Victor Davis Hanson...

#3
#3
LouderVol said:
can you provide a summary?
Click to expand...


I will summarize .....In a nutshell he summarizes the drastic changes that have been pushed on our culture over the past 10 years. He also discusses the corruption and collusion of the FBI over the past couple of election cycles and how they colluded with social media platforms to push false stories to hurt a certain candidate and then how they lied and hid certain information to protect another candidate.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tbh, UT_Dutchman, Gandalf and 2 others
#5
#5
VolinWayne said:
I will summarize .....In a nutshell he summarizes the drastic changes that have been pushed on our culture over the past 10 years. He also discusses the corruption and collusion of the FBI over the past couple of election cycles and how they colluded with social media platforms to push false stories to hurt a certain candidate and then how they lied and hid certain information to protect another candidate.
Click to expand...
BINGO. :cool:
 
#13
#13
VolinWayne said:
I will summarize .....In a nutshell he summarizes the drastic changes that have been pushed on our culture over the past 10 years. He also discusses the corruption and collusion of the FBI over the past couple of election cycles and how they colluded with social media platforms to push false stories to hurt a certain candidate and then how they lied and hid certain information to protect another candidate.
Click to expand...

Massive cultural changes with the FBI doing underhanded BS? Sounds a lot like the 1960's.
 
  • Like
Reactions: EasternVol
#14
#14
PEPPERJAX said:
Need fact checkers to confirm.
Click to expand...
Anytime I hear someone claim that we're on the verge of a cultural revolution (a la China in 50s) because of trans swimmers, I know they're typical rightwing windbags that are not to be taken seriously.
 
#19
#19
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson


Biden is Too Demented to Be Found Guilty of Crimes, But Not Too Demented to Be President?

Special Counsel Robert Hur just found Joe Biden was guilty of violating national security laws in removing classified documents— after examining then Senator and Vice President Biden’s some 15-year habit of removing classified files to his offices and residences, where they were stored in unsecured fashion.

Period. End of story.

Hur then as a disinterested Special Counsel, not a local county prosecutor on a limited budget, logically would have indicted and prosecuted Biden.

It really is a jury’s decision to determine whether Biden was guilty or innocent, or whether he is pardoned/exempted by reason of dementia.

It is not the role of Hur, as a prosecutor and advocate for the state, to imagine how difficult his case might be to prove someone so incapacitated like Biden was guilty, as Hur’s own research and investigations had otherwise indicated that he was.) Is mindset, intention, or mental status a normal consideration of violations of national security laws, or is it the act itself?

So we are back to the James Comey defense: Hillary was guilty but in Lord and Savior Comey’s judgement no jury would likely convict a presidential candidate of such stature of violating national security laws. (NB: After her reprieve, Hillary immediately claimed such extenuating circumstances were proof of her innocence! And Biden in a nanosecond likewise claimed he is now exonerated too, as was the administration’s plan all along).

Finally note the following:

1) The Left, Hur, and others believe that someone who has lost his faculties and who would not be allowed to drive a semi-truck, teach a class, diagnose a patient, argue a case, wire a house, or cook a hamburger is nevertheless fit enough to run the United States of America.

2) Note this same old/same old shocking but predictable asymmetry. Trump is a mere four years younger than Biden. The left fixated on the fact that he recently confused Nikki Hayley with Nancy Pelosi. Are we then to expect Jack Smith to follow the precedent of his fellow special counsel Hur, who was likewise appointed by Biden administration AG Merrick Garland and thus to conclude that although Trump violated the law by removing files, he seemed too confused to indict, given the likelihood of a sympathetic jury?

3) Hur himself tried to preemptively defend himself from the obvious conclusion that he extended special considerations not to indict Biden in a manner Jack Smith did not to Trump. Yet he omits that there were key differences in the two cases:

Biden had no putative right, as did Trump as President, to declassify files he took home.

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago walled and surveilled estate was far more secure than Biden’s rickety garage.

