Happy Stantennial
One hundred years ago today, the greatest Cardinal of them all-- Stanley Frank Musial-- came into the world swinging. He was baby Stanislaus to his Polish-born parents living next to the coal mines in Donora, Pennsylvania. By next year, we will be celebrating Stan's 80th year as a Cardinals player and/or legend. If you remember the time before Stan Musial was the Cardinals, you likely also have a good memory of FDR's third term. For roughly half a century already, his statue in bronze has stood outside the Cardinals' home park as a meeting place for fans and a civic sculpture ranking in the level of iconography not far beneath that of the Gateway Arch. It's not a good looking statue. Everyone agrees. The shoulders are too broad and it looks as if the hitter, whoever he's supposed to be, is holding something more akin to a twig than a bat. (One critic has described the statue's style as "Soviet realist.") But the words beneath are more than apt. They were those of baseball commissioner Ford Frick upon Musial's Hall of Fame induction in 1969-- "Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight."
Here, back by popular demand, are the two bookended pieces I wrote about Mr. Musial when he died. They were originally published January 19th and 20th, 2013. I was caught off guard by his passing when I attempted the first, and like to think I improved upon it with the second. It's impossible to imagine the team or the city of St. Louis without its favorite citizen...
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Stan Musial 1920-2013
I hardly ever watch St. Louis Blues hockey on television, but tonight I am. I want to feel close to the city of St. Louis. Stan Musial, the greatest Cardinal of them all, died three hours ago at the age of 92. The Cardinals made the public announcement of his death.
It's hard to know what to write about the Man on this occasion, and I've had quite a bit of time to plan it. He's been in ill health for months. I can tell you that I ate in his restaurant on my first-ever trip to St. Louis, and on the day of the first game I ever attended. My aunt and uncle got me his autograph from a golf tournament when I was ten. I saw him throw out or present the ceremonial pitch at an Opening Day, a World Series game, and an All-Star Game. I have lived in jealousy of one of my best friends, who shares his birthday. There are six framed photos of Stan Musial currently hanging in my home.
I met him once-- during just my second day ever working in radio. I was a fresh-faced intern in 1996, not even a college graduate yet, and was invited along with news and sports reporter Chuck Shockley to go to the Iowa Capitol Building, where Stan was getting a public tour of the facility from Governor Terry Branstad as a guest of fellow Baseball Hall-of-Famer Bob Feller. (Now Stan and Feller are both dead and gone and Branstad still occupies that office-- a crippling thought.) The opulence of the surroundings that morning-- the high ceilings, the marble, the ornate decor-- met with the gravity of the moment. One percent of one percent of his fans ever met Stan Musial in such a posh setting. I remember that Branstad was droning on and on about the accomplishments of his public career, something Musial was famous for never doing. "You know I'm the longest-tenured governor in the United States," Branstad boasted. "Oh, that's great... just great," Stan humored, busy signing away for little pug noses like Shockley and me. It should go without saying that I never collected an autograph again from somebody I covered during my journalistic career. On cue, Stan pulled a stack of photo cards from the pocket of his sport jacket, and inscribed, "To Chris, a great fan. Stan Musial." I was so excited about this moment that I stayed in radio for an unconscionable nine more years waiting for another to match it.
You will read tonight and tomorrow, and hopefully the day after that too, that Stan Musial was the living, breathing embodiment of the city of St. Louis, of the Cardinals, and of all that's great about baseball and sports. I like to think of him as what's great about the Midwest too. Our heroes are authentic. He wasn't a sour prick like his contemporary, Ted Williams. During his long retirement (five decades), Musial never demanded to be formally introduced as the greatest player in the long history of his team, like another contemporary, Joe DiMaggio, did-- although he easily was that.
He was married to the same woman for 72 years, had doting kids and grandkids, who were at his side when he died. He played his ass off, and won three championships on the field. He competed with the Cardinals for his entire 22 year career, and then made his home in that team's city until his death, becoming as iconic there as the Gateway Arch. Some equally great men and women never did any of those things, but I just thought it important to point out that he did.
I don't need to describe his baseball legacy in more flowery terms than that. Others will. I don't need to go down the list of his records. He held most of the batting ones in the National League when he retired. And I don't need to tell you that I loved him. He was universally loved.
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Sunday, January 20, 2013
I'm not done yet-- More on the Man
I'm going to go out on a limb and call Stan Musial quite possibly the funniest man in the Hall of Fame. Not jokey-funny so much, but funny in a happy, fun-loving way. A man of such exquisite character would be considered insufferable by all who greeted him if he didn't have a crack sense of humor. As he told Tim Kurkjian on one occasion, "I like to make people smile. It's the only thing I love as much as hitting." He could smile all the time himself because he felt like he was the luckiest person living on Earth. He once told the sportswriter Bob Broeg, during a bout of air turbulence on the team charter flight, "I can just see the headline now: 'Cards plane crashes; Musial sole survivor.'"
