read the indictment for yourself. Here it is: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf

I should have been more reserved in condemning the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022.  I was furious at what seemed to me to be just another DC hit job on Trump.  Regardless, they discovered a treasure trove of classified documents that covered military plans, capabilities, military assessments of our friends and foes, etc., and rashly shared by Trump with friends and apologists like Kid Rock.

If established in court, the double-standard defense quickly loses its force.  The acts are so egregious.  Anyway, since Hillary, Comey, and Biden avoided prosecution, it is no defense for Trump.  It’s an argument to throw the book at Hillary, Comey, Biden . . . and Trump.  Constantly, our criminal justice system is wracked with a few convictions in a sea of non-prosecutions and acquittals of nearly identical circumstances.  At a certain point, in flagrant situations, the law must be enforced.  It’s too bad, though, that the feds, who have soiled themselves so blatantly in the recent past, are now tasked to bring Trump to the bar of justice.

I can understand the skepticism on the right.  But we are now duly warned about putting our faith in a man who has the awful habit of being his own worst enemy.  Maybe he actually believed his own rhetoric: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The ancient Greeks called it hubris which led to nemesis and on to personal destruction.  The Trump saga reads like Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex”.  Go ahead, go online and read a few synopses of the play.  Trump is Oedipus, King of Thebes.

Donald Trump indictment latest: Former US president 'told aide to hide ...

Oedipus the King | Book by Sophocles | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

RogerG