Biden had stored files for over a decade not less than two years.

Biden’s attorneys came forward just days before Smith was appointed on November 18, 2022. So it was not altruism that prompted their confession after Biden’s years of secretly hiding such illegality, but rather fear that Trump would soon be hounded for a ”crime” of which Biden was found out to be long guilty. So they went public to preempt that charge and falsely claim civic virtue.

This is just more of a long, disgusting pattern of biased applications of the law: Jan 6 vs 2020 May to October deadlier and more violent riots; election denialism of Trump versus Stacey Abrams’s nonstop claims of being the real governor of Georgia; “insurrection” called for in Trump’s speech vs Kamala Harris’s threats that the 2020 riots (“protests”) would and should keep going; the Trump 2020 election gambit versus the 2016 Leftwing coordinated effort to leverage electors into renouncing their states’ popular vote mandates. And so on.

No Department of Justice in our history has ever done more to undermine Americans’ confidence in the fair and equitable application of justice.

This is not the America we grew up in.
5:42 PM · Feb 8, 2024
·
133.9K
Views
 
  • Like
Reactions: davethevol, dillyo51 and StarRaider
#20
#20
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson


President Biden—the Matter Is Not Over, Not Now, Not Ever

President Biden Thursday night hit rock-bottom as he gave a mean-spirited distortion of the special counsel’s report. And in the process, Biden further embarrassed himself, his toady press, and the country at large. In sum, the press conference disintegrated into an embarrassing free for all.

Note that following:

1. To prove that he is cognizant, and does not believe that some dead European leaders are still alive, Biden assured us that President el-Sisi of Egypt was actually the President of Mexico, and almost seemed to believe that the Gaza corridor to Egypt was on our southern border. The more he talked, the more he confirmed Hur’s conclusions.

2. Biden lost his temper and finally lashed out at the special counsel who all but ruined his own reputation by straining to find any reason not to indict a sitting president. Biden should have thanked him for using the mentally incompetent defense to keep a sitting president out of jail.

3. Weirdly, the usually comatose, obsequious White House press finally woke up Thursday night. It was embarrassed that the jig is up and sycophants want to reboot as journalists before they are utterly discredited for participating in one of the great farces of the age: namely, Joe Biden was never mentally fit and was used as an empty vessel and a supposedly moderate veneer for his hard-left controllers—the Obamas, the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing, and the Squad sorts. The con worked for three years but tonight it started to fall apart.

4. The media understands the self-created fix the Democrats are now in: Biden is either cognizant and thus according to the prosecutor likely guilty of violating national security laws, or he is cognitively challenged and therefore unfit to continue his presidency. Take your pick—dangerously demented or guilty of violating his nation’s national security laws? Or both?

5. Otherwise, Biden gave a very brief but characteristically disingenuous defense of his violations of the law, with his old ritual of trashing of Trump.

In fact, the Biden and Trump cases are as different as they are similar:
Mar-a-Lago is a far more secure location than Biden’s garage;
Biden had no prerogative to declassify documents unlike a President Trump;
Biden took out the files for over a decade, Trump for less than two years;
It was not Biden’s civic virtue that led to disclosure of the files, but the Biden Justice Department’s effort to turn a bureaucratic/civil dispute over classified presidential papers into a criminal indictment of Trump. That move prompted a cynical preemptive effort to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, given inevitably Biden years-long violations would then logically come to light.

6. Biden flat-out lied about the Hur report. It did repeatedly document that Biden was mentally challenged; it said unequivocally that Biden willfully knew he was breaking the law by removing classified documents; and it noted specifically that the Afghan materials were in fact classified as “top secret”. Biden is a pathological prevaricator, and lied every time he referenced the Hur report.

7. Screaming, insulting, blaming staff, claiming he had to focus on presidential business, self-righteous—all that scapegoating only further convinced the country that the Biden classified files scandal is not over. It is a spark to a fire that is about to burn out of control.

