Opinion
By Jeff Childers
07-21-24
Good morning, C&C supporters, it’s Sunday! Which means it’s time for your subscriber bonus of essential news and commentary. This morning’s bonus post includes: More Ukraine coordination as Boris Johnson comes out for Trump; more details on the second Trump-Zelensky call; FBI and Secret Service caught lying, and clam up; trio of high-profile New York Times op-eds suggest a sea change in liberal politics may be surging in; WaPo hit piece on J.D. Vance accidentally burnishes his conservative bona fides; Biden covid update; Clintons ally with Biden against Team Obama; and dems hope against hope for Judge Cannon’s removal.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 Now I have seen everything. On Thursday, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who never saw a Proxy War he didn’t love, published a pro-Trump editorial in the UK Daily Mail headlined, “BORIS JOHNSON: Why I am more convinced than ever that Trump has the strength and bravery to save Ukraine and end this appalling war.” Trump will save Ukraine! Boris also tweeted it:
The op-ed and Johnson’s tweet showed us President Trump met with Boris and discussed Ukraine on Tuesday—at the RNC. Trump was multitasking, and Boris attended. Here’s what Boris said in his op-ed:
Having talked to Donald Trump this week, I am more convinced than ever that he has the strength and the bravery to fix it, to save Ukraine, to bring peace — and to stop the disastrous contagion of conflict.
The war has been going on too long, and the cost is immense, in lives, in economic misery and instability.
I believe that Trump can end it — on the right terms for Ukraine and the West. I stress that I cannot be sure exactly what he would do, if elected. But this is what he could do.
The rest of Boris’s thoughts are delusional magical thinking about Ukraine’s prospects, but that’s almost a side issue. The UK’s former Prime Minister was clearly arguing that Trump, not Biden, is the way forward. It stood in stark contrast to NATO hand-wringing about a potential Trump victory; could it be a sign of moderation?
One wonders who else might have attended the Milwaukee convention, and how much work President Trump accomplished behind the scenes, all while Joe Biden slept off his Paxlovid treatment.
🔥🔥 Yesterday I reported on this week’s Trump-Zelensky call, as the two men picked up the threads from their historic 2019 call that blew up the world. Here’s President Trump’s tweet, which sums up everything we know about the call.
There’s no new information today, but note that none of Biden’s neocons ever mention “peace,” the “cost of so many lives,” the “devastated innocent families,” “ending the violence,” or paving a “path forward to prosperity.”
Only President Trump talks about those things.
And … where have our pro-Ukraine commenters gone?
🔥🔥 This Reuters headline was already remarkable but it still managed to bury the lede:
I will now repost the entire Reuters article about this massive scandal that should, in sane world, rock the federal government to its core. You ready? Here it is, the whole thing:
That’s it! That’s the entire article. Not a single reaction quote from anybody. Nor any details, nothing about who said what, not even a snarky comment saying reporters tried to get a comment from anyone.
This is what passes for journalism in the age of corporate media.
The headline should have been something more like, “Secret Service LIED About Denying Trump More Protection.” Instead, the crack journalists at Reuters deployed the gentle euphemism, “this is a reversal from earlier statements by the agency.”
A reversal? A ‘reversal’ is when, under withering emotional manipulation, you give in and let the kids get toppings on their ice cream. It’s not a ‘reversal’ when you find seven crumpled candy wrappers under your teenager’s bed right after they loudly protested having no idea who cleaned out the pantry.
In technical terms, psychologists call that getting caught lying.
The New York Times’s article was a bit better. The Times, at least, reported the previous strong denials that, in Secretary Mayorkas’s own words, were “irresponsible” and “unequivocally false:”
But yesterday, under pressure, Secret Service Spokesman Guglielmi admitted that the “baseless” claims were not, after all, quite so baseless, nor were they exactly “irresponsible.” As it happens, President Trump has requested more security the entire time he’s been out of office:
Finally, to its credit, the Times article recapped the three biggest unanswered questions hanging over the rally field:
So many questions! And so few answers.
Yesterday, video emerged of President Trump asking a delicate question of his own in an interview with Fox’s Jesse Waters: why didn’t the Secret Service simply ask him to hold off starting the rally for a few minutes until they could find Thomas Crooks?
CLIP: Trump begins asking questions (0:40).
“Nobody said there was a problem,” the President explained, “and I would’ve waited for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I think that was a mistake.”
Great question.
🔥 The FBI’s silence is deafening. The nation’s top law enforcement agency, tasked with getting to the bottom of what happened (or didn’t happen) in Butler County, has not updated its investigation website for the Trump Assassination Attempt since last Sunday. No updates. Zero, zip, nada. In fact, there are only three updates total on that web page — about the most important investigation in the FBI’s modern history.
