"God Save The Queen, Man!"

From CTInsider:

President Joe Biden ended his keystone speech Friday at the National Safer Communities Summit at the University of Hartford with a line that has drawn confusion and criticism.

"God save the queen, man," Biden said.

The site gave the White House explanation for the line:

The comment puzzled some people because Queen Elizabeth II died last September, but White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Alair Dalton said Biden's remark was directed at someone in the audience. Dalton said Biden was unable to do a full rope line, where he usually interacts with audience members in close spaces, because he needed to leave as a storm approached.

The certainly leaves open the interpretation that Joe is completely out of touch, recognizing neither that the queen of the UK isn't sovereign over the US, but beyond that, she's deceased, and there's now a king. But I simply think it's another indication of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, "a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge." I've mentioned this in connection with Joe here frequently.

In this case with the "God save the queen" remark, Joe was cracking a joke, or at least he thought he was. This site talks about the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it relates to comedy, which was one focus of the original study:

Standup comedy is a magnet for the delusional, in part because everyone assumes they have a good sense of humor.

. . . The Dunning-Kruger effect is excruciating to behold: This guy really thinks he’s funny? But it’s also reassuring. In an industry that offers few clear paths for advancement, self-doubt is as crucial a tool for success as bravado. In comedy, anxiety and neurosis are the keys to the kingdom. If you’ve ever asked yourself if you’ve got Dunning-Kruger, you probably don’t.

One artifact of Joe's everyday speech is his frequent remark "No joke, man!" or, conversely, "I'm joking", when he's about the least funny guy there is, no matter what he says or how he means it. This is a man without reflection and without insight, from which it follows that he's without humor. This probably contributes to an impression that he suffers from a medical disorder of cognition, when it's much closer to an issue of being unable to read a room or more generally relate to his circumstances.

Nor does it help that he's the most powerful man in the world, and he inevitably traces this to his own innate ability. But let's see if we can parse out why he said, "God save the queen, man!" and thought it was a joke, when pretty much the whole world took it instead as just a strange and recondite remark. Go to the start of the YouTube excerpt above at the end of his speech:

We're the United States of America, and there's nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops! We can get this done! Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean it! Thank you!

He then diverges into an explanation of why he isn't going to go down to the audience and shake hands, when he normally would, because there's a storm or something -- and then he wraps it up,

Alright? God save the queen, man!

Putting this in context, a moment earlier, he'd just uttered what he must have understood was the most conventional politicians' bloviation, we're the United States of America, nothing we can't do, God bless, God protect our troops, thank you, I mean it! -- and he's disgusted with it. In fact, it's beneath him. His handlers are making him do this one more time, and he'd rather be back in Delaware. So he sums it all up with "God save the queen, man!" which is his private little joke about how everything he's just said is as empty as if it were said in a foreign country.

In other words, the one thing he's sure about is he's the most powerful man in the world, and he thinks all patriotic platitudes are a waste of time, and he's letting the people who really know what's up know that he understands this perfectly. (This probably extends to his private opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and its mass, for all his weekly attendance there. He's never done it for other than the most cynical reasons, and he's always been on the verge of losing patience with it as well.)

For that matter, God save the pope and God save the holy Roman emperor, if he could only figure out who that guy was. This also goes to why he always has to be led off the stage, as he was at the end of yesterday's vignette. He's the most powerful man in the world, and also the smartest, and he doesn't think he should be wasting his time remembering which way to leave the podium.

Yet again, this is not a medical condition. I think it's important that his opponents understand this. People think he's sick and feeble, when he's just stupid, which requires a different set of strategies.

Updates On The Biden Boodle

On of the big questions I've had throughout this saga has been that the sums of moneyjust don't seem right. The Vice President of the United States is alleged to have sold out for a measly $5 million. The Biden family overall, nine or 12 mwmbers, is alleged to have taken in $10 million over a period of years, when this amount wouldn't cover just the cocaine habits, shopping sprees, and luxury rehab stays of Hunter, Hallie, Caroline, or Ashley, leaving all the others and their extravagant lifestyles aside.

Either there's a lot more to this story, or it's all bunk, because the numbers we've been seeing just don't fit. However, via the New York Post,

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Thursday teased that new bank records his panel expects to obtain will reveal that the Biden family has accepted as much as $30 million from foreign nationals.