God save us all.
12:22 PM · Feb 9, 2024
 
  • Like
Reactions: UT_Dutchman, dillyo51, StarRaider and 1 other person
#21
#21
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson


“Oh What a Tangled Web Biden Weaves, When He First Practices to Deceive”

Joe Biden and his White House handlers continue to peddle misinformation if not lies about his removal of classified files.

The worst is that Biden—supposedly so unlike Trump—came forward willingly as soon as he realized that he had unlawfully, but inadvertently, removed and possessed classified files. And thus he cooperated fully and promptly with federal authorities.

The truth is far, far different.

Biden removed files improperly both as a Senator and Vice President.

He held some of them in his unlawful possession for perhaps at least 14 years without a word to authorities, dating back at least to his departure from the Senate on January 15, 2009 when he resigned to become Vice President—or if not longer over his some 36-year Senate career.

In fact, in 2017 Biden was fully aware that he had wrongly removed these classified files. As Hur noted, there is a taped conversation on record between Biden and his ghostwriter to just that effect. Biden, at home in Virginia, was recorded as remarking, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”.

And yet Biden apparently did nothing. He never came forward to any federal authorities for nearly the next five years.

So given that knowledge, why did the attorneys belatedly disclose Biden’s possession of the files on November 2, 2022? Civic virtue? Altruism? Respect for the law?

Hardly.

Otherwise, Biden would have disclosed his unlawful possession at any time during either the intervening prior years when he was a private citizen or during the first 18 months of his presidency, when he knowingly still possessed classified files and still did nothing about it.

In truth, Biden would likely never have come forward, save for one insurmountable problem: Merrick Garland had likely decided to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump files that the FBI had swooped into Mar-a-Lago looking for 3 months earlier on August 8, 2022.

In other words, knowing that Smith or a generic special counsel would very quickly be appointed (Smith was sworn in a little over two weeks later, on November 18, 2022), suddenly Biden and Co. preempted that announcement, in fear that Biden had done virtually the same thing as Trump—albeit without presidential declassification power and for at least 14 years in possession of classified files.

Had the attorneys and Biden not come forward, Trump and others would have asked whether Biden had not also removed files. So to get out in front of the formal announcement of the Smith appointment, they preempted, misleadingly and disingenuously, preening that civic virtue had prompted Biden’s “voluntary” disclosures and “cooperation”.

A final note: one of the more disturbing moments in Biden’s catastrophic press conference was his flare up at Hur’s revelation (“How dare he bring up that!”) that in formal interviews an enfeebled Biden had not remembered the general date of his son’s tragic death from a glioblastoma brain tumor on May 30th, 2015 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC.

Biden went on to vent at Hur.

But Hur was simply documenting his analysis that Biden was severely cognitively impaired, and not as VP Kamala Harris claimed, gratuitously smearing Biden.

But who exactly had serially lied about Beau Biden’s demise, by claiming that he had died while on duty in Iraq, serving in the Delaware National Guard as a Judge Advocate?

Joe Biden.

He has still a bad habit of directing attention away from grieving families of fallen soldiers, by claiming that he too experienced the same nightmare.

Biden had been pilloried in the media to cease such false narratives about his son’s tragic premature death due to natural causes back in the United States, years after his deployment in Iraq.

But to no avail, he continues spinning such myths as he did repeatedly as late as last year.

Sadly, doctoring family tragedies for his own purposes is not new to Biden, as Jack Fowler noted in 2019.

The tragic death in a December 1972 traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, and the injuries of his two sons, was raised for decades by Biden—but in a completely false context of blaming an innocent truck driver, Curtis Dunn for the death.

Dunn was innocent of any culpability. No matter, Biden in his serial retelling for years repeatedly smeared Dunn as drunk driver (“an errant driver who stopped to drink”) who had killed his wife and daughter.

Biden finally gave in to the repeated pleas for decades from the truck driver and after his death, his family.

