I was considering posting about a completely superfluous article in The Atlantic called “Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls,” as an insult to the intelligence of the literate American public. Gee, that’s a tough one! What could the answer be (other than the fact that the biased and dishonest American pollsters haven’t started cheating yet)?
Could it be, perhaps, that Joe Biden has been a spectacular failure in the White House by almost any measure, has overseen an unprecedented attack on personal liberties and Constitution, has directed a banana republic-style effort to remove his primary political opponent by abuse of the justice system, and is older than dirt? Could it be that he is obviously in a state of cognitive decline from an intellectual foundation that was never adequate in the first place? I suppose readers of the Atlantic are so Trump-Deranged and dyed-in-indigo blue that none of that would occur to them.
This, in turn, got me thinking about my still-unfinished survey to determine whether Joe is the Worst American President Ever. I stalled after covering Woodrow Wilson, and realizing again how that awful man laps the field, making the task of covering the group of 18 POTUSes remaining (Woody was only #28) seem like a low priority. But the report about Biden’s statements in Florida over the weekend sparked an epiphany: even if Joe isn’t the worst President, he is unquestionably the dumbest. I don’t think anyone else comes close.
Back to Florida: After the President toured the damage in Florida from Hurricane Idalia, he had to politicize the visit by stating,
“If you can’t hide it, decorate it!” the maxim goes. Thus it is that someone in the ethics-free “resistance”/ Democrat/mainstream media alliance (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” we call it in in these parts) decided that President Biden’s problem with the truth—he ignores, distorts, and denies it regularly—must be dealt with, since part of the strategy to defeat Donald Trump is to emphasize his “falsehoods” and “lies.” So a directive went out to the Washington Post’s “Factchecker,” Glenn Kessler: “Hey, Glenn, do one of your cool columns, the ones with the Pinnochio-head ratings system, about Joe’s fabulism, but make sure you’re careful which whoppers you mention, and make sure you don’t call them ‘lies.’ Trump lies. Joe…well, you know, he just does what he does, but it’s no big deal, in fact it’s kind of endearing.” And whoever it was—heck, it might have been Dr. Jill, Chuck Schumer or Merrick Garland!—added, “And besides, it will be good for you, too! It will prove that you’re objective, fair and non-partisan!”
The Post dutifully agreed, because it is not objective, fair, or non-partisan. Neither is Kessler, whom I have tried mightily over the years to regard as a man who tries to do his job ethically, but because bis biases make him stupid, can’t quite manage it. Ethics Alarms officially recants that sympathetic assessment. Yesterday’s Post feature by Kessler headlined “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” clinches it. Kessler is a disgusting hack with no shame or integrity, and the Washington Post is a full-time agent of the Democratic Party and an enemy of democracy.
As for its readers…well, I’ll get to them.
“President Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories — stories that attempt to connect his life story with his audiences and make up an essential part of his persona,” Kessler begins. He uses a “everybody does it” approach right away, mitigating Biden’s serial lies and sliding over the fact that lies from the president of the United States are not in the same category as lies by “everyone.” “The Fact Checker” also defines Biden’s lies out of existence by labeling them “stories.” Stories are entertaining! Stories are fun! Stories aren’t lies. See, when Donald Trump said that he saw Muslims in the U.S. celebrating after the 9-11 bombings—it was on TV someplace—that wasn’t a story, that was a lie. When he described how he vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion from the very beginning (in fact, he initially said he agreed with it), that was a lie too. But when Joe says that he never, ever, ever discussed his slime-ball son Hunter’s business dealings with him that’s just a story. When Joe says that U.S. citizens weren’t allowed to own cannons in the 18th Century (which he does almost every time he talks about gun control), that’s just a story too, a charming, completely made-up story, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Stating that he attended a “historically black college” while addressing an African American audience? A harmless story! Saying that Beau was killed in Iraq? A comforting story from a grieving father. Understand?
President Biden was speaking before Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law [ the group calls the January 6 riot a white supremacy insurrection, so you know what its biases are] as another chapter in his ongoing division and hate tour, making the case that Republicans and conservatives are racists and that systemic racism runs rampant over the land. At one point in this now familiar slander, he said, “I was able to, literally, not figuratively, talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the, the Civil Rights Act before he died. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s real progress.’ But hate never dies, it just hides. It hides under the rocks.”
Fascinating. The Civil Rights Act was passed in the Senate by a 73 to 27 vote on June 19, 1964. Biden wasn’t elected to the Senate until January 3, 1973. Senator Strom Thurmond of Dixiecrat fame was one of the 27 “nay” votes on the iconic bill. Other than that, what Biden told the group was “literally” true. Well, that bit about ” before he died” is shaky: Thurmond died in 2002.
I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politicothat the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? Andit’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
The “Axis” is, in Ethics Alarms parlance, “the resistance,” or those who believe that the existential threat of Donald Trump justifies suspending laws, traditions, fairness, standards and the Constitution; Democrats, who believe that their path to permanent power must be achieved by any means necessary, and the news media, which has become the propaganda arm of both entities and an active participant in the restriction and control of political speech.
All three groups were horrified yesterday when Judge Terry Doughty, Chief U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, delivered a sweeping ruling in Missouri v. Biden in which he issued an against what he called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Doughty declared that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.” He restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms regarding their decisions on which content should appear online, explaining that “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication, regarding what Defendants described as ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ have colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”
There are unmistakable signs that the mainstream news media, that is, the propaganda arm of the progressive Borg and the Democratic Party, may be ready to report on the Biden family influence-peddling scandal that they have been burying for years. The reason seems to be that they have decided that Biden is a Dead President Walking, and the sooner he can be LBJed and forced to withdraw from the 2024 Presidential race, the more likely it is that the “resistance”/ Democrats/MSM’s “Get Trump!” efforts will finally succeed. Yesterday, the White House Counsel issued this fascinating bit of subterfuge:
“As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son. As we have also said many times before, the Justice Department makes decisions in its criminal investigations independently, and in this case, the White House has not been involved. As the President has said, he loves his son and is proud of him accepting responsibility for his actions and is proud of what he is doing to rebuild his life.”
