++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Corruption or just likes to fly? Is Hunter the white equivalent of Al Sharpton, ie shakedown bag man trading off daddy's position and name or just his daddy's foot soldier helping America? You decide.
Judicial Watch Obtains Secret Service Records Showing Hunter Biden Took 411 Flights, Visited 29 Countries
Judicial Watch announced recently it received records from the U.S. Secret Service showing that, for the first five and a half years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden traveled extensively while receiving a Secret Service protective detail. During the time period of the records provided, Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29 different foreign countries. He visited China five times.
READ MOREAnd:
Some reading if you are interested:
Time to Expose the Fraud That Launched BLM Jack Cashill"The acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman" went very differently from how BLM and the liberal media want you to think. More
End Cancel Culture with One Simple Trick Christopher ChantrillHere’s how to stop the Cancel Culture dead in its tracks. More
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++A somehwata more sober review of the pandemic as opposed to the hyper dramatic negative news that emanates from the Hate Trump mass media:
John Roberts Knows Exactly What He's Doing Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
The Democrats Indulge in a Death Wish
Joe Biden’s present lead in the polls is a levitation. These are the dangling entrails of the panic that the national political media, which are unofficially conducting the Democratic campaign in the unheroic absence of the putative nominee, have sown about the coronavirus and the impression, desperately promoted, identifying Trump with the recent chaos.
A public opinion climate worn down by lengthy social confinement, arrested economic activity, and high unemployment is especially vulnerable to disgruntlement about its leaders. Given the pandemic, the recession, and the worst rioting in America in over fifty years, Trump has done well to maintain his approval rating in the mid-forties.
All of these elements are evaporating: the increasing incidence of the coronavirus is practically irrelevant since the fatality rate has declined by about 80 percent. Over 90 percent of those who contract the illness have minimal or no symptoms and each such person becomes a barrier to the spread of the virus, as those who have had it and have recovered are much more resistant to it thereafter. This phenomenon is known inelegantly as “herd immunity”: once the virus has gone through society, that society is substantially invulnerable apart from those with diminished immunities.
The increasing incidence of COVID-19 cases has been amplified in the anti-Trump media. The president, who was so reviled for inability to test competitively with other countries in March, has produced a regime in which an incomparable total of about 30 million Americans have now been tested.
The president’s appearance in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday has been much mocked because about 6,000 of the 19,000 places in the indoor stadium were vacant, and half of those that were filled were occupied by Republican Party officials and guests—but assembling 13,000 people in one place, in itself, is a breakthrough in the pandemic era, a first in four months. Trump is now engaged in converting the United States from being a frightened nation to a people emboldened to resume their lives, apart from those—especially the elderly—with handicapped immune systems. These must continue to be prudent themselves and to be thoroughly insulated from the illness.
As usual, Trump is swimming upstream against the tide of confected public opinion, but he is supported by the facts: all healthy people, about 80 percent of Americans, have almost nothing to fear from this disease and the cold terror inflicted on the nation by the president’s enemies will not survive discovery of that agreeable fact.
Ironically, the protesters, rioters, and hooligans who hate Trump the most (but have no use for the useful milquetoast idiots who infest Democratic ranks, even though they will vote for them), have demonstrated that to most people the coronavirus is a paper tiger. The Democrats have been shrieking fear and babbling utter nonsense about testing and tracing millions of people and badgering people suspected of being susceptible to the virus to self-quarantine, in order to prolong the artificial economic recession for their own political gain on election day.
The Democrats have the pathological riffraff of Antifa and the extreme factions of BLM to thank for the accelerated elimination of this barrier to the president’s reelection—they demonstrate that rioting together at close quarters doesn’t spike the virus. It always takes a few weeks for the polls to catch up with such tidal changes in the ever-mobile currents of public opinion. Though the physical attendance at the president’s rally in Tulsa was disappointing, up to 11 million people seem to have watched his lengthy address on television and the internet. It was a conspicuous success to attract seven or 8 percent of the voters on a Saturday night in June, more than four months before the election.
A remarkable fact about the continuing chronic disorder is the absence to date of a serious backlash. It seems that the national political media have been partially successful so far in portraying the president as unsympathetic to the victims of police excess and to the discontents of the African-American community generally. They have thus saddled independent opinion with the illusion that the president is responsible for the obscene levels of destructive urban violence and effrontery to the most revered personalities and events in American history.
And the president is only just beginning to draw public attention to his Democratic opponents’ ambiguous response to the mindless hate-filled violence of the mobs that have surged through many of America’s great cities. He is also just beginning to point out the extent to which this urban discontent is based on the incompetence and corruption of the Democratic city political machines that generate most of that party’s votes and to which Joe Biden has been bound hand and foot for nearly 50 years.
