What Are They Thinking?

Only days before the Robert Menendez indictment, California Gov Newsom sought to downplay the Hunter Biden scandal by saying it was nothing new:

Newsom made the remarks during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash when asked about Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry into the president.

“Republicans have shown that Hunter Biden, he tried to leverage his father’s name and that the president allegedly, before he was president, joined phone calls that Hunter Biden’s business associates were on,” Bash said. “Do you see anything inappropriate there?”

“I don’t know enough about the details of that. I mean, I’ve seen a little of that,” Newsom claimed. “If that’s the new criteria, there are a lot of folks in a lot of industries, not just in politics, where people have family members and relationships and they’re trying to parlay and get a little influence and benefit in that respect. That’s hardly unique. I don’t love that any more than you love it or other people I imagine love that.”

Newsom should know, since he himself is related to Nancy Pelosi by marriage. But Sen Menendez's indictment just underscores how common "influence peddling" is, especially since Sen Menendez was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (he had to resign as chair, but not as senator, following his indictment), a post Joe Biden also held from 2001 to 2003. The level of influence this position gives to its occupants is indicated by the statement of the prosecutors:

Menendez is accused of using “his power and influence, including his leadership role on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to benefit the government of Egypt in various ways,” said the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, during a press conference on Friday.

This is the same US Justice Department that has proven amenable to all sorts of influence, not just from Joe, but from Menendez himself. According to the prosecutors,

[Fred] Daibes, a real estate developer, gave Menendez gold bars and cash after Menendez sought to influence a federal criminal case in New Jersey against Daibes for obtaining loans under false pretenses, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said. Daibes pleaded guilty and received a probationary sentence.

So if you know the right people, you can plead guilty to federal charges and get probation. Where have we heard that before? But the Biden and Menendez cases aren't just parallel, they seem to have some connections: The UK Daily Mail has previously published a memo found on Hunter's laptop in which Hunter and Eric Schwerin discuss coordinating with Menendez to hold a 2010 event at the vice president's official residence in return for access to key Spanish finincial figures. Per the Daily Mail,

[W]hen an aide to Senator Robert Menendez requested VP Biden host the U.S.-Spain Council's 2010 annual meeting at his official Naval Observatory residence in Washington DC, they contacted Schwerin rather than Joe's White House office.

Hunter and Schwerin then privately discussed the potential to ingratiate themselves with 'CEOs of the major banks' if they helped arrange the request.

So I'm scratching my head. The federal prosecutors, who as we've seen are fully capable of slow-walking investigations if it's convenient for the right people, have indicted Menendez, who is nothing if not a frequent flyer in bribery and corruption cases, right at a time when bribery and corruption allegations have surfaced against Joe Biden, who coincidentally has spent his career in precisely the same Senate positions of power as Menendez. Beyond that, one of the allegations in the indictment is that Menendez got kickbacks from military aid to Egypt, which he was in a position to influence:

At all times relevant to this Indictment, MENENDEZ held a leadership position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (the “SFRC”), first as the Ranking Member and then the Chairman, and therefore possessed influence over, among other things, the Executive Branch’s decisions to provide foreign military sales, foreign military financing, and other aid or support to or for the benefit of the Government of Egypt.

. . . [T]he State Department would typically not proceed with a transfer of foreign military financing grant money to Egypt’s bank account (located at all relevant times in Manhattan), or with a foreign military sale to Egypt, while the Chairman or the Ranking Member of the SFRC had not signed off on, and was maintaining a “hold” on, such a transfer or sale. As a result, at all times relevant to the Indictment, ROBERT MENENDEZ, the defendant, as the Chairman or the Ranking Member of the SFRC, possessed substantial influence over foreign military sales and foreign military financing to Egypt.

. . . in or about May 2018, HANA hosted another dinner at a high-end restaurant with MENENDEZ, during which MENENDEZ disclosed to HANA nonpublic information about the United States’s provision of military aid to Egypt. Shortly after the dinner, HANA texted Egyptian Official-1, “The ban on small arms and ammunition to Egypt has been lifted. That means sales can begin. That will include sniper rifles among other articles.”

In other words, the Menendez indictment contains allegations of circumstancrs and methods that are remarkably similar to those that have emerged related to Joe Biden's dealings with Ukraine. Ukraine, like Egypt, is a major recipient of US economic and military aid. The aid is subject to numerous approvals and potential holds, which can be lifted by the right people in the right positions. In the case of Menendez, it's alleged that in exchange for bribes, Menendez, who had the power to get holds lifted, in fact did this.

How does this differ from the case of Joe, who was in a position to threaten a hold on Ukrainian loan guarantees in December 2015 and by his own account demanded the firing of Viktor Shokin to have the hold lifted? Since 2015, Joe has been in a position to influence whether or not Ukraine gets over $100 billion in military aid. Given the parallel circumstances and the parallel opportunities for corruption from two guys who've enriched themselves throughout their political careers, why shouldn't we be suspicious that the same sort of back channel deals that enriched Menendez are also taking place with Ukraine aid and Joe?