Wow, hanging a straw man and moving the goalposts at the same time! When was the issue ever Joe “being in business with his son?” The question is and remains the degree to which the President was aware of Hunter’s influence peddling schemes in which Joe was a necessary participant, when he learned about them, if he facilitated them (out of love, naturally) and whether he has been lying about all of it.
It pays to be the king, doesn’t it? Queen Elizabeth, may she rest in peace, used to say the best approach is “never complain, never explain.” She could do it too, because she didn’t answer to anyone. Democrats in office have a tendency to believe that they answer to no one, and given that Biden supposedly got the most votes of any president to date, more popular even than his old boss, why should they think otherwise? The thing is, it’s one thing for Buckingham Palace issue a statement saying that his majesty is done discussing a wayward, publicity seeking second son, it’s quite another to simply refuse to address obvious corrupt dealings and tell the press to pipe down.
1. It’s not a matter of incompetence for the White House not to have an answer prepared for this question. It’s a matter of the White House refusing to answer this question until the media gets the point, and moves on.
2. …And until the public gets the message that this issue is over and moves on to re-electing our most incompetent president yet, making sure we keep dangerous demagogues out of the White House.
3. It worked for Bill, didn’t it? Deny until you can no longer deny, then trickle information out so slowly that the media and the public forget about it, then say it’s a closed issue and you have important work to do, so let’s move on, already.
4. Turley is absolutely right, but his being right has no more value than classmates who see the class bully beating up the least popular member of the class. No one is going to do anything about it. .
6. If you wonder what they would have said you can always go over to Democratic underground or the Daily Kos. Same effect without having to put up with garbage from blue Kool-Aid drinkers and Bidenbots who display all the intelligence of a slug.
7. It looks like the nation dodged a bullet. McConnell did the wrong thing by refusing to grant a hearing to a nominee, and he did it for the wrong reasons by trying to shaft the sitting president, but in the end, he got the right result, which was keeping a partisan hack off the Supreme Court. Frankly, Obama has no one but himself to blame. He was the one who refused to build the relationships with members of Congress from the other party that he needed in order to work effectively with them and get important things done. He was the one who looked down his nose at the other party and characterized them as the enemy. He was also the one who was not able to persuade the notorious RBG not to step down while the stepping was good, so she died just in the nick of time so that she could be replaced by (horrors!) a conservative woman. In effect, it’s as much his fault as anyone else’s that Roe v Wade is history. Chuck the Schmuck helped set the precedent, though, when he said that the Senate should basically declare judicial nominations closed when there were 18 months still to go in George W. Bush’s second term.
It really all boils down to one political party having to eat the bitter herbs of their previous errors.
That said, all of this has a chance, maybe even a very good chance, of blowing up in the Democratic Party’s face. Maybe it gets to the point where the media can’t ignore it, or maybe someone in the mainstream media grows a backbone. Maybe someone at Fox gets in touch with a contact like Woodward and Bernstein. It’s a race between this fuse finally reaching the keg of TNT and the next election, and no one really knows how long this fuse is. I hope it goes kablooey before this nation can be deceived into giving this senile old puppet and his masters a second chance, but we’ll see.
1. How can the White House not have a response prepared for this question?
2. How long can the mainstream media refuse to give this slowly exploding story the attention and coverage it obviously deserves?
3. It is true that everybody—I think literally everybody—knew that Joe Biden was lying when he said his son had “done nothing wrong” and when he said that he never discussed Hunter’s dealing with foreign governments with him. But is it possible that the President, his advisors and his party really think that they can duck the scandal with the Clinton “Deny, deny, deny!” formula?
Remember Plan E? That was the designation on the Ethics Alarms list of resistance, Democrat and news media impeachment or removal plots for the 25th Amendment theory, which was that President Trump was mentally disabled and thus should be declared incompetent. The catalysts for this intellectually dishonest effort were Trump-hating hack author Michael Wolf and now-fired Yale psychology instructor Bandy Lee, but many in the “Get Trump!” mob quickly embraced their nonsense, as Ethics Alarms discussed here. I wrote, “Ethics Dunce is too mild a name here. We have the mainstream news media proclaiming to the world that the President of the United States is mentally deficient based on tweets, gossip, leaks, unethical diagnoses by discredited professionals, an author who has admitted making things up and lying to the White House to get access, and Steve Bannon.” Prominent among the 25th Amendment-pushing journalists, if you can call him that, was CNN’s fake media ethics watchdog, Brian Stelter. Of course, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends were also convinced that Trump had dementia.
Last week, as he ended his remarks at a “gun safety summit” in Connecticut, President Biden said, for no apparent reason, “God save the Queen, man!” The video was instantly all over social media.
That’s a silly headline, isn’t it? First, the MSM has already established that it has no integrity, so any tests are superfluous. Second, the mainstream media sees its job as protecting Democrats, not calling attention to their lies, distortions of facts, embarrassments, failures and hypocrisy.
Still, if ever Donald Trump was handed an opportunity to say, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I told you so, you big dummy!” this is it. During their final debate in the 2020 campaign, Biden expressed disgust at the Trump policy disqualifying aspiring illegal immigrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they neglected to first apply for asylum in the other countries they traveled through on the way here, saying,
Ethics Alarms 