“We have more bank records coming in, we’re going to exceed $10 million this week. And I think we’ll get up to between $20 and 30 million,” Comer (R-Ky.) told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo when asked how much money the committee has identified as being obtained by President Biden’s family members from overseas sources.

. . . The panel has gleaned the information from records Comer has issued subpoenas for from four banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and Cathay Bank.

. . . “We’re pretty confident from other sources that that number will grow to beyond $20 million and it could be more if you factor in the president’s brother, who dealt mainly in the Middle East. We haven’t even gotten to him yet,” he explained.

The same story lists with greater specificity the members of the Biden family that the Comer committee believes have taken foreign payoffs. Putting names to references in the text, these would be:

1. Hunter
2. Naomi Biden, Hunter's daughter
3. Joe's brother James
4. Caroline Biden, James's daughter
5. James Biden Jr, James's son
6. James's wife, Sara
7. Hallie, Beau's widow
8. Melissa Cohen, Hunter's current wife
9. Kathleen Buhle, Hunter's ex-wife

Although the total here is nine, Comer has said that as many as 12 could be recipients of the payments, which might include Joe himself, Dr Jill, and Joe's daugher via Dr Jill, Ashley. This would also explain Hunter's extreme reluctance to disclose his income sources in the court case over his child support payments to Lunden Roberts. Again, the very sketchy data we've had suggests that Hunter has over $600,000 per year in alimony and child support payments, but his publicly available income source is just sporadic payments for his paintings -- but he must also be paying millions to attorneys like Abbe Lowell for both his child support and tax cases. That his wife Melissa is getting Biden payoffs suggests this is an effort to conceal Hunter's income as well.

A story by Margot Cleveland at the Federalist fleshes out details of the alleged $10 million in payments to both Joe and Hunter from Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky:

The Bidens allegedly “coerced” a foreign national to pay them $10 million in bribes, according to individuals familiar with the investigation into the FBI’s handling of the FD-1023 confidential human source report.

. . . In the FD-1023 from June 30, 2020, the confidential human source summarized earlier meetings he had with Zlochevsky. According to the CHS, in the 2015-2016 timeframe, the CHS, who was providing advice to Zlochevsky, told the Burisma owner to stay away from the Bidens. Then, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest, the CHS asked Zlochevsky if he was upset Trump won.

, , , The CHS responded that he hoped Zlochevsky had taken precautions to protect himself. Zlochevsky then allegedly detailed the steps he had taken to avoid detection, stressing he had never paid the “Big Guy” directly and that it would take some 10 years to unravel the various money trails. It was only then that Zlochevsky mentioned the audio recordings he had made of the conversations he had with Hunter and Joe Biden, according to the CHS.

Coy references in the story suggest that the "CHS" cconfidential source was a subordinate to Zlochevsky who knew him well and has stayed in touch. Vague references to "sources" familiar with the investigation also suggest that there have been multiple whistleblowers speaking to Sen Grassley and the Comer committee.

It's hard to avoid thinking there are major tax issues here for all the Bidens that could make Hunter's current tax problems seem trivial, and that's before we get to the question of money laundering -- and that in turn is before we get to the question of bribery. Any one instance, including the revelation of a new income source in Hunter's child support case, could start to unravel a great deal else. And it isn't 2024 yet.

"Where's The Money? I'm Joking."

The problem I keep seeing about the Biden boodle that won't go away for me is precisely the question Joe asked a week ago: where's the money? What we've seen, at least since 2019, is the appearance of multimillion-dollar expenditures on Hunter's debts and legal problems, followed since last year by other multimillion-dollar legal expenditures for Joe's own classified document issues, yet I'm about the only one out there asking where all this money comes from. High-power, partner-level lawyers don't work for free, and being lawyers, they know how to get paid.

This story came out on Breitbart yesterday, but it was buried almost immediately: Exclusive: GOP Lawmakers Question Who Gave Joe Biden’s Corporation Nearly $10M in 2017.

Republican lawmakers are demanding transparency from President Joe Biden regarding his 2017 tax returns in which his entity, “CelticCapri Corp,” listed nearly $10 million without specifying revenue line items, raising concerns about who paid the entity and for what in the wake of Joe Biden’s alleged link to a $5 million Ukrainian “bribery” scheme.