So far, nobody at either the legacy media or Conservative Inc has noticed these parallels, but this all reinforces for me the idea that we need to start looking at the Milo Minderbinder theory of the Russo-Ukraine War, that this is being pursued in large part because powerful people, including Joe Biden, are getting kickbacks from a multibillion-dollar skim off economic and military aid that they're promoting and approving.

All the Menendez indictment is doing for now is enabling the possibility that investigators will look into this. Why on earth did Merrick Garland approve this move? Is the guy deeper than he looks, or what?

Joe Goes To New York

Joe had several enagements in New York over the past week, all of which tend to confirm the estimates I've made here of his character all along. Let's just start with the episode where he walked off a stage where he'd appeared with Brazil's President Lula at the UN:

Joe Biden has seemingly wandered off the UN stage without shaking hands with Brazil's Lula at the end of a joint speech.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, looked visibly irritated after the two leaders shared a stage to speak about their initiative to improve workers' rights in each country.

Throughout the presentation by Joe, Lula, and the Director of the International Labor Organization, Joe seemed to be fidgety and impatient. By the end, his gestures and body language indicated that whether or not all the ceremonial niceties had been fully observed, Joe was done. He gave a flippant farewell salute to the audience -- and not to either of his fellow speakers on the stage -- turned, and purposefully walked off. Unlike the Daily Mail in the link, I wouldn't characterize it as "wandering" -- he saw the exit and went straight for it.

I put this directly in the context of the September 5 episode, which I covered in this post, when Joe walked straight out of a ceremony in which he awarded the Medal of Honor to a Viet Nam War helicopter pilot. He placed the medal around the recipient's neck and then, without standing on formality, simply walked out of the room. As I said in that post,

I don't think this was a result of Joe being unaware of his surroundings or even the requirements of ceremonial decorum. I think he was either drunk or under the influence of prescription drugs used to excess, he felt like walking out, and he could, because Joe is Caesar.

I think it's fairly plain that Joe generally feels he can get away with offending other heads of state, as he is reported to have done on July 18:

President Joe Biden seemingly fell asleep today while sputtering gibberish during a high-level meeting with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog.

I noted at the time,

[I]t's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

I think the same attitude is clear in the episode with Lula at the UN, this is a big waste of my time, it's gone on too long already, I'm done. But troubling as the meeting with Herzog was in July, his encounter with Prime Minister Netanyahu this past Wednesday goes farther:

At the start, Joe refers to talks about the possibility of negotiating with the Saudis and says, "I think we look at each other and kinda, 'Who's been drinking what?'"

Netanyahu replies, "Good Irish whiskey!"

Joe, somewhat nonplussed, responds, "Good Irish whiskey -- that's the reason I've never had a drink!"

As I've said here, I think the legend that Joe's never had a drink is up there with all the other lies he routinely tells about himself, that he drove an 18-wheeler, that he was arrested during the Civil Rights movement, that he went to the Naval Academy, or that he taught political theory at Penn. The evidence we have, which was amply on display at various speeches he gave in New York, is that his speech patterns are often (though tellingly, not always) indicative of intoxication.

Although both Netanyahu and Biden spoke of their friendship in the clip above, there's been tension in their relationship:

At the end of March, President Joe Biden landed a verbal body blow against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden gave a forthright and unequivocal “no” to a question whether he would be hosting Netanyahu at the White House. “Not in the near term,” the president declared.

It has become almost a norm that newly elected Israeli prime ministers visit Washington during the first months of their tenure. That no date had been announced for Netanyahu was already raising eyebrows, alluding to problems in the relationship. But a very public uninvitation is quite another matter, a unique diplomatic occurrence among friends and allies.

Was this just Biden being Biden? Was he shooting from the hip without the requisite consideration?

My sense of the "good Irish whiskey" exchange was a dig back from Netanyahu, which I would read as an indication that the Mossad is fully aware that Joe is usually drunk, and Bibi is letting Joe know it. Joe replies with a nervous laugh; moments later, as Bibi speaks of friendship, Joe crosses himself, which I take in context to mean that Joe doesn't agree, and indeed, he means it as a sub rosa anti-Semitic gesture, much as he's used "God save the Queen" in other contexts to imply "balderdash".

Joe does all this stuff, the walking out, the fidgets, the appearance of falling asleep, the offensively cryptic gestures and remarks, because he can. He's Caesar, he can get away with this stuff, which includes acting like a sophomoric entitled frat boy as he chooses, which is most of the time.

