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Enabling the Enablers
This October has been a long few months. Breaking news about Hunter Biden today seems like just another October Surprise in a string of surprises. Even though the news isn’t really a surprise, because if you haven’t been living under a rock you know by now that dad’s power enriched the son and has basically enabled him to make the poor choices he has.
I know, I know. Hunter is an adult who makes his own decisions. Anyone with grown children, such as myself, can attest to the fact that your kids might do some things that don’t sit well with you and you can’t figure out where you went wrong. Then a well-meaning friend points out that you can’t control what your adult children do, because, well, they’re adults. But this isn’t that. Who among us hasn’t gotten a $50,000/month paycheck from a foreign entity in exchange for favors from your powerful dad? When Joe Biden proclaims, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he knows what he’s talking about.
It’s a fact that Joe has had very sad things happen to him during his lifetime. Since when does that pass as an excuse for bad behavior and preclude any person from taking responsibility for their harmful actions? In the real world, that doesn’t work. We need to stop disconnecting the trouble that this son has had from his dad’s power, wealth, and corruption. The appeal to emotion is a logical fallacy and has no play here. This is co-dependency on display; not only about many giving Joe a pass because he’s had some tough times, but also the issues with his son.
Let’s also remember that a family is allowing their elderly patriarch to campaign for the highest position in the land when they know darned well he isn’t fit for service. (Don’t “But Trump” me.) It takes a brave truth-teller to intervene and no one is doing that on either count. Or maybe someone is. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors, but if I were running for president and this was going on with my child, I would have admitted long ago that it was a problem and tell everyone we were handling it in private. End of story. Instead, it seems we might get a First Family full of enablers, which we probably deserve because it’s fairly indicative of what’s going on in the rest of the country.
This story is just a small part of what I see as a much bigger problem. There are those on the right who continue to speak out and others who want to tell the hard truths but won’t because we’re afraid of being canceled or upsetting the wrong people. We enable the many more unhinged voices to change the narrative in real-time, including changing the meaning of words in the dictionary, and they, in turn, enable one another by cheering it on. We can get on Twitter (or on Ricochet) and opine about how things have gone so very wrong, but the Orwellian path continues and it feels like a runaway train that can’t be stopped. People are losing their ability to think rationally and it’s unnerving. I’m not sure even “four more years” will stop any of it, and either way the election goes we’ll get unhinged hate or unhinged gloating and power tripping from the left. None of which are a good look.
Get ready as I “But Trump” this story: if this had been a Trump kid, the news would be shared far and wide with glee. Just like Melania’s secretly taped phone calls. Instead, the press is trying to hide this news about Hunter because, well, you know why. To enable Joe. Our firefighter journalists are bashing others in their own profession who share it, and are tying themselves in knots to explain it all away. Let’s just call them the sup-press, because that’s what they do. I just want it to stop.
Published in General
We would all like it to stop, but it won’t. This doesn’t qualify as an October surprise because it won’t be covered by the MSM, and those of us who do not rely on the MSM for news are not surprised.
I am starting to think the Biden family is more corrupt than the Clinton family. But it just be that the Biden’s are more hamfisted at corruption. I want all the corruption exposed. Anyone in D.C. not exposing corruption is part of the problem.
I’d be curious if the Clinton Crime Syndicate was so widely known and accepted throughout the Obama Administration and executive agencies that it was more of a “green light” to others to get in on the action. Kerry’s son being involved with Hunter Biden, Pelosi’s kid being involved with something in Russia if I recall.
I argued (unsuccessfully) with many of the never-Trumpers I know that the fact they are so hated by the bureaucracy and the Manhattan Elites that it has probably kept them more honest than any administration in a long, long time.
Easier to try and drain The Swamp if they won’t let you in it (and you already have ‘FU’money).
Trump’s kids would be pretty stupid to get into something like that because their dad has probably been the one that has had to pay corrupt politicians and mafia dons off to get a lot done in NY and other places. Businessmen cannot be corrupt if politicians aren’t.
