A Possible Answer To Yesterday's Question About Jack Smith

The big thing that struck me yesterday about Jack Smith's petition to the Supreme Court for a near-immediate ruling on Trump's presidential immunity was its apparent urgency, and I posited that there must be someone in the background (for convenience, a lizard person) who's able to prod Mr Smith into that level of haste. As I said, this plays into the Trump team's Chicago Seven strategy of forcing hasty actions on the judge and prosecution that play out badly in front of the public and eventually result in appellate reversals.

Oddly enough, Larry Johnson at the Gateway Pundit may have an explanation. But keeping him in context, he's the same Larry Johnson who, as a PBS News Hour talking head a generation ago, discounted Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden as terrorist threats, something that's hurt his credibility ever since, although more recently, he's been an important contrarian voice on the Ukraine war who's proven correct on that issue so far. Here's his allegation:

My old friend and business partner, John Moynihan, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Office on November 28 alleging that Jack Smith, the Special Prosecutor pursuing Donald Trump, was engaged in an extortion scheme while he was working at the International Court of Justice. . . . It is no coincidence that Jack Smith, in the wake of that complaint, made an impromptu move on Monday (December 11) asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump had immunity to the charges filed by Smith. Moynihan’s complaint was filed on November 28, 2023 and Smith, 13 days later decides to bypass the Appeals Courts. Smells like politics.

The Moynihan complaint is political dynamite because it provides circumstantial evidence to support Donald Trump’s belief that Jack Smith is not only politically motivated but corrupt. The Trump team wisely has refrained from piling on this news in order to avoid accusations that this was a manufactured hit job.

The complaint alleges in brief that Smith, while serving as chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague from 2018 to 2022, engaged in bribery and extortion. In one instance, his job was to track down Kosovo war criminals, but in the process, he solicited bribes to avoid prosecution:

In August 2020, Imeri contacted Halit and tasked him with contacting three “war criminals” in Kosovo. Imeri said that Jack Smith’s office was going to leak dossiers on the three individuals and that Halit’s job was to contact them and solicit a bribe. Halit did as instructed and incurred the wrath of the three targets. His next conversation with Imeri was unpleasant, with Imeri accusing him of botching the bribe request. To earn the trust of Smith’s operation, Halit was asked to “donate” more than $400,000 to a black fund used by the Prosecutor’s office. Halit did as instructed.

Another source reported that Smith was interested in tracking down Russians who may have been aware of corruption by Hillary Clinton. Johnson asks,

How did Jack Smith know that the Russian Potanin possessed incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton? And why was a prosecutor with the International Court of Justice meddling in that area? Legitimate questions that merit an investigation.

Another article makes the point that the information in the Moynihan November 28, 2023 complaint had already been provided to the Justice Department in April 2022. That author surmises,

Attorney General Merick [sic] Garland learned about this material 18 months ago, and he (or Lisa Monaco, the Littlefinger of Garland’s DOJ) summoned Jack Smith back to Washington, DC to tell him something along the following lines: Listen you SOB, we know that you have been blackmailing people over in Europe and we are going to put you away for 30 years…. or you are going to come home and prosecute Donald Trump. We don’t care how far-fetched the legal theories, you are going to indict him and hound him to thwart his return to office.

Thisis at least a potential explanation for the impression I get that the urgency in Smith's request to the Supreme Court comes from someone well above his paygrade. But we'll have to see what shakes out.

Yeah, It's Still The Chicago Seven Strategy

All I can conclude is some very serious lizard people have told Jack Smith that Trump's DC trial must start on March 4, or else. Alan Dershowitz hasn't commented on Smith's move to take Trump's appeal based on presidential immunity directly to the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz has already noted that Trump's strategy is essentially the same as the Chicago Seven defense: force the judge and prosecutors into errors the defense can get reversed on appeal.

The stakes are high:

The outcome of this fight may determine whether Trump faces any of his four pending criminal trials in 2024. His other three remain in flux or unscheduled. And if the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court consider the former president’s immunity claims on their typical timelines, that may force Chutkan to slow down her own.

While lawyers from special counsel Jack Smith’s team pleaded with Chutkan not to alter the March 4 date, they appeared to concede that Trump’s defense won’t be obliged to respond to most legal issues in the case while his appeal claiming presidential immunity is pending at the D.C. Circuit.

Trump has argued that the entire case must be halted while his immunity appeal is pending because a ruling in his favor would shut down the prosecution. His lawyers also say he shouldn’t be subject to the “burdens of litigation” while his appeal is live.

The problem is that Joe Biden hasn't been adjusting his campaign strategy as the polls gradually turn against him. Instead, he remains focused on a strategy from last year or earlier, to put Trump on trial through the primary and general campaigns and present Joe as the less-bad alternative. But this isn't aging well:

The media are full of stories that cite Democratic Party sources and contributors suggesting that the 81-year-old president, who has shown signs of age-related mental impairment in recent years, should drop out of the running. The complaints have become increasingly urgent as Biden’s presidential favorability readings have plunged sharply.

Meanwhile, Trump faces an unprecedented legal assault, with four separate indictments covering 91 allegations of criminal behavior on his part. In normal times, that would be a political disaster.

. . . . [Based on a recent poll] Among all voters, 60% agreed that the unprecedented legal charges against Trump were politically driven by the Democratic Party, while 31% disagreed.

What’s surprising isn’t that majorities of Republicans (81% “agree,” 13% “disagree”) and independents (53% “agree,” 35% “disagree”) see eye-to-eye, but that a plurality of Democrats (49% “agree,” 44% “disagree”) also believe the prosecutions are politically motivated.

The Trump campaign jumped on the news of Smith's motion:

Smith asked the high court to quickly take up the issue of whether Trump can be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, a move that attempted to bypass the appeals court. Smith beseeched SCOTUS that Trump's "trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected."

The Supreme Court agreed to take up Smith's petition, directing Trump's team to submit a response by Dec. 20. The court made clear its "response does not mean the court will take up the case — only that it will consider the request in an expedited fashion."

"Crooked Joe Biden's henchman, Deranged Jack Smith, is so obsessed with interfering in the 2024 Presidential Election with the goal of preventing President Trump from retaking the Oval Office, as the President is poised to do, that Smith is willing to try for a Hail Mary by racing to the Supreme Court and attempting to bypass the appellate process," a spokesperson for Trump's campaign said in a statement prior to SCOTUS' answer.