What interests me most, though, is that he can turn some of this off. This is what I noted about his July 10 presser in Hanoi:

[T]he one feature that was missing in Hanoi was the markers of intoxicated speech, stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring. His enunciation was clear, and his pace, if slow, was consistent, without stuttering or hypercorrection. He was clearly tired, which led some observers to question whether he was up to the job, but he wasn't talking as though his BAC was somewhere north of the legal limit.

My sense of things for Joe in New York was that unlike in Hanoi, Joe didn't think anything he had to do in New York was so important that he had to stay sober. Because when he really needs to stay sober, as in his 2020 debates with Trump. he can. In New York, he didn't. But his problem isn't senility. His problem is he's Caesar.

President Zelensky, Meet Bud Light!

I'm intrigued by the controversy surrounding Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, most recently characterized as a 46-year-old man from Florida named Mike, because it raises several questions about our involvement in Ukraine.

Sen J D Vance raised the right issues over how Ashton-Cirillo wound up in the news:

Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance wrote this week to top Biden administration officials demanding information on the American citizen after Ashton-Cirillo posted a video on social media declaring that Ukraine was planning to “hunt down” alleged Russian propagandists.

The letter itself reads in part,

I’ve seen claims this individual is an American, a former intelligence operative in the United States, and an employee of the Ukrainian government. Others have argued Ashton-Cirillo is pulling an elaborate prank.

. . . Is this individual an American citizen? Did they ever serve, in any capacity, in American intelligence services?

Sen Vance's questions open the door to what I think is perfectly reasonable surmise: how did it come about that this American guy in a wig and fake boobs became an official spokestrans for the Ukrainian military? Did he have help? Going back to the Wikipedia entry I linked on Tuesday, Ashton-Cirillo simply doesn't seem to have the resources to fly around the globe at whim, which appears to be part of his background:

According to her byline with The Nevada Independent, she has lived in Las Vegas since 2004; according to the Nevada Current she "established residency [there] in 2016 to be closer to" her ex-wife and child. In this phase of her life, she worked as a real estate analyst, a poker player, and the communications director at a healthcare company.

. . . In 2015, before her gender transition, Ashton-Cirillo went to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey to report on the refugee crisis, having been afraid to enter Syria itself.

. . . Ashton-Cirillo said that she began to "hate Russia" after visiting museums in the Baltic States while she was writing a novel, Fair. Right. Just., which she self-published in 2017. When Russia invaded Ukraine in full in February 2022, she traveled to Ukraine with plans to write a book on both the resulting refugee crisis and her previous experience with the Syrian refugee crisis.

Beginning about 2018, he underwent gender transition, including gender-affirming surgery. According to this site, "The cost of medical treatments can add up to more than $100,000, and they’re often not covered by health insurance." The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health says,

In the first five years, the researchers found, providing health care for transgender people cost between $34,000 and $43,000 per year of quality of life; after 10 years, the cost dropped to between $7,000 and $10,000 per year of quality of life.

Add to this the cost of self-publishing his various books and the opportunity cost of travel -- not only does he pay for air fare, food, and lodging, but he isn't getting an income while he's in Syria, the Baltics, and Ukraine. How is he paying for all this? And who vouches for him? He must have handlers. Who are they? This puff piece from last May in the Washington Blade unintentionally raises these questions:

The Blade first spoke with Ashton-Cirillo last December while she was in D.C. to speak with lawmakers on behalf of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry about the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s medical needs.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Joe Biden and spoke to a joint session of Congress less than three weeks after the interview.

Ashton-Cirillo early last month became a junior sergeant. She returned to D.C. on May 15.

Ashton-Cirillo met with U.S. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and aides for U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) before she left the nation’s capital on May 19. Ashton-Cirillo also spoke to journalists from the Global South at the National Press Club and met with José Andrés, whose World Central Kitchen continues to operate in Ukraine, and Amnesty International representatives.

Somebody scheduled all those meetings and convinced all those journalists and politicians he was worth their time. Who was behind this? What was the agenda? And Sarah/Mike seems to fly back and forth from Ukraine to Washington pretty frequently -- even if it's on discount flights, I doubt if the pay of a Ukrainian junior sergeant covers it.

But let's ask another set of questions, that Sen Vance has also brought up:

[T]he U.S. State Department confirmed that the American government is aware that a citizen journalist, known as Gonzalo Lira, is currently in prison in Ukraine. Lira has reportedly been accused by the Ukrainians of having “had a criminal intent aimed at the manufacture, distribution materials containing justification, recognition as legitimate, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, which began in 2014, as well as justification, recognition as legitimate of the temporary occupation of part of Ukraine territory.”

Ashton-Cirillo has publicly admitted to being involved in the prosecution of Lira, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Chile. Last week, the transgender spokesperson claimed to have met with Lira while giving testimony in the case, claiming that the YouTuber is in good mental and physical health. Lira has previously claimed to have been tortured and extorted while in prison after being arrested initially in May.