Stan always had the words for the moment. In his retirement, in that charming, elderly way, he collected these words to be repeated time and again as anecdotes, ones such as: the time the team arrived back at Union Station in St. Louis, May of '58, after having smacked his 3,000th hit at Wrigley Field in Chicago earlier in the day, he shouted to the throngs, "No school tomorrow." And when his wife shoved a fan who had been overly aggressive in pursuing an autograph from the slugger, he told her after, "You shouldn't have done that. That was my fan." When asked about his bad knee in old age, he always attributed the injury to having "hit too many triples." About his long-time roommate, fellow Hall-of-Famer Red Schoendienst, "The good thing about him was that he didn't snore." He always delivered each of these stories with a wide grin, very visibly amusing himself. Stan Musial could make himself spasm with laughter. He was "Stan the Man," definitely never "Stan the Deadpan."
I like the story of how he would sign autographs for people who simply knocked on the front door of his house in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue. It was the beat writer Kurkjian who said Musial promised him a signed picture in Cooperstown years ago, and then days later, asked him if he had received it. The Sporting News' Stan McNeal tells this one: "About 10 years ago—a couple of years after moving to St. Louis—my then-wife was having lunch with her boss in the same restaurant where Musial was dining. Her boss knew Musial well enough to introduce her. 'My husband is named after you,' she told him. 'Anyone who is named after me gets a bat,' he said matter-of-factly. Her brush with fame made a nice story at dinner that night, then was forgotten. Until two weeks later. sure enough, a delivery truck pulled up to the house and out came a cardboard package that looked like a three-foot long shoebox. Inside was pure Adirondack ash. No receipt, no note. Neither was needed. The inscription said everything: 'To Stan McNeal, My namesake — (signed) Stan Musial, HOF69.'"
An online commenter posted another tale, almost too good to be true, last night of how he was supping in New Orleans' French Quarter one night during the week of the 1985 Super Bowl when a conga line of more than a dozen people danced through the dining room. The line was shockingly led by a recognizable face, that of Stan Musial, playing his harmonica, the best musical instrument known to man for carrying in the pocket of one's sport coat. And at the time of the '85 Super Bowl, Stan was already 65 years old.
On Deadspin, "CallMeOzZe" relayed this similar story Sunday, "I met Stan Musial at Paul Manzo's in STL. Everyone in the restaurant, clearly, recognized him, but it being the Midwest, no one approached him. As he left, he pulled out a harmonica and started playing "When the Saints" while stopping at each table. As he came to ours, my cousin started singing. He put down the harmonica long enough to say, 'Please. Don't sing.' I laughed so hard I choked on my Spaghetti Norma. I don't know anything about baseball, but I recognize character when I see it. RIP, Mr. Musial and thanks again."
And maybe that's the greatest legacy of Stan Musial. ESPN reporters say they're struggling to describe it. He's largely considered to be the most underrated great player of all-time-- a very incomplete assessment. Many of his batting records have now been surpassed. He is second in total bases lifetime, behind only Hank Aaron. He's fifth or sixth in several of the other big categories. He missed the 500 home run club by 25 long ones, and never led the league in that category for a single-season. Gehrig and Ripken had longer games played streaks. He didn't have the immortal hitting streak, like DiMaggio. He wasn't the last to do something specifically great, like Ted Williams. His greatness owed more to his lasting consistency, but what's a more important attribute for a baseball player than consistency? He won 7 batting titles, and 3 MVPs, and he led 3 world championship teams, but his great statistical accomplishments require almost a paragraph to describe. There are no magical numbers in his biography, except the one that's attributed most often to that amazing consistency-- 1,815 career hits on the road, 1,815 in St. Louis. But at his best, he was truly great-- 8th all-time among all players in a recent ESPN poll of baseball writers. The most impressive season to me is 1948, when he scored 135 runs, drove in 131, had 230 hits, 103 of those for extra bases, and against only 34 strikeouts.
He wasn't larger than life. Because he was too accessible. There was no air of mystery about him to intoxicate sportswriters. Indeed in retrospect, it's quite obvious that he bored them. He wasn't good copy because there was nothing salacious about him. No aspiring essayist could write an imaginative magazine piece about what Stan Musial was really like, because any person could see plainly what he was really like. There's no evidence that John Updike ever even set foot in St. Louis.
Stan's autographs are far too abundant to carry the financial value his batting records argue they should. He never married a Hollywood starlet or threw a punch at somebody in the bar. He never feuded with a teammate or even got ejected from a game-- and only five men in history played in more games. He could be found at Toots Shor's restaurant on team trips to New York City, and he palled around with Danny Kaye, Jack Benny (a similarly beloved personality), James Michener, Harry James, and his New Orleans buddy, trumpeter Al Hirt, who taught him everything he didn't know about music, but he didn't treat celebrities better than he did civilians.