Or as a 2010 Mark Bowden Atlantic essay on Biden noted:

“For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”
10:31 AM · Feb 10, 2024

===================


 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: BreatheUT
#22
#22
jmacvols1 said:
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson


“Oh What a Tangled Web Biden Weaves, When He First Practices to Deceive”

Joe Biden and his White House handlers continue to peddle misinformation if not lies about his removal of classified files.

The worst is that Biden—supposedly so unlike Trump—came forward willingly as soon as he realized that he had unlawfully, but inadvertently, removed and possessed classified files. And thus he cooperated fully and promptly with federal authorities.

The truth is far, far different.

Biden removed files improperly both as a Senator and Vice President.

He held some of them in his unlawful possession for perhaps at least 14 years without a word to authorities, dating back at least to his departure from the Senate on January 15, 2009 when he resigned to become Vice President—or if not longer over his some 36-year Senate career.

In fact, in 2017 Biden was fully aware that he had wrongly removed these classified files. As Hur noted, there is a taped conversation on record between Biden and his ghostwriter to just that effect. Biden, at home in Virginia, was recorded as remarking, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”.

And yet Biden apparently did nothing. He never came forward to any federal authorities for nearly the next five years.

So given that knowledge, why did the attorneys belatedly disclose Biden’s possession of the files on November 2, 2022? Civic virtue? Altruism? Respect for the law?

Hardly.

Otherwise, Biden would have disclosed his unlawful possession at any time during either the intervening prior years when he was a private citizen or during the first 18 months of his presidency, when he knowingly still possessed classified files and still did nothing about it.

In truth, Biden would likely never have come forward, save for one insurmountable problem: Merrick Garland had likely decided to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump files that the FBI had swooped into Mar-a-Lago looking for 3 months earlier on August 8, 2022.

In other words, knowing that Smith or a generic special counsel would very quickly be appointed (Smith was sworn in a little over two weeks later, on November 18, 2022), suddenly Biden and Co. preempted that announcement, in fear that Biden had done virtually the same thing as Trump—albeit without presidential declassification power and for at least 14 years in possession of classified files.

Had the attorneys and Biden not come forward, Trump and others would have asked whether Biden had not also removed files. So to get out in front of the formal announcement of the Smith appointment, they preempted, misleadingly and disingenuously, preening that civic virtue had prompted Biden’s “voluntary” disclosures and “cooperation”.

A final note: one of the more disturbing moments in Biden’s catastrophic press conference was his flare up at Hur’s revelation (“How dare he bring up that!”) that in formal interviews an enfeebled Biden had not remembered the general date of his son’s tragic death from a glioblastoma brain tumor on May 30th, 2015 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC.

Biden went on to vent at Hur.

But Hur was simply documenting his analysis that Biden was severely cognitively impaired, and not as VP Kamala Harris claimed, gratuitously smearing Biden.

But who exactly had serially lied about Beau Biden’s demise, by claiming that he had died while on duty in Iraq, serving in the Delaware National Guard as a Judge Advocate?

Joe Biden.

He has still a bad habit of directing attention away from grieving families of fallen soldiers, by claiming that he too experienced the same nightmare.

Biden had been pilloried in the media to cease such false narratives about his son’s tragic premature death due to natural causes back in the United States, years after his deployment in Iraq.

But to no avail, he continues spinning such myths as he did repeatedly as late as last year.

Sadly, doctoring family tragedies for his own purposes is not new to Biden, as Jack Fowler noted in 2019.

The tragic death in a December 1972 traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, and the injuries of his two sons, was raised for decades by Biden—but in a completely false context of blaming an innocent truck driver, Curtis Dunn for the death.

Dunn was innocent of any culpability. No matter, Biden in his serial retelling for years repeatedly smeared Dunn as drunk driver (“an errant driver who stopped to drink”) who had killed his wife and daughter.

Biden finally gave in to the repeated pleas for decades from the truck driver and after his death, his family.