The Democrats’ prayerful attempts to retard the economic recovery, swaddled in fear-mongering and humbug about the coronavirus, run up against the popular ambition for restored prosperity. There is immense liquidity in the system, and the only feeble barrier to a sharp economic revival is Democratic media defeatism about the pandemic. It won’t work, though it will take some weeks to emerge from under the mountains of media misinformation that have been built up over the issue. Time is on the president’s side not only in public health and economic matters but in political realities. At some point Joe Biden is going to have to face questions from journalists who actually wish to have coherent answers to relevant questions, not just the toe-curling deference of Joy Behar and Don Lemon.
And before the campaign ends, the familiar and often dramatic finale of a mano a mano debate showdown between the two principal candidates will occur. It is hard to imagine how the pallid and inarticulate Biden of this shadow campaign will come through such a test intact. Biden narrowly lost the debate to the trivia question opponent of 2008, Sarah Palin, when he was in his prime, and Trump more than held his own with Hillary Clinton. This year should be a mismatch.
The attorney general, William Barr, has indicated that the Durham investigation into the origins of the monstrous scam of the Russian collusion investigation will be heard from before the end of the summer. There is no reason to believe that Biden himself will be charged, but the allegations against other senior officials of the Obama regime will not enhance the prestige of the Democrats. Biden’s limited verbal agility will be sorely challenged in explaining what he was doing while unprecedented, unconstitutional skullduggery was initiated by senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration, some of which skullduggery he must have been aware.
The Democrats, their confident masquerade as clear winners notwithstanding, have already done a campaign course correction. They have killed Senate debate on police oversight reform—they don’t want the problem resolved; they want police brutality and oppression of African-Americans as election issues, while ignoring mob violence and the physical, fiscal, and public relations assault Democratic and BLM spokespeople have launched against the police. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explicitly has blamed the death of George Floyd on Trump, without elaboration. The president has his limitations but this is malignant lunacy.
He faced a sudden and grave public health, economic, and political crisis in March, and elected to accommodate the hysteria that had arisen and the weight of plausible scientific opinion and shut down the economy to flatten the rise of the virus. In a quick-step, he moved to encourage governors to take the country out of the shut-down after two months as local conditions allowed, and the economy, despite prodigious Democratic media efforts to retard its recovery, has shown a spontaneous reflexive recovery that has startled the legions of Trump-hating prophets of gloom.
Despite the tumult and the controversy, aggravated by this president’s peculiar abrasiveness, he appears to have taken difficult executive decisions promptly and successfully and has guided the country through very serious challenges unfazed by the threat posed to his tenure of office.
The Democrats have descended to depths of mudslinging, demagogy, and indulgence of racial violence and national self-hate never before plumbed in a U.S. presidential election. They are afflicted by a death wish, and in the national interest and for their own sake, that wish must be granted by the voters.
And:
Flynn has it about right:
The publication of a set of notes taken by now-disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok related to the prosecution of former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn provides the first specific evidence that former President Obama was behind the wrongful prosecution of Flynn and, almost certainly, the investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidential transition.
And:
Flynn has it about right:
Gen. Michael Flynn: If we don't act, 2% of the people are about to control the other 98%
And:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Obama's sensitivities show: https://dailycaller.com/2020/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Congress is making monkeys out of us:
Congress is making monkeys out of us:
You start with a cage containing four monkeys, and inside the cage you hang a banana on a string, and then you place a set of stairs under the banana.
Before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.
You then spray ALL the monkeys with cold water.
After a while, another monkey makes an attempt.
As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray ALL the monkeys with cold water again.
Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put away the cold water.
Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new monkey.
The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs.
To his shock, ALL of the other monkeys beat the stuffing out of him.
After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original four monkeys, replacing it with a new monkey.
The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked.
The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm -- because he is now part of the "team."
Then, replace a third original monkey with a new monkey, followed by a fourth.
Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.
Now, the monkeys who are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs.
Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
Having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water.
Nevertheless, not one of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.
Why, you ask? Because in their minds, that is the way it has always been!
This is how today's House and Senate operates, and this is why, from time to time, ALL of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME!
DISCLAIMER: This is meant as no disrespect to monkeys.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When Americans no longer care about treasonous behaviour by a president then you can kiss this nation goodbye and , I am fearful, we are reaching that point.
It Was Obama All Along
It Was Obama All Along
Worse than Watergate: Part 3.
