My instinctive answer to the question "did he?" is: Why would he? Biden is not a strong opponent, so what's the point of taking him out? It's what other Democrats want to do. Why would Trump want to help them? My hypothesis is that Trump has a more complex game that his opponents do not understand and that they are therefore making awful blunders.
Back to Smith:
[T]he backdrop of [the Democrats] effort is far more complex and convoluted, connected not just to Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine and related evidence but the three-year war of attrition the Democrats have waged against the president. Their main instrument was the Trump-Russia collusion story... [but] Ukraine was always at the center of the Trump-Russia affair....
One of the first things he did after the Mueller report debunked the collusion narrative was to call the Ukranian president and ask him to help [get to the bottom of an underhanded years-long campaign against him].... Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election....There's so much more at the link that I'm abandoning this effort to cut it down for easy consumption. Last paragraph:
Recent interviews with senior sources on Capitol Hill and newly acquired documents show that Ukraine was and continues to be central to the effort to take down Trump. That’s why Trump’s most urgent request of the Ukrainian president was to assist Attorney General William Barr in his investigation of the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe. “Our country has been through a lot,” Trump told President Zelensky. “They say a lot of it started with Ukraine.”...
[T]he panicked clamor coursing through the press at present is not about Joe Biden or his son or Trump’s alleged commerce with foreign powers. Rather, it is the fear that the Russiagate bubble is likely to burst. And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin.
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94 comments:
"Trump has a more complex game that his opponents do not understand and that they are therefore making awful blunders."
The issue is not what his opponents understand but what they can make Americans believe, particularly the Althouses of America.
I’ll believe the “ruin” when I see it.
My lesson from living in California and also witnessing the rot in the federal government (Lois Lerner etc) is that there will and continue to be absolutely no consequences to government officials’ corruption.
Their fear is palpable. In every headline, every breathless minute of Morning Joe, Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow, etc. It's that unspoken thing, the reality that the entire coup might be exposed for what it is, and that it could bring down or stain very favored people, including a former President.
The entirety of the media and political class- by which I mean both Democrats and never-Trump Republicans- is banking their lives and fortunes on removing the current President, without shining any light on how they did it.
But there are an Army of Davids with LED lights. I'm not sure there's enough blankets to cover all of us. If he gets impeached, but not removed, he wins in a landslide. If he gets removed, everyone else gets removed (via election- just to be clear). It'll be the largest turnover of incumbents ever.
It's not going to be pretty.
I want to impeach the Fake News and convict them in the court of public opinion. I watched Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes on Sunday. Very misleading story. Chuck Todd shouted down the Senator from WI because he didn't like what he was saying. And this AM on CNN, more breathless nothing.
They all need to go. They are all Dem advocates.
Under the Fake News view of the world, it is perfectly fine for Dem officeholders to take millions in bribes from foreign countries in return for policy favors and the Dems are totally immune from prosecution because, well, they're Democrats. Pure bullshit.
If CNN was a separate public company, it would be BK in about 2 years.
Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election as it appeared in August of 2016 in the New York Times
Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
Basically it was dirt on Manafort that came from Ukrainian intelligence files.
The whole point is to obfuscate this. It’s the script of the impeachment where it wasn’t about Bill Clinton’s forcible rape of Juanita Broaddrick, of which there was enough evidence to send him to jail, even then, let alone if you looked at the evidence through todays lens, but it was about a “blow job.”
The dirt on Biden is out there in the public record. Biden bragged about it. And notice how studiously they keep China out of it. No need to dig further.
Remember the new Ukraine president is another anti-corruption reaction. I would expect he has an incentive to help.
And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin.
From their mouth to God's ear. At this point, the institutions that pushed this narrative need to fail completely so that they can be built back up into organizations worthy of our trust.
If that is really what it hinges on, they better have more evidence than what they have shown so far. Four spades doesn’t make a flush.
People not disgusted by 27 years of Bill & Hillary scandals aren't likely to be bothered by 3 years of anti-Trump treachery and deceit. The officials have nothing to fear from a DC jury.
I agree that Biden is weak and other Democrats are probably running this Op hoping to get rid of him. However, I do get the narrative that whatever Trump might have dug up wouldn't be used now but later during the General Election phase. So the argument makes sense from that perspective. This is about attack an opponent when it is one-on-one.
Still, it is all absurd. Political opponents nearly by definition are always trying to take someone down. So the real question was Trump trying to force a foreign power, and as has been asked, what was the force? Military aid? Trump gave the aid. However, Biden is on video record of withholding aid to the same country to force them to take down a political opponent. May not be a domestic political opponent, but the prosecutor was a political opponent all the same.
So if Trump has committed a crime; that crime was first committed by Biden, who boasted about committing the crime. It only seems reasonable Trump would want to investigate, right?
