Better in their words…

This is really good, and well written. Jenkins in the WSJ is massive. Comparing Russian siloviki with US silovike- perfect.  mrossol

Source: HINDSIGHT ☙ Sunday, June 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

👨‍⚖️ We begin with Reuters’ Friday story headlined, “Trump’s immunity ruling due Monday as US Supreme Court announces end of term.” On Friday, Chief Justice Roberts announced that tomorrow, the Court’s current term, which started in October, will conclude. Unless he changes his mind again. Haha, just kidding. What Roberts meant was, get ready, the Trump Immunity Decision is dropping on Monday.

On Monday, “we will announce all remaining opinions ready during this term of the court,” Justice Roberts pronounced from the bench on Friday. Corporate media is already circling the wagons, because what Democrats really do not need right now is any more good news about President Trump. Newsweek ran its very hopeful story yesterday headlined, “Donald Trump will “lose” in Supreme Court immunity ruling: Attorney.”

By “lose,” with quotation marks, Newsweek meant there’s nothing Trump can do this time, his goose is cooked this time, and there’s nothing the Supreme Court can do to save him this time.

Opinions, like garlic cloves, are common and they all stink. Newsweek’s garlic stunk worse than most. The “newspaper” quoted a an MSNBC lawyer and an MSNBC anchor who both opined that, even if the Supreme Court fully immunizes Presidential actions, Trump’s judge Lashawanda Tyquashia Chutkan, or something like that, will immediately find that Trump’s January 6th conduct wasn’t a presidential action in the first place and put her case on greased skids toward yet another mind-numbing Trump trial.

Newsweek’s stupid MSNBC-fueled article was yet another example of one-sided reporting undermining media credibility. Literally every TV lawyer has an opinion about how the Supreme Court decision could shake out and whether it helps or hurts the President. But Newsweek, apparently, could only find two MSNBC anchors who both agreed with each other.

For the very first time in the Nation’s 240-year existence, the Supreme Court is laying out the boundaries of Presidential immunity. This historic decision’s effect cannot be predicted with the confidence of Newsweek’s two opinionated sources. There’s a lot of this kind of cheap, unaccountable, lazy journalism going on as the legacy media circles the toilet bowl.

Polls show citizens have grown increasingly suspicious of corporate media, and prefer to get their news from social media sources like Twitter, or intersection panhandlers.

Unlike Newsweek, I won’t try predicting whether the Supreme Court will rip the legal bowels out of Judge Chutkan’s case or whether she’ll fly away on a broomstick. We only have to wait one more day to find out.

🔥🔥 As I predicted, the hard questions continued popping out yesterday. The Hill ran its story headlined, “Senator Tillis calls on Cabinet to invoke 25th Amendment after ‘painful’ Biden debate.” Apparently, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) —a member of Mitch McConnell’s leadership team— drew the short straw. He went there.

While it’s true Tillis is ostensibly a Republican, he’s a squish who the Hill said “is widely considered one of the most bipartisan members in the Republican conference and has been involved in a number of key talks throughout Biden’s term in office.” Tillis sent a letter to the GOP conference calling for Biden’s Cabinet to consider whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove Biden for mental incompetence and cognitive decline.

“Displaying that decline in front of hundreds of millions of Americans is most certainly not normal,” Senator Tillis told the Hill’s reporter. “Especially when your day job is serving as the nation’s commander-in-chief.”

Tillis’ letter won’t get any traction in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But over in the House, reliable conservative Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) promised to file a similar resolution, calling on Vice President Harris and the Cabinet to declare Biden incompetent to fulfill his presidential duties.

Under the 25th Amendment, the vice president and a majority of Cabinet members can vote to declare a brain-damaged commander-in-chief “unable to discharge the powers and the duties of his office” and transfer the president’s duties to the vice president. Hilariously (dark humor), Democrats used to bring up the 25th Amendment all the time when President Trump occupied the office. They couldn’t shut up about it. It was their favorite amendment.

I’d bet Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio that Democrats don’t want to talk about the 25th Amendment now. What do you think?

Thanks to Biden’s drooling debate performance, in races from dog catcher to the U.S. Senate, Republican politicians are about to enjoy the political version of what we call a target-rich environment.