Maybe the CrowdStrike crash took down the FBI? Anyway, in the New York Times’ article about the Secret Services’ stunning ‘reversal,’ the paper noted the agency has never held a press conference to answer questions about its failure to protect the former President — even though the Butler Police Department did, and even though that underfunded agency currently has no police chief:
I’m only a lawyer, not a public relations expert, but it seems to me that the FBI and the Secret Service should hold daily joint press briefings to provide ongoing public updates about the investigation. This isn’t like they are investigating a Mexican opioid ring or a wayward Chinese spy balloon. This time, they can’t hide behind the old “ongoing investigation” excuse for long.
If you were trying to paint a picture of agencies locking down and covering up, the FBI and the Secret Service couldn’t possibly being doing a better job of that.
🔥🔥 I keep vowing to take a break from the anti-Cabbage reporting and yet every day something new and memorable emerges and I can’t help myself. Yesterday delivered three elite editorials in the New York Times that evidenced a kind of intellectual breakthrough. To get rid of their brain-damaged candidate, they are beginning to realize the gaslighting is no longer working, and they are forced to grapple with their worst enemy: the truth.
We begin with a truly remarkable piece penned by far-left pundit Nicolas Kristof, titled “Here’s the Hope if Biden Withdraws.” After a week of hapless Democrats pretending everything was business as usual, Kristof began by admitting what is manifestly true: this week was utterly unprecedented and historic:
Biden Agonistes! The elites love their neat turns of phrase, but I still prefer the simpler President Banana Brain, or words to that effect. In any case, at long last, Mr. Kristof has obviously started thinking. Without explicitly saying so —he’s not suicidal— Kristof admitted the Democrats’ policies of pushing trans mutilations and opening the borders have backfired:
Progress! Bite-sized progress, in small degrees, but still. Kristof continued in that vein, concluding that his greatest ‘hope’ for the country is that Joe Biden will step aside. At that point, Kristof’s logic crashed like a CrowdStrike computer, as he described a Democrat dream ticket: the unlikely pairing of Michigan lockdown maven Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker (D-N.J.) (for diversity).
Dream or nightmare; you choose.
Evoking whiffs of “Thelma and Louise,” regular Times columnist Michelle Goldberg published the paper’s second eye-opening op-ed titled, “It’s Time for Democrats to Hold Hands and Jump. “There is no salvaging this campaign,” she dolefully wrote. Waxing eloquent, she described the current status of the Donkey Party as “a despair-inducing slog” induced by “the profound pathos of a man unable to accept his inexorable decline.”
Ouch!
Ms. Goldberg offered the best and most succinct description of the Democrat Doom Loop that I’ve yet seen in print:
“But if that’s the worst of all worlds,’ an agonized Goldberg concluded, “the one we’re in now is a close second.”
Rounding out the trio, Times editorial darling, intellectual elite, and transgender Russian ex-pat Masha Gessen published a very thoughtful piece headlined, “The Seeds of This Political Disaster Were Sown Decades Ago.” Setting the table, Masha admitted she’d expected a conspiracy-theory fueled MAGA rally at the RNC convention, but instead beheld attractive ideological diversity and common sense:
It felt like an effort to reach independents who sympathized with things they heard from the RNC. But Masha really hit her rhetorical stride when, like Kristof, she described this week’s historical nature, and how difficult it was for all of us to grapple with:
But I nearly spilled my coffee when I read Masha’s description of the classic C&C Superman Fallacy — deployed in this case against Joe Biden:
Astonishingly, Masha intended to criticize Democrats for the autocratic argument that since Trump poses an existential crisis to democracy, only ‘superman’ Joe Biden can save America. Obviously, she also painted Trump with the same authoritarian brush, but her theme was really meant to answer Democrats clinging to Joe Biden:
All three authors also decried Democrats’ social media conspiracy theories, which this week widely speculated that the Trump Assassination Attempt had been staged to make Trump look good or something. The theories shocked the Times’ elites. Conspiracy theories are only for Republicans!
Masha explored how this confounding reversal could possibly happen:
Confronted with the left’s ready willingness to believe moronic conspiracy theories, Masha (correctly) diagnosed the problem not as Trump Derangement Syndrome or low information so much as low trust in government and media, correctly explaining that “conspiracy theories flourish — not, as it is often mistakenly thought, in a low-information environment, but in a low-trust environment.”
The gaslighting isn’t working anymore. They are starting to tell the truth. We are breaking through.