Trump was under investigation, and still is, having to do with election interference. Giuliani is his lawyer in that case. Giuliani has a right to gather evidence in his client’s defense, and his client has a right to a defense.
Obviously election interference came out of Ukraine. Why are we not allowed to care about it? Because Democrats know that Democrats were behind it.
Crowdstrike never saw the servers that they pronounced were hacked by the Russians. Metadata on the leaked file itself indicates that it was copied to a flash drive before being uploaded. The timeline that Crowdstrike gives doesn’t add up, there were emails in the leak that were written AFTER Crowdstrike claimed that they had given Russia the boot from the DNC servers. See Steve McIntyre’s blog for that info. Crowdsrtike is a company that comes from that cesspool of Democrat corruption known as the Ukraine.
Lee Smith was fired from The Weekly Standard for publishing one of the first articles that showed Russiagate was a farce. He was willing to take a stand, a very unpopular one. I trust his reporting.
It is simply war. Trump leads the Constitutional American Republic's forces and the USMC into battle against the Intelligence Agencies of the European world government and CIA that have been running a clusterfuck of bribed traitors in DC, either paid off or secretly blackmailed by pedophilia traps, since the 1950s.
But they should never have killed DJT's friends JFK and JFK, Jr. And for those assassinations they are Unforgiven. And apparently many who do not resign will face GITMO Tribunals and be hung, unless they can take out DJT first.
Alas for the Democrats we can read the transcript. CNN and others tried to peddle edited bits to mislead, but we can read the transcript.
Trump asked Ukraine to cooperate with investigations into violations of US law. Is that improper? Imagine if Trump had instead asked Ukraine NOT to investigate and NOT to cooperate.
is this view more meta meta
https://thebulwark.com/impeachment-is-a-symptom-of-runaway-presidential-power-not-the-answer/
I don't think its a coincidence Ukrainegate broke shortly after the IG FISA report was completed and submitted to the FBI/CIA for redaction.
"Crowdstrike never saw the servers that they pronounced were hacked by the Russians. "
Who the hell did, then?
I found this article on the CrowdStrike in light of Trump's inquiry to Ukraine very interesting.
CrowdStrike and the Impeachment Frenzy
Excerpts below, more detail at link:
In their breathless coverage of the Russian hacking story, the media downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative victim. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server.
But the DNC refused.
Why would the purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Was it hiding something? Was it afraid the server’s contents would discredit the Russia-hacking story?
The answers to those questions began to emerge thanks to a July 2017 memorandum to President Trump by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts...
As set forth in its memorandum, VIPS’ investigative findings were nothing short of stunning.
First, VIPS concluded that the DNC data were not hacked by the Russians or anyone else accessing the server over the internet. Instead, the data were downloaded by means of a thumb drive or similar portable storage device physically attached to the DNC server...
VIPS also found that, if there had been a hack, the NSA would have a record of it that could quickly be retrieved and produced. But no such evidence has been forthcoming. Can this be because no hack occurred?
Even more remarkable, the experts determined that the files released by Guccifer 2.0 have been “run, via ordinary cut and paste, through a template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints.” In other words, the files were deliberately altered to give the false impression that they were hacked by Russian agents.
Thanks to the VIPS experts, the Russia-hacking claim — the very prologue of the Trump-Russia conspiracy story — appeared to have been affirmatively and convincingly undercut.
After the DNC denied law enforcement access to its server, the FBI — under James Comey’s leadership — meekly agreed to accept the findings of CrowdStrike, the DNC’s private cybersecurity firm, as to the server’s contents. This was in lieu of the FBI’s using legal process (such as a search warrant or forthwith grand jury subpoena) to seize and search the server for Russian malware and evidence of hacking, even though, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Comey conceded that “best practices” require “direct access” to the allegedly hacked computers.
So why did Comey and the FBI agree to such an impotent, absurd, and self-defeating arrangement?
...Comey replied under oath, “In the case of the DNC … we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity [CrowdStrike], that had done the work.”
...On March 13, 2019, a month before the Mueller report was released, VIPS submitted a memorandum to the attorney general in which they accurately predicted that Mueller would choose to “finesse” the key issue of whether or not the Russians hacked the DNC computers by relying on the purported analysis by “CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations.”
...Further to this point, VIPS posed this critical question:
Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller completes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving the U.S., and would most certainly have such packets if they exist.
"Biden is not a strong opponent, so what's the point of taking him out? It's what other Democrats want to do. Why would Trump want to help them?"
The issue is not whether Biden is a strong opponent, but whether Trump believes that Biden is a strong opponent.
Trump's own fixation on Biden in his Twitter rants and public statements shows pretty clearly that Trump thinks that Biden is his strongest opponent. Trump's focus almost exclusively has been on Biden, other than the occasional "Pocahontas" shout-out or "Crazy Bernie" reference.
"Trump has a more complex game that his opponents do not understand..."