By Jed Babbi
The publication of a set of notes taken by now-disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok related to the prosecution of former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn provides the first specific evidence that former President Obama was behind the wrongful prosecution of Flynn and, almost certainly, the investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidential transition.
Strzok took the notes at a January 5, 2017, White House meeting at which he, Obama, Joe Biden, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-FBI Director James Comey, and Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, all were present.
The notes recount part of the conversation as follows:
Rice-Comey-Yates: [Flynn cuts] Other countries …
(Note: this probably means they listened to partial recordings of the Flynn–Kislyak conversations)
Comey-Yates: lean forward on [unclass?]
Biden: “Logan Act”Obama: These are unusual timesBiden: I’ve been on the intel cmte for ten years and I neverObama: Make sure you look at things + have the right people on itObama: Is there anything I shouldn’t be telling transition team?Comey: Flynn – Kislyak calls but appear legit
Obama directs the investigation of Flynn to proceed. He doesn’t say, “Have your best people on it”; he says, “have the right people on it,” which means something entirely different: have politically reliable people investigate Flynn. Obama directed Yates and Comey to have people who could be relied on to pursue Flynn perform the investigation.
The next relevant meeting we know about is the one that took place on January 23, 2017, after Trump’s inauguration and long after Comey told Obama that the Flynn–Kislyak conversations appeared to be legitimate. Bill Priestap, then the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, made the notes of that meeting either during or after it. The meeting was between Comey, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and himself.
Priestap’s notes recall conversations in which the three apparently decided to not warn Flynn of his constitutional rights or that there was a risk of Flynn being prosecuted for lying to the FBI.
Priestap’s now-famous notes say, “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired? … If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ + have them decide.”
Comey, Priestap, and McCabe were following Obama’s orders and setting up the interview to entrap Flynn into lying or admitting a violation of the Logan Act, the 1807 law precluding American citizens who lack governmental authority from negotiating policy matters with representatives of foreign governments.
Comey had already determined that the Flynn–Kislyak conversations appeared to be legitimate. There is absolutely no doubt about their legitimacy: Flynn, as incoming national security adviser to the already-elected Trump, would be highly derelict in his duty if he hadn’t had such conversations with Kislyak and a wide variety of foreign government representatives on any subject relevant to Trump’s concerns.
But the investigation continued, the FBI interviewed Flynn on the record and, after the investigation was continued by special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of partisan Democratic prosecutors, Flynn pleaded guilty rather than have Mueller persecute Flynn’s son.
Go back to the meeting with Obama, Biden, Yates, Comey, and Rice. This wasn’t an extraordinary event. It was a routine event for the president to be briefed on a counterintelligence investigation.
What made it unique is — as Obama noted — these were unusual times.
The Flynn investigation “Crossfire Razor” was nothing more than an offshoot from original “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump’s campaign. We have, as yet, no proof that Obama was directly involved in and directed the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. But think about the people who ran it: CIA Director John Brennan, Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. There is zero chance that the three ran “Crossfire Hurricane” without Obama’s knowledge. And there is no reason to believe that he was more reluctant to issue them orders on how to conduct that investigation than he was to direct Comey and Yates to investigate Flynn and “put the right people” on it despite the obvious legitimacy of Flynn’s actions.
For those who have forgotten, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s surveillance warrants against Carter Page — all four of them — were based on the fictitious “Steele dossier,” the compilation of opposition research materials paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Which brings us around to the January 6, 2017, declaration by the Director of National Intelligence that the entire U.S. intelligence community (IC) that the Russian interference in the 2016 election was intended to benefit candidate Trump.
We know now — and the intelligence community knew then — that the Steele dossier was a product of Russian intelligence activities. Steele had based his series of memos on Russian sources. But the IC was determined to defeat Trump and then to disrupt his transition to the presidency. In short, the January 6 declaration was as false as the Steele dossier itself.
It’s a great pity that you can’t impeach someone who is no longer in office, because Obama’s actions — clearly in violation of the law and of the constitutional rights of Flynn, Trump, Carter Page, and others — were entirely worthy of impeachment.
During the Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon’s actions, Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) famously asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” In the case of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the question is what did Obama do and when did he do it?
So where do we go from here?
One trusted source tells me that Susan Rice — she who took to the airwaves and lied about the Benghazi attack on five Sunday news shows and participated in the push to investigate Flynn — is high on Joe Biden’s list of possible vice-presidential running mates.
