In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A story that emerged overnight offers some insight into President Biden's actual strategy for the Afghanistan pullout: Joe Biden once snarled “F–k that” when asked if the US had an obligation to protect Afghans from the Taliban, according to newly resurfaced reports. , , , At the time [2010], Biden reportedly was arguing that the US should leave Afghanistan despite the humanitarian costs, including the potential erosion of women’s rights. “F–k that. We don’t have to worry about that,” he allegedly told [diplomat Richard] Holbrooke. “We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” Two things jump out at me. The first is that Nixon and Kissinger weren't the ones who pulled out of Vietnam; that was Gerald Ford, and the images from Saigon were definitely a factor in Ford's 1976 loss. And Nixon nevertheless never got away with anything. That Biden misremembered history to suit his own views is revealing. But it also fits what I'm coming to s...

Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said as the Viet Nam war went south, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country." Given the statements in the clip from Tapper above, I'm wondering if this isn't now the case with Tapper and Biden. Tapper is a smooth-running product of the Ivy League assembly line, something I've seen at first hand. He does what he's told; if anything, just a teeny bit extra, but not too much, nothing that would get out of line. So in going aggressively after Biden (though only in apostrophe, as Biden took no questions) he's doing precisely what his editors have told him to do, or just maybe a teeny bit more to show he's 101% with the program. This could change at any time. But at the moment, the legacy media is definitely not in Biden's corner. The internet headlines have had almost no change in the past 24 hours. The most important development is that the Kabul airport has resumed operation . ...

As far as I can tell, the only White House response to the terrible debacle in Kabul over the weekend was to issue an updated verson of the Camp David photo I posted yesterday, showing Biden in a different outfit in the empty room, looking bemused instead of defeated. From various reports, he will address the nation "soon", "at the right time", or "in a few days", but there hasn't even been a peep on Twitter since Saturday. It's perhaps even more intriguing that his chief flack, Ms Psaki, is nowhere to be found : Fox News reported late Sunday night that Psaki “is taking a break from her duties” while pretty much everyone questions “the silence of President Joe Biden.” When Fox’s Micheal Lee attempted to make contact with Psaki multiple times via email on Sunday, he was sent an autoreply “out of office” message. Psaki apparently won’t be returning calls until August 23rd, or approximately three days after our last local friend or military con...

If I try to get an idea of how the lizard people meant to game out a post-2020 strategy, I can come up with only an inchoate notion that there would be some type of master reset sustained by media consensus and having both legislative houses and the executive in the hands of the Democrats. Then there would be a series of woke reforms, including defunding police, forgiving student debt, bullet trains, largesse for the Lumpenproletariat , and whatever else. A glimmer of difficulty arose fairly early in this phase when it began to be recognized that the 2022 election would still be held, and the Great Realignment would be enacted only through the slimmest congressional majorities, which would be threatened in the off-year election. Among other things, the initial post-2020 fantasy envisioned eliminating the Senate filibuster, which proved not to be attainable, and that forced a dial-back of other priorities. Thus at this point, much more aware that the 2022 election would likely clo...

The only context I have for this is remarks by Dan Bongino last year: Former Secret Service Agent and conservative pundit Dan Bongino has declared that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is suffering rapid “cognitive decline," according to sources who are "close to the situation." . . . . Breitbart News reported. "Not a joke and not hyperbole – I’m hearing from people close to the situation that Biden’s cognitive decline is rapidly worsening and is becoming increasingly difficult to mask," Bongino wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday morning. The strong implication seems to be that Bongino's sources are former colleagues in the Secret Service, who would be in the position of routinely trying to shepherd Biden through awkward moments like those caught here. The body language of the agents in the clip suggests they're working hard to maintain a professional detachment and respect for the office, but I also have the impression that this is a ...

As of yesterday, our intrepid public health authority Dr Walensky was complaining about how nobody took her seriously or something . “I am really struggling with how to communicate to people who are worried about politics, and I just want them to continue to be at their family’s dinner table,” Dr. Walensky told the Wall Street Journal. [Family dinner table? Wha?] “My job is to put my head down, ignore the criticism and do the right thing for the public and to do the right thing for health.” The Journal noted that patients Walensky has treated in the past are “generally” trusting of her advice but as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “she has learned the same isn’t always true of many people in the U.S.” . . . Walensky’s mistrust comes as White House officials are reportedly frustrated by the CDC’s lack of coronavirus data transparency. “Top Biden officials are growing frustrated with the lack of internal visibility into data being collected by...

A couple of data points puzzle me about the California recall election's progress. The first is that by July 29, there were two polls in quick succession that showed growing sentiment among likely voters to recall Gov Newsom. Since then -- fully two weeks later -- there's been nothing. This is a rapidly developing story, with the September 14 election little more than a month away, and nobody's releasing polls. In fact, we received our own mail-in ballots in yesterday's mail, something the state is doing for every voter in this election. This means that voting is already under way. The top Republican candidates are actively campaigning via ads on Facebook and elsewhere. But Newsom, who has raised more than $58 million to defeat the recall , three times as much as all his opponents combined, is far less visible than Elder, Cox, and the other Republicans. Elder in particular is able to leverage appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to get free coverage, but New...