America may not realize it, but it has the upper hand. Even China’s own bogus economic data show high unemployment and slowing economic growth there. It turns out that communism doesn’t work. Goldwater was correct.
A weaker American position will only fuel suspicions of corruption — “10 percent for the big guy.” Why are the Chinese Communists so desperate to buy off American elites? Because on some basic level, deep down, they know the truth is Goldwater was right. Communism is beyond hope. The Communist Party in China, like the Soviet one before it, is just buying time until the eventual ineluctable reckoning with freedom.
There is a remarkable national lack of curiosity about that message, “10 percent for the big guy.” If I said to you that a company that was effectively controlled by the Chinese government paid Hunter Biden almost $5 million for vaguely defined “consulting” and legal work, wouldn’t that bother you? Even if you’re a loyal Democrat — even if you were so progressive you’re to the left of Bernie Sanders — do you want members of president’s family to get in bed with the Chinese government*? (*I know, I know: Insert an Eric Swalwell joke here.)
There is no argument on any part of the American political spectrum that it is good for the kids (or siblings!) of politicians to cash in on their parents’ connections by accepting fortunes from hostile foreign states.
…Once again, it seems fair to ask just what Hunter Biden offered a de facto Chinese government entity that would justify paying him nearly $5 million. For those who want to say it was his expertise and insight, keep in mind, according to Hunter Biden’s own memoir, “From 2016 to 2019, Hunter Biden’s life was a mess. He and his wife divorced, and he drank and smoked crack just about every day.” The president’s son characterizes this time as “I was smoking crack every 15 minutes.”
The only value that Hunter Biden could possibly have to the Chinese government was as a conduit to his father. No one in their right mind saw Hunter Biden as a financial genius or an astute analyst. He was the former vice president and potential future president’s severely screwed-up man-child who was desperate for cash — exactly the sort of target that Chinese foreign-influence operations desired.
And as the Post reported, the Chinese reached out to Hunter Biden when everyone could see he was in dire straits:
During divorce proceedings with his wife Kathleen, a court filing in the case described “outstanding debts [that] are shocking and overwhelming,” with the couple carrying maxed-out credit cards, double mortgages on both properties they owned and a tax debt of $313,970. Three checks to their housekeeper had bounced, and they owed money to medical providers and therapists, according to a February 2017 filing in D.C. Superior Court.
An intermediary from CEFC initially reached out to Hunter Biden in December 2015 to set up a meeting between the then-vice president’s son and Ye Jianming, the founder and chairman of the Chinese firm, according to verified emails from a purported copy of the laptop hard drive reviewed by the outside experts for The Post.
What do you think the Chinese government wanted from Hunter Biden that was worth millions of dollars?
…In November, Xi Jinping will travel to the G-20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, and is expected to have his first in-person meeting with Joe Biden since Biden was elected president. What kind of thoughts will go through Xi’s mind, when he sits across the table from the American president?
“I can roll this guy”? “I can buy this guy”? “I’ve got leverage over this guy”?“
We’re going with “This guy is bought and paid for!”
Here’s the juice: Whenever a politician or bureaucrat enacts a policy or makes a decision which leads you scratching your head, just follow the money!!! It’s how a career politician never earning much money affords a multi-million dollar beach house in Delaware.
As had been noted by one relatively incorruptible American of note:
As we noted this past Friday of Joe Manchin’s inexplicable reversal on the manifestly misnomered Inflation Reduction Act, “the question isn’t whether Manchin has been bought off, only how much it took, when the payoff will be made and in what form it will come. On one thing you can depend: The payoff will benefit Manchin…
…not the good citizens of West Virginia, leaving the rest of us, along with our descendants, to foot the bill. We’d like to think some Republicans like Tom Cotton, Jim Jordan and those similarly concerned more with the country than their bank accounts are different, but unfortunately there’s not enough of them. And Kevin McCarthy, if you’ll check his record, ain’t one of ’em.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, since we’re on the subject of corruption, Andy McCarthy recounts…
“So . . . does Mike Pence think Mike Horowitz should stop criticizing the FBI?
Does the former vice president believe the lives of those he this week called the “brave men and women who stand on the thin blue line” at the bureau have been put at risk by the hundreds of pages of reports (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) in which Horowitz, the Justice Department’s own inspector general, has scalded the bureau for serial abuses of its national-security surveillance powers, shocking political bias, lying under oath to investigators, leaking investigative information, usurping the authority of federal prosecutors, petty corruption, and so on?
