What a desperately presumptuous act it is for the White House Counsel’s Office to blast out a memo ordering media organizations to apply the blowtorch to Republicans and defend Joe Biden in the impending House impeachment inquiry.
The marching orders went out Wednesday morning under a blaring headline: “MEMO TO EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP AT U.S. NEWS MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS.”
Ian Sams, the grandly titled special assistant to the president and senior adviser and spokesman for White House Counsel’s Office, declared: “It’s Time For The Media To Do More To Scrutinize House Republicans’ Demonstrably False Claims That They’re Basing Impeachment Stunt On.”
Talk about ungrateful.
The White House is making overt what has been covert, and humiliating their media handmaidens in the process.
That section of the media that ought to have been scrutinizing the president rather than covering him must be scratching their heads, and red-faced with embarrassment.
They don’t need a public rallying cry.
They already know what to do.
They have been carrying water for Joe Biden since he first shuffled out of the basement.
The White House memo insists there’s “simply no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong” and offers as evidence that there’s no evidence quotes from a herd of deaf, dumb and blind RINOs, like Ken Buck, (R-Colo.): “The evidence doesn’t exist right now;” and Don Bacon (R-Neb.): “We need to have more concrete evidence.”
The memo was accompanied by a 16-page so-called “dossier” in which the FBI, Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, CNN and Associated Press are quoted liberally back to themselves exonerating Joe Biden in the counterfactual post-truth parsing of language that passes for journalism these days at those formerly august outfits.
As House committees and whistleblowers have piled evidence upon evidence of wrongdoing, corruption and coverup that links back to Joe Biden, these bastions of American journalism have behaved like a combination of Mr. Magoo, Baghdad Bob, Sgt. Schultz and Monty Python’s Black Knight — and maybe with a dose of the Three Wise Monkeys thrown in: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
The White House wants them to stay that way, so that half the electorate remains in the dark.
Forget the bank records, shell companies, SEC complaints, sworn testimony, IRS whistleblower statements, FBI informant files, emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, photos, speakerphone calls, voicemails, White House visitor logs, Air Force 2 travel logs, Joe’s pseudonym email addresses and a parade of Hunter’s shady foreign benefactors lining up for handshakes with Joe in Beijing, breakfasts at the VP’s residence and dinners at Café Milano, not to mention millions of dollars in filthy foreign lucre for no discernible product or service other than access to Joe.
Gaslighting the nation
Democrats impeached Donald Trump over a single public phone call.
“With his words and his actions, President Trump has indicted himself,” candidate Joe Biden said at the time.
“By obstructing justice, refusing to comply with a congressional inquiry, he’s already convicted himself in full view of the world and the American people.”
But when it comes to impeaching Biden, the media is instructed that there’s simply no evidence.
Gaslighting the country is the Democrats’ only defense.
And with stalwarts like David Ignatius at The Washington Post and Morning Joe of la la land, pulling the pin on Joe: “You’re too old, retire already,” the White House is panicking.
For years they said there was “no evidence” Joe was involved in Hunter’s scams.
Now they say there’s no “direct evidence,” as Rep. Dan “mini-Schiff” Goldman put it when he self-corrected in the one sound bite last week, or, as The New York Times put it, “no firm evidence.”
Actually, there’s plenty of evidence, firm, direct, circumstantial, soft, and everything in between.
Just the sort of evidence Goldman used to prosecute people in his former life as an assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York.
The White House could have avoided all this unpleasantness if they had just told Biden to come clean and explain to the American people just how House Oversight Chairman James Comer, and all the whistleblowers, and Hunter’s ex-business partners, and all the documentary evidence, are wrong.
Maybe he has a simple explanation.
If he has done nothing wrong, he must be furious at this besmirching of his legacy. Any innocent man in his position would want to come out loud and defiant and clear his name.
Lucky for Joe, he’s president so everyone would listen.
But he can’t keep pretending that he knows “nothing” about Hunter’s scams, and pretending he wasn’t involved.
Twenty speakerphone calls and two Café Milano dinners and a dozen other meetings beg the question.
The White House tried to thread the needle on the lies with a new form of words after Hunter’s former best friend Devon Archer’s testimony.
The president wasn’t “in business” with his son.
Denial is a river in Egypt, too.
Crazy like a bathrobe
The president wandered around in India and Vietnam during the recent G20 in various states of befuddlement and lucidity.
We’ve become used to the yoyo-ing grip on reality of our elderly commander-in-chief.
You wonder sometimes if the president’s waxing and waning cognitive abilities are something more than just medication or sundowning.
He is fairly lucid when he needs to be, in a debate, or a rare press conference or interview.
He might have the gait of a stiff 90-year-old but foreigners who have been in meetings with him at international conclaves say he was focused and in command, barely referred to notes and was deferred to by the likes of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Could it be that we are seeing the outlines of the old “bathrobe” defense that mob boss Vincent Gigante used to get the feds off his back in the ’60s? Vinny the Chin, a k a the “Oddfather,” used to wander around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe mumbling and pretending to be crazy.
Maybe, when the gig is finally up on a lifetime of Biden grifting, old Joe will resort to Plan B, and be diagnosed with dementia.
Then everyone will feel sorry for him and turn on his persecutors.
Leave the old man alone!
All kidding aside.
Not a joke.
Think about it.