. . . “Now that we know there are recordings of conversations Joe Biden and his degenerate son had with a Burisma executive, it’s becoming more and more obvious how the indictment of President Trump is meant to be a distraction,” [Rep. Eli] Crane added. “It would shock no one in this town if Joe Biden received millions of dollars from selling out the country in a bribery scheme and then hid that money in shady shell companies.”

The implication in the story is that the "nearly $10 million" on Biden's 2017 tax return roughly corresponds with the total of $10 million, $5 million to Joe himself and $5 million to Hunter, that's allegedly discussed in the tapes Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky apparently claims to have made of his discussions with Hunter and Joe.

However, as best we can surmise for now -- the FBI's FD-1023 forms in question haven't been made public, and we have no assurance that the alleged Zlochevsky tapes even exist -- the bribes, if they were paid, were paid in return for Joe's alleged insistence that prosecutor Victor Shokin be removed from a Burisma investigation in March, 2016.

Biden did demand that Shokin be removed. At an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2018, Biden seemed to boast about it, saying that during a visit to Kyiv -- likely in December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."

"Well, son of a bitch," Biden continued. "He got fired."

Shokin was indeed fired, but not until March that year [2016?].

But the vagueness of the timing, mixed with Joe's well-established tendency to fabricate, puts the precise date of any discussion, and any resulting payment from Zlochevsky to the Bidens, into question. If Biden spoke with Zlochevsky during a December 2015 visit to Ukraine, as the story suggests, we've got to assume the money was paid even before Shokin's 2016 removal and would have needed to be covered up in a Biden tax return earlier than 2017.

And of course, the tale of the fired prosecutor could simply be just another of Joe's routine fabrications, that he's Greek, was raised by Puerto Ricans, went to shul as a kid, or maybe went to black churches then instead.

The problem for Joe overall, even if the story of Zlochevsky's 17 recordings turns out to be the purest moonshine, is that the numbers have never added up. For ibnstance, I have a hard time with the idea that Zlochevsky ever paid $5 million to Hunter; he never had that kind of money, and the money he had appears to have come in large part from stiffing his employees and partners over much smaller payments. The Bidens overall seem to have obtained lines of credit or debt forgiveness simply on the basis that they were Bidens, but that sort of thing goes only so far.

As well, Rep Greene's account of the 1023 has Zlochevsky referring to Hunter as "stupid", which has the ring of truth, but it does then raise the question of why Zlochevsky would give him $5 million. But that in turn raises the question of how much was enough to buy Joe, if in fact Joe was being bought.

I don't think $5 million alone was enough to buy Joe, nor would an additional $5 million to Hunter have done it. But let's just say Zlochevsky paid Joe-and-Hunter $10 million in December 2015, as the link above suggests. That dosn't account for the mystery "nearly $10 million" that appeared on Joe's 2017 tax return -- and $10 million won't buy you all that much these days, maybe a five-bedroom mcmansion in a leafy suburb. Joe needs more than that kind of money.

Where is it? That's not a joke.

The photo above is of Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma owner who is now alleged to have passed a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and kept tapes of the discussion. Before I finished yestereday's post, I went to Wikipeida to see what I might be able to glean. In my post yesterday, I credited Wikipedia and summarized the key points of the entry.

So this morning at Breitbart News, fully a day later, I found the headline on Breitbart Meet the Ukrainian Oligarch Who Allegedly Paid Joe Biden $5 Million by some guy named Wendell Husebø. Without crediting Wikipedia at all, he gives the same dates and details you can find there, as well as an April 2017 article at the Guardian, which he presumably found the same way I did, via a five-minute web search.

That's fine, of course, except that Mr Husebø is a Professional Journalist, while I'm an old guy on a 401(k) with a desktop, and I beat him to precisely the same story by 24 hours. This is what Conservative Inc is giving us. Beyond that, the guy is presumably making good money as a full-time Professional Journalist, but he doesn't have any better resources than I do, viz, a search engine and a desktop.