Or as a 2010 Mark Bowden Atlantic essay on Biden noted:

“For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”
10:31 AM · Feb 10, 2024

===================


Click to expand...


Hanson is a brilliant thinker and thus writer, and leads an argument with evidence.
 
  • Like
Reactions: StarRaider and jmacvols1
#23
#23
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson

2-12-24

There Are Only Two Things That Can Stop the Re-election of Donald Trump

The Biden news cycle is disastrous—and unending: a perfect storm of his failures abroad, disaster at the border, and reasons why sky-high prices nullify the Bidenomics hype.

The bad news is interspersed with fallout from the Special Counsel's damning report. Panicked Democrat grandees worry not over whether, but how, to remove Biden.

Then there are, of course, Biden’s daily flubs, confusions, spaciness, and creepy outbursts that grow at a geometric rate.

So there are only two things that can likely stop the reelection of Donald Trump.

One is the obviously coordinated effort of four prosecutors—Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis to rush to judgement and keep Trump in a courtroom all spring and summer, convict him, and put him in jail before the November election.

But that gambit is starting to unravel.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis will be taken off the case, if not disbarred or indicted herself. With her demise, her inflated indictment will likely not be taken up by surrogate partisans.

Jack Smith’s federal suit had been damaged by his obsessions with accelerating the trial for patently political purposes. Now there is a growing asymmetry in the two special counsels’ antithetical applications of the same law.

Joe Biden’s got a pass for taking out classified documents for a longer time, knowingly not reporting it, and putting them in less secure places than Mar-a-Lago, without an option to declassify them, as accorded to a president.

Letitia James’s case has received the most legal rebuke, given no other person has ever been so charged in New York for supposedly overstating real estate assets where there no injured party.

In Trump’s case no bank came forward to complain about the collateral Trump put up to secure loans—given he paid the loans back, in timely fashion and with profitable interests to the banks.

Alvin Bragg dragged up a 2005 tryst and a 2016 nondisclosure agreement to claim a campaign finance violation, in a fashion unimaginable for any candidate other than Trump.

All the prosecutors are either registered Democrats or liberals or both. There are clear ethics violations that range from prosecutors running for office on promises to get Trump, to coordinating their suits with the White House counsel or the January 6th committee.

So Trump may well find a way to be able to beat these patently weaponized indictments.

The other only way Trump might lose is—Trump himself.

He is being handed a rare gift with the Biden mental meltdown that will lead to even more damaging news cycles.

The Democratic donor class and political elite are desperate to find some bizarre way to dump Biden and appoint a replacement either before, during, or after the convention.

So all Trump must do is three simple things:

1) Enjoy the Biden doom loop and do not interrupt it.

2) Do not say something weird or crazy enough to feed the left-wing media machine that is desperately searching for a way to stop the news of the Biden hemorrhaging.

3) Do not appear unpalatable or toxic to independents and moderates whose support could give Trump an extra 3-5 percent margin—and with it some insurance over the inevitable Democratic “edge” in non-Election-Day, and thus less verifiable, voting.

Instead, in a 24-hour cycle Trump violated all three cannons.

One, in lose/lose fashion he asked rhetorically where was Hayley’s husband (an attempt to fuel rumors of adultery surrounding her years in South Carolina governance?)

That only set him up for her answer: patriotically serving his country abroad as a soldier.

Next, he trolled his critics by claiming that he had once told a NATO ally that if any still persisted in refusing to meet its military spending obligations, and still expected the U.S. to defend them, then he would tell the Russians to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any financially wayward NATO nation.

Trump likely was trying to boast in art-of-the-deal, hard-ball fashion how he got NATO countries to up their defense spending, or said it in trolling fashion to irk his perennial NATO/Putin critics.

But no matter: the media went crazy and for a day the country forgot Biden’s news noose.

Such trolling disrupted the Biden free fall. It gave the media another shot at their hysterical mongering of “how dare Trump say that”.