So Ashton-Cirillo has admitted to some role in trhe prosecution of Gonzalo Lira -- but wait a moment. Isn't he just a combat medic and a junior sergeant, or something like that? What's he doing with the organs of Ukrainian state security and their gulag? Here's what we currently know about Gonzalo Lira:

The State Department has confirmed that American citizen Gonzalo Lira is being held in a Ukrainian prison over charges related to his speech and views on the war in Ukraine.

Lira is a popular YouTuber and journalist who was arrested by the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) in May for creating content that was critical of the Ukrainian government and explaining how the Russia-Ukraine war was provoked. He was charged over claims that he “justified the Russian invasion.”

. . . “We are aware of the detention of Mr. Lira in Ukraine. We take our role in assisting US citizens abroad seriously and are providing all appropriate assistance,” a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News on Tuesday.

“We are monitoring the situation but have no further comment at this time. We reiterate our message that US citizens should not travel to Ukraine due to the active armed conflict,” the spokesperson added.

So the State Department is telling US citizens not to travel to Ukraine, but it's hard to avoid thinking that Sarah/Mike is there under some sort of tacit understanding that this is OK, and indeed, to mess around with other US citizens there, to the point of having them sent to the gulag for wrongthink. In any case, yesterday, as soon as the case hit the news via Sen Vance,

The Ukrainian military has announced that it has suspended controversial transgender spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo for allegedly making unapproved statements on social media; however, there have been no updates from the Ukrainians or the Biden administration on the fate of an American citizen journalist currently imprisoned in Ukraine.

Following a row sparked by inquiries initiated by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), as reported by Breitbart News, the Command of the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) announced on Wednesday that Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American transgender individual, has been suspended from the role of spokesperson.

So, what's Sarah/Mike's current role? Is he going to stay in Ukraine? Doing what? On whose dime? Is he still in the Ukrainian armed forces as a combat medic or whatever despite his suspension as spokestrans? If not, when will he return to the US? As what? On whose dime?

Sarah/Mike is an expensive project. Somebody's paying for it. I like Sen Vance's initiative, I hope he keeps it up, because I think we have a great deal more to learn.

But another problem is that Mike Ashton-Cirillo could well become Ukraine's Dylan Mulvaney, the public face of the whole ongoing fiasco. I think President Zelensky belatedly woke up to this yesterday.

The Michelle Obama Option

The idea of running Michelle Obama for president isn't new, but Ted Cruz gave it a different twist as a solution to the Joe-and-Kamala conundrum:

“Here’s the scenario that I think is perhaps the most likely and most dangerous,” Cruz said on his “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast. “In August of 2024, the Democrat kingmakers jettison Joe Biden and parachute in Michelle Obama.”

Cruz explained that by running Michelle Obama as the party’s candidate, the Democrats could “avoid the problems” of having to choose a candidate among political figures like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Vice President Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Sen Cruz sees this as effectively a dropping of the charade and an acknmowledgement that Barack has been pulling the strings all along:

“Barack Obama is already running the Biden administration,” Cruz said. “I think he is already the puppet master, behind this Biden White House, I don’t think Joe Biden is the decision maker. And so, when I see the media turning on Joe Biden right now, I think the odds of Michelle Obama parachuting in in August of 2024 have risen dramatically.”

I've posted here that I don't think Barack is the puppet master in the first place. But I also think the idea that putting Barack and Michelle back in the White House with Barack again running the show would be a reprise of the golden age -- or at least, it could be pitched as that -- is just as much a mistake.

I always sensed background vibes in the Obama years that the two didn't get along, and if nothing else, they have to be praised for maintaining the facade that they did for eight difficult years. And as of 2019, things had only gotten worse:

Michelle and Barack Obama are ferociously feuding while living separate lives, and pals fear the bubbling bad blood will boil over into an ugly, scandal scarred divorce!

. . . Currently, Barack jets around the globe on big-money speaking gigs from a base in Washington, D.C., while Michelle, 55, rented a sprawling home in the Hollywood Hills, where she’s expanding her blooming showbiz career and schmoozing with big A-listers Beyoncé, Jay-Z and the Clooneys.

Their separate careers and problems with wild daughters Malia, 21, and Sasha, 18, have torn apart their family life, insiders dish.

Apparently this was the case even while they were in the White House, per this report from 2013:

Michelle Obama has had enough. According to a bombshell new report, the First Lady and Barack Obama are sleeping in separate White House bedrooms. Michelle is also preparing to boot her hubby of 21 years out of their ritzy Chicago home - and seriously discussing divorce.