But this does lead me to one conclusion he doesn't seem to have drawn, that either potential sources in the FBI, the Comer committee, or Sen Grassley's staff have no confidence in Mr Husebø as a Professional Journalist, or those same people in the know are disciplined enough not to leak to anyone, least of all Mr Husebø. Take your choice. Either way, it says little for Conservative Inc media, but it does bolster somewhat my confidence in the people on the staffs of the Comer committee and Sen Grassley.

But let's tease things out a little farther. Chairman Comer said this about the interaction between Zlochevsky and the Bidens to Larry Kudlow on Fox News Monday:

Yeah, what the motive was, Larry, was they [Zlochevsky/Burisma] were wanting to enter into the US energy market through an IPO. They felt like they couldn’t conduct an initial public offering if they were under investigation for corruption in Ukraine. That’s what it all pertained to. That’s where the supposed bribe happened. That’s why it happened, because they wanted to get rid of the prosecutor and try to clear up their name and have a Biden on the board. . . . They also wanted to buy an existing energy company, and I believe it was in Texas, but I don’t know the name of the company. So that was their whole business model to get their foot in the door, buy a company and do an IPO.

But isn't that pretty small ball? This doesn't fit a reasonability check. You want to buy some Texas energy company and do an IPO, so what you have to do is bribe the Vice President of the United States? In addition, I've seen references to the idea that the IPO was an idea Hunter himself was pushing as a Burisma board member, and as part of that pitch, he was selling his services as an intermediary -- except that, like nearly every other castle in the air Hunter tried to sell, it never went through.

The one pattern we keep seeing throughout the Biden family frammis is that it's a con. Whether it's Hunter, Joe's brother James, his sister Valerie, or any other member of the family, they promote schemes that just happen to need Joe's coopration to work, so all you have to do is cross some Biden's palm with cash, Joe will look upon this scheme with favor, and you'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Except that for some reason or other, the castles in the air the Bidens keep pitching never quite work out, and after all, you were trying to bribe Joe, weren't you? This is not an enforceable contract, sorry.

That's the long and the short of the Biden frammis. But let's delve a little deeper. Zlochevsky was last seen at all in Odesa in 2018. So he's been on the lam for five years, maybe living in Monaco, maybe in Cyprus, nobody's quite sure, but apparently some guy the FBI trusts knows how to get in touch with him, and it's being bruited about that he's either credibly got the Biden tapes, or he's already turned them over.

That suggests he's still alive, which for an oligarch with Russian connections on the lam for five years is something of an accomplishment. There've been an awful lot of Russian oligarchs on the lam in places like Spain or Monaco who haven't made it that far in the last couple of years, sudden illnesses, inexplicable falls from windows, suicides, all very tragic. What's Zlochevsky's secret?

Well, maybe it's this, which I've already pointed out:

Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. . . is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

This guy, a Russian agent, has tapes of himself paying bribes to Joe Biden and his son Hunter? Might that be a pretty good reason for Putin to want to keep him alive? Consider that playing those tapes would at minimum affect the reelection of Joe, who has been the primary funder of the Ukrainian side in the Russo-Ukrainian war, with an influential faction of Republicans much less enthusiastic about continuing that commitment should Biden be defeated in 2024.

Zlochevsky, as far as I can see, let Joe and Hunter walk right into a trap he'd laid for them. They thought they were playing a game of pretending to sell Joe's influence but never following through, what the Bidens had been doing for years. The problem was that they did collect the money, whether they ever meant to do what they were paid to do or not, and it's on tape.

Isn't that worth a whole lot more to someone like Zlochevsky, especially if he's a Russian agent, than a measly $10 million or an IPO? That's the one thing that's never fit for me in this story -- if Biden sold out for $10 million, he was still selling out for cheap. It's a price like $50,000 for the Brooklyn Bridge. The Bidens were selling the bridge but were never going to follow through. The problem was that Zlochevsky was one step ahead of them.

The project for Chairman Comer and Sen Grassly is still to nail down the money and paper trail of those payments. I feel pretty confident they'll do it, if they haven't done it already. Again, I have the feeling that the people behind the scenes here are highly disciplined, and every question they've asked has been one to which they've already had the answer.

