RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/doj-and-the-media-are-the-real-story-in-belated-biden-corruption-revelations/

Here is what the New York Times doesn’t tell you.

I can’t decide which is my favorite part of the story dribbled out by the media-Democrat complex’s mothership last night.

It’s probably the part, 16 paragraphs down, in which the New York Times explains how it knew the Biden-Harris State Department was stonewalling on the production of documents showing that, while Joe Biden was vice president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter beseeched the Obama-Biden State Department to lobby the Italian government on behalf of Burisma — the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was lavishly paying Hunter so it could have access to Vice President Biden and his political influence.

Pray tell, how did the Times know? Well, as reporter Kenneth Vogel relates, because the State Department “had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop” (emphasis added).

Right, the laptop from hell.

That’s the Hunter Biden laptop that the Times, the rest of the media-Democrat complex, and the politicized “community” of current and former national-security officials colluded with the 2020 Biden campaign to convince the public was a Russian disinformation operation. The same laptop over which Hunter and his allies smeared the repair-shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, as a thief . . . even as they implied that the incriminating data might be fake.

Like the FBI, the IRS, and rest of the Biden Justice Department investigators, who had acquired the laptop data months earlier, the Times understood that the laptop was authentic, that the data was not manufactured by a foreign intelligence service. Ergo, as Vogel relates, the Times sued the Biden-Harris State Department when it failed to produce relevant government correspondence, the existence of which the laptop established.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/15/the-woke-medias-grotesque-gloating-over-the-shooting-of-trump/

Imagine being taken off the airwaves because your bosses are worried you might gloat over an attempted murder. That, reportedly, has been the fate of pundits on MSNBC’s maddeningly woke talk show, Morning Joe. It’s been pulled from the air today, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, allegedly out of fear that a guest might make an ‘inappropriate’ comment about the shooting. CNN has the lowdown. It reports that MSNBC benched its best-known show, despite the ‘seismic’ events of the past 48 hours, as a pre-emptive strike against the possibility that one of the ‘stable of two-dozen-plus guests’ would say something nuts about the violence visited on Trump.

If this is true – and we have no reason to doubt that it is, given the liberal media’s been full of ‘inappropriate’ chatter on the shooting of Trump – it is terrifyingly revealing. That one of America’s top liberal broadcasters seemingly cannot trust its own talking heads to be sombre and decent in the aftermath of the attempted slaying of a former president is extraordinary. It points to more than the problem of shock-jockery, where people who say outrageous things tend to get the most clicks and clout. It speaks to something worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome. No, it shines a light on the wholesale unanchoring of the woke elites from the norms of democratic politics, and their drift into an alternative world of invective and vengeance.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-fact-checks-biden

To measure the terror now gripping the mainstream media in the wake of the Biden–Trump debate, consider this: the New York Times is now fact-checking Joe Biden in favor of Donald Trump.

Monday’s print edition of the Times contains an article titled “In ABC Interview, Exaggerations about Polling and Trump.” The article applies a level of scrutiny to Biden’s Friday interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that is nearly unprecedented toward a Democratic candidate.

The Times now quotes Biden verbatim, with the clear intention of putting his verbal shuffles on full display:

Biden: “After that debate, . . . I did events in—in—in Georgia, did events like this today, large crowds, overwhelming response, no—no—no slipping.”

So remorseless is the Times toward Biden’s speech stumbles that it even records a missing syllable:

“The New York Times had me behind before anything having to do with this race—had me hind—behind 10 points.”

Factual errors that before would have been allowed to pass unnoticed are now harvested and amplified:

Before the interview on Friday, Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump at a rally in Wisconsin that he would “beat him again in 2020.” At a Fourth of July barbecue with military members and their families, Mr. Biden referred to Mr. Trump as “one of our former colleagues” before correcting himself. And at a fund-raising reception in East Hampton, New York, he confused Italy and France when referring to the location of a veterans’ cemetery he recently visited.