Almost half the country thinks Joe Biden is corrupt, according to a new YouGov poll.
While most Democrats are being ostriches, even 52% of independents don’t believe the “Honest Joe” malarkey about the “poorest man in Congress” anymore.
Among Americans who voted for Biden in the 2020 election, a full 13% have been red-pilled.
They have eyes, and common sense, and somehow the avalanche of incriminating evidence spewing forth from the House Oversight Committee has managed to bypass the gatekeepers of the media and slowly permeate the public consciousness.
Once people with eyes and common sense see the evidence about the influence-peddling racket operated by Joe’s son Hunter and brother Jim to make millions of dollars from shady characters in China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc., while Joe was vice president, it is impossible not to grasp the corrupt nature of that business and Joe’s role in it.
Joe was “the brand,” as Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer testified to the House Oversight Committee.
The “signals” that were sent to friends and enemies by a corrupt oligarch’s association with the second-most powerful man in the world were worth millions of dollars.
That’s influence-peddling.
You don’t need a bank statement with Joe’s name on it or a secret recording of the Big Guy shaking down some Ukrainian oligarch to know what is going on.
Just watch “The Godfather.”
The reason the president still gets away with the innocent act with half the country is because of the gaslighting from complicit media, fed by anonymous intelligence sources and Atlantic Council types who have covered up for Joe for years, especially when it came to his most vulnerable quid pro quo in Ukraine.
Formerly august media organs have degenerated into naked propaganda operations, pumping out lies, or as they might prefer to call them, “narratives” in which truth is “debunked” and fiction is evidence.
Or, as Philip Bump of the Washington Post likes to call it, “parsing.”
Bump, who could be a minor character in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satirical novel about journalism, “Scoop,” has been wrong on almost every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop saga, just as Bump was on the Russia hoax and the Donald Trump “photo op” controversy in Lafayette Park in DC.
For instance, when every other media organization finally admitted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, Bump clung to his story that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”
Blind to the facts
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley points out, Bump spreads “false stories” and then refuses to accept the facts even after he’s been proven to be spectacularly wrong.
He never has apologized, nor has the Washington Post issued a correction or reassessed whether Bump needs remedial editing.
After Turley, in his column in The Hill, laid out Bump’s errors on the three above-mentioned stories, Turley received an email from a WaPo mandarin telling him the newspaper “stands by Philip Bump’s reporting and your characterization of his articles as ‘false’ is incorrect.”
That’s how the “prestige media” ecosystem works. They are Potemkin villages of journalism and don’t take kindly to anyone peering behind the façade of rectitude.
Turley in his blog comprehensively swatted Bump, which is worth reading as an insight into journalistic delusions.
But an even harsher showcase for Bump’s self-belief came from an unusual place: a podcast run by Noam Dworman, owner of New York’s own Comedy Cellar.
Gently challenged on his insistence that there is no evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s money-grabbing schemes around the world, Bump lost his mind and ended up walking out.
With his voice rising to soprano levels of panic and arms flailing, he was a man in distress for much of the hour-plus podcast.
“I just I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna lose my mind,” Bump says at one point, when Dworman is pressing him on Archer’s testimony that Hunter would get his father on the speakerphone to talk to overseas business partners about the “weather.”
Dworman: “Is there nothing we can talk about … half the country believes this stuff.”
Bump: “I know, because half the country doesn’t actually dig into the issues.”
Dworman: “Here’s your chance to disabuse people. They don’t read the Washington Post.”
Dworman is probably best described as an old-school Democrat who likes to keep an open mind about contentious subjects, with the view that “even my enemies may be telling the truth against my friends,” as he told Bump in a conciliatory email after the contretemps.
“Live long enough, many unexpected people turn out to have been telling the truth.”
An open mind was once the marker of good journalism.
But these days, as Dworman puts it, the media has lost its curiosity:
“What we’re seeing is akin to an ocean full of sharks who have simultaneously lost their ability to smell blood in the water. The press seems to have lost its ability to alert itself to obvious facts that need to be followed up on.”
Instead of explaining how he reached his conclusions, Dworman’s forensic questions just made Bump frantic.
“There’s just no point, because all you want to do is you want to have me here as the putative expert so that you can present me with things that have been debunked multiple times that I’ve written about.”
Dworman: “What’s been debunked?”
Bump: “These, these claims. I’ve written about this, this argument about his dad calling him. I’ve written about this. Did you read what I wrote?”
Dworman: “It’s not debunked. Neither of us were there.”
Bump: “Well, I debunked it in the standpoint that I’ve already addressed this and presented the counterarguments to it.”
Toward the end of the podcast, Dworman said: “I have two issues here. One is Joe Biden’s behavior and one is the issue of the press. The press actually bothers me more than Joe Biden.”
Bump: “Because you don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen, and you continue to insist upon things that are, you know, parsing of language. And it’s just, it’s this is why I keep saying it’s silly.”
Bump finally says he’s leaving.
Dworman: “Well, it’s a shame because this is a good conversation.”
Bump: “It’s not a good conversation, because you refuse to listen to what I’m saying to you. You asked me on to present evidence. I keep telling you.”
Question of reliability
When Bump sneers at independent journalist Matt Taibbi, Dworman asks why: “Is Taibbi unreliable?”
Bump replies that Taibbi has an “agenda.”
Dworman: “You have no agenda.”
Bump: “I do have an agenda … My agenda is to do my best to try and present accurate information to the public. And I have an institution behind me to hold me to account when I don’t do that, which I think is an important consideration.”
The WaPo letter to Turley suggests otherwise.
