In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Let's take a look at the timeline of Passportgate. At 10:22 AM yesterday morning (all times EDT), Trump first posted, “Wow! In the raid by the FBI of Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else” on Truth Social. This was greeted with immediate skepticism : It remains unclear why Trump only spoke out about this a week after the search of his property in the US state of Florida. At 12:45 PM Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich posted on Twitter reiterating Trump's claim. At 3:55 PM. NBC News anchor Norah O'Donnell posted that "according to a DOJ official," the FBI was NOT in possession of Trump's passports. However, at 4:34 PM, Budowich replied to O'Donnell with a screenshot of a message from the FBI's Jay Bratt confirming that the FBI had the passports and would return them. Bratt, by the way, is head of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the DOJ’s National Security Division ; he al...

It seems to me that the visuals from the big guy's family vacay to Kiawah Island are an indication of where his handlers expected things to be: First Crackhead Hunter was along with his wife and the kid in what looks to be an utterly contrived tableau of family harmony. The real situation is reflected in reports last month that Hunter has called his stepmom a “vindictive moron” and “entitled [redacted]”, while his wife Melissa appears to be a jetsetting do-gooder who likely spends little time with either the kid or the crackhead dad. Can you imagine what the real atmosphere in that dysfunctional pseudo-family must be like? What are they paying Melissa to stick around? Hunter's broke, and her meter's running. Where does that money come from? Nevertheless, the visuals say the big agenda for Brandon's handlers last week was to rehabilitate Hunter in the runup to 2024. By then, the grand jury investigation will have gone away, and the First Crackhead will be the pictu...

I was always fascinated by everything connected to the Watergate scandal, and I eagerly read books about it for decades afterward. One, Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (1991), raised a question nobody else I'm aware of ever bothered to ask: what were the Watergate burglars looking for? The book itself was wildly speculative and flat-out wrong in several areas, but the question it posed is still intriguing. According to Wikipedia, Colodny and Gettlin contend that former White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary. His motive was argued to have been to protect his future wife Maureen Biner by removing information linking her to a call-girl ring that worked for the DNC. A big problem is that they go on to argue that Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, when former FBI deputy director Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat in 2005, and beyond that, In 1992 John and Maureen Dean sued Nixon "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy for libel, after...

Poor Dr Fauci. He's overstayed his 15 minutes of fame by a considerable margin, but now, even if he's booed, nobody notices. Not only that, but on Thursday, The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the nation should move away from restrictive measures such as quarantines and social distancing and focus on reducing severe disease from Covid-19. In new guidelines released Thursday, the agency no longer recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people to reduce the risk of exposure -- a shift from guidance that had been in place since the early days of the pandemic. These developments come on the heels of the LA County health department deciding that, on second thought, we should just never mind about a renewed indoor masking mandate, even though the link to the CDC announcement says this actually isn't the CDC's position: "It also continues to recommend that people wear masks indoors in about half the country." That would actually i...

What intrigues me is how little anyone is bringing Watergate up at all in the Mar-a-Lago contoversy. It occurred to me just yesterday how much Watergate added to our daily vocabulary, from the suffix -gate to characterize any scandal (like Irangate, Travelgate, Troopergate and Whitewatergate) to expressions like "stonewalling", "modified limited hangout", "deep throat", "[expletive deleted]", "what did he know and when did he know it", and more. I'm sure part of it is this only got into motion 50 years ago as we speak, and most of the first-hand participants are long departed, while even reporters and commentators who might have covered it early in their careers are retired. Nor does it help that something like Mar-a-Lagogate doesn't trip off the tongue. On the other hand, I lived through it as a full adult while my intellectual faculties were still being formed in graduate school, and in fact as I followed it closely, it ...

By the way, the Watergate burglary took place 50 years ago this past June. I was studying Milton's prose in graduate school at the time, and I never believed anyone could get hooked on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. How wrong I was. Now I'm starting to get a real sense of deja vu. Sorting through this morning's news and commentary, I think there are three important items. The first, and likely most consequential, is Judicial Watch's motion to unseal the Mar-a-Lago search warrant : The public has an urgent and substantial interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president and likely future political opponent. . . . [N]o official explanation or information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly outweig...

The official White House position on the Mar-a-Lago raid is this: “What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.” Members of the public who haven't just fallen off the turnip truck will nevertheless say it depends on what the meaning of "definitively and for sure" is, and indeed, those who follow true crime will add that the more redundancies people pile onto their denials, the greater the likelihood that they're false. Others have certainly said that if the above is in fact true, it's proof that someone else is running the show -- but of course, neither assertion necessarily contradicts the other. It's time to update my estimate of what's going on in the First Fuddy-Duddy's head. My view all along has been that his problem isn't medical, and a medical diagnosis from a distance ...