“The smart money says the marriage is doomed,” a source told the National Enquirer. “Barack and Michelle have had a rocky go for years and mainly stayed together for their daughters and his political career. “But now Michelle is mad AS hell. She feels violated in front of the whole world, and screamed at him, ‘I’ve had enough.’ “She’s met with divorce lawyers and told Barack that she wants a life apart from him. “Michelle will stay in the White House for the rest of Barack’s term for appearances’ sake, but she made it clear they’ll be leading separate lives.

“She’s moving into one of the vacant bedrooms in the family’s private living quarters, and she’s preparing to move his clothes and personal things out of their million-dollar house in Chicago.”

To make a return to the White House by the two as a couple, with Michelle a ventriloquist's dummy on Barack's lap, a remotely credible enterprise would require that the two return to the old charade of domestic bliss. I can't imagine either wants to do this, when they appear to be doing perfectly well individually outside the public eye.

But let's go back to the problem that Hillary first illustrated, but so far, nobody's looked at very closely. On one hand, Hillary was never a charismatic bombshell with working-class appeal like Eva Peron, but on the other, even though Hillary was frumpy, she didn't have the gravitas of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, or Angela Merkel. In fact, it didn't help her at all that almost any woman besides Hillary could clearly turn Bill's crank better than Hillary could.

In fact, there's the pesky subtext that won't go away that Barack is gay. And let's not forget that by late in the Obama era, YouTubers were calling Michelle "Mike". This is the unspoken problem of Bud Light, that there are subtle signals that resonate in the popular subconscious that can attach themselves to brands without warning: suddenly, Bud Light became gay beer, and nobody who wasn't openly gay wanted to be seen drinking it.

By the same token, Michelle is seen among the same cis male population as unsexy in a masculine sort of way, such that anyone married to her would probably prefer more feminine company, even if they're guys. Michelle as president is so ugly, she'll make all us guys turn gay. Neither Hillary nor Michelle is credible in a conventional spousal role, nor as a symbolic national spouse, even though each tries to seem as though she is, which leads to an overall impression of phoniness.

So I don't think political mechanics would make Michelle electable, especially in the unspoken context that anyone married to her would have to be gay. But this ignores Sen Cruz's implication that the Democrats have to get past the Kamala problem somehow: Biden has announced that Kamala is staying on the ticket, she's his designated successor, and to replace her with a white candidate, even a white female, would lose the party black women voters and surely the general election. Thus Michelle Obama, which nevertheless won't work.

So far, that view is probably correct. The only way it could be contradicted would be to have a Kennedy type who's so charismatic that nobody notices there's no black on the ticket. Robert Kennedy Jr so far doesn't quite qualify. As this piece in Slate puts it, The Cake Is Baked. Deal With It.

[T]here are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.

. . . Rather than worrying about what Harris might do in 2028, Democrats would do well to imagine what she and her team might do if they get thrown under the bus, especially if they feel like they are taking the fall for the failings of the president himself. If you think cutting memoirs from random Cabinet secretaries are bad, imagine the tea that a spurned Harris and her team might spill about the inner workings of the Biden administration. There are probably more embarrassing stories to share than bitey German Shepherds and interminable slide shows over lunch.

So quit it: Vice President Harris isn’t going anywhere.

Let's recall as well that Sen Cruz is a Republican. If he's saying nominating Michelle is a "dangerous" option, maybe we should ask if he's trying to goad the Democrats into picking it.

Things Aren't Going Well In Ukraine

The biological male in the photo above is Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, according to Wikipedia,

an American former journalist serving as a spokesperson for Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, in which she is a junior sergeant. . . . She arrived in Ukraine in March 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion, and has variously served as a war correspondent, a representative in aid negotiations, a civilian analyst with the Ministry of Defense, and a combat medic.

. . . Starting in March 2022, Ashton-Cirillo reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Kharkiv, Ukraine, primarily for LGBTQ Nation, often writing about the war's effect on LGBTQ people. A trans woman, she is thought to have been the first openly transgender war correspondent.

The Wikipedia entry lists various official and quasi-official positions she's held in Ukraine:

In Kharkiv, she worked closely with the Ukrainian military and police, and was appointed by the mayor of Zolochiv, Kharkiv Oblast, as a representative to advocate with aid groups. After witnessing and reporting on the October 2022 Kyiv missile strikes—including posting a controversial widely shared video that showed a dead body—she resigned from LGBTQ Nation to become a combat medic in Ukraine's Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, a Crimean Tatar unit. In February 2023, she was wounded by Russian shelling while serving on the front lines in the Donbas with the 209th Battalion of the 113th Kharkiv Defense Brigade. She was subsequently assigned to the Territorial Defense Forces, and became one of its English-language spokespeople in August 2023.

