RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal.

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was Obama’s policy “point man.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/decision-time-for-the-costco-mom/

If you get this wrong, those toilet paper scrums at Costco might become a routine occurrence.

Earlier this year, a strange spectacle kept recurring at one of the country’s most popular big box stores.

Costco shoppers across the land wrestled each other for industrial-sized packages of toilet paper; as panic set in about the looming coronavirus pandemic, well-heeled suburbanites quickly depleted the retailers’ nationwide supply of Charmin and Quilted Northern. Even the store’s discount Kirkland brand sold out fast.

It’s unclear exactly why toilet paper topped the list of the COVID-19 survival kit but the scenes were instructive as far as observing upscale suburban women in their natural habitat. The toilet paper rush of 2020 probably started with a few comments at the monthly Bunco game or the ladies’ league liquid lunch or at a bespoke med spa house party.

Soon enough, premium membership card in hand, suburban women cruised their Range Rovers to the nearest Costco ready to fight for their right to a 30-roll pack like it was the last size 4 Veronica Beard camo blazer at Nordstrom. Photos of TP booty were proudly posted on Facebook; the booties of Jacob and Olivia would be safely clean for years to come.

And thus we had a peek into the workings of the hivemind of modern-day suburban moms.

In 2018, the sorority of suburban sisterhood found a common enemy: Donald Trump. Suburban congressional districts from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to Orange County, California flipped from Republican to Democrat, giving Nancy Pelosi enough new members to take back her coveted speaker’s gavel. Like nearly all midterm elections, the outcome was a rebuke of the sitting president. Millions of white suburban women, amid a booming economy and period of international peace, cried “but his tweets!” all the way to their polling places.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/a-momentous-election/

So here we are, 10 days out from the most momentous election of my lifetime. 

Candor requires that I admit that I have often felt that sense of existential emergency around election time. But reflection tells me that the closest thing to the 2020 election was the 2016 election, and that was not because of its wild card—Donald Trump—but because of “sure thing” Hillary Clinton, the single most corrupt serious contender for president in our history. 

That may seem melodramatic, but the truth is often melodramatic. 

I did not, until recently, suspect Joe Biden of serious corruption. The ongoing revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” have led me to reconsider that judgment, especially when combined with the ongoing bulletins from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who claims that Joe Biden, contrary to his repeated assertions, was involved in discussions about his son’s business dealings. 

So far, I believe, the public is not privy to any smoking-gun evidence about Joe Biden’s involvement, but the gun is warm and the optics are bad. The implicit oath of omertà followed by the media with respect to the saga of Hunter’s laptop has been truly impressive. 

Day after day, the New York Post, which first broke the story a week or so back, has been broadcasting more and more tidbits from this extraordinary trove of perversity and apparent corruption. No matter that the Post is the country’s fifth-largest paper: Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and television news have joined forces to close the public’s eyes, seal its ears, and scream there is nothing to see here, move along, and pay no attention to those muffled cries from the oubliette. It has been an extraordinary act of malignant solidarity, worthy of the Politburo in the heady days of Joe Stalin’s airbrush. 

I think this strategy is in the process of backfiring. Twitter may close down the Post’s account and forbid people to retweet its stories, but that, too, is news and the news, finally, will out. The Streisand Effect will not be denied. 

I have limited curiosity about Hunter Biden’s choice in narcotics or prostitutes. His alleged influence peddling, however, trading introductions to “the Big Guy” for wads of cash, especially if some of that cash wound up in the Biden family fisc—well that is something else entirely. The implications of this story have yet to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream media, who are playing the three wise monkeys for Halloween, at least so far as Democrats are concerned. But it won’t matter. Curiosity is a stronger passion than politically fired discretion. We’ll find out what’s on that hard drive, and we’ll find out soon. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16682/american-election-party-system

The American two-party system resembles cartel arrangements in business: it restricts access to power to two gigantic machines that, like big business driving out little business, prevent diversity and competition on a large scale. As a result, small radial groups are forced to infiltrate the two parties and push them in directions not necessarily wanted by the mass of their followers.

The two-party system offers unusual political stability.

The reverse side, however, is that it narrows policy options to two and the role of elections to deciding the exercise of power rather than its substance.

Does the current presidential campaign in the United States have an ideological content?

Having covered six of the last nine campaigns as a reporter and followed the other three from the sidelines my answer is “yes and no”.

Let’s start with the no side of my equivocal answer first.

The current campaign is focused on two themes that leave little room for the broader questions the US faces with dramatic demographic, cultural and societal changes at home and the crumbling structure of world order.

The first theme of the campaign has been the personality of Donald J Trump. No leader in American history has been the subject of such vilification as Trump.

Jimmy Carter was mocked as “the peanut farmer” and Ronald Reagan dismissed as “Hollywood cowboy”. Bill Clinton was laughed at as “the skirt-chasing bozo” while George W Bush generated an industry with his Bushisms. Barack Obama was dubbed “the ventriloquist’s dummy” who, as Hillary Clinton quipped, “makes a speech each time there is a crisis”. Before that, Richard Nixon had been branded “Tricky Dick” and Lyndon Johnson castigated as serial liar.