In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In the clip above, Tucker Carlson, puzzled at why legacy media and some senior Democrats have effectively abandoned President Biden, reaches out almost in desperation to Glenn Greenwald, not your ordinary Fox talking head, to ask him what's going on. Greemwald puts it to a combination of Biden's cognitive decline and the permanent war faction of the deep state. I disagree on both counts. First, if the deep state wants to get you, they don't need to rely on the Taliban. They'll just make up Russian hookers peeing on the bed. They didn't get Trump that way, and so far, they won't get Biden with the Taliban. Second, even up to the clip of Biden wandering through the White House shrubbery, I would have signed on to the cognitive decline story, but I no longer do. Part of it is the folk wisdom that dementia isn't when you forget your keys; dementia is when you forget what your keys are for. As I said yesterday, senile people are disorganized. Lying, evading...

A week ago, I posted on what in early 2021 seemed to be a consensus " Götterdämmerung strategy" among the elites, whereby Speaker Pelosi, possibly expected to retire after the 2022 election, would use slim congressional majorities, plus control of the White House, to enact a massive Great Reset agenda and ignore the post-2022 consequences because, well, she'd be retired by then. I likened this to someone who, assuming the world would end on December 21, decided to run up a huge credit card bill that would never need to be repaid. The dificulty arises with scheduling. If for any reason the world doesn't end exactly when you expect it to, or even if you run your card up to its limit too soon, you'll be forced to make those extravagant payments after all. President Biden summed up the scheduling problem with his remark, “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” In other words, the collapse of Afghanistan had been programmed into the a...

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...