I suspect the Trump defense strtagy had something like this in mind from the start -- file an appeal that could result in a delay of the DC trial past March 4, which would threaten to move the whole trial timing away from the election season. Someone -- and I think it was someone who gives Jack Smith de facto orders -- decided this was unacceptable, even though the Biden reelection strategy based on putting Trump in prison by November has alrweady been overtaken by events. Nevertheless, the lizard people are in full panic mode.

The Trump defense has been fully aware that putting Smith into appellate territory puts Smith at a major disadvatage:

Special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought federal charges against former President Donald Trump, is an “overzealous” prosecutor who relies on ethically dubious tactics, including media leaks and enticing witnesses, say those who have been caught in his snare.

Other reviews of his record come to conclusions like this one:

Special Counsel Jack Smith, tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Donald Trump for allegedly wrongfully maintaining classified documents in his residence – a fairly common practice other U.S. Attorneys General have refused to prosecute – has a troubling record of failed, botched, and/or suspect prosecutions against prominent public figures.

This record suggests the Trump team deliberately forced a bad choice on Smith -- either allow an appeal that would delay the trial, unacceptable to the lizard people, or attempt to get a quick ruling in his favor from the Supreme Court, which, given his appellate track record, is itself an iffy proposition. The Trump team's strategy all along has been to get both the judge and prosecutor rattled and force them into panic-driven decisions, and it looks like it's working.

Here's A Question Nobody's Asked

It dawned on me in the middle of last night that normally, for the person indicted, a federal indictment is never a surprise. I did a quick search and discovered that pre-indictment is a legal specialty. For instance, at the Hedding Law Firm, which specializes in federal criminal defense,

If you feel that you are under investigation by the feds, you definitely want to get an attorney involved with your case immediately. Never a good idea to try to handle it yourself. Now's not the time to pinch pennies and not hire an attorney immediately.

Basically, pre-indictment intervention has to do with before the feds indict you, which is their filing document where they're filing criminal federal charges against you. You can intervene and you can use an attorney to either investigate the case to show that you're innocent or to investigate the case to try to get information on your behalf to either mitigate or reduce the charges.

We must assume that Hunter hired Abbe Lowell, one of the most prominent federal criminal defense attorneys, to oversee his whole case, and up to this past Thursday, this would have included extensive pre-indictment discussions with the prosecutors over the past six months. Neither the date of the indictment nor the specific charges would have been any sort of surprise to Hunter or his legal team, but this leaves aside what must also have been a heads-up from Attorney General Garland to the White House.

But if the indictment wasn't a surprise to the White House, why have they been unable to issue much of a statement? They've had weeks or months to prepare, but they're simply repeating what they've been saying when the charges against Hunter were likely to result in just a diversion agreement:

The White House reiterated President Biden’s pledge that he would not pardon his son, Hunter Biden, if he is convicted amid his ongoing legal battles.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president had not changed his mind on the statement in the wake of new tax crime charges brought against the younger Biden in California, when reporters asked.

. . . “Nothing has changed,” Jean-Pierre said Friday during a gaggle aboard Air Force One en route to Las Vegas. “That is still the case.”

. . . “I’m going to be really careful and not comment on this and refer you to Department of Justice or my colleagues at the White House Counsel,” she added.

Except that neither the Justice Department nor the White House Counsel will have anything to say, either. On the other hand, Hunter's own remarks, made on a podcast prior to Thursday's indictment, likely indicate, first, that the indictment wasn't a surprise, and second, the actual level of concern, if not panic, among the Bidens:

"What they're trying to do is they're trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way," he said, adding that they want him to relapse to drug abuse.

"It's not about me," he continued, adding that "these people are just sad, very, very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives that they've decided that they are going to turn into an evil that they decide that they're going to inflict on the rest of the world".

. . . Mr Biden added: "I'm gonna survive it clean and sober, is because I am not gonna let these [expletive], OK, use me as just another example of why people in recovery are never gonna be OK, never to be trusted, they're all degenerates."

Let's recall, though, that every indication is that Hunter, who had been living in the White House for nearly a year, was eased out over this past summer after the incident of the baggie in a cubby. My surmise is that the Secret Service laid it out to Joe that there were simply limits to its ability to cover for Hunter's drug use there. There's been an ongoing subtext for quite some time that nearly everyone has been refusing to recognize -- evidence that Hunter is nowhere near clean and sober has been lurking in the wings all along, and any new episode will further damage the family's credibility.

Hunter's assessment that the indictment, in the wake of Beau's death, is something Joe will be unable to handle, especially in the context of a troubled reelection campaign, a bad economy, an open border, and two wars, is almost certainly correct. Something is going to have to be worked out, but Joe is currently in denial about it.

It seems to me that the clearest option will be for Joe to withdraw from candidacy in 2024 while pardoning Hunter, although further revelations from the House investigations may either hasten this or add other complications to a whole separate deal for Joe that could even include resignation.

Tip Of The Iceberg

I'm headinbg into a period over coming weeks where, due to personal issues, posting will have to be sporadic, which is just as well, since all we can say about current developments over Hunter and Joe is that much more is likely to come out. Jonathan Turley is one of the few asking the right questions:

The steps taken by Hunter to evade taxes are impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the efforts of the Justice Department to evade any direct implications for his father, President Biden.

In that sense, the indictment itself is a marvel of evasion.

. . . [T]his recent indictment keeps the focus squarely on taxes not paid, not how the money was “earned” in the first place.

Also missing in the indictment is any charge against Hunter Biden as an unregistered foreign agent.

. . . The problem with charging Hunter with FARA is obvious.

It opens up questions about the millions of dollars going to the Biden family from foreign sources, a topic that Attorney General Merrick Garland has spent years avoiding.

In the second indictment, Weiss spends more time detailing the salacious use of this money rather than how and why it was given to the Bidens.

He just matter-of-factly describes millions flowing through these accounts from China, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and other countries.

. . . Weiss indicts the failure to pay taxes on the proceeds of these dealings without addressing that underlying corruption.

It is akin to arresting a bank robber for speeding away from the crime scene without mentioning the reason for his flight.

In a scandal with dozens of references to the presidents [sic] and millions sent for influence and access, it took a steady hand for Weiss to avoid ever touching on President Biden’s role.