As of today, Trump's more complex game plan appears to be to audition Rick Perry for the role of Fall Guy #1. Perry, for some reason, seems reluctant, feeling perhaps that the role lies outside his range.
Nunes did good work. I hope Admiral Mike Rogers gets a nice shout in Smith's book as well.
Professor Althouse said: My instinctive answer to the question "did he?" is: Why would he?
This was something I tried desperately to explain to a lib who clearly didn't understand.
The prevailing theory is that this was all to get dirt on Hunter Biden to use against Joe?
Really? By all accounts, Hunter is a pretty horrible person. There's plenty of dirt on him already, that's publicly available and simple to understand. This is neither. It doesn't have any sizzle to it. And Trump, despite all his faults, understands audiences and crowds. He knows what sizzles and what doesn't.
Even if you feel that Biden is a formidable adversary (why would you?), why go to all this effort when there's better stuff already out there? Trump isn't that stupid. Or at least not stupid in this particular way.
Professor Althouse said: My instinctive answer to the question "did he?" is: Why would he?
This was something I tried desperately to explain to a lib who clearly didn't understand.
The prevailing theory is that this was all to get dirt on Hunter Biden to use against Joe?
Really? By all accounts, Hunter is a pretty horrible person. There's plenty of dirt on him already, that's publicly available and simple to understand. This is neither. It doesn't have any sizzle to it. And Trump, despite all his faults, understands audiences and crowds. He knows what sizzles and what doesn't.
Even if you feel that Biden is a formidable adversary (why would you?), why go to all this effort when there's better stuff already out there? Trump isn't that stupid. Or at least not stupid in this particular way.
I think you are correct, that Trump is after the pre-2016 election conspiracy to prevent his election and undermine his Presidency if he was elected, and that is what the Democrats are trying to prevent with the Ukraine and impeachment nonsense. I am not convinced that AG Barr's investigation into the origins of the Russia-Ukraine business and possible conspiracy will ever see the light of day. We've been promised transparency and answers for so long and not gotten them that I have to believe the so-called deep state has complete control of this stuff.
The Louisiana Governor race should be very enlightening.
Let’s tag this as dense Althouse for not wanting to see how it would be in Trump’s interest to take down Biden after he became the Democratic nominee. Yes, he likely also had a more complex plan to force Ukraine to make peace on terms favorable to Russia. Getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens would be a twofer, as Ukraine publicly conducting such an investigation would tend to undermine support for Ukraine over Russia among Democrats.
Whatever you may think of the Democrats in Congress, the people parrying Trump’s efforts to make nice with Russia have been remarkably successful. They got Flynn fired in the early days, they got Russia sanctioned, and now they’ve blown the whistle on this latest gambit. That can only be because Republicans in Congress support them.
I suppose that when Trump talks about a coup, that is what he is worried about, getting overthrown by the Republican establishment. He’s not worried about the Democrats because he thinks he can beat them. In 2016 the Republicans saw that they had both houses of Congress and Trump would be more likely to sign their legislation than Clinton. But what if they see themselves only holding one house after 2020, which means they can’t get their legislation through for Trump to sign? Putting up with Trump nonsense might not be worth it for Republicans anymore. That means Republicans may have to fear losing both houses for it to be worth it for them to keep Trump in office to avoid Democratic legislation getting signed.
If Trump understands that, and there should be every reason think he does, he’s got to play a double game, win both houses for Republicans to get back where he was in 2016 or cause them to lose both.
Trump is Cromwell, marching around the land slighting the castles that were once the center of the power of the feudal lords. Biden is Charles II. The wrong guy won in that case. The world wasn’t ready to shed its ruling caste.
No. Impeachment has little to do with that phone call. Pretty obvious that it was a setup in the first place. The “whistleblower” apparently illegally approached Schiff’s staff, illegally disclosed to them classified, restricted information that he had no legal rights to obtain, who had gained access to it second hand from first hand sources that had illegally leaked it. He then apparently worked with Schiff’s staff to draft the complaint, then proceeded to submit it to the IC IG, and lied about working with Schiff’s staff. Since it involved second hand, highly questionable, information, someone, while this was going on convinced the ICIG to change the complaint form to allow unreliable second hand information (this smells of Lawfare).
But maybe more importantly the conversation touched on restarting the criminal investigation into the Bidens. VP Joe Biden had extorted and bribed the Ukrainian government to fire the head prosecutor who had been investigating, among others, his son, Hunter. Biden, Sr, was acting in his official capacity as VP, when he credibly threatened withholding US aid to the country if the prosecutor was not fired. The prosecutor was fired, and the investigation was dropped, until Obama and Biden were out of office. That WAS a high crime or misdemeanor on the part of the VP.