So, whom are they trying to kid? Most Ukrainians belong to Orthodox Christian denominations, which are even less friendly to transsexualism than Roman Catholics or Protestant Evangelicals. A US national, she can't be there to appeal to Ukrainians and rally them to the cause. Yet it appears that she functions as some type of official Englsih-language spokesperson-cum-pinup trans for the Ukrainian armed forces. I doubt if many Ukrainians in or out of their army give her the time of day. She's there to speak English and appeal to a US audience, in particular a US audience aligned with the trans agenda.

Her newfound prominence in US media comes in the context of growing skepticism about the war, for instance in this op-ed in Newsweek:

Despite great hopes for a rapid success, Ukraine's months-in-the-making offensive has sputtered from the outset. That shouldn't have surprised anyone in the White House. On April 5, two months before the start of the offensive, I wrote that "Zelensky's troops—with little to no air power and a dearth in artillery ammunition—could suffer egregious casualties while gaining little."

. . . Whereas Ukraine was reported to have lost 17,500 troops in the first year of the war, it is presently assessed to have lost a breathtakingly high 50,000 additional deaths, for a total of 70,000 dead and 120,000 wounded.

. . . Rather than repeating over the next year and a half what has already not worked—potentially costing Ukraine yet additional hundreds of thousands of losses—it's time to try something that has a chance to succeed. In other words, it's time to acknowledge objective reality and employ policies that can work.

At the official level, this is unlikely to happen, and what we're seeing is an effort by President Zelensky not to focus on battlefield success, but to appeal to a narrow US audience that will continue sending him taxpayer money at the current level. Thus there's an English-language spokesperson who's meant to appeal to the Biden-aligned queer community as informed support for Ukraine's prospects falls away.

Another part of Zelensky's strategy appears to be to acknowledge the obvious, which is that Ukrainian corruption, credibly alleged to be worse than Russia's or Mexico's, is diverting US aid. In response, he's rounding up the usual suspects. Two weeks ago, he fired his defense minister. Oleksii Reznikov:

Although Reznikov has yet to be tied with any of the corruption scandals personally, the Times went on to admit that the resignation has “elevated the issue to the highest level of Ukrainian politics”. Unnamed Ukrainian officials even told the paper that some funds intended for military contracts “failed to produce weaponry or ammunition and that some money has vanished,” while claiming that the issue was merely confined to the early days of the war.

Just yesterday, he fired at least six of Reznikov's deputies as well:

Deputy defense ministers including Hanna Maliar, Vitalii Deyneha and Denys Sharapov, as well as the state secretary of the Ministry of Defense, Kostiantyn Vashchenko, were fired, according to the Telegram account of Taras Melnychuk, permanent representative of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Melnychuk provided no explanation of the firings, but the government has been investigating accusations of corruption in the military related to purchasing equipment.

It's worth noting that throughout history, despots tolerate corruption as a useful tool -- their vassals can steal as long as it's convenient to let them do it. As soon as it's more useful to remove them, they'll be fired (or worse) for the corruption they've always practiced -- but the system functions the same as ever, the point isn't to cure the corruption, the point is to remove whomever isn't convenient at a particular time.

What we aren't seeing is any change in US policy. Instead, we're seeing a gradual acknowledgement in the NATO establishment that they're pulling a bait-and-switch:

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Sunday that the West must make preparations for a “long war in Ukraine,” and declaring that there is “no doubt” Ukraine will eventually join the American-led military alliance.

In an interview with the German Funke media group, the Norwegian politician threw cold water on the notion of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine coming to an end any time soon.

Let's recall that the 2022 line on Ukraine, first from Zelensky and quickly echoed in the West, was that Ukraine's heroic resistance to the Russian invasion would lead to Putin's quick collapse, at the minimal cost of some Ukrainian lives and stockpiles of obsolescent Warsaw Pact weapons held in NATO reserves. A year later, we're looking at a "long war" using tactics that have proven ineffective, funded largely by the US taxpayer in increments of $20 billion here, $30 billion there, with no end in sight.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian people have themselves tired of empty heroics. Larry Johnson at Gateway Pundit quotes the account of a Polish volunteer in Ukraine:

“There are no willing ones. They are looking for them on the streets. In Lviv there are “round-ups”, people are taken from construction sites, from bars. Recently I witnessed such a situation at the bus station in Lvov. Five policemen stood and checked everyone who wanted to leave Lvov.

Eight people were detained in this way. Many reasons for the current situation with mobilization originate in Bakhmut. It was such a plum, such a meat grinder that there was no one left to fight”.

This brings me to the surmise I've had for a while: there's a skim going on in Ukraine. That's just in the news. It's likely in the multibillions, and firing half a dozen bureaucrats won't fix it -- it's not meant to be fixed. The skim will continue as long as multibillions in US aid continues. The fighting itself is increasingly just a charade to justify and prolong the skim. But let's return to Milo Minderbinder, who played both sides of World War II for his own benefit in Catch-22: some of that skim is finding its way back to the US. That's got to be why there's no prospect of any serious change in policy at our end.

