In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One of my regular points here has been that it's less productive to try to explain Biden's behavior by saying he has a medical condition, which nobody other than a medical professional who's examined him can say, than it is to refer to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. A clear example of how this works is in Joe's heated exchange with Fox's Peter Doocy in New Mexico this past Wednesday, August 9. Doocy is providing some funny backstory to the exchange, as well as reporting on the White House’s response to his question. Doocy said Biden was waving him over to talk, so he tried to climb over a barrier where the press was being held when he was stopped by a White House aide. The aide was trying to stop him, saying Biden didn’t have time to talk. Doocy joked, cautioning the public not to ever jump over a barrier to do what he did in the face of the Secret Se...

It turns out that while I quoted Speaker Emerita Pelosi's apocalyptic remarks on Trump yesterday, they were from a piece in New York Magazine, How Nancy Pelosi’s Long Game Led to Trump’s Indictment , and I actually missed much more important content that bears on what I've been writing about for the past several days. (While various accounts of her retirement have referred to her as "emeritus", a term I've been using, it turns out from the piece that she is actually styled "Speaker Emerita", though I would think the politically correct usage would be "Emeritx".) In the interview at the link, Pelosi takes credit for Trump's indictment, and indeed by implication almost everything that's happened since January 6 -- although she avoids taking credit for the Capitol incursion itself. It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the sele...

Back in 2021, I was intrigued by what I called the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, which they implemented following their narrow congressional victories in 2020, along with the hinky Biden electoral victory for the presidency. I called it that, because it reminded me of the lighthearted comment some people made over the Mayan calendar prediction that the world would end on December 21, 2012, that if thry knew it would end on a date certain, they'd run up their credit cards over the prior month knowing they'd never have to pay them back. At the time, I noted [Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi w...

On Sunday, I noted the phenomenon we've seen since Trump's arrival as a political contender whereby received opinion has promoted a series of quasi-verities that go unquestioned, at least for a period of years, and anyone who doubts them is called a conspiracy theorist. Then something happens, and the quasi-verity collapses and turns out to have been a hoax. One that has continuing prestige, at least so far, is the idea that Trump is delusional or in denial that he lost the 2020 election, which was, as it's sometimes put, stolen fair and square. But the history we've seen of such quasi-verities makes me skeptical. One of the shorter-lived examples promoted by received opinion was the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was just Russian disinformation. Recent testimony from FBI whistleblowers has established that The FBI “verified” the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in November 2019 and a federal computer expert assessed “it was not manipul...

Over the weekend, since the third Trump indictment, I've begun to see renewed references to the 1876 election, the Compromise of 1877, and the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Trump's strategy, given assertions that the 2020 vote counts in several states were irregular, was to throw the election into the House of Representatives per the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, as intepreted by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. This post at the National Constitutional Center from December 15, 2020 , anticipates and explains this strategy: Federal law requires the states to deliver certified electoral college results to the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, and other parties by December 23. Then a joint meeting of Congress is required by the 12th Amendment to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the presidential election. The session on January 6, 2021 starts at 1 p.m. Objections at that meeting about electors will be settled using a process ...

One pattern that's kept reemerging in the Trump story since 2016 has been a constant stream of narratives that have been sold as verities, yet they've wound up collapsing into hoaxes years later. The first was the 2016 "pee tape" story that alleged Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in that year's election. This wasn't effectively refuted until the Muller Report in 2019 . However, the Wikipedia summary at the link raises what may become a prophetic issue: The investigation intentionally took an approach that could not result in a judgment that Trump committed a crime. This decision was based on an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution, and Mueller's belief that it would be unfair to accuse the president of a crime even without charging him because he would have no opportunity to clear his name in court[.] So the problem with the overall "pee tape" narrative was that it gav...

The YouTube video above is from the Hindustan Times, one of the few media outlets that's essentially repeating a New York Times story that's behind a paywall. The Gateway Pundit has an excerpt: “Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether. […] Now the Western-trained Ukrainian brigades are trying to turn things around, U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire. A troop surge is underway in the country’s south, with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mo...