Now though, Trump, chief law enforcement officer in the country, suggesting that the United States wouldn’t mind that the Ukrainians reopen that investigation into felonies committed by Joe Biden while VP, is somehow the high crime or misdemeanor required for impeachment. What they are effectively saying is that investigating Biden, for credibly alleged felonies committed while VP, based on commonly known information that provides a prima facie case for those felonies, is grounds for impeachment of the President. Not really that different from the Mueller investigation having ultimately been started based on Trump jokingly pointing out the obviously felonious conduct by his opponent, Crooked Hillary.
Another aspect of this is that the Ukraine, under previous management, was the country that worked the closest with the Clinton campaign, and Dem politicians against Trump. Much of the fake dirt against Trump came out of the Ukraine. CrowdStrike has Ukrainian ties. The previous Ukrainian government working closely with Clinton and the Dems against Trump is apparently well known there. The new government has apparently repeatedly reached out to the US government to provide them information about this collusion, only to be ignored by multiple agencies. It is only being generally discussed at the very highest levels, between our two governments, because our own Deep State is so studiously ignoring the Ukrainian entreaties for cooperation and to provide information.
In addition to Althouse, another blog I have come to enjoy is "Manhattan Contrarian", written by former attorney Francis Menton, who was a partner for over 30 years in a big Manhattan firm and since his retirement has devoted himself to his blog, which covers issues in politics, law, economics, and - especially - "climate change." Since 2013, he was written nearly 30 major posts on the whole climate change/AGW scam, usually titled "The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time, Part (X)". That is how I first discovered his blog, I believe via a link from "Watts Up With That."
In the past couple of weeks he has gotten into the impeachment/Ukraine story and wrote a pretty good commentary on the illegality of the Bidens' activities, <a href="https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-5-the-bidens-stone-cold-crooked“>The Bidens: Stone-Cold Crooked</a>. Worth a read and worth following for his ongoing commentary in addition to what is being covered here. He could use a few more commenters.
(And sorry about the link but for some reason my HTML is not working. Can't figure out why. You'll have to copy and paste.)
A good take by both Lee Smith and our cruelly neutral host...
Good God the reckoning for the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives can't some soon enough.
“Under the Fake News view of the world, it is perfectly fine for Dem officeholders to take millions in bribes from foreign countries in return for policy favors and the Dems are totally immune from prosecution because, well, they're Democrats. Pure bullshit.“
Worse than being just fine - it is, according to the Democrats, a high crime or misdemeanor to look into open and notorious felonies committed by prominent Democrats.
If Trump is serious about going after DC-connected corruption, then ALL of the long term DC pols will be at risk. They are all corrupt. Blago was small potatoes corrupt compared to committee chairmen. Everybody knows it in their bones.
As a small government conservative I am thrilled that all the corruption might be exposed. That exposure might lead to less federal control, for a while. Maybe enough to rebuild federalism and a republican form of government.
Let's go after Democratics in their machine towns, too.
“Crowdstrike never saw the servers that they pronounced were hacked by the Russians.”
Not sure about that. It was importantly the US government in general, and the FBI specifically, that never saw the server, nor was an image of the email server provided them, despite several requests. And instead, based by (now obviously false) claims by CrowdStrike, the lead agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) of the IC made their determination that the Wikileaks dump of the contents of the DNC email server came from Russian hacking, and not from an inside source, where it almost surely did come from. Of course, we know by now that the team that accepted this determination was hand picked by DNI Clapper (so, of course, it included the ubiquitous Peter Strzok), instead of being staffed from all of the IC agencies.
Before Trump ever mentioned Biden in the phone call, he first asked that Crowd Strike be looked into.
Crowd Strike is about Hillary. So, no, this isn't about Trump wanting dirt on political candidate opponents. It's about draining the swamp of official obstructions of justice.
RT must pay Bruce by the word
The issue is not what his opponents understand but what they can make Americans believe, particularly the Althouses of America.
I generally agree, but my concern is not with the Althouses of the world who are well informed. It is with the well meaning liberals and moderates who only pay cursory attention to the news and that news is coming from the Mainstream Media (aka Propaganda arm of the DNC).
Victor Davis Hanson: The Madness of Progressive Projection
I Accuse You of Doing What I Did!
Unfortunately, projection is now an encompassing explanation for almost everything the Left alleges. After all, the Australian government’s own connection with U.S. elections is only on the American political radar because in 2016 its former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who had steered a large Australian donation to the Clinton Foundation, may have colluded with intelligence agencies to entrap George Papadopoulos, a minor and transient Trump campaign employee, to find dirt on the Trump campaign. Bringing up Australia is like the Left leaving a scented trail to its own past miscreant behavior.
Take the Ukraine. It would be hard for any Democrat politico to argue that Ukraine was not involved in 2016 to feed faux-charges of “collusion” to Hillary Clinton—a fact even the liberal press once repeatedly conceded. Ukrainians were only too happy to meet and consult with U.S. intelligence officials when they assumed Hillary Clinton was to be elected, and their yeoman service in frying the sure loser Trump would somehow be appreciated and awarded.