Who's getting the kickbacks over here from that Ukrainian skim?

A Reminder: The Problem Isn't Hunter, The Problem Is Joe

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 belatedly how much Joe has been on the take, indeed throughout his career -- and compared to Nixon, Carter, and even the Clintons, this is also starting to look like a matter of degree.

Thus we have a relatively minor story from last week:

A potentially devastating video from 2005 has resurfaced showing Hunter Biden socializing with then-senator Joe Biden and potential clients, discussing “the weather.” I’m just kidding. They weren’t talking about the weather; they were talking business.

I'll get into what the video reveals about the Hunter-Joe tag team below, but let's look at where it stands in the overall timeline. The dates covered in Hunter's laptop run from roughly 2010 to 2019, when he dropped it off at the Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved it. Up to now, the earliest entries on the Hunter timeline include Dubya's appointment of Hunter to the Amtrak board in 2006 as a favor to Joe as senator, as well as his 2006 purchase of Paradigm Global Advisers with his uncle James Biden. This tape from 2005 definitely widens the picture.

According to Wikipedia, after he graduated from law school in 1996, Hunter went to work for the MBNA bank, headquartered in Wilmington, and was there until 1998. It's worth noting that during the 1990s, MBNA

became one of the most profitable companies in the United States, the world's largest independent credit card issuer, and the largest private-sector employer in Delaware.

In 1995, MBNA moved its headquarters from a suburban location to Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. This investment was credited with helping to revive Wilmington's downtown real estate market.

Hunter's status as an executive there would have facilitated the relationship between MBNA and his dad Joe as senator from Delaware, and it's hard to avoid thinking Joe facilitated the growth and success of MBNA in a highly regulated banking and credit card environment. From there, Hunter went to the US Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton, which looks like a run-of-the-mill patronage job.

Biden then became a lobbyist, co-founding the firm of Oldaker, Biden & Belair. According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which "Biden wouldn't ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn't tell his father about them."

But the 2005 video provides an insight into their actual working relationship during this same period. According to the first link above,

[I]t captures a moment where Hunter Biden stands on the sidelines while Joe Biden interacts with attendees, “working the room,” as Kelly describes it. After waiting patiently for the right moment, Hunter eventually joins the conversation to greet a couple with whom he had apparently discussed a potential business opportunity linked to his lobbying firm.

. . . “Maybe we can work something out,” Joe Biden says to the couple in the video.

“Yeah, yeah, that is what we will do,” the woman excitedly replies.

“Hunter was just telling me about his law firm in Washington, his law firm,” replies the man next to her.

“Yeah,” Joe Biden says, clearly not surprised.

. . . At this point, the woman starts engaging with Joe, while Hunter and the man go off to the side to have a separate conversation that the camera can’t pick up.

. . . This took place while Joe Biden was a senator. He wasn’t even vice president yet, and it appears that he and Hunter had been working political events for years to make business deals.

. . . While the new impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden involves influence-peddling during his time as vice president, it’s quite clear the shady Biden family business was going on well before that.

The meeting where this was recorded was in South Carolina, when at the time, Joe was a senator from Delaware. What was pretty clearly being pitched was Joe's overall influence in Washington, something that would only grow when he became vice president. This suggests the range of Joe's marketing efforts even as a senator, when Hunter's position as Joe's agent and intermediary was in only its early stages. In addition, this meeting, as well as Hunter's career phase with Oldaker, Biden & Belair, isn't covered on his laptop, and we know little about his activities then otherwise. Nevertheless,

“Back in 2002, he filed his Form 1040 late-filing and owing over $100,000 in taxes; 2003, owed more than $100,000 dollars in taxes; 2004, late-filed and owed more than $20,000 in taxes; and then 2005, late filed his personal return and owed over $100,000 in taxes,” [an unnamed IRS] whistleblower testified.

His ex-wife Kathleen Buhle wrote in her memoir

she first began noticing Hunter's drinking might be a problem around 2001 . . . when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. . . . By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time[.]

What this suggests is that the working relationship between Hunter and Joe was closely coordinated well before Joe became vice president, and it worked especially well for Joe throughout the latter part of his political career -- less well, it would seem, for Hunter, since as the working relationship developed, so did his addictions. But the big question is this: Joe had a modus operandi of taking money for influence that he emplyed throughout at least his later years in the Senate, extending into his time as vice president.

So when did he stop taking these payments? Much of what we've learned about Joe has come from Hunter's laptop, which covers only the time of Joe's vice presidency and his interregnum, up to his decision to run for president in 2019. But we're slowly starting to learn Joe was on the take at least before the time of the laptop. What about after? Habits don't change. Joe's been the same guy, as far as we can tell, all his life. What's he up to now?

