In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's an emerging consensus that the Mar-a-Lago raid was a fishing expedition in search of something, maybe anything, that would get Trump once and for all, but one pesky issue as far as I can see is that this was a very high risk operation. Even if the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI were collectively oblivious to this risk in their weeks of deliberation, the actual downside was evident the moment the raid became news. This was high risk that had to be justified by a high reward unless the actors involved were much, much dumber than we thought. So what would have justified the risk? It's hard to envision what it could be -- we can pretty much rule out nuclear secrets at this point, since we've been told the big suits dithered at length over whether to go in. It's also hard to imagine that it was just an open-ended dragnet looking for anything from kiddie porn to a cocaine stash -- and whatever it might have been, it sounds like somebody had to repo...

I've thought all along that COVID was an adventitious development that was seized by the deep state in order to give society at large -- or more accurately, society at large except for the upper and gentry classes -- a time out over of all things, Donald Trump. What I find to be a remarkable confirmation of this is that within days of the CDC radically liberalizing its COVID protocols, and within weeks of the LA County health department backing down on reinstating indoor masking, we had the remarkably counterproductive FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Exacly contemporary with the raid, Trump has fully reentered the public discourse. Banned by Twitter, he's simply putting out mean tweets on his own platform, which people have given the same attention they gave on Twitter -- except that Twitter, facing allegations from Elon Musk that maybe a third of its accounts are phony, is a diminished thing. The return of Trump has been greeted by consternation, especially among never Trumpers, w...

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 ...