When Joe Biden makes the accusation that Trump was colluding with the new Ukrainian president to reopen investigation of the Biden influence-peddling conglomerate, naturally we knew that Ukraine in general had been leveraged in the past to help the Clinton campaign, and by Biden himself in particular to enrich his own son. Poor contorted Ukraine now backpedals as fast as it can—from trying to help destroy Trump in 2016 to suggesting in 2019 that it regrets having done so. And soon it will hedge its cooperation in 2020—unsure whether the Democrat colluders of 2016 will return to power and it can expect to be punished for renouncing them in 2019.
In surreal fashion, every charge that Biden levels against Trump’s supposed thought crimes amounts to more evidence of his own real wrongdoing in using threats to cut off aid to a foreign nation in exchange for dropping investigation of his wayward son. The latter’s only apparent qualifications for employment are shameless readiness to play on his father’s position.
Projection as a Leftist symptom came to the fore during the Mueller investigation when Mueller’s dream team of progressive attorneys began pressuring a number of minor Trump former campaign officials, and eventually his national security advisor, on trumped up charges—from leaking sensitive documents, to obstruction of justice, to lying to federal officials, to collusion (whatever that non-legal term denotes) with foreign governments and in particular Russia. In each case, Mueller ended up hunting down possible misdemeanors while ignoring likely felonies.
“RT must pay Bruce by the word”
I wish.
BTW - what is RT?
The Dems haven't yet learned, let alone accepted, that Trump is smarter than they are. And waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more wiley.
bbkingfish,
Please remember to pass the joint. Biden would be a tough opponent? Neil Kinnock probably has a story about that theory. And there's no reason to attribute the story. Overkill, as they say.
Biden is the gaffe-o-matic 1000. The original gaffe-o-matic model. He simply cannot win on the big stage. He's raising less money than Pete Bootyjudge. And he's corrupt. His family is corrupt. And his public policy positions cannot sway voters to his side.
LiarWatha, or Fauxcahontas if you like, has the same policy problems. The Leftist Collectivist base will support either of those knuckleheads. Swing voters aren't swinging to open borders and Medicare for all.
Deal with it.
"Trump's own fixation on Biden in his Twitter rants and public statements shows pretty clearly that Trump thinks that Biden is his strongest opponent."
It's the other way around - it rallies the blind Dem base toward Biden. The real conflict between Trump and Biden is legal, not political, and it's being pushed entirely by Democrats.
Mountain Man, your link doesn't work. I'll keep trying to find it.
Howard, Bruce is one of the reasons I read this blog in spite of the moderation.
Your comments are one of the reasons I read it less than I used to.
"Left Bank of the Charles said..."Let’s tag this as dense Althouse for not wanting to see how it would be in Trump’s interest to take down Biden after he became the Democratic nominee." (emphasis added)
Look at a calendar. You're entire analysis is obviated in your first sentence.
found a fascinating snippet in a profile of burisma on npr, it shows that mr. z has a yearly energy conference in Monaco, as recent as 2016, where the grimaldis, prodi of Italy, joscka fischer (ex student radical) all have been guests, it's along side a fashion show for a Spanish owned shoe company, so you see why they are covering the pillows,
The Bidens: Stone-Cold Crooked
Thanks for the recommendation, MountainMan. It was the quotation marks that did you in.
here's another bit,
https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-radio/dnc-ukraine-collusion-sytnyk
<a href="https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-5-the-bidens-stone-cold-crooked“>The Bidens: Stone-Cold Crooked</a>
helping out MountainMan
People - namely Comey Rosenstein, McCabe, Brennen, Clapper, et al - SHOULD Be ruined over what they did. The Russia hoax was used to spy on and take down Trump. Go read McCabe's email to Roesenstein that just got released. The guy was opening up a FBI criminal investigation on Trump for firing Comey! Rosenstein was offering to wear a wire. And of course, both were keeping this secret from Trump or anyone else loyal to Trump.
Rosenstein actually had Mueller picked out as Special Counsel before Comey was fired. And set up a situation so that if he could got fired along with Sessions, the Mueller investigation would go forward. Crazy!
Biden may be a weak candidate in Madison, but in Wisconsin the most recent Fox News poll had him beating Trump 48-39.
Why isn't their more focus on China-Biden? The VP goes to China with his son, and 2 weeks later, the Chinese Government puts $1 billion in a Private equity firm run by Biden's son. That ONE BILLION - 1,000 Million. If Biden got a 2% finders fee, that's $20 million from the Chicoms.
And why would the Chinese do that, except he was the son of the Vice President of the USA?
What if Trump is offering up "new improved Whistleblowers on GOLDEN SHOVELS" to D's who can't see past the edge of the hole they are diggin?