🔥🔥 French novelist Joseph Conrad once observed that a man can be judged by the quality of his enemies. In that frame, Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as Vice-President increasingly appears politically brilliant. The Washington Post ran a delightful story yesterday headlined, “Leaked memo shows J.D. Vance’s anti-woke ideology on foreign affairs.” The article probably did more to shore up Vance’s conservative bona fides and his intelligence than anything the candidate himself could have done.
The Post meant to undermine Vance by painting him as an intolerant bigot. But right out of the gate, the article began with the unintentionally heartwarming update that Senator Vance “was known in the most powerful offices of the State Department as the single biggest obstacle to confirming career ambassadors in the Senate.”
The single biggest obstacle! Who knew the first-term Senator was hiding all these undisclosed talents under a bushel basket?
You have to read through the entire snide, incomprehensible story to figure out what actually happened. Don’t bother. The short version was that Senator Vance single-handedly held up about 30 diplomatic candidates who gave woke answers to a well-drafted questionnaire Vance designed.
For some reason, Vance seems to have suspected the State Department was proposing woke, far-left, hipster candidates to represent the United States overseas by flying rainbow flags over our embassies.
As usual, WaPo reported no “news.” Back in April, Vance and the State Department already worked things out, and the State Department satisfied Vance it would propose people based on merit instead of ideology. Vance then allowed all the candidates to move forward except for two of the worst ones. Of those two, the Senate has approved one anyway, overriding Vance’s procedural barricades through a special process.
So at the end of the day, Vance only blocked one candidate. That’s the ‘news.’ But it showed the first-term Senator managed to bring the State Department to heel. In that sense, the Washington Post’s smear confirmed J.D.’s credentials as a warrior against the deep state.
What is emerging is what looks like a deliberate strategy by Trump to select and train his replacement, just like any good executive would do.
🔥🔥 On Friday, the White House issued an official update on President Robert L. Peters’ covid infection, the terrifying virus that has sidelined the leader of the free world. The news is: Biden has a dry cough. According to Joe’s constant companion, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, as of Friday Biden had munched down four daily Paxlovid pills. (They must be sorely tempted to claim next week that Biden is suffering from a politically convenient Paxlovid rebound, buying Joe another five days of avoiding Nancy Pelosi).
We pray Joe Biden fully recovers from his dry cough and can very soon resume his campaign.
🔥🔥 Yesterday, Insider Paper claimed that the Clintons have joined Team Biden against the Allied Anti-Cabbage forces:
This news provoked a series of wild online conjectures that Hillary Clinton will become the Democrats’ next nominee, which could only happen over President Obama’s dead body. But Hillary already lost to Trump once, so why bother?
A coalition of forces is emerging: Team Clinton versus Team Obama. Who should we root for?
🔥 If there is one judge in America that Democrats hate worse than Clarence Thomas, or Adolph Hitler, it must be Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon. The Washington Post ran a story yesterday hoping beyond hope that the 11th Circuit will cancel her, under the headline “Tossing Trump’s case was risky for Judge Cannon — at least for now.”
The Post’s “experts” opined that Judge Cannon’s “stunning” dismissal of the Mar-a-Lago raid case this week “put her on shaky legal ground.” Actually, WaPo’s legal experts are on shaky legal grounds, but I digress.
The lengthy analysis, putting to shame Reuters’ pathetic mini-article about the Secret Services’ lies, rounded up a small army of liberal legal experts. They acknowledged Justice Thomas’s special concurrence spoke directly to the issue, but then argued at length against the Supreme Court judge’s logic. The article was practically a legal memo.
They are all dying to help Special Prosecutor Smith with his appeal.
Their hope is that the 11th Circuit, which has reversed Judge Cannon twice in the case (on the same issue), will take the wild and unprecedented step of straight-up removing Judge Cannon from the case, maybe for bias, or bad judging, or something. The chances of that happening are about as solid as the chances that Joe Biden can utter a sentence without using the word “anyway.”
And it would be political TNT. So the prospect of the 11th Circuit removing Judge Cannon is more like hopium than anything you could call legal analysis.
But the WaPo’s experts’ fears were more tangible. “If he gets back to the White House,” the WaPo’s expert fretted, “Trump could pressure his Justice Department to close the case. He could also promote Cannon to the very appeals court that will soon examine her decision to toss the case.” Those things are much more likely to happen than their hopes.
It got worse. Unhinged democrats on social media perceived an even more terrifying, if not apocalyptic, possibility: Trump might appoint Judge Cannon to the Supreme Court!
That might be the most unlikely possibility of all, but if they can hope, then we can hope. Judge Cannon for Supreme Court!
Have a blessed Sunday! And a profound thank you for your loyal support. See you tomorrow morning, to kick the week off right with a terrific roundup of essential news and commentary.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