Biden’s participation in the unjustified pursuit of Mike Flynn (of which he says he was aware, but doesn’t admit its illegitimacy) makes him unfit for the presidency. And if he chooses Susan Rice as his running mate and wins the election, we’ll be governed by the two of the worst people. It’s a kakistocracy in the making.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I caught Biden's talk today but not the question part of his press conference. In typical fashion he accused Trump of failing to do everything Trump is doing. Democrats have perfected the ability to do everything they accuse their opponents of doing and yet,get away with it because the mass media are in their corner.
Biden listed 5 things we must do and which Trump is already doing and Biden said it in his his best syrupy tone. It was clever and for those who can't read or think it was probably convincing but we already are testing, making masks, have ventilators. We have yet to conclude that everyone should be wearing masks but we have been told the three most important things we should do when inside is wear a mask, keep distance and wash our hands. We have been told this repeatedly. We also know we are working on a on a serum and many who are doing so are already building inventories even though there is no evidence the serum works. Biden said we need to be doing all these things as if we are not already doing them. What hypocrisy. I was in the car listening to Biden so I can only assume he was reading from a prepared script.
I did not hear the questions because I had other things to do and assume he was thrown soft ball types so even he could handle them.
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
https://www.nationalreview.co
Former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event in
Lancaster, Pa., June 25, 2020. (Mark Makela/Reuters)
Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till
Election Day.
Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a
geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He
stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related
susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.
I say "pretext" without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise
stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews,
speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and
canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is
cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.
Often Biden cannot finish a sentence. Names are vague eddies in his mind's
river of forgetfulness. He is in a far more dire mental state than a
physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term.
The earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially
sharp even when in control of most of his faculties. We recall the former
sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his "put y'all in chains"
demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden's riffs about a "clean" and
well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories. All are the
trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared
with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is
agrammatical - he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and
then abandons the sentence entirely.
If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any
noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to
suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is
doing or saying or where he is - a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In
scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost
reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles
to process signals of perceived danger.
Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con
was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become
chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his
handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump's tweeting,
alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that
in voters' minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the
current commander in chief.
But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in
his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer
polls.
One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only
enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and
experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more
Biden "rests up," the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare
staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse
does not make it firmer.
Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential
candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or
hears him - in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to
the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the
dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that
the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old
idea, rather than the current reality, of him.
So too the ghost model was supposed to work for Biden.
He is a cardboard candidate, but at least he's not on the front lines of
commentary on statue toppling and the contagion, and so he can be blamed for
neither.
But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable.
He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn
cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at
all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end
up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that
they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential
candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency. And if Biden
is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood-prop mute
chair.
Why, then, is Biden the nominee at all - other than that he leads in the
delegate count and surged after Democrat back-roomers panicked when
Bloomberg imploded and Bernie surged? As a result, politicos forced or
enticed all the other primary candidates to vacate and unite around someone
nominally not a socialist.
Is one consolation that Biden's dementia offers a credible defense that he
has "no recollection" that he was in on Obama's efforts to surveil an
oppositional campaign and abort a presidential transition?
While all Democrats know that the cat must be belled, no one wishes to step
forward to do it and remove Biden - and indeed no one knows how to steal a
nomination from an enfeebled winner and hand it off to an undeserving but
cogent alternative. Take out Biden in August, and who knows what sort of
candidate stampede might follow in today's insane landscape?
So what are these strategies of dementia other than putting Biden on ice
while redefining the election as Trump versus the media's version of the
virus, lockdown, and economic stagnation?
Pity is one pretext. The progressive media have put Biden's blank stares and
word searching off limits. We are not supposed to remember that Trump was
hounded by progressive M.D.s, to the point that he took - and aced - the
Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, an examination that no one in his right
mind would suggest Biden now take, given that the results would be no
surprise.
Dementia is also about the only valid reason one can legitimately say "I
don't remember." So ask Joe Biden about those early January 2017 strategy
sessions in which Obama, Biden, and their henchmen plotted the surveillance
of the Trump campaign and the destruction of Michael Flynn - and he can
honestly say, "What administration?" Ask Biden about his illiberal past
statements, his associations with neo-Confederate senators, or his
plagiarism, and without guile he can retort, "What? What plagiarism? What
senators?" Burisma? Hunter Biden's Chinese lucre? He will look dumbfounded
and turn to an aide to ask, "What is Burisma and who is Hunter?"
