RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/20/a-woke-joe-biden-ends-his-hibernation/

The Democratic presidential nominee had embraced one of the most bizarre but—until recently—effective strategies thus far in a presidential campaign. Like some fictive vampire, Joe Biden has been ensconced in a basement tomb and, now pale, he is reemerging into the light and finding the glare all but lethal.

Under the cloak of the coronavirus and national quarantine, Biden essentially had shut down his campaign from late March to the present. Ostensibly, his handlers believed that any downside of appearing to play-rope-a-dope and to avoid unscripted events was more than outweighed by not putting a sometimes frail 77-year-old man with apparent cognitive challenges out on the campaign trail for 16-hour days.  

Or as his former boss, Barack Obama, reportedly warned Biden of the looming 2020 ordeal and his apparent fragility, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.” He really didn’t have to—except that Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders proved inept messengers of socialism.

The “Summer of Love”

As the media-constructed summer news cycle from May through August wounded Trump—Trump, the Typhoid Mary, COVID-enabler Trump, the mask denialist and bleach drinker Trump, the Herbert Hoover economy-wrecker Trump, the reincarnation of the racist Lester Maddox Trump—Biden kept torpid in his home basement. And that mostly successful sequestration required lots of complicity from our elite. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/13/biden-the-great-and-powerful/

For now Joe Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the projection.

Media bias is not new.

In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove? 

Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”? 

Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.” 

Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself. 

The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.

But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest. 

Bunker Illusions

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/09/21/wrong-way-biden/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

“Alas, Abraham Lincoln is not on the ballot this year. Two flawed men present themselves for our inspection. Biden may promise “hope and light and love,” but that is merely the accepted euphemism for greatly expanded federal powers to reshape everything from the energy sector to girls’ locker rooms. The distractions of personality foibles, Twitter wars, and misadventures in assertions of truth aside, the crux of this election is that we are confronted as usual with one party that says, “Let’s get to work reshaping everything in the United States” and another party that says, “Let’s not.””

Joe Biden is a proud retail politician, a man who believes the personal touch is how elected officials cement a connection with us. So I’ll share my personal story about how he cemented a connection with me, back when I and a few hundred thousand other troops were preparing for war, and Joe wafted in to warn us we were all to get our collective ass kicked.

In January of 1991, I was a second lieutenant in the 178th Personnel Service Company, an administrative appendix to the buffed body of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. My troops and I had landed in the Gulf town of Dhahran a week before Christmas and gradually made our way inland by long, grim, nearly silent convoys — creeping, 20-mph slogs across the one two-lane highway, then off the road and across the sands to set up camp.

In mid January, after maybe twelve hours of deliberate, dusty driving, I climbed out of a deuce-and-a-half and stretched my limbs as the soldiers began unloading, somewhere beneath the triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. A radio was playing in someone’s truck. Radio options were limited in this landscape; occasionally you could find the signal for the Armed Forces Network, if there was a large enough base nearby, but sometimes you couldn’t. AFN, Stars and Stripes, and occasional copies of a surprisingly good English-language broadsheet called “Arab News” were our sole media diet apart from whatever magazines we subscribed to, which would arrive weeks late in the mail. All three of our main sources were, of course, pro-U.S., which was fine by me. I had no idea what we were in for. I wanted only the most optimistic spin on things.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/moral-equivalence-camouflage-moral-cowardice-bruce-thornton/

NRO’s Jim Geraghty in his daily column indulged one of the NeverTrump favorite rhetorical devices: That the president is just as bad for the Republic as the radical Democrats, and neither side “wants to solve real problems.” Apart from the common mistaken notion that the Founders created our political order “to solve problems” rather than protect the liberty of states, towns, civic society, families, and individuals, this tic often obscures an unwillingness to identify clearly those guilty of creating conflict and disorder by equally apportioning guilt to both sides.

Moral equivalence becomes the camouflage for moral cowardice, a fear to assign responsibility where it is due.

During his discussion of the Democrats’ dilemma over how to spin the ongoing riots, Geraghty can’t help sniping at Trump:

But we all know that Donald Trump’s view on how to deal with an angry and potentially destructive mob is dramatically different from that of Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, or New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Trump’s administration sent U.S. Park Police into Lafayette Park, using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” Quite a few observers contended the tactics used more force than necessary or that was justified by the situation. But we know Trump’s instincts are to overreact to the threat of mob violence, not underreact.

The Dem blue-state mayors underreact, but Trump overreacts because of his “instincts” rather than a sober and judicious analysis of the crisis. The two responses are morally equivalent. Hence in Lafayette Park, near the storied church “peaceful protestors” had set on fire, and swarming with violent thugs know for using bricks, rocks, commercial fireworks, frozen water bottles, skateboards, and other weapons against the police, Trump overreacted by using “smoke canisters, irritants, explosive devices, batons and horses.” In other words, standard non-lethal methods for dispersing a violent mob set on injuring others.