Monday, November 18, 2019

News That Should Trump The Impeachment Farce

     If the possible corruption of public officials is a big deal, why is it that the “respectable” media leave it to the “fringe” media to cover it?

     Corrupt actions by the former Obama-era vice president and secretary of state are coming to light after new leaked documents surfaced. In a bombshell tweet, activist and entrepreneur Michael Coudrey released a series of leaked documents from the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office, which allegedly detail a so-called ‘slushfund’ collecting large sums of money from foreign sources.
     Leaked transaction and bank records indicate an influx of large payments from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Limited to Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, in what appears to be monthly payments of $83,333.33. pic.twitter.com/BZXi61NnOO

     — Michael Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) November 14, 2019

     The report claimed this fund is owned and operated by former Secretary of State John Kerry and Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.

     Please read the rest. We should be grateful that One America Network has taken up the mantle of actual news reportage. In our time, the “respectable” media seem to regard their task, in Jim Treacher’s formulation, as suppressing news of any sort, however serious, if it might reflect badly on important Democrats. Nor can this be dismissed as a penny-ante heist. With $1.8 billion of American foreign aid “missing,” the media ought to be digging furiously...but they’re not.

     There are several aspects of this report yet to be addressed:

  • Will Ukraine’s government confirm that the leaked documents are its authentic, unaltered products?
  • Can the ownership interest of then-Secretary of State John Kerry in Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC be confirmed?
  • Is there a “money trail” that connects Kerry to the slush fund, as Hunter Biden is connected?

     But don’t hold your breath waiting for the “respectable” media to take the ball from One America Network and run with it.

     When the National Enquirer broke the story of U.S. Senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards’s extramarital affair and illegitimate child, it would have been reasonable to expect that the “respectable” media would blush a bit at having been scooped by a supermarket checkout-line tabloid. It would have been reasonable to expect that they’d strive to improve their performance, at least cosmetically. The opposite has happened instead. Why?

     If there’s a credible explanation other than the complete conquest of the “respectable” media by the Left, such that they no longer function as a news source but rather as organs of disinformation and propaganda, I haven’t heard it. The evidence for that contention is piled awfully high. The media’s complete suppression of any news about the many scandals in the Obama Administration should be conclusive – especially now that they’ve enlisted in the effort to remove a Republican President from the White House on the most ludicrous charges imaginable.

     If there’s an irony cherry to top this corruption confection, it would be that the media once played up Joseph Biden’s habit of riding the train from his Delaware home to D.C. for his work in Congress. The idea, of course, was to emphasize his integrity: to underscore the cleanliness of his hands at a time when service on Capitol Hill was the most reliable route to riches in the known universe. Needless to say, the same media have nothing to say about the “golden triangle of corruption” that has sunk deep roots into federal Washington: i.e., the use of non-office-holding relatives as conduits for ill-gotten gains:

     Corruption in modern D.C. is shaped like a triangle. A person or entity seeking a favor doesn’t hand the money directly to the politician or public official. Instead, the money goes to a trusted family relation under a vague “consulting” or “speaking” arrangement. This golden triangle of corruption appears over and over again in the Russia collusion hoax.

     The Clinton email scandal and the Biden/Ukraine scandal have a lot in common. Both originated with snooping into high-level triangle schemes but morphed into a counter-scandal against Trump. In Clinton’s case, she deleted 30,000 emails that likely contained more evidence of favors to donors and friends. The process was so formalized that one Clinton Foundation official actually wrote a memo bragging about how the foundation work led to lavish speaking fees for Bill Clinton. As an example, he obtained speaking fees for Clinton from UBS in the amount of $900,000, $750,000 from Ericson “plus $400,000 for a private plane.” The memo author bragged that he negotiated a $1,000,000 fee for a one-hour Bill Clinton speech in China. When Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she no longer had influence to sell and the donations to the “charitable” foundation dried up.

     But there have been several other triangle arrangements. Consider the Ohrs. Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a very senior attorney in the Justice Department, lent his credibility to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research contractor by sponsoring it to the FBI. The same contractor, Fusion GPS, paid Bruce Ohr’s wife tens of thousands of dollars to work on the same project.

     That’s from another please-read-it-all piece. The practice is pervasive. It’s an open secret. But we only read about it in the “respectable” media when they can hang a Republican out to dry for it.

     The Republic, it seems, is ruled by some of the very worst men in the world. Men to whom power is merely a trade good, by which they can acquire great riches and other “perquisites.” But the only official the “respectable” media are interested in pillorying is the one who has explicitly renounced the possibility of even trivial monetary gain from his office: the 45th president of these United States, Donald J. Trump.

     I think I’ll spend some time playing a video game. Shooting imaginary villains through the head has proved politically analgesic before. Perhaps it will do so again.

1 comment:

NITZAKHON said...

"The Republic, it seems, is ruled by some of the very worst men in the world."

Power corrupts.

It also attracts those who are corruptible.

I don't recall who it was - perhaps Heinlein - who said that the mere act of WANTING to run for office should be a disqualifier.