Meet the man who’s really calling the shots in D.C.
For the last two years or so, there has been endless speculation about who is really calling the shots in the Biden White House. If there is any consensus, it is that the the maestro is not the senescent, doddering Joe Biden. Other names are bruited about, none more regularly than Barack Obama. That said, Obama has always been more of a puppet than puppeteer. Having written four books about the man, I feel confident in that conclusion.
Although immersed in leftism since childhood, Obama never left the shallow end of the pool. He proved so adept at breaking promises as president because he did not care deeply enough to ensure they were realized. What mattered more for Obama was that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the right narrative. He is not a serious man, never was.
Other suggested candidates for chief puppeteer are equally lacking in gravitas – Susan Rice, Anita Dunn, the Clintons. International scoundrels like George Soros or Klaus Schwab, haunt our imagination the way Lex Luthor did Superman’s, but they are not hands-on kind of guys.
When we shoot something down, no one talks
“What in the world is going on?” asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Has the Biden administration just dialed the sensitivity of our radars all the way up? If so, what are the objects that we are just now noticing for the very first time?”
As refreshing as it is to hear McConnell ask an obvious question, he has been around Washington long enough not to expect an answer, at least not an honest one.
The unfortunate truth is that when the United States national security apparatus makes a mistake with political consequences, no one talks.
Columbia Journalism Review report ‘The Press Versus the President’ a win for Trump
The Columbia Journalism Review, led by veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeff Gerth, spent the last year and a half analyzing “in granular detail” the media’s “tortured dance with Donald Trump. Gerth focuses almost exclusively on the media’s reporting of Trump’s alleged relationship with Russia. “Gerth’s findings aren’t always flattering, either for the press or for Trump and his team,” writes CJR’s Kyle Pope in the introduction to the 20,000 word piece, “The Press Versus the President,” but Pope miscalls the outcome.
“I realized early on I had two jobs,” Trump told Gerth. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.” As Gerth proves, Trump’s claim that the news was “fake” was even more right than he knew. On reading this report, if they ever choose to, Big Media reporters will feel much the way Bengals’ defensive tackle Joseph Ossai did on watching the ref throw his yellow flag after his late hit on Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes Sunday. Sick. Forever damaged.
Bread and Circuses Not For The Masses, But At Their Expense
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger is a walker. “There’s something very natural about walking through a dense downtown and going to a baseball game,” Goldberger told
KCUR radio, National Public Radio’s Kansas City affiliate.
Like most ambitious cities, Kansas City caters to the genus “walker.” You know the type: young, fit, newly urban, and self-involved. We’ve given them light rail, bicycle lanes, entertainment zones, soccer stadiums and, soon enough, unless common sense prevails, their own ballpark. The walkers prosper at the expense of the suburban genus “driver.”
Goldberger doesn’t understand the latter type. Walking through bustling streets, he tells us, “is very different from the sort of more suburban experience of coming in a car and parking and walking across acres of asphalt to go into something.” Watching the urban genus “walker” over the years, I am reminded more than a little of the “walkers” in the hit TV show The Walking Dead. Our zombies, like theirs, lack minds of their own, follow where led, make a lot of noise and are much too eager to infect others.
49ers’ Brock Purdy carries on QBs’ Christian tradition
San Francisco 49ers rookie quarterback Brock Purdy has a lot to be thankful for. Injuries to two players above Purdy on the depth chart propelled him to the starting quarterback’s job midway through the season.
Selected in the seventh round with the very last pick, “Mr. Irrelevant” has led the 49ers to eight straight victories and a place in the NFC championship game this Sunday at Philadelphia. During this stretch, Purdy has thrown an impressive 16 touchdown passes against only three interceptions.
“Every time I play – no matter what happens – I want others to see God through my actions,” Purdy has said. “Every time I step on the field I want to bring Him glory. Even when we lose, I point to God and thank Him for the opportunity. Everything happens for a reason; it’s all a lesson from the Lord. It’s a game, it’s not my life.”
Biden Lawyer Has History of Finding and Releasing Elusive Documents
In his own discreet way, President Joe Biden’s “personal” attorney Bob Bauer is back in the news again. On Saturday, Bauer released a statement about a new discovery of documents chez Biden. According to Bauer, the Justice Department “took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President.”
This same CBS News report notes that this new find comes after 10 or so classified documents “were discovered by Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2.” Others were found at his home on December 20. Bauer goes unmentioned in those earlier finds, but he almost surely had to be one of those “personal lawyers.” Six days before the midterms, these attorneys made the strategic decision not to go public with their find. In Bauer’s case, I suspect the decision to go public after the election was strategic as well—but not necessarily on Biden’s behalf.
Bauer, of course, has a history of blocking the release of certain documents and then strategically releasing them. In the way of background, on August 21, 2008, a week prior to the Democratic National Convention, Democrat attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.