Chairman Comer said the same thing last night:

Comer said, “What he got charged with, with that indictment last night, that had nothing to do with all of the so-called loans that the Bidens have taken. We’ve identified, it appears, with the president’s son and brother, over $14 million in loans where it doesn’t look like they made any payments on, principal or interest. And what point do those loans, if you’re not going to pay ’em back, become income?

Comer added, “So, we think this is just the tip of the iceberg. We think there’s many more crimes. and my concern is that Weiss may have indicted Hunter Biden to protect him from having to be deposed in the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.”

This takes me back to the 1970s yet again -- I can only think of the Nixon White House term modified limited hangout:

What do you do when you get caught in a lie or trying to cover up something? Like the kid who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar? You offer a little bit of the truth. Yes, my hand was in the cookie jar, but I wasn’t looking for cookies, just checking to see if it was clean so I could put some more cookies in the jar.

That’s called a limited hangout. It’s a phrase coined by the spy trade to refer to a strategy for when a veil of secrecy or a phony cover story to misinform the public is no longer reliable. In that case, they resort to admitting some of the truth while still managing to withhold the damaging facts in the case. When used successfully, the public can be so intrigued by the new information that it is distracted from pursuing the matter further.

There are too many open questions at this point for the whole matter to go away, and what makes this delicious is that the leaks and revelations about how, for instance, the Justice Department totally reversed course on the potential charges against Hunter are only going to start now. I suspect we'll be learning a great deal more in coming weeks, so it's just as well I'm in a position where I can't comment day to day.

The Deep State Drops Joe Biden Overnight

This would not be allowed, even from Alex Jones, even from Tucker Carlson, if the lizard people weren't on board:

Jones told Carlson that he believed Joe Biden was 'completely out of his mind.'

. . . Jones said: 'He wanders around for the entire two and a half years naked in the White House. In the middle of the night, doesn't know who he is.

'They have to give him a bunch of drugs - a bunch of amphetamines in the morning, and they have to drug him at night.

'Sometimes he'll be out for the morning, for a while, then come back at night for a ball. That's when there's a real problem.'

Carlson nodded, looking grave.

'He is on drugs. I have established that,' said Carlson.

As of 2014, there were leaks to that effect about Joe when he was vice president:

According to a new book, Joe Biden's Secret Service detail is leaking information about where the vice president is most vulnerable to being assassinated, as well engaging in less dangerous breaches of decorum, like gossiping about when he gets naked. These are breaches of the strict privacy code usually kept by the agents.

I've noted here the occasions when Joe is able to speak without stumbling or slurring, and I've offered the most charitable take, which is that he's usually drunk, but his handlers can sometimes keep him off the sauce for important meetings. Alex Jones has a different theory, but he's responding to the same evidence. I can only assume that insiders have been able to keep this quiet for only so long. But why now? This has been the same Joe for years.

Here's one possibility:

The Biden administration is openly threatening Americans over Ukraine. In a classified briefing in the House yesterday, defense secretary Lloyd Austin informed members that if they don’t appropriate more money for Zelensky, “we’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight… pic.twitter.com/BPKMEBW8TK

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 7, 2023

Note that this also comes from Tucker Carlson, for whatever it's worth, but Joe himself is saying essentially the same thing in public:

“Who is prepared to walk away from holding Putin accountable for his behaviors?” the president asked. “I’ll tell you I’m not prepared to walk away, and I don’t think the American people are either.” Failure to pass the funding, Biden warned, would give Putin “the greatest gift he could ask for.”

He again warned that Putin would “keep going” if he takes Ukraine, suggesting that Russia could eventually attack a NATO ally and draw US troops into conflict.

Larry Johnson at Gateway Pundit gives some background:

The blame game about who lost Ukraine is starting. We know this thanks to the Washington Post, which managed to do some real reporting by publishing a two-part series on Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive.

. . . Western military leaders are a bunch of arrogant dumb asses, who have not won a conventional military engagement like the one that confronted Ukraine in more than 70 years. They ignored the intelligence assessments from the CIA, they ignored the crucial role that air power plays in a all of NATO plans and they ignored the importance of having troops properly trained to conduct complex combined arms military manuevers.

. . . So, to summarize, the U.S. took the lead in coming up with a battle plan that it had ZERO experience in executing. It agreed to provide limited, inadequate training to Ukraine. It could not supply artillery shells or fixed wing aircraft required to pull off such an operation, and U.S. leaders were “surprised” that Ukraine’s counter offensive failed.

Johnson has been saying all along that the intelligence community has never been on board with the neoconservatives at State and Defense, and events seem to be reaching a tipping point with Congress over Ukraine aid -- the insistence in both the House and Senate on including border policy changes with Ukraine aid are an indicator.

But think about this for a moment: the news of Hunter's new tax indictments came out the same morning as the Washington Post story and Alex Jones's remarks to Tucker. The Hunter indictments in particular could never have happened without the approval of whomever approves whatever Merrick Garland does about the Bidens. The Hunter indictments will almost certainly lead to Joe's withdrawal as a 2024 candidate, but this will also force a negotiated settlement in Ukraine.

"I m Actually Doing You A Big Favor!"

Little signs are beginning to emerge that Joe is at least aware of his potential electoral plight. According to the New York Post,

President Biden said Tuesday that he might have retired after a single term of office if former President Donald Trump wasn’t running in next year’s election.

“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the 81-year-old president told a group of Democratic donors in Boston. “But we cannot let him win.”

Well, certain kinds of people, if you suggest they've screwed something up in an unhelpful way, will try to turn things around and insist that "I'm actually doing you a big favor!" by, say, suggesting you didn't want that person as a friend anyhow. In the vignette above, I think Joe's subtext is that you may think he's screwing things up by insisting on running in 2024, but he's actually doing the country a big favor by keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, which by implication nobody else can do.

If Joe is acknowledging his awkward situation in even the most backhanded way, it must be because the auguries are beginning to look bleak even to him. I've already posted on the kinds of stories that emerged in the summers of 1988 and 2004, sourced to unnamed Democrat insiders, complaining about stalled campaigns, but we're beginning to see those stories now at the end of 2023, not next summer:

Democrats nervous about the president’s low approval ratings, and recent national polling showing him trailing or within the margin of error of Donald Trump in a potential rematch, have begun sounding the alarm about what they see as the lack of urgency on the part of Biden’s team.

