In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It seems to me that we're back to a situation where Donald Trump understands media dynamics a lot better than the media professionals who think they run the planet. His response to the latest indictment has been to call it, among other things, just another hoax in a series of hoaxes. According to the BBC, Mr Trump, who is running for the White House again in 2024, called the indictment a "hoax" by the "corrupt political establishment", also describing it as a "joke" and a "travesty of justice". On one hand, you can hurt yourself by claiming something that clearly isn't a hoax a hoax. The idea that a bunch of Islamist terrorists didn't bring down the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is a hoax, and if you claim it isn't, you damage your credibility on anything else you claim. On the other hand, the problem for never Trumpers of any persuasion has become that there's now a series of factoids put forth as truth that hav...

I was going to write about David Brooks's latest pronouncement that he made on last Friday's PBS News Hour, and I'll get to that, but in searching for an image to put at the top of this post, I ran into the one above. You might think somebody had photoshopped a photo of Hunter off the notorious laptop onto the great man's visage, but on fact, the photo is from 2015, when Hunter's own crack-addled capers were hardly a glimmer in his own eye. The title of the oddly sibylline piece where it appeared was I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys , and it was written by Albert Bourneko. It's strangely prophetic in more than one way, because it mirrors the impression I've begun to have that there's a connection between David Brooks's world view and that of another sage observer of our time, the powerful new novelist Kevin Morris. A few weeks ago, I noticed that both Brooks and Morris focus on the creature Brooks calls Patio Man , the prosperou...

I suppose I have to take Jonathan Turley seriously, but I've expressed my reservations before : he's a generational member of the Establishment, and he isn't going to rock any boats. As well, he's speaking to Fox News , which clearly likes what he's saying: It is an extremely damning indictment. There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence. There are some indictments that are just bare bones. This is not. The special counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way. This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions. It’s overwhelming in details. And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline. The problem with this view is that we're talking about Donald Tr...

As I've outlined over the past several days, my working hypothesis of the Biden boodle is simply that Hunter, a hopeless alcoholic all his life who'd also become addicted to cocaine by the time Joe was vice president, was never competent to operate a business enterprise and could never be trusted around money. The record we have, whatever we can make of it, is that the dozens of shell companies he set up with various cronies and partners could never, as some have alleged, have supported nine to 12 Bidens, plus the cronies and partners, several of whom were addicts themselves, and all of whom lived extravagant lifestyles. Hunter's appointment to the Burisma board in 2014 had no effect other than to give Hunter an annual income of about $1 million, which prompted the start of an epic five-year binge of crack cocaine, incestuous affairs, hookers, fast cars, condos for girlfriends, luxury hotels, and phony rehab. According to Reuters, Hunter never even visited Ukraine whil...

I continue to be intrigued by Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's reputed sugar bro, because he's just one more feature of the whole Biden narrative that simply doesn't fit. He and his wife, Gabrielle Morgerman, a senior VP at the William Morris agency, are reputed to be powerful behind-the-scenes Hollywood figures, but for all that, they've both kept low profiles, except that in recent years, Kevin has been heavily promoting himiself as a novelist, of all things. Sor far, he's published a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). As best I can tell, he's been attempting to recasst himself as a major novelist of bourgeois angst, a John Updike for our current epoch, for some time. The review of All Joe Knight at Amazon says , A prominent figure in the entertainment world who has turned to fiction in the last decade, Kevin Morris received wide literary acclaim with his story...

The conventional view of the Biden family finances we've had from the quasi-investigative right-wing press, along with limited information from the Comer committee, has been that Hunter is the business mind and the bagman who collects payments from assorted foreign businessmen, gangsters, and wannabes and funnels them into a general Biden family fund that supports somewhere between nine and 12 parasitic family members with assorted other cronies and retainers. It's alleged that part of the scheme is "10% to the big guy", based on a cryptic reference in an e-mail on the Hunter laptop. In part, this is also a view that Hunter himself promotes among some in the family, including his uncle James and daugther Naomi, also based on e-mails in the laptop. But let's take a 30,000-foot look at Hunter's actual career. Every indication is that he never had much business or financial acumen, and in fact he himself led a parasitic lifestyle based on his position as son...

On Saturday I said my kabuki alarm has been going off since the start of the elaborate cat-and-mouse between the Comer committee and FBI Director Wray over an FD-1023 form that may contain allegations of bribery against Joe Biden when he was vice president. This was all going to be settled when Wray brought the FD-1023 in question over to the Capitol yesterday to show it to Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin in person -- except, of course, it wasn't. According to NBC: House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced Monday that his panel will start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress, a move the agency called "unwarranted." The FBI briefed Comer and Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Capitol Hill for more than an hour Monday and offered them the chance to review a document that purportedly describes an allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe as vice president. Speaking to reporte...