I think the majority of politicians are on the take for themselves and their families. That is probably why this is a difficult story to be pushed, so many are guilty of similar stuff, like they are in a special club.
I suspect trump is the least on the take politician serving today, and possibly why he needs to be booted from the club.
For all the interviews he’s given and books and articles written about him, I’d really like to know how Trump’s business career (payoffs to local, state and federal politicians, of both parties), regulations, etc. – how that shaped his views? I’ve never heard it from him and would really like to know.
I’ve heard how he’s not a “textbook/intellectual conservative” but he’s an intuitive one. Doesn’t matter to me but think it would be a good story. Probably more effective in persuading current voters than Von Mises or Burke.
This is the Post story that Facebook and Twitter are apparently suppressing. I haven’t tested that allegation myself, but I intend to just to see if the suppression is ongoing. The Post itself seems convinced.
Not a peep out of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Denials from the usual suspects, Vox, Media Matters, the Daily Kos. (It’s bad enough I gave them clicks; I won’t give them links as well.)
The Biden campaign’s denial. They have checked the “official schedule” and there are no Burisma execs on that, so it never happened. Joe won’t be addressing this at a quickly scheduled press conference, because someone put his lid on already.
The Clinton Foundation dwarfs any and all of the accusations made against the Bidens so far, as I am sure Biden’s consigliere would agree.
In Peter Schweizer’s book, “Profiles in Corruption,” almost a third of the book is about the Biden family. They are all dirty. Maybe Beau was the only honest one.
https://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Corruption-Peter-Schweizer/dp/006289790X
Forget the obvious corruption and lack of morals for a minute. I’m not a super spy, but, at the most basic level, if your laptop contains evidence that could be construed as Arrested Development style light treason and crack pipes. If it gets damaged, you don’t take it in to be fixed. You set it on fire and chuck it in the Chesapeake with an anchor. I’m pretty sure that’s like day three of villain school.
I’m not sure what Facebook and Twitter think they’re going to do here — it’s obviously an effort to keep the story from getting into the feeds of people they think might be undecided voters, but the New York Post isn’t just some conservative internet portal — it’s co-owned through News Corp. with The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. And while Lachlan Murdoch is seen as being more liberal than his did (but not woke-on-steroids like younger brother James), Rupert’s semi-retired, but not dead.
Based on his 60-plus year history of wanting to annoy the journalistic establishment, seeing one of his properties censored by the two top social media sites is Facebook and Twitter just asking for blowback from the other News Corp. outlets (Fox News is already doing it this evening and tonight, but it will be interesting to see if the WSJ gets involved on Friday, and if Twitter and Facebook then attempt to censor the Journal).
Now that would be entertaining.
Absolutely nothing in the WSJ online so far. It looks like they are going to ignore this for as long as possible as well. I’m not sure I have ever seen this level of media malfeasance before. Both this story and Crossfire Hurricane are enormous scandals. It is absolutely shocking that neither gets coverage. This is a new low for American journalism.
The Journal’s news side has been way more liberal than its editorial side for over 50 years now, so that would explain the lack of coverage in the news pages. On the editorial side, it did get mention in today’s Best of the Web column, but we’ll see if anyone else on the op-ed pages posts something between now and morning.
Have they had enough time yet? How many hours has this been going on? How long should it take to figure out whether these are at least plausibly the real emails?
I really don’t know the answer to either question.
Of course, I know the answer to the “What if it had been Trump’s son’s alleged emails?” question.
There is something very strange though about the story. I’m not sure how Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer ended up with a copy of the hard drive and interviews with the computer repair shop make him sound evasive: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-emails-computer-repair-store-owner-john-paul-mac-isaac.