A Theory Of Joe's Fake E-Mail IDs

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 chosen consciously. Based on his policies and performance, it seems altogether possible that "JRB [Joseph Robinette Biden] Ware" sees himself as the "head of a communist underground cell in Washington" in the spirit of his namesake.

The main objection to this theory is that Joe doesn't read books, he plagiarizes them. Cashill is postulating a level of subtlety and depth far beyond a guy who, as it suits him, will claim to have been raised in black churches, by Puerto Ricans, or by Jews.

It might be barely within the realm of credibility to propose that Barack Obama was some sort of New Left sleeper agent, but the idea that Joe Biden would somehow see himself as a Stalinist spy under deep cover doesn't pass the laugh test -- it's too much like all Joe's other tall tales. "You may think this is a joke -- I'm not kidding here, though -- I was a Soviet spy. I mean, I actually ran both Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. And Nixon didn't catch me!"

But Cashill's piece actually helped me to clarify one of the points I made in yesterday's post, that's been made by writers from Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich to Ralph Ellson in Invisible Man, that a major factor in the original New Deal coalition was an alliance between Northern industrial money, funneled through non-profits and universities, and Southern segregationists, which in fact predated Roosevelt and extended back to Reconstruction.

And Joe Biden, rather than being a Soviet agent, made his career from this alliance. We need look no farther for substantiation of this than Ted Kaufman, Biden's longtime adviser, who was appointed to the remainder of Joe's Senate term when Joe became vice president in 2009.

Kaufman originally moved to Delaware in 1966 to work for DuPont as an engineer.

In 1972 he joined Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign, which was considered to be a long shot, on a volunteer basis. After Biden's surprise victory in 1972, he took a one-year leave of absence from DuPont to organize and head Senator Biden's Delaware Office. In 1976 he became Biden's Chief of Staff and administrative assistant and served until 1995, also working on Biden's subsequent Senate campaigns. After Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, Kaufman was chosen to head Biden's transition team.

Given what we know about the Delaware Way, nobody runs for Senate and gets elected there without the DuPonts, and the DuPonts are Northern industrial money if anyone is. Not only does Ted Kaufman seem to have engineered DuPont support for Joe, but DuPont let him take a leave of absence to set up Joe's office once he was elected.

What we so far know little about is how the relationship between Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden got started, but it's hard to avoid thinking Kaufman by 1972 had become a conduit between Joe and the DuPonts, when Joe at the time was a fervent segregationist in a Southern state:

In a series of never-before-published letters from Biden, which were reviewed by CNN, the strength of his opposition to busing comes into sharper focus, particularly how he followed the lead of – and sought support from – some of the Senate’s most fervent segregationists.

. . . Biden, who at the time was 34 and serving his first term in the Senate, repeatedly asked for – and received – the support of Sen. James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a leading symbol of Southern resistance to desegregation. Eastland frequently spoke of blacks as “an inferior race.”

Indeed, by 1974, the DuPonts were happy enough with Joe to give him a deal on a mansion that had been part of the family estate.

[I]t originally belonged to the du Ponts, a prominent family who settled in Wilmington, Delaware and made billions off of their gunpowder business, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (which now goes by the name DuPont).

. . . [I]t was built in 1930, and it includes five bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and three fireplaces, spread across two stories and just over 10,000 square feet. The former Vice President called this abode “The Station,” and it even acted as the headquarters for his 1988 presidential campaign.

The DuPonts let him have it for $185,000 in 1974, and he sold it for $1.2 million in 1996.

In yesterday's post, when I noted that the Democrats, having lost much of the old New Deal coalition, had nevertheless gained "African-Americans . . . gays [I should have said "queers"], radical feminists, aging hippies, and parlor socialists", I left out the greens, but it's worth noting, as Trump has pointed out, that the greens are doing the will of the Northern industrialists in agitating for tax-supported projects like solar energy and EVs that will go from government budgets to their bottom lines.

Evs will be built in whole or part in China, using Chinese raw materials. It's worth noting that up to 1957, DuPont owned 24% of General Motors, when the US Supreme Court ordered DuPont to divest its shares:

In concluding that the law had been violated, the decision noted that “the bulk of du Pont’s production of automotive finishes and fabrics has always supplied the largest part of the requirements of General Motors, the one customer in the automobile industry connected to du Pont by a stock interest, and [so] there is an overwhelming inference that du Pont’s commanding position was promoted by its stock interest, and was not gained solely on competitive merit.”

As Ferdinand Lundberg has pointed out, it's never easy to determine who owns what part of what company, with ownership concealed by street names, investment funds, and other devices -- but it's hard to avoid thinking even now that what's good for the US auto sector -- de-unionization and government subsidies, among other things -- will be good for DuPont.

For now, that's why Joe, the last relic of the old Democrat coalition, is president. He's anything but a Soviet plant.