Or perhaps Pence thinks that it is the federal judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) who have imperiled the lives of FBI agents? In late 2016, the judges lambasted the bureau for its institutional “lack of candor.” They weren’t referring to the FBI’s misconduct in connection with that year’s election — that rebuke would come later. Instead, they were exasperated by the bureau’s years of systematically flouting restrictions on its surveillance authority and misrepresenting the scope of that illegality to the court — with the result that millions of innocent Americans were swept into its national-security monitoring.
…As someone who criticizes the FBI out of reverence for the institution and what it should be, I no longer believe the bureau can get its priorities straight. We have to be honest: Things are headed in the wrong direction. Over the last decade, as it took on the cast of a spy agency, the bureau returned to its Hooverian roots, becoming enmeshed in politics and serving a partisan agenda — inevitably that of the Democratic Party because Democrats are the party of government and the bureau knows where its bread is buttered. There is a reason the FBI, taking cues from its political masters, now translates the term domestic terrorism to mean the right-wing extremism of white supremacists, even as left-wing radicals and the criminals they coddle destroy America’s cities.
Funny, but I don’t recall Vice President Pence’s being a ferocious defender of the FBI while his boss, to whom he was the very model of obsequiousness, spent four years attacking it. If he gave a “Now, now, Mr. President, let’s not throw out the thin-blue-line baby with the Hoover Headquarters bathwater,” I’m afraid I missed it. But if he really thinks that negative criticism of the FBI, on the current record, is a form of dangerous incitement, then he has no business running for president.
I’ve never been a big Pence fan, glad as I am that he showed backbone in resisting a hare-brained election-theft scheme that he had to know had no chance of success. I genuinely admire the unflinching courage he exhibited during the Capitol riot, but politically he has always seemed more opportunistic than courageous to me. He is, in any event, a wonky good-governance type, so I’d have thought he’d be familiar with the criticisms of the FBI raised by the Justice Department and the federal courts, which address a depth of malfeasance well beyond a few bad apples in the front office.
And does he actually believe that saying “Defund the FBI” is the same as saying “Defund the Police”? The FBI is not a safe-streets police force. It is mainly designed to counter sophisticated criminal syndicates that operate across state or national borders; its best work is deliberate and analytical, not instant and reactive policing. Defunding the police destroys communities; no one calls the FBI when a store gets robbed or an old lady gets mugged — they call the police, and they complain that if police were on the beat the neighborhood would be safe. If the FBI’s budget were zeroed out (a bad idea, to be clear) while municipal police forces were fully funded and encouraged to enforce the laws (a good idea), crime would be reduced dramatically.
The FBI can still be a valuable force for good, but not if we close our eyes and swallow our tongues regarding its problems. I believe it must be converted strictly into a federal law-enforcement agency, one that sticks to investigating serious crime and assisting the Justice Department in prosecuting it. Though that’s a hard job, it’s one the FBI can still do well. But the bureau should get out of domestic security and foreign counterintelligence. Those missions should be transferred to an intelligence agency that has no police powers — one that has liaison with law-enforcement agencies but does not do law enforcement, one that is bound to honor the Constitution in its domestic operations and subjected to exacting oversight.
You may think that is the right way to go, or you may think I’ve misdiagnosed the problem. But you’d be hard-pressed to deny that there is a problem — and to be solved, problems have to be confronted. In a functioning free society, sensible people do not shrink from addressing serious challenges just because doing so might provoke the most irrational of their fellow citizens. In a functioning free society, violence is aggressively prosecuted, regardless of the -ism that motivates it, and the specter of violence isn’t allowed to become a shield against accountability. Mike Pence should know that.“
He undoubtedly does…which makes his defense of the indefensible even more unforgivable, and is in part why he garners such little support in our current poll at the top right of the page.
Next, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson provides the latest on…
“Here’s a remarkable — stupid, awful, ghastly — document of our times: A group calling itself Physicians for Reproductive Health has published an open letter to the nation’s reporters and news editors, demanding that they pretend anti-abortion activists do not exist.
The group writes:
We are writing today with a big request: stop giving air-time to anti-abortion activists. . . . We know your reporting standards are to cover “both sides” of any debate. Allow us to be clear: Medicine and science are not up for debate. Health care is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. And the fact is, abortion is not in the realm of theory or belief. Abortion belongs in health care, social services, and public health reporting.
With this in mind, we are asking for a commitment from the community of media outlets reporting on abortion to keep in mind the true danger that you present when interviewing anti-abortion extremists. You are giving the opportunity for dangerous lies to spread. You are, by way of asking them questions, legitimizing their answers. You are allowing hateful, dangerous harassers to build a base that encourages protesting at clinics, stalking and harming clinic staff and abortion providers, and online and in-person abuse of people who have abortions and those who support them in getting that care.
This is mad and foolish in several ways.
