In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I didn't intend to spend any time on Mikhail Gorbachev's passing, but the dog days of summer being what they are, and the whole range of opinion on any subject being as obtuse as it's been, Gorbachev is one of the most interesting subjects around -- which I guess says something. The first observation to make is that the Ukraine invasion has proven to be a last, desperate, feckless gesture of Soviet revanchism. The tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February carried Soviet flags in addition to their Zs for victory, neither of which has worn well. This was the system Gorbachev intended to preserve and reinvigorate. The conventional obituaries have missed the point. Here's The Guardian : Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration. So...

FBI agent Timothy Thibault was reported late Monday to have been escorted out of his FBI office in Washington Friday afternoon and to have "abruptly resigned". Thibault had been a public target of allegations by Iowa Sen Charles Grassley that FBI agents have shown political bias in their investigations. "The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI's receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI's false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation," GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland on July 25. "The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter." . . . In October 2020, one month before the election, "an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed" by a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office. An earlier letter ...

Victor Davis Hanson published an essay Friday in the New York Post, Elites’ divide & conquer failure: How middle class now view their rulers with rightly earned disdain . Hanson emerged with a new set of commentators like the late Angelo Codevilla around the time of 9/11. From the start, I always thought there was more he could have done with any of his themes than he ever actually delivered, but in recent times, I think the problem has grown. In this piece, he's specifically addressing class, which means he really needs at least to nod his head to Marx, but he doesn't. He writes either as if Marx didn't exist, or Marx is completely irrelevant to the subject, or (possibly more likely), he thinks he underatands Marx and expects the reader to assume he does, so he won't mention him. However, he doesn't understand Marx. We have to back up and see how this matters. It's important to recognize that Marx had a point, and his basic taxonomy of class and class ...

On Friday, I looked at what seems to be the best case for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, that there was ample evidence of highly classified material stored there willy-nilly in rooms that, while they were under locks with video surveillance and controlled by the US Secret Service, had not been formally designated facilities eligible to receive classified material. This is a violation of bop-de-bop. Both Andrew McCarthy and Alan Dershowitz argue that this meets the probable cause standard for both an indictment and a search warrant. On Saturday, I pointed out that in well-publicized prior cases, Hillary Clinton received no penalty for an equivalent violation under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard, while John Deutch. having run afoul of the Clintons as CIA Director and being eased out of that job, went though several years of investigation in which neither the Justice Department nor the CIA would prosecute for similar violations. His case, clearly a political grudge by...

I'm astonished at how little analysis, smart or dumb, there's been in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago affadavit's limited unsealing -- but the situation is comparable to how poor the analysis has been of the Russo-Ukraine War. Journalists just aren't smart people, but when the news actually takes some work to report, they don't even show up. Here's how I see it. Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek the same thing Andrew McCarthy said at National Review Online yesterday, Donald Trump's former attorney Alan Dershowitz said that the unsealed affidavit supporting the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago gives the Justice Department enough evidence to indict the former president. In an interview with Newsweek, Dershowitz said, "It sounds like there would be enough for an indictment, but like probable cause, an indictment is easy to get," explaining that prosecutors could simply point to the materials found at Trump's residence that he had unlawful acces...

It's hard to imagine anyone in modern history, and by that I mean back to maybe 1517, who's been investigated as much as Donald Trump. The man is human, certainly not blameless, but so far, despite multiple congressional investigations, two impeachments, and some number of grand jury proceedings, he remains unindicted and unremoved from office. If critics claim he's a narcissist, it nevertheless remains that narcissism is not against the law. Instead, as president, he presided over prosperity and kept us out of wars. I would enjoy hearing of some historical figure who's been investigated nearly as much, if not more. As I reflect on this, it occurs to me that regimes are normally much more efficient at disposing of those whom they find inconvenient, which may say something about the capabilities of Trump's enemies, and that may lead me to my eventual point here. The reaction of never Trumpers to the Mar-a-Lago raid may actually be illustrative of the overa...

Let's examine some data points. Dr Fauci's sidekick, Dr Deborah Birx, was able to retire on generous terms after she was caught violating COVID protocols. (Her job in any case, of course, was simply to stand next to Big Doc and nod while he spoke): A top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force has said she will retire after it emerged she hosted a holiday gathering. Dr Deborah Birx, who is 64, cited the criticism she had faced for a family get-together over Thanksgiving in Delaware in her decision to step aside. . . . Late on Tuesday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted President Donald Trump's good wishes, saying he "has great respect for Dr Birx and likes her very much. We wish her well". In an interview with US news network Newsy aired on Tuesday, a masked Dr Birx did not specify when she would stand down, but said she would help the incoming Biden administration and "and then I will retire". So ...

I've noted before that once the Watergate scandal got well under way, there was a regular pattern whereby Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would make some assertion that the White House wasn't involved in any sort of coverup, only to have documents surface in subsequent days that showed the opposite was true. Ziegler then became famous for declaring his previous statements "inoperative". We seem to be returning to the days of inoperative statements . Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News. The memos show then-White Hou...

The biggest story yesterday without a doubt was Dr Fauci's announcement of his resignations from his interlocking positions within the deep state, although he stressed this wasn't "retirement". Fauci is currently the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden. “I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci revealed in a statement. Fauci’s decision significantly moves up the timeline of his retirement, as he said in July he would resign at the end of Biden’s first term. Just two Saturdays ago, I noted that Dr Fauci had been booed while throwing out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Did this have anything to do with his decision? I wouldn't rule it out, but too much else has been happening. For instance, his former sidekick Dr Birx is starting t...

I continue to be intrigued by the logical incoherence of any attempt to explain the objectives of the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid. The prevailing interpretation is that the FBI was trying to find something that Trump wanted to keep hidden. That might be something damaging to Trump himself, like the pee tape or maybe evidence of a January 6 conspiracy, or it might be something Trump knows will damage the deep state that he's withholding until the proper time. The problem with any version of this is that the FBI is assuming that although it's very high value information, Trump is storing it in a low-value repository, a home office safe where any journeyman safecracker can get at it. Trump is smart enough, and he has the resources, not to do this. It's also worth recognizing that Trump has been the focus of investigations since before his presidential run in 2015. He's been a reality TV star and a generalist celebrity, thus fair journalistic game, for decades. During hi...

As I've noted, in the two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid, there's been a chorus of Deep Throats who allegedly have knowledge of the FBI's inner workings feeding backgound info to overcredulous news writers. It's worth tabulating what they've been saying, if only to see if it might fall together into some kind of working hypothesis, although there's a logical problem with any theory that says the search was intended to retrieve a particular document or artifact. Let's start with the analysis of Peter Strzok himself, who surfaced last week to give his own take : Please oh please keep asking how you can turn down the temperature in the country. And why does he have two passports? The Russian passport, of course, is kept in a vault at Yasenevo and only swapped out at third country meets, so it can't be that one. pic.twitter.com/Hbk8iL39Ax — Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 15, 2022 Clearly Strzok still believes there's a Putin connection, quite p...