Another day of moderation,.
MountainMan said...
In addition to Althouse, another blog I have come to enjoy is "Manhattan Contrarian", written by former attorney Francis Menton, who was a partner for over 30 years in a big Manhattan firm and since his retirement has devoted himself to his blog, which covers issues in politics, law, economics, and - especially - "climate change." Since 2013, he was written nearly 30 major posts on the whole climate change/AGW scam, usually titled "The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time, Part (X)". That is how I first discovered his blog, I believe via a link from "Watts Up With That."
In the past couple of weeks he has gotten into the impeachment/Ukraine story and wrote a pretty good commentary on the illegality of the Bidens' activities, <a href="https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-5-the-bidens-stone-cold-crooked“>The Bidens: Stone-Cold Crooked</a>. Worth a read and worth following for his ongoing commentary in addition to what is being covered here. He could use a few more commenters.
(And sorry about the link but for some reason my HTML is not working. Can't figure out why. You'll have to copy and paste.)
MountainMan: since your 09:50 comment repeated above helpfully visibly splays your HTML code out for us to examine, it's clear that the issue is two different kinds of double-quote characters bracketing the embedded URL. The second double-quote (the one at the end of the URL) is actually a curly-quote character (“) rather than (one of) the requisite straight double-quotes (") to be placed before and after.
Here's that link correctly stated: The Bidens: Stone-Cold Crooked.
If you're using an iPhone, there's a particular issue with curly-quotes on (older ones of) those — and a particular solution. All the other quotes in your comment are straight double-quotes, though, so it's not clear how that particular one got erroneously entered as curly.
You'd have to be a Democrat to believe a word of this nonsense.
Somehow I have gotten through the last 15 years without ever watching Glenn Beck for more than a few minutes, despite my being, by today's standards, right-wing. This is no doubt a side-effect of my effort to avoid TV for even longer than that.
But today I intend to watch a 2 hour commentary by Beck titled "Ukraine: The Democrats' Russia."
A big part of the appeal of the left, for I think many people, is that they always have a simple narrative. Now almost always that narrative turns out to be false, but I nonetheless understand the appeal of simple narratives. In this case, for instance, I have up to now successfully resisted the temptation to look into the Ukraine business because I have been through this sort of thing too many times already and I know how it's going to turn out.
The truth will turn out to be complicated and it will take hours and even days for me to even discover what I think about the whole thing except that I will discover once again what I already know: a large proportion of my fellow human beings, and especially journalists, who though if I meet them personally don't seem all that bad, are nonetheless when it comes to this sort of thing deeply and profoundly dishonest.
And I will also rediscover that even if I after I go to all this trouble it will be difficult to accurately describe what I think happened and to boil it down into few enough words that someone else might read it.
Well that's what I expect to happen. We will see.
Ralph L said...
People not disgusted by 27 years of Bill & Hillary scandals aren't likely to be bothered by 3 years of anti-Trump treachery and deceit. The officials have nothing to fear from a DC jury."
Well said. If and when the time comes, the prosecution should conduct the trials in the bum fuck part of the country. You know, in real America.
bbkingfish said...
Trump's own fixation on Biden in his Twitter rants and public statements shows pretty clearly that Trump thinks that Biden is his strongest opponent. Trump's focus almost exclusively has been on Biden,,,
____________________
Sun-Tzu'ing this: What if "attacking Biden" is the best way to mislead on Trump's real strategic purpose?
Howard, why should you care, you didn't read the comment did you?
Someone above alluded to it- Lee Smith, for the sin of getting the entire Russian Collusion story correct in pretty much every single detail right from the end of 2016, as demonstrated by the Volume I of the Holy Mueller Report, got fired as a senior editor of the now dead and buried neoconservative and NeverTrump The Weekly Standard. The final nail Smith's firing was his trying to publish a story about outfits like Fusion GPS who were writing pre-packaged stories for newspapers and paying journalists and editors to publish them. Of course, at the time Smith didn't know that his boss, Bill Kristol was one of Fusion GPS's clients- so Kristol fired him.
Chris of Rights said...
Professor Althouse said: My instinctive answer to the question "did he?" is: Why would he?"
The real target isn't Biden (although getting him out of the way is a benefit), it's Obama. Tie it all back to Obama and all the dots get connected and all the players get exposed. Maybe Trump wasn't kidding when he said he was going to drain the swamp.
Blogger Howard said..."RT must pay Bruce by the word"
I was going to say you could rebut him with a substantive argument, but then I realized you can't.
this was back when it was safe to inquire,
https://www.dw.com/en/who-are-hunter-bidens-ukrainian-bosses/a-17642254
Some interesting names are coming out of the Ukraine: not just Biden père et fils, but Clinton (so far just the wife), the Podesta brothers, and Paul Pelosi (son of Nancy). @Althouse, don’t bother looking for any of this in your favorite newspapers; it’s being very neatly bottled up so folks can continue to believe the Democrats aren’t all that corrupt.
here's the piece
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/766579412/what-to-know-about-the-ukrainian-company-at-the-heart-of-trump-s-biden-allegations
Quick question for Democrat Congresscritters from Trump-leaning and even toss-up districts: are you willing to jeopardize your seat to protect Hunter Biden and Paul Pelosi?