Nor should we discount Trump's gut feelings on this or many other matters:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that President Joe Biden's physical health and mental capacity might prevent him from becoming the eventual Democratic nominee in 2024.

"I don't think he makes it. I think he's bad shape physically," Trump said during an Iowa forum with Fox News's Sean Hannity. "I watched him at the beach, he wasn't able to lift a beach chair which is meant for children."

At age 81, Biden's health and fitness for office have attracted mounting scrutiny from the media, with his penchant for making awkward gaffes and telling bizarre anecdotes fueling much of that speculation.

It's worth noting that although there's been a series of revelations from House committees on Biden family business transactions that implicate Joe, these alone seem to have little impact on his poor polling. Currently,

President Joe Biden's approval hit an all-time low in a CNN poll released Wednesday.

Just 37 percent of the poll's 1,795 respondents approved of the president's job in office, while 63 percent disapproved. The numbers represent the lowest approval and highest disapproval rating Biden has received in a CNN poll since the beginning of his presidency. The margin of error of the poll was 3.2 percent.

. . . CNN's poll is not the only one to show Biden is struggling with public approval. The RealClearPolitics polling average on Wednesday shows 40 percent approve of his job and 56 percent disapprove. FiveThirtyEight's polling average the same day had his approval rating at 38 percent and his disapproval rating at 55 percent.

As I've been noting here already, one disadvantage for Joe is that he can't respond well to questions from the press about the family business, which applies as much to the issue of his age and fitness as it does to whether he's on the take.

Joe Biden spoke to the press for the first time since the revelation that he received direct payments from one of his son's shady businesses. That news broke in the face of the president's repeated denials over the years claiming that he had zero connections to Hunter Biden's dealings.

When faced with the glaring contradiction, Joe Biden freaked out, doubling down and storming out of the press conference.

. . . He can't just keep shutting down questions on this without inviting a backlash from even those in the press who are predisposed to defend him. Further complicating his situation is that there are many Democrats who do not want him to be the nominee in 2024. Every piece of bad news provides fodder for those trying to force him out.

I think most Democrats realize that this is only going to get worse as more and more is uncovered. To ride with Biden in 2024 is to invite very bad odds of winning the presidency. I expect the internal drama to get much worse in the near term.

RedState suggests,

At what point does the Democrat Party kick Joe to the curb?

Granted, the ultimate decision would be Biden's, but one would think that the people around him, even including his limelight-loving, pretend-doctor wife, at some point, would say, "Joe. It's time to go."

And Joe being Joe, he'd do his damnedest to make it look like it was his idea all along.

That may be, but if he withdraws, there's no serious Plan B. The bet is that he'll withdraw in favor of Kamala, but neither she nor Gavin Newsom at this point would be acceptable to the far left of the party, while one more traditional member of the New Deal alliance, the Jews, are following labor and Catholics out the door.

The Real Question About The Latest Payments To Joe

In a nutshell,

Newly disclosed bank records, released on Monday as part of the House Republicans' ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden, indicate that Hunter Biden arranged direct, monthly payments to his father. The records show that at least one payment of $1,380 was sent from Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC to Joe Biden in September 17, 2018.

On one hand, this is just the drip-drip-drip pattern of classic Washington scandals, ranging from the White House insistence in March 1973 that nobody had prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, to Bill Clinton's insistence that he never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky, whereby presidential denials that such-and-such ever happened are gradually refuted as evidence surfaces that indeed they did. Ms Jean-Pierre's comment after being asked about the bank record was simply part of the pattern:

“So, I have to be clear with you. I have not seen that report, so I would have to refer you to my colleagues over at the White House counsel’s office on that particular question,” KJP said as she closed her binder.

The problem with this revelation is that it only raises more questions. The bank record simply indicates that a Hunter Biden shell company set up a monthly direct deposit to a Joe Biden personal account for $1,380, less than the average Social Security direct deposit of $1,705.79. For someone living the Biden lifestyle, this is little more than pocket change.

We've already had the Sept. 3, 2017 $40,000 personal check Joe's sister-in-law Sara signed over to Joe Biden as a "loan repayment. The funding for this has been traced to a $5 million payment from a Chinese company to another Hunter Biden shell company made on Aug. 8, 2017.

Again, this amount alone, while significant to ordinary middle-class people -- it'll buy a nice Toyota -- isn't the sort of thing the Bidens would even notice. To make a difference to any of them, there would need to be dozens of those payments coming in, every day, every month, all the time. While I think something like that must certainly be happening, it's a little strange that we aren't seeing more evidence of it.

The second question, which I think is more important, is that these payments took place in 2017 and 2018, while Joe was out of office and, at least in ordinary public expectations, retired and unlikely to return. If we look a little more closely, we know that he made a calculated decision to sit out 2016, apparently based on a consensus that it was Hillary's turn, but every indication we now have is that this wasn't going to be the end of the story, and by 2018, likely earlier, Joe was planning a 2019 announcement that he'd be running in 2020.

This isn't all that different from the Clinton Foundation, which had been collecting putatively charitable donations from the moment Bill left office in 2001 on the expectation that Hillary would run for president. The main difference was that the Clinton Foundation had a veneer of legality, while the Bidens never had any pretense that their business was anything but an influence shakedown. But let's also keep in mind that the likelihood of Hillary's candidacy, from 2008 onward, was something bankable, and her election once she was nominated would be only slightly less so.

The big-money corporate and quasi-charitable donors to the Clinton Foundation weren't throwing money away. It simply happened that in both 2008 and 2016, Hillary was overtaken by events. What intrigues me is how, in 2017 and 2018, there was at least some money being placed on Joe Biden's odds in an equivalent way. But at least in public, Joe's odds were never anything like Hillary's, and as of 2019, the conventional wisdom was that Joe's campaign was faltering. In The New Yorker on June 28, 2019:

The immediate question is this: Just how much damage did the second Democratic debate do to the campaign of the front-runner, Joe Biden? Only opinion polls conducted in the next few weeks will provide a definitive answer. . . . But one thing cannot be contested. Considering the debate over all, Biden’s performance raised fresh doubts about his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills.

Somehow, an invisible hand, whatever it was, restored Joe's credibility, and another invisible hand, or maybe it was the same one, gave us COVID and put bumbling old Joe in the Oval Office with the 2020 election. Somehow, The New Yorker thought Joe was the front runner in June of 2019 despite his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills, and while there were anxious moments aplenty, he never really lost that status.

