Corruption
The evidence of endemic corruption in American civic life is overwhelming and obvious. Most Americans either haven't noticed or don't care.
Jun. 11 - To the extent this almanac follows politics and current events, however loosely and moronically, there ought to be coverage of the European Parliament elections that wrapped up on Sunday. So before I get to the gangrenous rot hollowing out American civic life, let’s spend a minute on that.
The election results were mixed. Virtually anyone of any political disposition can find things to like and dislike in how it all panned out. It was not as big a victory for the European “far right” (read: the non-left) as the media have been making it out to be, but it was certainly not a good election for Europe’s far left.
I was disappointed by Denmark’s results: the Socialist People’s Party and the Social Democrats got three seats each, and the milquetoast “right-of-center” party got two. Another seven parties got a single seat each.
In all, Denmark’s 15 seats broke out like this: 8 left of center, 6 right of center, and one for the goddam “Moderates”—the centrist party that stands for nothing, nothing at all, but whose members want power so they can get their filthy mitts on the levers of state.
Overall, the European Parliament did indeed inch a little away from the far left, and that’s nice (for those of us who roll that way), but the EP is such an architecturally leftist body that even packing it with an Ayn Rand or John Stuart Mill clone armywould do little more than slow it down a little.
The Danish media are excited about Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, the 26-year-old socialist who was the biggest individual vote getter in Denmark—although as even that linked article from Danmarks Radio (DR) notes in its lede, “Her goal is to eliminate poverty and save the planet — but she flies to and from Brussels anyway.”
Mm-hm.
Much more interesting, I think, was the introduction of Hunter Biden’s laptop as evidence in his Delaware trial last week. Here’s recently red-pilled life-long Democrat Jonathan Turley:
Watching the coverage this week out of Delaware was like finding oneself in a parallel universe. There were ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post and other news outlets reporting matter-of-factly that the Hunter Biden laptop showed no evidence of tampering and was both real and authentic.
These are the same outlets, and some of the same reporters, who eagerly spread the false claims that the laptop was "Russian disinformation."
Yet, what followed the testimony of FBI agent Erika Jensen was absolute crickets. There was no effort to track down the signatories of the now-debunked letter from former intelligence officials just before the election. In the letter, figures such as Leon Panetta, former CIA director in the Obama administration, claimed that the letter had all the markings of a Russian disinformation effort by intelligence services.
Read the whole thing. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to share his final paragraph:
The reappearance of the laptop in a Delaware courtroom might be awkward for most people, but not the media or intelligence officials or politicians who pushed the conspiracy theory. After all, they were all in on the trick. It was the voters who were played for chumps.
Turley calls the laptop disinformation hoax “the single greatest political trick in history,” and compares its execution to Houdini’s disappearing elephant act.
He’s got his facts right, and the significance right, and he’s appropriately angered and disgusted, but he’s still too ginger for my liking. Too polite.
When, in March of 2022, the first major news organizations began conceding that, gosh, you know, maybe that laptop hadn’t been bogus after all, I got a little hot under the collar.
And this is no small thing: the emails on that laptop, which had by then already been publicly verified by one of the men on the distribution list (who went so far as to make his own electronics available for forensic analysis to further verify his corroboration)—the emails, as I was saying, described an influence peddling scheme in which Hunter Biden would be keeping a 10% cut “for the big guy.” So this wasn’t just a treasure trove of Hunter Biden’s tawdry, drug-laced OnlyFans out-takes: this was the kind of stuff that certainly ought to have been investigated immediately and aggressively by the media. The election was mere weeks away: didn’t the American people deserve to know that Joe Biden may have illegally used his office and American foreign policy to enrich himself and his family?
I wondered aloud why articles of impeachment weren’t being drawn up against Biden right then and there, and expanded on that thought:
He had a personal problem that could hurt his campaign, a real problem that he knew damn well was true, so he accused Russia of cooking up a plot against him. And really, why not? It worked for Hillary Clinton’s little email problem. And of course Ole Puddinhead knew his supporters and media would back him up—and they did.
They even went overboard: Twitter and Facebook, our great arbiters of Socratic truth, actually blocked the story from being shared. More than that: Twitter blocked the New York Post from use of their service for two weeks in the closing days of the election.
This is corruption on such a grand scale, illustrating such contempt for America by the very people assigned responsibility for its welfare, that it’s actually hard to accept. Which is why I have no doubt that many Americans will not accept it. By which I mean they’ll dismiss it.
Credit where it’s due: I fucking nailed it.
I’m still astonished by the enormity of corruption the laptop story revealed. Donald Trump’s conviction on a bunch of over-inflated small-ball misdemeanors only fuels the inferno of my wrath.
Just think who’s implicated in this corruption: The President of the United States, the American intelligence community, the Democratic Party, the establishment media, big tech. . . they colluded to mislead Americans into believing something they themselves knew to be false in order to swing an American election the way they wanted.
They didn’t just squash a story: they spun it around so instead of damning evidence of what still appears to have been a pay-to-play influence peddling scheme by Joe Biden while (and after) he was Vice President, they pushed the idea that l’affaire du laptop was evidence of the Kremlin manipulating the American election to keep Putin’s pawn Donald Trump in office.
They’re dirty, all of them, they’re corrupt, they’re dishonest, they’re as grubby as they are power-hungry, and that can’t be denied or pretended away. It’s what Donald Rumsfeld would have called a “known known.” Everything I’ve written above is known, it’s all in the public domain.
