In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It looks like I missed the developing buzz over the past couple of weeks about Franklin Foer's new book on Biden, The Last Politician . Foer, it turns out, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic whose views appear to be as predictable as we might assume given that background. According to Axios , Frank Foer of The Atlantic worked 2½ years and spoke to nearly 300 people for his forthcoming opus on President Biden's first term, the author tells Axios. Why it matters: In " The Last Politician ," Foer concludes that Biden provides "an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could." Driving the news: The 432-page book, out Tuesday, "dramatizes in forensic detail the first two years of the Biden presidency, concluding with the historic midterm elections," per the publisher. Foer's work "includes ...

The New York Post has a story about a new book , The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall . The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story. Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story, President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left h...

I'm not posing this question as though I think there may be a specific answer. I'm posing it more in a spirit that there is a range of possible explanations for current US Ukraine policy, of which one answer might be that Zelensky does have something on Biden, but there are other answers that might include policymaker stubbornness, confirmation bias, or conventional-mindedness, but this would be attributable to Joe's handlers, not Joe himself. If the policy decisions are traceable to Joe and not his handlers, the most likely explanation probably does have more to do with pure venality. But I think this also goes to what Trump intended to say on the "perfect phone call", in which he is reported to have asked Zelensky in very general terms to help Trump's people to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. I think putting this request in the way he did, a by-the-way “I would like you to do us a favor, though”, was in Tr...

The "perfect phone call", as Trump himself characterized it, was a heavily monitored 30-minute conversation on July 25, 2019 with current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky, a political outsider but a well-known media figure like Trump, had defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff election 73%-24% on April 21 of that year. Thus this call would be a get-acquainted opportunity that would set the tone for ongoing relations between the US and its relatively new client state Ukraine. As far as I can tell, since the "perfect phone call" has simply faded away in the wake of two Trump impeachments, the 2020 campaign and its continuing controversies, as well as Joe Biden's own scandals, nobody has tried to put that 2019 call in the context of what we now know about developments in Ukraine between 2014 and the call itself. As a result, for instance, Wikipedia still has an entry on the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory that dismisses the story as...

So let's recapitulate. By February, 2014, the US Deep State, acting through the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy and with the sponsorship of Victoria Nuland at the State Department, had engineered a coup in Ukraine that caused the elected president, who was pro-Russian, to flee the country. At the same time, Putin seized Crimea and much of the Donbas. Over the next two months, the Deep State drew up a plan for Ukraine to navigate these changed circumstances, and they sent two people, Vice President Joe Biden and State Department energy guy Amos Hochstein, to explain to Ukrainians how things were going to go forward in Kyiv. The Biden-Hochstein team seems to have been ventriloquist and dummy, with Hochstein pulling the string that controlled Biden's mouth while Joe sat in his lap. From what Hochstein explained on background to the press during the flight over, the Deep State plan for a new Ukraine was comprehensive, domestic-political, military, and financial. One p...

I'm still working my way through the question I asked at the end of yesterday's post: By the time he was Obama's vice president, Joe Biden wasn't taken seriously. In January, 2014 -- just as the Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea were in train -- The Atlantic was quoting Robert Gates, who had been defense secretary under both Dubya and Obama: "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says of Vice President Joe Biden in his new book coming out later this month. And there's Obama's own estimate : Speaking to a fellow Democrat about Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020, Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.” As a true crime fan, I tend to take the homicide detective's truism that there's no such thing as a coincidence to be a useful epistemological tool. But I...

The two people in the photo above, conveniently almost unrecognizable behind their COVID masks, are Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the left, and Victoria Nuland, currently Acting Deputy Secretary of State, on the right. I quoted Seymour Hersh Wednesday on Nuland: . . . “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “ The one other figure who really ought to be in the same photo is Amos Hochstein, described by Politico as "perhaps, the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about. He wants to keep it that way," which is probably why we'll never see him in such a photo, with or without a mask. For good or ill, these three are indisputably r...

A couple of stories came out yesterday that raise two questions about Joe's Ukraine timeline, neither especially new, but intriguing as we learn more context. The two questions ultimately boil down to, first, what did Obama know about Joe's Ukraine payoffs, and second, what does Zelensky have on Joe? Red State brings up the first: New questions are swirling about Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine while he served as vice president during the Obama administration. . . . How did things get to that point, though? A newly unearthed exchange from 2014 is providing a major clue. A "senior administration official" (at the time) gave a press briefing on background about Biden's now-infamous trip to Ukraine. According to one answer given, the now-president may have actually requested the role of overseeing American foreign policy in Ukraine. From there, the timeline only gets more suspicious. The transcript of the press briefing , which took place on ...

There's general consensus across the spectrum that the planned Ukraine 2023 counteroffensive has "stalled", although that's probably a generous characterization -- it might be more accurate to say it never really got under way. Other than Tucker Carlson's Monday interview with retired Col Douglas MacGregor, which is over-the-top, there's been little other recent discussion. On the other hand, there's a good analysis on Seymour Hersh's Substack , which is mostly behind a paywall, but Gateway Pundit has a summary : Hersh cites an unnamed intel official who said that SecState Antony Blinken “has figured out that the United States” and Ukraine “will not win the war” against Russia. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported the U.S. intel community realizes the Ukrainian offensive will fail to achieve its key goal of taking the southeastern city of Melitopol, a strategic Russian logistics hub. “The word was getting to (Blinken) through the Agency t...

Joe's performance on his Maui visit wasn't good, especially the visual of him falling asleep at a luncheon meeting and the transcript of his remarks at Lahaina : Governor Josh Green, you’ve been incredible. From the day we’ve spoken on this, you’ve been way ahead of the curve. Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke; Brian Schantz [Schatz], our senator; Senator Mazie Hir- — by the way, Mazie, I told my granddaughter, whose name is Maisy as well — she said, “That’s why I like her.” (Laughter.) Anyway. But her name is Maisy as well. And — and Jill To- — Tokuda, Representative Ed Chase, and Mayor Rick Bassen [Bissen]. Rick, when we talked on the phone, I never — you look like you played in defensive tackle for — I don’t know who, but somebody good. But, anyway, I want to thank you for your leadership in this unimaginable — during this unimaginable travedy — tragedy. What puzzles me here is that his own staff has released the official transcript verbatim, with every mispronun...