Why is Trump doing scorched earth on Biden?
Because Biden is the longest and easiest to use lever to discredit the latest coup attempt by the Democrats and allies in the deep state.
What’s amusing, is this attempted impeachment/ coup, is exposing the dirty tricks of the Dems.
"[T]he panicked clamor coursing through the press at present is not about Joe Biden or his son or Trump’s alleged commerce with foreign powers. Rather, it is the fear that the Russiagate bubble is likely to burst. And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin."
The crooked dems and the crooked liberal media deserved to be ruined. They scared and desperate, just watch the despicable liberal Chuck Todd at this link.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senator-johnson-please-chuck-todd-grows-enraged-with-gop-lawmaker-during-ukraine-discussion
It's taken me awhile, but I've come to the realization that Fen (may he rot in hell) won.
Again, it plainly appears all one needs to do in order to get away with blatant corruption is become a 'political opponent' of Donald J. Trump.
That's quite the trick they're managing to pull off.
MountainMan gave a good link to an argument of why the Bidens are, in fact, "stone-cold crooked". The argument used is similar to the one I made several days ago here where I gave the timeline of events in the Ukraine and simply asked whether anyone really believed the Bidens' defense of their actions. ManhattanContrarian, though, took the argument even further than I did by analyzing he nature of the defenses being put forth by the Democratic propaganda arms of the WaPo and the NYTimes, and how basically all of them reference either outright lies, ignore actual evidence altogether, reference anonymous sources in defense, or simply argue from their own authority (i.e. media investigations have debunked the allegations against Biden, etc.).
Bidens Stone Cold Crooked- Part 1
Bidnes Stone Cold Crooked- Part 2
"Why would he? Biden is not a strong opponent, so what's the point of taking him out"
Correct. We want Slow Quidproquo Joe.
In this case, as in most others, progs are projecting. They'd like to see Joe gone. They think Trump thinks Joe needs to be gone. Therefore --
Someone said...""Trump's own fixation on Biden in his Twitter rants and public statements shows pretty clearly that Trump thinks that Biden is his strongest opponent."
Blogger Rory responded..."It's the other way around - it rallies the blind Dem base toward Biden."
I generally don't subscribe to the notion that Trump is a genius, but sometimes ...
yes, that's a good summary it includes the shokin letter in the attachment, you can add the European ties that z had until recently, the recorded statements from syntynt, the first head of the anti corruption bureau, re Hillary and collusin
Blogger mandrewa said..."The truth will turn out to be complicated and it will take hours and even days for me to even discover what I think about the whole thing except that I will discover once again what I already know: a large proportion of my fellow human beings, and especially journalists, who though if I meet them personally don't seem all that bad, are nonetheless when it comes to this sort of thing deeply and profoundly dishonest.
And I will also rediscover that even if I after I go to all this trouble it will be difficult to accurately describe what I think happened and to boil it down into few enough words that someone else might read it."
You hit the nail on the head this time.
"narayanan said...
helping out MountainMan”
If he has a Mac, he needs to leave out the quotes around the link or it won’t work.
Biden is collateral damage. At first I thought this was a skirmish that got out of control, but now I see this is a set piece battle with the plays laid out like an NFL opening drive, where all of the plays are chosen in advance. One way you knew this was that they were talking about a coverup even after Trump had released the transcripts.
Trump sent Giuliani to investigate the election interference that came from the Ukraine in 2016. The people who are trying to make it about Biden are the Democrats, because it takes the focus off of the obvious stuff that came out of the Ukraine. Sorry Joe. This is combat and people get chosen to die by commanders all the time in combat. Maybe they really did think that working stiffs wouldn’t begrudge Biden’s son his big paydays. Joe is narcissistic enough to think that nobody could question how deserving his crackhead son is.
I give you the link again to the New York Times story on the leak from the Ukrainian “anti-corruption” agency that sunk Trump’s campaign manager.
Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
According to Democrats, the above story doesn’t exist, because Democrats would never collude with corrupt foreign oligarchs to attack a political opponent!
BTW - what is RT?
Ha ha. “Russia Today,” no doubt. Howard's still fixated on the “Russia collusion” syndrome.
"[T]he panicked clamor coursing through the press at present is not about Joe Biden or his son or Trump’s alleged commerce with foreign powers. Rather, it is the fear that the Russiagate bubble is likely to burst. And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin."
Duh.