Americans are cheering about Trump having been convicted of a bookkeeping misdemeanor inflated into a felony through the byzantine logic of an obsessive prosecution and a partisan judge. Literally cheering: see the videos I linked to the other day. Joy Behar was so excited she claimed to have literally "leaked a little!" Steve Colbert led his audience in a chant of "lock him up!"
Not because they’re depraved partisan animals, but because they love justice, right? They love that this man who violated the laws has finally been held to account. No one is above the law!
It’s the moment of truth for all the chattering, poo-flinging monkeys of the American left. If no one’s above the law, and we now all know with 100% certitude that Hunter’s laptop is real—and, more importantly, that its contents are, too—and we also know with 100% certitude that this was known back in October 2020, then when do we start holding these corrupt creeps accountable? When do we get to see how not above the law they are?
Are Americans too dumb, too numb, or too clueless to connect the dots?
I mean, there are only two dots: (1) the Democratic elite, the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities, the media, and big tech are demonstrably corrupt and in cahoots. (2) Those same people have made the overarching theme of the 2024 election the need to “save democracy” by defeating Donald Trump.
A brain-injured collie could connect those dots.
Save democracy? For whom? For the people who’ve been shitting all over it the past four, eight, ten years?
It sounds crazy to talk like this, but the facts are all out there.
Joe Biden: that whole laptop story is a bunch of garabage and the intelligence community says it’s Russian propaganda.
The Intelligence Community: Damn straight that’s what we say! And anyone who says otherwise is perpetuating Russian disinformation and therefore an enemy of the American way of life!
The Media: Yasss!
The Reality: the laptop is and was always real and everyone always knew it was real, but it was more important to nail Trump with a lie than to question Biden about an inconvenient truth because DEMOCRACY!
Scott Pinsker explores what all this means on PJ Media.
Ingrid Jacques explores it in USA Today.
Matt Vespa gets into it on Townhall.com.
The editorial board of the Washington Times has chimed in.
William McGurn touches on it on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
And Kurt Schlichter has been beating that drum all along.
The establishment media, many of which acknowledged long ago that the laptop was in fact real, still have not sorted through the implications of the fraud that was perpetrated upon the American public by means of their complicity. There has been no settling of accounts.
We are expected to believe that some tricky bookkeeping between Trump and his lawyer was a felonious crime threatening the integrity of a national election—and to simultaneously accept that the Biden laptop fraud was just, you know, well, god, it was so long ago and at this point what difference does it make?
Joe Biden and his administration are corrupt, the media are too corrupt to report on it, and big tech is so corrupt they’re enabling all the other corruption.
I don’t know how much longer it can go on, or how much worse it can get, before we reach the necessary tipping point.
But at some point Americans are going to have to realize that not only isn’t the emperor not wearing any clothes—he’s surrounded by a vicious praetorian guard who are going to continue insisting on the magnificence of his glorious raiment—and that it’s the rotten kids claiming he’s naked who aren’t wearing any clothes.
Garbage people, garbage government, garbage media, garbage tech: here’s hoping all it takes to get out from under all that garbage is a peaceful election on November 5.
Football Heroes
June 11 is an important day for American football fans and seems almost inevitably slated to someday become a national holiday. It's the birthday of both Vince Lombardi (1913) and Joe Montana (1956).
Mr Lombardi played at Fordham University and was a Latin and chemistry teacher in New Jersey before becoming the head coach of the Green Bay Packers at the age of XLVI.
They had won only I of XII games the season before he was hired; they won VII his first year. Over the course of his brief career, the Packers won V NFL championships and the first II Super Bowls (Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II, in that order).
It was Coach Lombardi's background in Latin that persuaded the NFL to use Roman numerals to number the Super Bowls.
“Winning isn't everything,” Coach Lombardi famously declared, “but it's a sensible aspiration in competitive endeavors.” (He was the first NFL coach to hire a publicist and his statements were carefully edited before distribution to the press.)
Over the course of his career, Joe Montana completed 3409 of 5391 passes and threw 273 touchdowns. In the playoffs, he completed 460 of 734 passes and threw 45 touchdowns. As a starter, he won 117 and lost 47 regular season games.
Upon his retirement, the town of Ismay, Montana, changed its name to Joe. The town of Joe, Rhode Island, attempted to change the name of its state to Montana, but was prohibited from doing so by heavily-monied special interests.
Lombardi and Montana share their June 11 birthday with Adrienne Barbeau (1945), Gene Wilder (1935), and Jacques Cousteau (1910), none of whom ever won a Super Bowl.
June 11 is King Kamehameha I Day in Hawaii. (Kamehameha is Hawaiian for “Thrower of tight spiral.”)
Note: today’s featured image was not drawn by my GPT illustrator Balzac because he refused my prompt.
Someone tell me why a generic illustration of a corrupt society should violate Open AI’s content policy—and then tell me with a straight face our entire society isn’t corrupt to the core.
Enjoy your Tuesday.
© The Moron’s Almanac
Maybe try the prompt without the words “corrupt society” but including the various examples of it? Possibly the very concept that society can be corrupt is offensive to the bias-adjusters behind the scenes. That’s like saying society, which is everyone, is as bad as, gasp, the Orange Convict Bad!
Of course, I distinctly remember the same crowd, whenever some criminal had done a very bad thing, solemnly intoning that society was to blame. But looking for consistency is a fool’s errand.
As to the main point of your post, it really is amazing to see the media issue dire warning that democracy is in peril because Trump supposedly said he *might* consider some of things that the Democrats have in fact been actively *doing* over the past years. Chutzpah galore.