Sure, Hayley is accusing Trump of being near senile, crazy, and dangerous, but he has to get even not mad—by ignoring her since she is going nowhere in the primaries.

Trump thinks his prior performance-art, rhetorical threats to NATO forced many of them to act in their self-interest and spend more on defense. And that may be true. But postfacto bragging of the threats he used only fuels the media’s old saw that Trump will destroy NATO and is Putin’s puppet.

Trump is sending a life-raft to a drowning Biden, while alienating millions of disenchanted and frightened Biden voters, especially independents, RINOS, and old Blue-Dog Democrats who are all considering a Trump vote. Again, he may need them.

Trump so far is doing his best to counter the lawfare of his enemies.

But only he can stop himself from gifting Biden and hurting himself—as he interrupts his enemies even as they dig their holes ever deeper.
11:02 AM · Feb 12, 2024
 
#25
#25
Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson


What the Left Has Bequeathed Us

The Left has created new rules for national politics. Here are 20 some precedents they now have established for America in the future:

1) When in control of the Senate, demand the end of the filibuster; when not, don’t.

2) Call for the end of the Electoral College–but only if it appears to recently favor the candidate of the opposition.

3) In an election year, change any state balloting laws deemed unhelpful through administrative fiat or court order to favor your political candidate.

4) Seek to flip electors from voting in accordance with the popular vote count in their states; indict as an insurrectionist any of the opposition who dare do the same.

5) Raid the home of any opposition ex-president who removed classified files; exempt any sitting president of your party who did the same.

6) Swarm the private homes of, and then bully and intimidate any, Supreme Court officials, politicians, or citizens you oppose.

7) Appoint two special counsels: one to go after the current chief presidential opponent in an election year; the other to exempt and excuse the sitting president for the very crimes charged against his rival.

8) Lobby to remove any oppositional president through the 25th Amendment; smear any one as ageist who suggests a cognitively challenged sitting resident of your party should be subject to similar invocations of the 25th Amendment.

9) Exempt thousands of arrested rioters from charges of 120 days of arson, looting, injuring 1,500 law enforcement officers, and assault—but only if they are radical supporters of your party.

10) Excuse any demonstrator or rioter for desecrating public monuments and cemeteries or shutting down bridges and freeways, or swarming and disrupting the Capitol Rotunda—but only if they agree with you and/or are pro-Hamas. Otherwise, ensure the charged face lengthy prison sentences.

11) Try to pack the Supreme Court—but only if justices you don’t like are in a majority.

12) Seek in an election year to remove a presidential opponent off state ballots for crimes for which he has never been charged, much less convicted of.

13) First target a presidential opponent, and then change, warp, or redefine laws to convict him. Weaponized prosecutors should always indict their political opponents in jurisdictions where they are guaranteed like-minded justices and jury pools.

14) Violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (the prohibition of “excessive fines”) by having sympathetic judges level multimillion-dollar fines to bankrupt the opposition candidate during a presidential campaign. The more there is no victim of a crime, the higher fines should be leveled for “damages”.

15) Open the border by destroying all the protocols and executive orders of a predecessor president. Then welcome 8-million illegal aliens to “surge” into America on the premise a new constituency might support agendas that American citizens do not. Then call the nonexistent border “secure,” while blaming a predecessor president for having left it secure.

16) Have local prosecutors invent criminal acts of an opposition national presidential candidate in efforts to make it impossible for him to campaign for the presidency.

17) Use the FBI to hire out social media auditors to censor any news deemed problematic for the correct presidential candidate.

18) Hire a foreign national to concoct a smear dossier about one’s opposition political nominee. Ensure the FBI also uses and pays the foreign national to spread untruths among the media and administrative state.

19) On the eve of any major national or midterm election, ensure a president drains the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gasoline prices.

20) On the eve of any major national or midterm election, ensure a president promises to cancel billions of dollars in contracted federal student loans.
11:32 AM · Feb 21, 2024
 
New posts
You must log in or register to reply here.

VN Store



Back
Top