As best we can tell, there were people in places like China that thought they had pretty good odds that this would take place, and they were putting money on it. Sounds like they weren't just fools or marks. There are lots of questions here.

Companies Waive Four-Year Degree Requirements For New Hires

From the UK Daily Mail:

Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.

And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November.

It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans.

The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so.

The Daily Mail title starts with "How the college degree lost its value", and the story implies this is a new trend. My own experience in the job market as a refugee from academia suggests the trend isn't quite so novel. Reflecting on my career path, after I left graduate work and low-level teaching, I went almost exclusively into jobs that simply hadn't existed before the computer age in the 1960s, with even more created by the rise of desktops and distributed computing in the 1980s.

These included programming, software technical writing, corporate computer operations, information security, and contingency planning. I began to work these jobs in the mid-1970s, and from the start, the education requirement was always four-year degree "or equivalent experience". But it took a long time for universities to come up with courses and major programs that matched what the new jobs needed, so HR departments had no choice but to hire anyone who seemed remotely capable of doing the new work, and very few of my colleagues ever had four-year degrees.

In fact, I would say those who had any sort of formal experience with things like punch card operations had picked it up in in enlisted roles in the armed forces. Everyone else just learned it on the job, the same way I did. One positive effect of this trend was that it basically took HR out of the loop; sure, you had to interview with HR and try to demonstrate whatever they thought they wanted to see, but the hiring managers would always override their reservations and insist no one else had even the remotest qualifications.

HR would ask me questions like, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" and I would give answers like, "This job I'm interviewing for didn't exist five years ago. I can't predict what jobs will be needed five years from now, so I can't really give you a good answer." The sour expressions of the HR reps are branded in my memory. I didn't get a lot of those jobs, but there were a lot of jobs open. I was almost always hired over HR's objections.

But this is a trend that's been going on at least since I went into the IT job market in the 1970s, it's nothing new. One thing I discovered while teaching as a graduate assistant before I switched careers was that universities are something of a racket -- their market is the socially mobile bourgeoisie that wants the chachet of a four-year degree as a class distinction. This is why parents tolerate their kids majoring in things like creative writing or ethnic studies, while they won't tolerate any uncertainty about their graduation. The job of low-level faculty is to bless this process. (The exceptions tend to be from Asian families who expect their kids to become doctors.)

If the rest of the middle class want their kids to have useful careers, they need to send their kids to local community colleges that offer courses in IT or law enforcement -- they won't get them at a liberal arts school. In fact, the young graduates my wife and I know have to find their way into low-pay internship-type programs with corporations after they get their degrees to have any hope of building careers there. So why bother with the four-year degree at all?

At the same time, corporations are recognizing that salary levels that allow employees to pay off student debts from four-year degrees aren't cost effective when students without that debt level but without the degree can do the job just as well -- what on earth does reading liberal-arts chestnuts like Coming of Age in Samoa or any of its contemporary successors qualify anyone to do?

These are the sorts of questions Mike Rowe has been asking for some time.

Yet More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

I've put up another post on he Michael Voris controversy at the Cold Case File blog.

Felicity Huffman Speaks Out!

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman

is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012.

But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link,

Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud.

According to Breitbart News,

Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officials $15,000 to fudge her daughter’s SAT scores in what was part of the infamous college admissions scandal, said she felt she had “no option” but to break the law in order to give her daughter “a future.”

“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system in making proverbial criminals [sic] deals in back alleys, but that was not the case,” Huffman insisted in a recent interview with ABC, breaking her silence on the matter for the first time since the scandal unfolded.

Nevertheless, the story she tells is muddled.

“I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” the Transamerica star continued. “I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly. He recommended programs and tutors, and he was the expert.”

“And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’ and I believed him,” she added.

Here's the first problem. Her daughter was starting the college application rigamarole, so she must have been in her first years in high school, maybe 15 years old. How could she possibly have known what college she wanted to attend? She lived in Hollywood, so maybe USC or UCLA might have come first to mind, but she'd probably be a day student at those schools, or at least home pretty frequently. Might she want to go to college farther from home to become more independent? Was anyone asking her basic questions like that?

We just don't know what schools were on Rick Singer's list, but we do know that none was a school she could get into, because that was what Rick Singer, a convicted con artist, told Felicity Huffman. I'll be that an ordinary guidance counselor at whatever high school Ms Huffman was sending her daughter to could have come up with a list of schools that would indeed accept her daughter. A quick web search shows colleges with good reputations in California alone that will accept just about anyone, including

• Sonoma State University
• Marymount California University
• Mills College
• California State University Stanislaus
• Saint Mary's College
• Mount Saint Mary's College

As it turned out, once the scandal blew over and her daughter actually took the SATs under her own name, she got into Carnegie Mellon University. This says to me that what almost certainly should have happened was that Ms Huffman should have had a serious sitdown with a real school guidance counselor who would tell her that trying to get into Stanford wasn't realistic, but she could certainly consider many second-level schools lilke CMU, which has a perfectly acceptable acceptance rate of 11%.

But beyond that, a real guidance counselor would have put together a list of maybe half a dozen schools, ranging from an aspirational first choice, down through schools where there might be better odds, and ending up with a "safety school" that could assure almost certain admittance. College visits to each of them during the application process would probably make both the applicant and the parents comfortable with any outcome on the list.

So basically Rick Singer was scamming Ms Huffman and putting her into a panic because her daughter wouldn't get into any of the schools she "wanted", even though there doesn't seem to have been a serious effort to identify which those might be. Thus:

“And so, when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future,” Huffman said. “And I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a mad mother if I didn’t do it.”

Desperate housewife indeed. I've already posted here about Dr Callahan, the principal of my junior high school, who was insightful enough to trace some of my adolescent behavior problems to my parents' panic to get me into the "college of my choice", which of course was the college of their choice -- at age 14 or 15, how could I possibly know anything about college at all, much less which one I wanted to attend? From what I recall, some time around my early adolescence about 1960, there was the first great media frenzy that the Ivies -- "the college of your choice" -- had become selective, and getting in would now be an arduous process.