The Plot Thickens

By late last week, I was beginning to get the impression that Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer were acting like homicide detectives. In particular, they were asking FBI Director Wray questions to which they already knew the answers, to wit, what was on the FD-1023 form that Wray was so coy about revealing to the Republicans. By Thursday, clearly coordinating with Chairman Comer, Sen Grassley announced that he'd already seen the FD-1023 in question, and it contained a highly credible allegation that Joe Biden had taken a $5 million bribe while he was vice president.

This was likely a major factor that overcame Wray's unwillingness to cooperate, and it illustrates the effectiveness of pretending you don't have information when you're interrogating a suspect. It gives suspects the latitude to lie, and then you can catch them when they do, which throws them off balance. In addition, and probably more important, it leaves the suspect unsure about what else the detective knows that he isn't revealing.

Thus, since late last week, there's been a series of new revelations about what's in the FD-1023. The first, made public at the time Wray agreed to let the full Comer committee review the original FD-1023, was that there were two additional FD-1023s referenced in the original, which would also be provided to the committee. But Sen Grassley made it plain yesterday on the Senate floor that what Wray had given the Comer committee was redacted, that the redactions concealed important information, and this was unacceptable:

Congress still lacks a full and complete picture with respect to what that document really says. That’s why it’s important that the document be made public without unnecessary redactions for the American people to see.

Let me assist for purposes of transparency. The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings.

According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden. According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden. These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.

He concluded, lest there be any doubt,

I want everyone to remember, that I have read the unredacted version.

It was then reported later in the day that the "foreign national" was Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. So I checked Wikipedia:

Mykola Vladislavovich Zlochevsky (Ukrainian: Микола Владиславович Злочевський; born 14 June 1966) is a Ukrainian oil and natural gas businessman, politician, and an oligarch. Zlochevsky was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources from July 2010 until April 2012 and was the deputy secretary for Economic and Social Security of the National Security and Defense Council from April 2012 until February 2014 when Euromaidan occurred.He is wanted by Ukrainian authorities for attempting to bribe the prosecutors in order to drop all charges against him.

. . . In 2012, Viktor Pshonka, the Ukrainian prosecutor general, began investigating Burisma Holdings owner, Zlochevsky, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption during 2010–2012.

In April 2014 Zlochevsky named Hunter Biden, son of then U. S. Vice President Joe Biden, to Burisma’s board as a director of Burisma, where he was said to have earned over $80,000 monthly.[21] Joe Biden had been made the point man on Ukraine after February 2014, when the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted and fled. Then U. S. President Barack Obama's administration was prepared to work with the new government, a position shared with European governments and institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But they were all concerned about Ukraine's corruption, which had plagued the country ever since it gained independence in the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Joe Biden became a frequent visitor to Ukraine. By his own count, Biden said he went there about a dozen times from early 2014 through early 2016.

. . . On 15 June 2018, after the Solomyansky District Court in Kyiv had annulled the ruling of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) to close a criminal proceeding against him in 2017, Zlochevsky was accused of having illegally issued, while he was Ecology Minister in 2010–2012, oil and gas licenses to the companies that belonged to him.[34]

According to Ukrainian authorities Zlochevsky is suspected of "theft of government funds on an especially large scale". Authorities said the criminal investigation on suspicion of embezzlement is currently on hold because Zlochevsky's whereabouts cannot presently be determined. As of 2019, Zlochevsky is reported to live in Monaco. According to an investigation by Al Jazeera he bought Cypriot citizenship somewhere between 2017 and 2019.

According to RedState, Zlochevsky

is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

But nobody quite knows where Zlochevsky is, cough, cough, except he's talking to a credible third party that the FBI respects. And he says he's got recordings that he uses as an insurance policy.

Meanehile, Alan Dershowitz is calling the upcoming trial of Donald Trump

The most important trial in modern history, maybe the most important trial since -- since -- Aaron Burr or the assassins of Abraham Lincoln in terms of constitutionsl lsw. . .

It's hard for me to see how Dershowitx doesn't see the potential problem in a Russian agent actually bribing a president of the US. The phony pee dossier and the Hunter's-laptop-is-Russian disinformation hoax quickly fade in comparison, but Dershowitz is a smart guy.

