In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I keep trying to find a parallel set of circumstances to what we're seeing now -- there's a general acknowledgement that there's some similarity to the withdrawal from Viet Nam, and we're just beginning to see calls for Biden's resignation a la Nixon, but it was fairly plain to observers in 1973, a year after the Watergate burglary, that a coherent plan was afoot. In October of that year, the deep state quickly ushered Spiro Agnew out of the vice presidncy in what one commentator at the time called "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop." Gerald Ford replaced Agnew as vice president in December 1973. Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, with Ford succeeding him in what turned out to be a caretaker role. Nelson Rockefeller, with lizard ancestry clearly in his DNA, waited in the wings. What strikes me in retrospect is how orderly this process was in contrast to what we're seeing now, which in many ways is looking like a very fast-action version of Nixon'...

The two chief issues right now are Afghanistan and COVID, and what seems to bring them together is a growing sense that the elite people who were supposed to be managing the situation are incompetent. In both cases, there are wild reversals in policy direction with little apparent planning and analysis, leading to a steady decline in credibility. On the COVID front, for instance , Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has demonstrated what anonymous administration officials described to Politico as a “worrying drop” in coronavirus vaccine efficacy over time, leading to the Biden administration’s conclusion to push vaccine booster shots. . . . The data, which the White House Covid-19 task force reviewed Sunday, is expected to become public this week. As a result, the Biden administration is expected to roll out its plan to push booster shots for fully vaccinated Americans, but details are still being worked out, as the Food and Drug Administration (F...

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 ...