Making a copy of the hard drive would indicate the repair shop owner was worried that the FBI would sit on the information, after it was turned over to them in the middle of the Trump impeachment kerfuffle. That fear wasn’t unfounded , since we didn’t hear about it until Wednesday, and not from the FBI, while sitting on hard drive information from a person connected to the Democrat presidential candidate is what Andrew McCabe tried to do with Anthony Weiner’s hard drive, until it became clear other people (likely NYPD) also had the hard drive contents, and could leak them to an outlet like the New York Post prior to Election Day.
So then it becomes who did he give the hard drive to initially, and did he have any heads-up that the Post was going to run the story on Wednesday? Since the Post apparently got their information via Steven Bannon and then got the hard drive’s info from Giuliani’s lawyer, it looks like there’s at least three degrees of separation between the computer shop owner and the authors of the Post’s article. Finding himself in the middle of a media firestorm was probably not what the store owner was planning for his Wednesday activities — if the bulk of the N.Y.-D.C. media people and woke Twitter world is incensed at the Post for running the storey, it’s not a shock if Isaac would want to tread carefully here after being the guy who provided the information (where he likely is going to face both economic and political blowback in Delaware, even if he’s legally in the clear because Hunter never paid for the repairs or reclaimed the laptop).
Leave it to 2020 to be this weird.
Not like 2016-2019 weren’t. All the Russiagate myth as a distraction from Hillary’s emails, and the Ukrainegate whatever-it-was as a substitute for Russiagate.
It’s Joe Biden’s brother James, too. Rudy Giuliani talks about the Bidens here. James is a long time lobbyist and agent for foreign governments; Rudy says that James’ clients always had a friend in Joe.
BLUF: The FBI and DOJ have had the recordings since last year. If they had done their job, the impeachment would have been scotched and Bernie would be the Democrat candidate.
I don’t think it’s more. The Biden family price for betraying the USA seems to have been a bit lower than the Clintons, and the coverup of Hillary’s wrongdoing lost some of its political potency and patronage potential when Trump beat her. The CCP’s investment in the Bidens has yet to fully pay off.
I think the Obamas looked at the Clintons and were inspired.
Anyone remember Roger Clinton and the fun that Billary had trying to cover up his misjudgments?
This is a bigger deal than Roger’s shenanigans.
Show.
Place.
Win!.
Joe Biden wasn’t good when times were good. On the other hand, and in his defense, he’s exhibited a decades-long consistency of mean-spirited, self-serving, two-timing, and corrupt behavior. The man is a walking, talking disgrace.
One person remembers! (Okay, I jest.) Yes, Roger was definitely small fry. But it was nonetheless entertaining watching the media try to cover up for him like they did for Bill’s indiscretions. Here we are, almost 30 years later, with a different movie, but a similar plot complication….
The Biden fanily is just as, if not more, corrupt:
https://spectator.org/biden-deception-family-corruption/
This!
It seems like nothing short of a miracle that no one has come forward with significant charges of corruption from Trump’s time when he was succeeding and failing in real estate. Something may yet come out, but as things stand now, perhaps he’s not as corrupt as so many say. (I have an aunt who calls him evil, even when compared to Putin and Xi!) Thanks to the impeachment over something less serious than what Biden bragged about, he’s learned how sensitive some of his employees can be when Republicans do those sorts of things. And yet, if Biden gets elected, to paraphrase another famous Democrat, there suddenly won’t be a controlling legal authority that interests the mainstream media.
Hahaha yes, I remember. Good times.
How can so many people still be OK with this? It’s baffling.
We went from suppressing to outright censorship in less than a day. Where were these fact checkers for that dossier and Russian collusion stuff for 4 years? What a joke.
Imagine what he’ll do as leader of the free world. *Shudder
The new Ricochet pod with Victor Davis Hanson addresses this so well. It was riveting. https://ricochet.com/series/ricochet-podcast/
If what is implied in these emails is correct, than asking Ukraine to investigate Biden was completely justified and Trump’s impeachment was completely unwarranted.