🔥 The logic is simple and straightforward. Saving America requires draining the swamp. Draining the swamp requires first admitting that the Deep State exists and is a problem. It’s one thing if I say it, but we need to convince people who don’t read Substack. In that vein, behold the latest Wall Street Op-Ed by Editorial Board member Holman W. Jenkins, titled “Joe Biden and America’s Out-of-Control Spooks.”

It isn’t easy to “out” the intelligence agencies or call them “out of control.” No less than Chuckie Schumer himself warned darkly that they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. That wasn’t a joke. And Chuck should know.

Something has changed, and I think it was the Biden Debate. Whatever it was, Mr. Jenkins obviously feels safe enough to call our deep-state spies out anyway, and he called them lying liars:

Siloviki was an interesting choice. First, it is a Russian word, and as you know, all things Russian are bad. Jenkins took a drastic risk of being labeled a Putin stooge by referencing Russia at all. Second, the concept of siloviki is much bigger than just spooks dabbling in politics.

Here’s how the Journal of Democracy defined siloviki, as bureaucrats “charged with wielding coercion and violence in the name of the state”:

I’d bet John Fetterman’s voice-to-text gadget that Jenkins chose the Russian term carefully, in full knowledge of its meaning. Having placed that ominous dish on the table, Mr. Jenkins then served up the next hard question —a question explicitly prompted by Biden’s disastrous debate debacle— asking what the intelligence agencies will do now:

To answer his rhetorical question, no, I do not want to find out. I want them arrested for their insurrection.

The deep-state spooks have big problems on their blood-soaked hands. Yesterday, the New York Times ran this astonishing headline, suggesting that Biden’s bad debate could end the deep-state’s Proxy War in Ukraine:

In some weird way I do not fully understand, Team Biden links Joe’s fate, obviously believing it is intertwined with the fate of that colorful French gadfly Emmanuel Macron. Yesterday, Politico also echoed worries about President Macron’s sudden and unexpected stumble from his seemingly secure position as the globalist’s youthful and energetic poster-boy to being a stale, day-old French doughnut:

Digging further into Politico’s article, which tellingly noted that Macron’s very first call after deciding to dissolve his Parliament was to Joseph R. Biden (fortunately around 11am when Joe was still awake). Biden, unsteadier than ever, seems to think Macron will somehow pull the octogenarian mumbler down too. And, as with the Times’ fretful article, we discover another reference to the Proxy War as the main risk of a Macron defeat:

Reading between the lines, I think the problem is that, following the debate, Biden can no longer save Macron. He’s busy saving himself. So, what will Biden do? The UK Daily Mail ran this tantalizing headline yesterday:

While the Mail’s article was packed with official denials that Joe would everconsider dropping out of the race, don’t be silly, it quoted NBC’s report from an anonymous source that the stumbling top Democrat plans to “informally” discuss his campaign’s future.

Could this be it? Is Joe going to “do the right thing for the country?” I doubt it. Why start now? But I’m not ruling anything out at this point. It is 2024, after all.

📉 The Washington Post ran a baffled headline this week that was so delicious I had to give you the screenshot version:

Hahahahaha! And they still haven’t learned anything! This time, what most alarmed WaPo was that its “Post-Schar School” surveys a specific group what it calls “deciders,” which is the group of registered voters most likely to show up for the Presidential election and most likely to be dumb enough to enter their credit card number on the WaPo website.

“It is a grim time,” the story began, “to be a member of the news media.”

What a baffling mystery! According to the latest poll, seventy percent of American deciders do not trust the media. And almost ninety percent of White Evangelical Christian deciders at this point just assume the opposite of anything the media says. How could this happen? Who left the media outside with the windows down right before the storm? WaPo blamed President Trump! Who else? Mostly because he pointed out the obvious fact that corporate media is packed with fake news and is mostly written from a posh coffee shop on the corner of Lobby Avenue and War Street in Washington, DC.

Despite having warehouses of on-call experts, corporate media reporters have learned nothing. Not one thing.