My parents were among the first to buy into that mass hysteria, which seems to have gripped many levels of society, including even the Hollywood elite, ever since. What puzzles me is that Ms Huffman bought into the idea that her daughter would have "no future" without a highly prestigious degree, and she would somehow be a bad mother if she didn't bribe someone to get her in, when there are dozens of perfectly acceptable upper-middle-level schools that apparently would have accepted her daughter with the SAT scores she had.

In fact, an intensive SAT prep course like the Princeton Review costs $2100, a bargain compared to the $15,000 Ms Huffman gave Rick Singer. I think what this all boils down to is that the Ivies have certainly allowed the impression to continue, if they haven't enabled it, that admission into an entering class is an unsurpassed indication of merit, reflecting as much if not more on the parents as on the applicant. Thus con artists can play on the insecurity and thwarted aspirations of the Felicity Huffman style parents of the world, as well as inflating the value of their own decidedly inferior product.

The Military Money Crunch

Right now, the US is fighting two hot proxy wars, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza, but at the moment, it's running out of money:

The military, like the rest of the federal government, is operating under a temporary funding measure that freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. And because the Middle East troop movements weren’t planned, the Pentagon has had to pull money from existing operations and maintenance accounts, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood said. President Joe Biden signed the stopgap measure this month to keep the government open until lawmakers can agree on a full-year spending bill.

. . . “Current events have revised some of the operational assumptions used to develop the FY 2024 President’s Budget request. Specifically, neither the base budget request nor the FY 2024 supplemental request included funding for U.S. operations related to Israel,” he said.

“We’re taking it out of hide,” Sherwood added.

This may bear some relation to reports of reduced enthusiasm for supporting Israel in its current Gaza action:

According to Ch. 12 report, Blinken clashed with Israel’s war cabinet about the next phase in the Gaza operation.

“I don’t think you have the credit for that,” Blinken reportedly told the defense minister about his stated goal to “dismantle Hamas, even if it takes months.” pic.twitter.com/qAFnJ2YvAC

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) November 30, 2023

At the link, someone writing as Bonchie comments,

Keep in mind, this is the same Biden administration that has repeatedly pledged to back Ukraine for "as long as it takes." I guess Israel, which is in a far better military position to deal with its enemy, doesn't get that same treatment.

Let me briefly digress into the pervasive unseriousness at Consrvative Inc. I suspect writing for Red State isn't Bonchie's day job, and he understandably wants to avoid exposing himself and his family to repercussions if he's outed as a conservative part-time pundit. But of all the pseudonyms he could choose, he picked "Bonchie", which is his byline for discussing the weightiest public policy issues. It's just short of "Muffie".

But back to the matter at hand. According to PBS, as of October 1,

Since the war began, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, and military support, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research institute. (This figure does not include all war-related U.S. spending, such as aid to allies.)

It's worth pointing out -- and this is worth serious congressional investigation -- that some significant part of that $75 million has been diverted due to corruption, and the result of the whole boondoggle has been a deteriorating battlefield situation in which Russia appears to be succeeding in an overall strategic plan:

Not - and again we stress this - a war of genocide, but a war which will destroy Ukraine as a strategically potent entity. Already the seeds are sown and the fruit begins to bud - a Ukrainian democide, achieved through battlefield attrition and the mass exodus of prime age civilians, an economy in shambles and a state that is cannibalizing itself as it reaches the limits of its resources.

. . . Putin is not going to leave a geostrategically intact Ukraine which will seek to retake the Donbas and exact revenge, or become a potent forward base for NATO. Instead, he will transform Ukraine into a Trashcanistan that can never wage a war of revanchism.

Compare this to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's recently recalibrated words:

All Allies agree that in the midst of a war full [NATO] membership [for Ukraine] is not possible. But of course, we will continue to look into to address how we can move Ukraine and NATO even closer together.

What he's saying is, given the battlefield situation, the corrupt current regime in Ukraine, and the likely medium-term outcome, we're just gonna be sorta-kinda about the sweet bye and bye. And no matter to us in Europe, this will all be on the US Visa card.

In contrast to the US $75 billion already down the drain in Ukraine, the current aid package to Israel is $14.5 billion, which in light of other defense priorities will be difficult to sustain. The basic problem is that the idea of turning Ukraine into a NATO country was, in light of Russia's strategic priorities, never realistic, and certainly never achievable at the funding levels assumed in the optimistic early days of the war.

It looks like there was never a serious or comprehensive Ukraine plan, either diplomatic or military, something that's concerned me from the start, and never a serious assessment of the prospects for success. Nor, we're beginning to see, has there been any planning for other contingencies. Without the money to exert leverage on Israel, the US will have a hard time controlling its Gaza campaign, while the appearance of weakening support for Israel will drive US Jews further from the old New Deal coalition.

More On Ivy Admissions

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy. Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction.

While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so.

. . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 students) relative to a theoretical benchmark where students are admitted at the same rates across the parental income distribution based on their test scores.

The study quantifies the effect of the admissions "baskets" that Jerome Karabel discusses in The Chosen, especially for legacies, applicants from private "feeder schools", and children of major donors.

Legacy admission policies exerted the largest effect, with legacy applicants admitted at higher rates at all levels of parental income. The biggest boost was given to high-income legacy applicants, who are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials who are not legacies. Legacies would account for 47 of the 103 extra students admitted from the highest income levels.

The authors also found that while children of alumni at a given Ivy-Plus college are much more likely to be admitted at that college, they are no more likely than non-legacies to gain admission at other Ivy-Plus colleges, suggesting that they do not have stronger academic credentials.

The weight placed on non-academic factors like extracurricular activities, leadership capacity, and personal traits had the next largest effect, accounting for 31 of the 103 extra top 1% students. Among students with similar SAT/ACT scores, those who attend private high schools tend to obtain much higher non-academic ratings (but similar academic ratings) than students attending public high schools.

Tellingly, the preference for private school applicants extends to athletic admissions as well:

The remainder of the high-income admissions advantage was due to athletic recruitment, yielding another 25 extra students from the top 1% because recruited athletes come disproportionately from high-income families.

Karabel explains this, at least in part, by noting that colleges recruit for upscale sports like rowing, skiing, and lacrosse, for which many public high schools do not have programs, but prep schools do. The study concludes that by eliminating legacy preferences, a more egalitarian review of extracurriculars, and a more egalitarian athletic recruitment policy,

those three changes would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution attending Ivy- Plus colleges by 8.7 percentage points, equal to about 144 students in a typical Ivy-Plus college class.