Rumor right now is that the DIJ OIG report on FISA abuse is supposed to drop this Friday. If not then, it should still drop pretty soon, since it has been out for Principals Review for several week now.
“Biden is collateral damage. At first I thought this was a skirmish that got out of control, but now I see this is a set piece battle with the plays laid out like an NFL opening drive, where all of the plays are chosen in advance. One way you knew this was that they were talking about a coverup even after Trump had released the transcripts.”
Not sure if I believe that Biden was collateral damage, but might instead have been a secondary target. I think that his candidacy was inconvenient. He was the front runner, esp in the “moderate” lane. He had a large amount of institutional support, partly, maybe greatly, as a result of having been Obama’s VP. But he wasn’t going to be able to compete well against Trump. He is too dirty, too pervy, too old, slow, and befuddled. Many on both sides, including myself, believe that he would be eviscerated by Trump. Warren, for one, would seem to able to much better candidate against Trump. She acts younger than her age, is relatively agile, seems to be able to think well on her feet, and seems to be, by far, the best organized candidate. Other candidates probably could also do better than Biden against Trump in the general election. I think that, in the end, this will break the Dem nomination process open.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the conversation in question occur BEFORE Biden officially announced he was going to run?
Trump is obstructing injustice and exposing deep state corruption.
Therefore, he must be impeached.
That's the story in a nutshell.
Thanks to everyone above for the help on the HTML for the URL. I see the problem now and thought someone might spot it if I posted the text i was using. Yes, I use all Apple products. Getting ready to leave on a big trip, got in a hurry, not paying enough attention. Posting by me, though not all that frequent, will be spotty for about the next 10 days, will be out of the country part of the time and probably not checking this or any other blog. But I will totally catch up with all the posts when I get back.
"and seems to be, by far, the best organized candidate."
But being well-organized around some very, very bad ideas is not an advantage. Unless Hillary jumps in she may be the nominee, but her ideas are horrible. I saw somewhere in the past week that the big money on Wall Street told the DNC that if she is the nominee they will sit this one out, or some may support Trump.
“And sorry about the link but for some reason my HTML is not working. Can't figure out why. You'll have to copy and paste.”
Don’t use curly quotes.
“Don’t use curly quotes”
Obvious solution. Yet I have fallen into this trap multiple times. He didn’t type curly quotes, but rather Apple helpfully converted his straight quotes into curly ones, presumably because they look better. (I don’t know if is still a problem, but Word used to do the same, which made editing HTML there problematic - but at leasin in Word, you turn this off).
After getting hit multiple times with this Apple issue, I now use an IOS Note that contains skeletons of of my commonly used HTML elements (you can also run into issues with IOS automatically turning one of the italics element parts uppercase, and not the other, which is legal in HTML, but not Blogger).
Birkel says...
"bkingfish,
Please remember to pass the joint. Biden would be a tough opponent?"
I didn't say Biden would be a tough opponent. Sharpen your reading skills.
Narayanan says...
"Sun-Tzu'ing this: What if "attacking Biden" is the best way to mislead on Trump's real strategic purpose?"
I'll will allow that this is possible, but only if you can convincingly explain how attacking Biden repeatedly helps to advance Trump's real strategic purpose, and what that purpose is.
Until you do, my default position is that you're just blowing smoke behind the name of some Chinese philosopher you've never read.
Why do people continually make the claim that Biden is an opponent of Trump's? I wasn't aware he had been nominated as Presidential candidate for the Democrats. Until he's nominated, he's only a candidate in the Democrat primaries, for which Trump is not running. Trump may have a preferred nominee in mind, but it doesn't necessarily default to Biden.
it's lazy writing, of course, since he was at the top of the polls, fwiw, now with warren now on top, they'll have to default to that,
“Don’t use curly quotes”
Don't use quotes at all if you're iOS. That's what works for me now (at some point in the past I had to use quotes, now I have to NOT use quotes).
“ ‘And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin.’ ”
It’d be nice to see even a little negative fallout from all this.
I'm sorry. I only got a few paragraphs into that article before the bootlicking made me nauseous. Carry on.
The solution to the iOS “curly-quotes” issue (as I call it) when entering the text for an html link (using iOS's on-screen keyboard) is, at the exact points before and after (bracketing the embedded URL) where one would ordinarily simply type an (unmodified, straight) double-quote character right off the keyboard (but that fails to work because iOS thoughtfully substitutes an [open or close] curly double-quote character) — instead hold down the double-quote key for a second or two until the iOS subsidiary menu opens up showing you a variety of available quote types (including curly quotes), at which point select the straight double-quotes (far right in the list).
At 12:02 I listed some of the names of Americans involved in corruption in the Ukraine. Today we added the name of longtime Clinton sycophant Sid Blumenthal, thanks to an apparent mistake by House Democrats.
(Except with Hillary making noises about entering the chase for the 2020 nomination one wonders ...)
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