What we're seeing from Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer appears to be very carefully calculated releases of precisely limited information about what Zlochevsky knows and what he has, and the way it's coming out also suggests the Republicans have more in reserve. At minimum, they've got to be off balance wondering who's talking go Zlochevsky and what else he's said. Something tells me the Republicans have more than an FD-1023, and it will come out exactly when it suits Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer.

Well, the Whitre House canceled Joe's schedule yesterday and today, ostensibly for a root canal, while even the New York Poat frets that he eats too much ice cream. We live in unserious times.

The Cry Wolf Effect

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 have kept turning out to be hoaxes, from the pee dossier to the 2019 Zelensky phone call to the claim that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation to the whole question of just what happened with COVID. It's the simple cry wolf effect.

Nor does it help that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought the latest indictment, looks like the nebbishy assistant sociology professor you remember from your sophomore year for trying to get the undergraduates to demand the university give him tenure -- but he was so nebbishy, not even the undergraduates would buy it.

So we have a repeating phenomenon, whereby with each new indictment, Trump surges in popularity.

A poll indicates that former President Donald Trump has widened his lead in the GOP primary following the Department of Justice’s indictment of him for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Florida home.

Surveying 1,798 potential voters between June 9-10 with a margin of error ±3.3 points, the CBS News poll showed the former president had 61 percent support in the Republican primary, leading his opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by a full 38 points – 61 percent to 23 percent. Republican Sen. Tim Scott (SC) stands in third place with just 4 percent of support, just one point ahead of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

This seems to be causing even figures like Alan Dershowitz to question the received wisdom on Trump's supposed predicament. Last week, he was with the establishment:

Since reading the 49-page indictment, which was unsealed on Friday, Dershowitz says, “at least one part of it is somewhat stronger than I had initially believed it would be.” Specifically, the indictment cites a tape recording in which the president allegedly brags to an unnamed person about classified “secret information” in a document about Iran.

By Sunday night, he was starting to hedge:

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz offered his legal insight into the indictment of former President Donald Trump, saying Special Counsel Jack Smith had only one job when he was assigned to the case: "Get Trump."

Beyond the legalisms, though, we're in a situation where the plebs is behaving unpredictably. The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney boycott caught everyone by surprise, and even in the early weeks, nobody thought it would last. Then it moved to Target, and again, its specificity, strength, and persistence have defied conventional wisdom. As of now, it appears that it may spread to other brands like Cracker Barrel. The plebs simply doesn't respond well to being told to believe things that go against common sense.

I would go so far as to say that questions like whether the pee dossier or the Hunter laptop Russian disinformation story were hoaxes have had far less impact on the public mood than the whole COVID-lockdown-masking-social-distance-mandatory-vaccine-booster-after-booster brainwash that's soured the public mood, likely for years to come. If Dylan Mulvaney and Alissa Heinerscheid allowed the plebs to pick the targets, freeze them, and personalize them as the problem, Trump has been able to move into a posiiton where he can be picked, frozen and personalized as the antidote.

And for now, it's William Barr, Jack Smith, and President Brandon himself who are playing the bigger media roles of Dylan Mulvaney and Alissa Heinerscheid as the frozen and personalized targets.. Bud Light and Target haven't figured out how to extricate themselves from their predicament. It doesn't look like the puppets who think they're running the political show have figured things out yet on a bigger scale, either.

Back To David Brooks

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 prosperous former Democrat who's moved over to the Trump column. Bourneko saw this trend nearly a decade ago in Brooks's writing:

I’ve been a pretty regular reader of the New York Times columnist since before he even came to the Times, going all the way back to his seminal 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which revealed, to the astonishment of various residents of the East Coast media world’s upper crust, that the rich white people of the Clinton years were different from previous generations of rich white people, because they used their money to buy elite refrigerators instead of jewel-encrusted top hats.

But Bourneko also saw a darker shift:

When David Brooks’s marriage collapsed, reportedly, around the end of 2013, it should have freed him to enjoy the spoils of pundit-class celebrity. He would be Out There, America’s most eligible thinkfluencer, thinkfluencing a perky publishing assistant onto his elbow for mutually rewarding committed relationship action and/or love!