🔥 With that delicious irony in mind, the Washington Post ran an even more ironic story Friday headlined, “Assange plea came after warning that U.S. would lose extradition fight.”  The sub-headline added, “After years of Justice Department efforts to bring the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to stand trial, the near-collapse of the case in a British court sent prosecutors hurtling toward a plea deal.”

WaPo reported it had received a copy of a confidential Justice Department email dated April 4th. The email was sent by a DOJ lawyer stationed in Britain, who bluntly told DOJ lawyers in DC that “The urgency here has now reached a critical point. The case will head to appeal and we will lose.”

I wanted to use this next paragraph as a clue to help WaPo understand why nobody trusts the media these days. But there’s a much bigger irony that the paper’s baffled editors completely missed. First, read WaPo’s description of its story’s sources:

Haha! There it is again. Another breaking news story completely founded on a soccer team’s worth of murky, anonymous deep-state bureaucrats. Not one of them willing to go on record. So here’s the funniest part: Julian Assange’s “Wikileaks” prosecution was for leaking confidential information. And yet, the very same DOJ lawyers prosecuting Assange for leaking confidential information themselves leaked confidential information to the Washington Post.

Siloviki, heal thyselves.

WaPo’s story is yet another media and deep-state self-own! These people either have no self-awareness at all, or things inside the deep-state are spinning wildly out of control. Or possibly both. You never know. But it is great to see.

🔥🔥 Finally, there was more terrific news from the conservative counter-revolution, as financial realities smashed right into stupid hiring practices, and our hard times continued making stronger men.  The Wall Street Journal ran the extended, magazine-style story surprisingly headlined, “Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much.”

Diversity, the experts have long advised, is our strength. But it turned out that diversity is not actually our strength. Diversity is more like a cheap Minnie Mouse band-aid that falls right off your kid’s leg as soon as you get in the car, forcing you to have to stop again and buy more cheap bandaids at the Kangaroo, and right after you just stopped fifteen minutes ago for the kids to use the bathroom.

Diversity is just like that.

The Journal’s article began by fingering the toxic fountainhead of corporate diversity initiatives, a 2015 McKinsey study. McKinsey & Co. is a plush Fortune 500 “consulting” firm. “Consultant” is a nifty euphemism for expensive scapegoat. Business consultants are expensive people you haul in to take the blame for unpopular decisions the corporate executives wanted to make anyways, but were too lily-livered to do it themselves.

In 2015, McKinsey published its seminal “study,” which miraculously linked higher profits to hiring diverse unqualified employees and putting them in charge of bloated budgets totally unrelated to products, customers, or vendors. In other words, according to McKinsey, corporations didn’t need innovation or nimble management. They only needed to hire more Rainbow People and get a bigger cash drawer.

In ten years, McKinsey has never identified the 86 companies it supposedly studied to learn that diversity equals profits. For privacy.

Still, ever since, corporate managers have waved the McKinsey study around like a rainbow flag, citing it as complete justification for building out bloated woke diversity departments and discrimination against white folks, mostly white men, and for casting all financial caution to the wind by hiring more diverse but less qualified people hoping they’d perform better than their individual mental illnesses suggested.

But the Wall Street Journal threw McKinsey right under the bus in its Friday article. It all but said McKinsey’s conclusions were fake, made up, and most unforgivably, unprofitable:

The article stopped just short of openly mocking a 2016 hedge fund that had enthusiastically embraced the McKinsey “study.” The exciting new fund initially claimed a +36% higher return from its portfolio of stocks in firms with at least three women on the board, or what it called “strong female leadership.” Ahem. Apparently, the stupidity of this ridiculous, misanthropic boondoggle was obvious to everyone in hindsight:

A moment’s thought suggests the dirty diversity bath water may be finally draining out of the woke hot tub. All it took was the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression combined with historic inflation rates. Maybe, in hindsight, it will all have been worth it.

Let me know what you think. Is diversity dead yet? Or is it more like Joe Biden’s Weekend at Bernie’s? What does hindsight tell you?

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you, sincerely, for your continuing loyal support for the C&C mission. Tune back in tomorrow morning, for your next excellent serving of essential news and sarcastic sniping as we scratch off another 2024 month and head into the back six.

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