For one thing, medicine and science are, in fact, “up for debate,” and health care is, in fact, very often a “matter of opinion.” Hence the ubiquity of such expressions as, “In my medical opinion” and “get a second opinion.” Debate is essential to science. This point may seem an obvious and trivial one, but it apparently needs repeating.
For another thing, the status of abortion is a matter of ethical and political debate, not scientific debate. There isn’t much scientific debate about what happens in the course of a typical abortion: A living individual organism of the species Homo sapiens is destroyed at an early stage of development. Scientists, pro-lifers, and honest abortion advocates mostly agree about that. The question is whether it matters, and, if it does matter, whether it matters in a way that ought to make it subject to legal regulation — as, indeed, it is in practically every decently governed nation on this Earth: At the moment, Switzerland and France have more restrictive abortion regulations than do New Jersey and California. There is a rumor afoot that they have scientists and doctors in Europe, too.
…Of course, Physicians for Reproductive Health wouldn’t dare to ask such a thing if so many reporters hadn’t already given themselves over partially to propaganda. But nobody would have dared to demand that Twitter and Facebook act as arms of the Biden campaign if those social-media giants hadn’t already shown themselves so eager to do so, and nobody would expect Harvard to engage in ritual self-abasement if it weren’t already on its knees. At some point, the leaders of these institutions will have to learn to stand up for their own interests, or they will see themselves surpassed by new institutions that do the things their institutions used to do. At some level, institutional leaders understand that: The panicked sneering at the plans for a University of Austin is terrific proof of just how fragile the status-farming syndicates at the top of the educational world know themselves to be.
You can try dropping those with views contrary to your own into a dank, dark, media oubliette, and you may even get a little something out of it. But the real world doesn’t go away just because you’ve stopped looking at it.
You’d think the abortion lobby would have figured that out after Dobbs.“
Here’s a second shot of the juice: They have, but they can’t admit it, as Progressive politics are one vast house of cards in which the removal of one would bring all of their programs and policies crashing down. So, in for a dime, in for the future of the Dimocratic Party.
And in the Entertainment Section, FOX once more misinforms us…
* Which is it FOX: Marin Sanna or Sanna Marin? Does ANYONE at FOX News proofread this crap?!?
“…Marin dismissed any speculation of drug use at the party and contested any claims that her behavior was “inappropriate.” “I did nothing illegal,” Marin told reporters, according to a translation from the BBC. “Even in my teenage years I have not used any kind of drugs.” Marin said she took the drug test solely as a show of good faith to her detractors in the public and in parliament.
Alcoholic beverages can be seen in the video, but in the brief clips Marin is not depicted drinking or doing drugs, leading many of her supporters to declare criticism of her behavior unreasonable. “I think my ability to function was really good. There were no known meetings on the days I was partying,” the Finnish leader added. “I trust that people understand that leisure time and work time can be separated.”…”
Sanna Marin/Marin Sanna’s behavior reminds us of this scene from Jurassic Park:
The distinction between “could” and “should” is sometimes as wide as span between Hillary’s left and right hips.
Moving on, here’s a quartet of specially selected items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Writing at Townhall.com, Amber Smith details why the Afghanistan withdrawal was the perfect storm of bureaucratic incompetence. As this video clip forwarded by Joe Flood demonstrates, Biden’s total ineptitude is just another amazing example of life imitating art:
“Olympic medalist Dina Asher-Smith wants more funding to research the impact a woman’s period may have on their athletic performance after the British runner finished last during her 100 meters title at the European Championships in Munich. Midway through her race on Tuesday, The 26-year-old suffered a cramp in her calf, caused by her period, and finished last. However, Asher-Smith, later in the week, easily qualified on Thursday evening for the 200m semifinals.
“It is a huge topic for women in sport,” she told BBC Sport. “It is something I think more people need to research from a sports science perspective.” “Sometimes you see girls who have been so consistent have a random dip, and behind the scenes they have been really struggling,” Asher-Smit added. “It could do with more funding because if it was a men’s issue we would have a million different ways to combat things.”…”
Three thoughts immediately come to mind: (i) That last statement’s both baseless and biased, but if it were a men’s issue, we’d recommend either a hysterectomy, not competing or just dealing with it as three quick and easy solutions; (ii) This is yet another reason mentally-ill men should not be allowed to compete with women; and (iii) We’re going to save everyone a lot of time and money by definitively deciding the impact is adverse.
Magoo
Video of the Day
VDH identifies the political party which poses the REAL threat to the Constitution and rule of law.
Tales of The Darkside
How bad are things when a Dimocrat who welcomed Biden to her state only last month now desperately denies working for him?
On the Lighter Side
We don’t know how we missed this forward from our brother Rob, but it’s hilarious! P.S. Watch it ’til the end.
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