. . . How he burns with resentment. The hot millennials do not want a New York Times columnist from whom to receive stimulating discourse about the moral and attitudinal deficiencies of the poor. No, they want a “not-repulsive person” who “does not look like a waxed talpid,” thanks to some cockamamie notion that “sexual attraction” might be a more fruitful basis for a relationship than “being lectured by a fusty boomer pissbaby about how masculine chivalry is the bedrock of civilization and both were destroyed by the sexual revolution.”

Which brings me to the question of how at the News Hour, anchors have come and gone, other talking heads have come and gone, interlocutors for David Brooks have come and gone, but David Brooks remains. And as of last Friday,,

New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that he thinks President Joe Biden’s staff overprotects him and that the President should be out in public more. Brooks also said that from what he hears from inside the Biden White House, the President’s “not a doddering old grandpa either.” And Biden “can be a very tough, mean guy and a very harsh boss sometimes.”

Brooks said, “[L]onger-term…I do think Biden is still underexposed. I think his staff is still overprotective of him. And he’s much smarter in public than a lot of people think — in private. And so, I do think they need to let him get out more, because it’s just not good for the presidency for him to be that much in the shadow of Donald Trump.”

Wait a moment. And he’s much smarter in public than a lot of people think — in private? What on earth does that mean? It sounds as though whatever ails the big guy isn't conventionally contagious, since Brooks imples he's not around Joe all that much, but somehow, mentally, he and Biden are starting to get into the same groove. So he thinks Biden should be "out in public more". Here's the problem. When Biden's out in public, he does things like try to do a little skip to prove he's spry, but instead, he falls over, which is what happened in Colorado Springs.

Or, asked about the allegations that he'd taken a $5 million bribe, he answers, "Where's the money? I'm joking. It's a bunch of malarkey," which, like Brooks's own remarks is meaningless. But Brooks goes on to say, "He’s like — can be a very tough, mean guy and a very harsh boss sometimes."

So what are the fruits of this tough, harsh, mean, demanding boss? Just yesterday, we saw his staff in action yet again:

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will welcome the NCAA men’s and women’s national championship teams to “College Athlete Day” at the White House on Monday.

In an email from the White House Office of Legislative Affairs addressed to members of Congress, Covid protocols were listed, notifying lawmakers that they would need to show a negative Covid test before being allowed to attend the event. If unvaccinated, the attendees must wear a mask and social distance.

“Masking guidance: Fully vaccinated guests are not required to wear a mask on the White House grounds. Guests who are not fully vaccinated must wear a mask at all times and maintain at least six feet distance from others while on the White House grounds,” the email states.

How 2022! The crack White House staff, with Mean Joe at the reins, belatedly recognized its mistake:

But the federal government has already terminated the national emergency declaration for the COVID-19 pandemic.

. . . But later in the week, the White House told Fox News Digital that the guidance in the email had been sent inadvertently and was out of date, according to the outlet. A White House spokesperson said they might be sending out another email before Monday's event with the up-to-date guidance.

It might be a better idea to surmise, contra Brooks, that Biden has exactly the sort of staff he deserves, if not just what he wants as well. I don't think it's out of line to suggest that, even if Biden isn't a doddering old grandpa, something's seriously off. I continue to think a medical diagnosis isn't necessary to draw some tentative conclusion about wnat's up, and we may not need to go much farther than the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. Or maybe just the Peter Principle, which simply says that people rise to their level of incompetence.

But a better interpretation might come from Catholic moral philosophy: as St Thomas Aquinas puts it, sin dulls the intellect. Here we have an individual who represents himself as a Roman Catholic -- he attends weekly mass, and that paragon of virtue Hunter goes with him when he's in town. (I would add the caveat that like another sketchy public Catholic, Speaker Emeritus Pelosi, he was formed in the faith before the Second Vatican Council, so that can't be blamed.)

Yet Biden continues to endorse public policy directly opposed to Catholic teaching, including recent statements by the current pontiff on transsexualism. I don't think we need to go a whole lot farther than just to ask about that contradiction. Let's say you're with the whole LGBTQIA+ program. Shouoldn't you be wondering why Biden goes to mass every week? Why can't he drop that superatitious medievalism? Isn't he living a basic contradiction, and doesn't this in some way affect his mental health?

Even David Brooks ought to be able to acknowledge this, except that even in 2015, some guy named Albert Bourneko thought there was a basic problem there, too.