This gives at least a hint of the relative sizes of Karabel's "baskets" for legacies, preppies, and recruited athletes: if those were eliminated, 8.7% of the current Ivy-plus student body would be replaced by students not from the top 5% of family incomes. But based on the information I cited in Wednesday's post, this leaves out the nearly 25% of foreign students in typical Ivy-plus student bodies, so, leaving racial preferences and children of celebrities and politicians aside, we're looking at over 30% of Ivy-plus student bodies who've likely been admitted via non-meritocratic applicant categories. And, because these are the ones paying full fees and likely future big donors, they're preferred customers.

I've always had a lurking question in the back of my mind, ever since the president of my Ivy undergraduate instution remarked something to the effect of, "We know that our smartest students always earn grades in the B and C range". He blurted this out, but he never expanded on it, and putting it in perspective, I can see why he wouldn't -- it's a clear effect of admitting something over 30% of the student body on a basis other than grades, test scores, and non-preferential extracurriculars. If your most profitable customers aren't your smartest, you're going to skew the whole program to accommodate them, not just admissions.

This also begins to explain another phenomenon I saw as an Ivy undergraduate: the "hot shot", except in "shot", we substituted the "o"with an "i". The expression would be "Bob Throckmorton is a hot [shot}," which implied basically that he was going to be fast-tracked through whatever program was involved -- it usually had something to do with grandiose social schemes in areas like international relations, energy policy, or urban studies. Somehow, Bob was going to get special treament, though it was also understood that it was less through his own merit than through some sort of patronage; whatever it was, Bob was predestined to be an important guy.

I don't know how you'd conduct a study that gave insight into this, but I'll bet that a lot of hot [shots] wind up in cabinet-level jobs. This is probably one reason we're in the mess we're in.

More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

I've put up a post with more information from a former insider at Church Militant on the Cold Case File blog.

Back To The Foreign Students At MIT

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit:

At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country.

The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT.

Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen, universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. These simply bypass the ordinary high requirements for SAT scores, GPA, and extracurriculars to which ordinary middle-class applicants are subject.

To these high-profit markets, we may also add foreign students -- except the Beacon is now telling us this category of exceptions to the ordinary admissions standards alone at highly selective elite schools is nearly one quarter of each entering class. (If I were arguing on behalf of the Ivies, I'd question where the Beacon got this information, as the size of the admissions bypass categories at each institution is highly confidential, but we'll accept this figure for now.)

But if we accept the Beacon's estimate of nearly 25% for just one admissions bypass category, how big are the others, for instance for major donors, alumni, preppies, and the rest? Joe Biden's son Beau, his daughter Ashley, and his granddaughter Naomi all got into Penn; Hunter's laptop carries details of at least one personal meeting between Joe and Penn's president to facilitate Naomi's admission. Presumably similar influence was applied in each of the other Biden cases -- but let's consider that when the elite schools also give this consideration in each entering class to the families of members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like, this is not a small number of exceptions.

Is this bypass category, adding the offspring of politicians and celebrities to the children of major donors and alumni, as big as the nearly 25% just of foreign students in each entering class? It's not beyond the realm of possiblity, which is one reason these figures are highly confidential. And let's recognize they stay confidential because the president, vice president, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like whose children benefit from such preferential treatment will quietly assure that issues like the size of elite-school endowments or the preferences in elite-school admission that benefit their families never come under serious legislative threat.

I do think it's reasonable to estimate that as a rule of thumb, as much as half of each entering elite-school class is admitted under relaxed standards that are below the SAT and GPA ranges that are published for the high school guidance counselors for the US middle-class students who are making their good-faith applications each year. Yet the prestige of Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford is based entirely on their selectivity from the ranks of the ordinary middle-class applicants. (It's worth noting that the foreign students who pay full freight are also from wealthy and influential families in their home countries, who use their US elite-school degrees to reinforce their prestige.)

This is certainly one reasonable explanation for how someone like Sam Bankman-Fried could be admitted to MIT. I suspect there's a "professional courtesy" category for bypassing admissions standards as well. Isn't it odd that the unpromising Caroline Ellison, daughter of MIT faculty, should get into Stanford just as the unpromising Sam, son of Stanford faculty, should get into MIT?

There's another conclusion we might draw from the MIT vignette and its reluctance to enforce policy on high-profit-margin students: the graduation rate from elite schools, already remarkably high, is bolstered by a general willingness to coddle those students. I recall an instance in my own time as an elite-school undergraduate in which the Dean of the College was called away from his normal schedule to address a family rift among the highly prominent ___________s, because a scion of that family, currently enrolled at my alma mater, had decided he no longer wished to attend. (Come to think of it, this was the man who served as the model for Dean Wormer.)

I don't recall the upshot, but poor Dean Wormer spent the better part of a week putting out that fire. If it had been me, it would have been half an hour in the dean's office to tender my withdrawal, if that. Sorry to see you go, John, good luck! The same influence that creates widespread exceptions to elite-school admissions standards seems to ensure that the students who get in on privilege stay in.

For the middle-class families who are caught in the college admissions rat race, if only half the applicants are admitted via the published criteria, no matter, that just means those who get in that way have acquired even more merit. The families of those who win that lottery aren't going to complain, any controversy will simply diminish the value of what they've worked so hard to get. The families of those who can bypass the middle class standards are just going to keep quiet, and when they can, they'll also work to keep things quiet.

It's Not A Stalemate, It's Worse

Looking for the current outlook on the Russia-Ukraine War, I found this article at Responsible Statecraft:

George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at [Quincy Institute], highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me.

“But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued.

. . . “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams] tanks, Patriot air defense systems, the Challenger tanks, the Leopard [tanks], all those things, nothing changed at all except the casualty count,” said former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow and Military Expert at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

“While the lines haven’t changed, I don’t call it a stalemate because I think time is continuing to work against Ukraine,” he said in an interview, noting the stark year-on-year decline in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

. . . Recent suggestions in the West of a stalemate and looming “frozen conflict,” though a stark change in tone from the kind of rhetoric that characterized the war as late as the summer of 2023, still does [sic] not reflect what experts describe as the severity of challenges facing the Ukrainian war effort.

However, the public US position, supporting Ukraine "as long as it takes", hasn't changed. As of today,

The United States is joining member states from NATO this week in renewing the alliance's "steadfast commitment" to Ukraine in its fight against Russia's aggression, according to a senior State Department official.

Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Brussels, where foreign ministers from NATO will gather from November 27 to 29.

But this morning, Larry Johnson reported at Gateway Pundit:

In Kiev, the rift between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny is widening, with rumors swirling that Zelensky will order a full mobilization of Ukraine that will draft 17 to 70 year old civilians, including women.

. . . Ukraine’s reported plan to draft as many as 20,000 prospective candidates for cannon fodder is being condemned by members of Zelensky’s party, who believe this is a meaningless gesture that will not advance Ukraine’s military fortunes.

. . . Zelensky’s efforts to hide the staggering losses of Ukrainian troops took a major hit when Ukrainian TV Channel 1+1 reported that the AFU’s casualties so far were 1,126,652 KIAs and MIAs. Andrei Martyanov noted that Zelensky’s office moved quickly to force Channel 1+1 to retract the story, but the damage was done. The horse left the barn. Closing the barn door does not put the horse back in its stall.

. . . Even if basic training is completed, the new soldiers are not qualified to operate the armored vehicles, mortars, artillery and tanks they would need on the frontlines. And there is one big assumption here — the United States and NATO will continue to flood Ukraine with a billion dollars worth of gear. That ain’t going to happen. Public support in the United States and Europe to continue pouring good money after bad in Ukraine is flagging and the trend line points to growing opposition.

At this point, Joe Biden appears to be preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas war; issues like Ukraine and climate change appear not to be among his top priorities:

President Biden will skip the United Nations climate summit that kicks off Thursday in Dubai amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, a report said Sunday.

Biden, who just weeks ago called climate change “the ultimate threat to humanity,” will not be among the leaders of nearly 200 countries who will attend the two-week event, known as COP28, a White House official told the New York Times.

The official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the president’s plans did not provide a reason for his absence, but senior aides told the publication that Biden has been preoccupied with the deadly conflict across Gaza and Israel.

Up to this fall, Ukraine and "as long as it takes" had been one of his signature issues. Zelensky visited Washington as recently as this past September, just two weeks before October 7, but his prospects were fading even then.

The blue-and-gold flag draped hero worship of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s last Washington trip, which stirred comparisons to Winston Churchill’s wartime stand against Nazism, was a distant memory on Thursday.

Nine months later, Zelensky was back in town and he and his hosts learned some jarring lessons about one another at a moment when a path to ultimate victory in the war against Russia seems increasingly distant.

Zelensky got an abrupt preview of how Donald Trump’s possible return to power after the 2024 election and how the ex-president’s current sway over the ungovernable Republican-led House of Representatives could rupture the multi-billion dollar lifeline on which Ukraine’s survival depends.

I think the signs are becoming clear that Biden, and in fact NATO, need to come up with an exit strategy. However, the cost will be that it gives Trump an opportunity to say, "I told you so", although so far, he's pressing other issues like the border and the economy. An outright collapse in Ukraine over the winter, which observers are beginning to consider possible, or even a coup there, since Zelensky has canceled elections, would change that quickly.

Ukraine and Just War Doctrine

Somebody Agrees With Me

Is Biden drunk? pic.twitter.com/ex6IjBoZ0J

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 24, 2023

Nick Arama responded to the post at Red State:

After the press conference, some on the X platform began asking questions about Biden's condition and how he came into the press conference.

Some of those questions didn't hold back and were blunt.

Unfortunately, farther down, he unintentionally reveals something about the condition of journalism at Conservative Inc:

He has gait problems, in addition to his incoherence and deterioration. I'm not sure that it matters what name you put on it at this point--except to say that he has continuing problems. If it were just that he was drunk, that might be beer, because at least that would goes [sic] away.

"That might be beer"? Wha? What on earth is he trying to say? Maybe he meant to type, "that might be bad enough, but at least that would go away". But then he followed it up "that would goes away". Here's my problem. The people who write at Red State are being paid; they're at least semi-pro. But not only are they not proofreading their own copy, there doesn't seem to be a copy editing function at Red State or nearly any other conservative alternate media. And Red State is owned by Salem Media, which calls itself "the largest community of opinion leaders and Main Street conservatives today". Where have you gone, Bill Buckley?

But back to my point. The video at the link isn't clear; all I can see is a certain hitch in Joe's gait that could stem from several causes -- I'm five years younger than Joe, and it's been a while since I've been really steady on my feet. But what's convinced me that Joe is drunk is that his speech patterns, slurring, hypercorrection, and random pauses, are the sort of thing police officers are trained to recognize are signs of intoxication.

Occam's razor is "the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements". The received explanation for Joe's stumbling speech is that it's an artifact of a childhood stutter, or something like that, but it seems to me that it reaches too far back and adds too many hypothetical factors. A much simpler explanation is that he talks like he's drunk because he's drunk.

But Mr Arama at Red State gets something else wrong -- if Joe is drunk, at least it goes away. The problem I see is that Joe displays intoxicated speech patterns almost all the time, and the "almost" is what gives it away. He was able to avoid the problem during his 2020 debates with Trump, which was a major factor in his November victory -- had his performance been the usual stumbles and gaffes, he woud have taken himself out of the running. He's also able to speak clearly at least for brief public statements after meetings with major world leaders, but only the G8, not the G20.

That suggests his handlers are able to keep him away from alcohol at the most critical times -- but otherwise, he's pickled. All the time, or maybe, as one Kennedy remarked about another, he's sober 20 minutes a day. This may be functionally equivalent to dementia, and it may make little difference in Joe's overall performance, but it's a simpler expanation that doesn't require a medical diagnosis.

How do we reconcile this with his frequent claims, which he's made even to Pope Francis, "I'm the only Irishman you've ever met who's never had a drink." Nevertheless,

Alcoholism, like any other addiction, changes behavior. People who struggle with addiction have undergone changes in their brains that make rational decision-making more difficult. Common behavior changes that many people notice are lying, deception, and avoidance.

Joe tells lies. He tells them all the time. He was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He was arrested marching for civil rights in the US. He was raised by Puerto Ricans. He got Strom Thurmond to vote for the Civil Rights Act. He was appointed to the Naval Academy. He used to drive an 18-wheeler. He played varsity football at the University of Delaware. Golda Meir wanted him to be her liaison with the Egyptians. That he's never had a drink has got to be the least of it.