In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It's worth noting that the discovery of Hunter's laptop is important because of what it began to reveal about Joe, not what it said about Hunter, who in the scheme of things is just a more extreme version of the standard-issue presidential relative, Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony and Hugh Rodham, and Neil Bush, all of whom led less than exemplary lives and in varying degrees tried to profit from their presidential connections. Except for the extravagance of Hunter's vices, he's nothing new. In fact, looking at allegations against figures like Donald Nixon, the Rodham brothers, and Neil Bush, there's some similarity insofar as they relied on benefactors with presidential connections to bail them out of financial crises or collected fees for influence peddling -- again, it's a matter of degree. The problem with Hunter is that the specifics of his connection to Joe have been so well concealed that we're beginning to learn only slowly and be...

I haven't run into much by Jack Cashill recently -- he's the guy who originally proposed that 1960s SDS agitator and Weatherman Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's Dreams From my Father , as well as other theories on TWA Flight 800 and the Oklahoma City bombing. But just this morning, I discovered a new piece at American Thinker , which frequently features his writing. He traces Joe's phony e-mail addresses like Robert L Peters, robinware456, and JRBWare to, of all people, Whittaker Chambers: One need only look at Chambers's page in Wikipedia — the scourge of right-wing conspiracy theories — to see the likely source of the Biden code (italics added): "[Chambers's] main handler was Josef Peters , Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to Harold Ware ... [and] that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington." It would seem far more likely than not that that the names "Peters" and "Ware" were chose...

It looks as though David Ignatius's column from earlier this week has precipitated a rush to find potential replacements for Kamala , even though this will be a feckless enterprise. Columnists at The Washington Post, New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer and a prominent independent writer said there are "better options available" for Biden’s running mate and that he should choose one of them if he wants a shot at winning re-election. Among the Democrats mentioned to replace Harris were Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth. Ignatius himself recommended Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for whatever reason. Gov Whitmer is the only one on this list who's also been named a potential replacement for Joe himself. Joe's potential replacements have included California Gov Newsom, who has since taken himself out of the running, and Illinois Gov Pritzker -- and that's about it. Besides Newsom, Whitmer, ...

Joe's own classified document scandal has been off the agenda for almost a year , and with it, there's been little scrutiny of the Penn Biden Center, but I think this is a productive path of inquiry regarding Joe's finances after he left the vice presidency on January 20, 2017. My governing assumption has been that Joe and his family have expensive lifestyles, as well as several with expensive addictions, which Joe's Senate pension (the vice presidency has no pension otherwise) wasn't going to cover. Joe was going to need a continuing income flow beyond that. But the Penn Biden Center is only the start of another set of shadowy questions. Let's start with Joe's decision not to run for president in 2016. Almost no attention has been paid to this, except to cite his own stated reasons : According to Biden himself, the reason was personal. His son, Beau Biden, who was Delaware's attorney general and had his sights set on the governor's o...

Ovwer the past week or so, I've tried to tackle the problem that Joe frequently seems to be intoxicated during public appearances despite claims that he doesn't drink. His normal pattern of speech carries markers like slurring, hypercorrection, sudden slowing, stuttering, and stumbling over words that suggest this, but on other limited occasions, he's able to speak clearly without any of those impediments. As an Aristotelian, I'm interested in the cause. I also keep seeing a problem with Joe's received narrative, and this covers the interregnum between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021, when Joe held no public office, yet indications keep popping up here and there that agencies of the Deep State continued to act as though he was still in some type of authority during this period. One of the clearest examples has been his apparent ability to have Secret Service agents act on his behalf, even though as a former vice president during his interregnum, neither h...

I've known a few people like David Ignatius, having been around the edges of those circles from time to time in both Washington and Los Angeles. His Wikipedia entry is instructive: Ignatius was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents are Nancy Sharpless (née Weiser) and Paul Robert Ignatius, a former Secretary of the Navy (1967–69), president of The Washington Post, and former president of the Air Transport Association. He is of Armenian descent on his father's side, with ancestors from Harput, Elazığ, Turkey; his mother, a descendant of Puritan minister Cotton Mather, is of German and English descent. Ignatius was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School. He then attended Harvard College, where he studied political theory and graduated magna cum laude in 1973. Ignatius was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard University and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received a diploma in economics. Like his fellow Was...

In last Wedneseday's post , I looked at some length into Joe's speech patterns in his address as he awarded the Medal of Honor to Cpt Larry Taylor at the White House on September 7. I concluded that the features of Joe's delivery, which included stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring, are also all features of intioxicated speech, as outlined by linguistic studies, police officers' training ane experience, and simple common-sense observation, although Joe, like Speaker Emerita Pelosi, claims not to drink. After I posted this, though, I began to notice that there have been occasional instances where Joe was able to speak quite clearly, without the markers suggesting he was intoxicated, most notably during the presidential debates with Donald Trump in the fall of 2020. In fact, I was going to link a clip from one of those at the top of today's post but then I realized I had a much more recent ex...