Democrats also knew that they would lose with an Elizabeth Warren, Kamala
Harris, or Bernie Sanders as their masthead. The primaries, even heavily
loaded to the left-wing base, taught them that well enough. The hard-left
agenda of winter 2020 went nowhere, and it will go less than nowhere in the
fall after months of televised arson, looting, and gratuitous violence
I caught Biden's talk today but not the question part of his press conference. In typical fashion he accused Trump of failing to do everything Trump is doing. Democrats have perfected the ability to do everything they accuse their opponents of doing and yet,get away with it because the mass media are in their corner.
Biden listed 5 things we must do and which Trump is already doing and Biden said it in his his best syrupy tone. It was clever and for those who can't read or think it was probably convincing but we already are testing, making masks, have ventilators. We have yet to conclude that everyone should be wearing masks but we have been told the three most important things we should do when inside is wear a mask, keep distance and wash our hands. We have been told this repeatedly. We also know we are working on a on a serum and many who are doing so are already building inventories even though there is no evidence the serum works. Biden said we need to be doing all these things as if we are not already doing them. What hypocrisy. I was in the car listening to Biden so I can only assume he was reading from a prepared script.
I did not hear the questions because I had other things to do and assume he was thrown soft ball types so even he could handle them.
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
https://www.nationalreview.co
Former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event in
Lancaster, Pa., June 25, 2020. (Mark Makela/Reuters)
Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till
Election Day.
Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a
geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He
stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related
susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.
I say "pretext" without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise
stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews,
speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and
canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is
cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.
Often Biden cannot finish a sentence. Names are vague eddies in his mind's
river of forgetfulness. He is in a far more dire mental state than a
physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term.
The earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially
sharp even when in control of most of his faculties. We recall the former
sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his "put y'all in chains"
demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden's riffs about a "clean" and
well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories. All are the
trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared
with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is
agrammatical - he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and
then abandons the sentence entirely.
If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any
noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to
suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is
doing or saying or where he is - a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In
scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost
reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles
to process signals of perceived danger.
Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con
was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become
chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his
handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump's tweeting,
alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that
in voters' minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the
current commander in chief.
But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in
his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer
polls.
One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only
enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and
experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more
Biden "rests up," the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare
staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse
does not make it firmer.
Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential
candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or
hears him - in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to
the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the
dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that
the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old
idea, rather than the current reality, of him.
So too the ghost model was supposed to work for Biden.
He is a cardboard candidate, but at least he's not on the front lines of
commentary on statue toppling and the contagion, and so he can be blamed for
neither.
But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable.
He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn
cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at
all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end
up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that
they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential
candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency. And if Biden
is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood-prop mute
chair.
Why, then, is Biden the nominee at all - other than that he leads in the
delegate count and surged after Democrat back-roomers panicked when
Bloomberg imploded and Bernie surged? As a result, politicos forced or
enticed all the other primary candidates to vacate and unite around someone
nominally not a socialist.
Is one consolation that Biden's dementia offers a credible defense that he
has "no recollection" that he was in on Obama's efforts to surveil an
oppositional campaign and abort a presidential transition?
While all Democrats know that the cat must be belled, no one wishes to step
forward to do it and remove Biden - and indeed no one knows how to steal a
nomination from an enfeebled winner and hand it off to an undeserving but
cogent alternative. Take out Biden in August, and who knows what sort of
candidate stampede might follow in today's insane landscape?
So what are these strategies of dementia other than putting Biden on ice
while redefining the election as Trump versus the media's version of the
virus, lockdown, and economic stagnation?
Pity is one pretext. The progressive media have put Biden's blank stares and
word searching off limits. We are not supposed to remember that Trump was
hounded by progressive M.D.s, to the point that he took - and aced - the
Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, an examination that no one in his right
mind would suggest Biden now take, given that the results would be no
surprise.
Dementia is also about the only valid reason one can legitimately say "I
don't remember." So ask Joe Biden about those early January 2017 strategy
sessions in which Obama, Biden, and their henchmen plotted the surveillance
of the Trump campaign and the destruction of Michael Flynn - and he can
honestly say, "What administration?" Ask Biden about his illiberal past
statements, his associations with neo-Confederate senators, or his
plagiarism, and without guile he can retort, "What? What plagiarism? What
senators?" Burisma? Hunter Biden's Chinese lucre? He will look dumbfounded
and turn to an aide to ask, "What is Burisma and who is Hunter?"
Democrats also knew that they would lose with an Elizabeth Warren, Kamala
Harris, or Bernie Sanders as their masthead. The primaries, even heavily
loaded to the left-wing base, taught them that well enough. The hard-left
agenda of winter 2020 went nowhere, and it will go less than nowhere in the
fall after months of televised arson, looting, and gratuitous violence
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