What he was then was a man who possessed the human qualities admired by anybody who might not even understand sports in the slightest, like the man quoted above. Anybody who follows sports during this century, or reads a website, should have it burned upon their brain by now that having the talent to hit a little ball, run fast, or jump high, has no connection whatsoever with the talent for being an ace person. Musial was a man who struck it rich in life because of a strong motivation and a sweet swing, but somewhere along the journey, he missed the lesson about how you have to start holding people at arm's length when they begin to ask much more of you.
I've never been famous, yet I know very well anyway that if I were, I would never have the patience to allow people to interrupt my dinner at a restaurant for an autograph, for example. A celebrity would be justified in treating people like this shabbily, and still, there are no comments being posted online anywhere this weekend in which people claim they were treated rudely by him. And the internet is practically begging for these stories, what with the effuse praise that's being thrown around. Where are all of the rude people without self-awareness running down Stan Musial because of that one alleged incident in the early '90s outside the Galleria, or at Charlie Gitto's on The Hill? There are zero. This is an unbelievable thing. Even a guy like Michael J. Fox seems to piss off Rush Limbaugh for some reason. And how much was Stan loved and respected even by his opponents? He was inducted into the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, and not because he ever played with them, but because he batted the shit out of them at old Ebbets Field. I tell you, the guy is not just known as "Stan.. the Man" because of a little rhyme and alliteration. If it was only that, we would have an historical figure in Germany known then and now as "Eichmann the Man."
St. Louis is a baseball town... arguably the baseball town, and this is all because of Stan Musial. Others argue for their favorite cities, but nobody ever argues that other team's fans are better behaved. If you're not a Cardinals fan, as most of my readers aren't, this reputation of ours might very well annoy you to no end. In some Cards fans, it might manifest itself as arrogant. It might come across as pointedly insincere when we cheer great fielding plays performed by the other team, and in truth, some of my brothers and sisters, I know, fail to pull off these traits as charming. But just so you know, the reason we're doing that is because we want to play the role of perfection demonstrated by Stan Musial. The older fans loved him in his Cardinals uniform. The younger fans came to love just as much the ever-smiling old gent wearing the bright red sports coat-- and also we love the older fans. Now can you imagine disappointing a most respectable hero by engaging in improper fan behavior? We want Stan to be thought of as our guy, our superstar, our ambassador, our warrior, our icon. Not every team has the marvelous fortune of having its best-ever player also being its best-ever person. It's the most selfish idea imaginable. We want you to think about us when you think about him.
A tribute
A poetry mash-up of the tweets and the wisdom of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the schemes and insights of Muhammad Ali
Last night I had a dream
The world had changed and it had started with me
Elections were joyous, celebratory events. It was capitalism’s last stand,
And a person’s ZIP code didn’t determine his or her destiny
Our identity forms our methods. That is how we ran.
Take our femininity, you take our power. I’m not going to compromise who I am.
You have to have a stake in the game. Congress is too old.
We owe it to the future to make demands. We shouldn’t be afraid to be bold.
The nation is never too broken to fix. Working people deserve their due.
Stimulus checks, rent insurance, mortgage relief, small business support,
And free hazard pay and health care for the uninsured, or is that too socialist too?
We can't knock on anybody's doors, we have to build our own house.
Challenges we champion, hopes we raise, and passions we rouse.
Free college for all, abolish ICE, defund the police, a Green New Deal
Taking care of the world’s children and saving the planet is not a conspiracy.
As Ali said, if my mind can conceive it, if my heart can believe it-- then I can achieve it.
And as Ilhan says, We must see others’ struggles as our own, and their success as our success, so we can speak to our common humanity.
We must #EmbraceTheBase. We are called to be a people-powered machine.
You’re never too late, too early, or too imperfect to pursue your dreams.
In the service of those that need it the most, we are called upon to give all that we have to give.
In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person should die because they are too poor to live
Women dance-- and congresswomen dance too. It doesn’t matter what anybody else is saying.
Respect the hustle, watch the transformation, get used to us slaying
We can't get along so we gotta get it on.
Speak truth to power and inspire a generation, like Muhammad Ali
Inspire a generation and speak truth to power, like AOC
The transfer of power
Once when King Daley the First ruled Chicago and was establishing the most famous political fiefdom in United States history (with due respect to William Tweed), a local reporter presented him with charges that he had used his public office to push insurance business in the government toward his son’s company. Daley replied to the accusation in anger, “What kind of world are we living in that a man can’t help out his family?”
The 2020 presidential election was Daley versus Daley. Trump Steaks and Trump University vs. Burisma Holdings. The winner this time was Daley. And the oligarchy. Always the oligarchy.
There’s a fantastic, five-part documentary series on Hulu right now called “A City So Real,” directed by Steve James ("Hoop Dreams," "Life Itself"), named for an Alex Kotlowitz book ("Never a City So Real"), and closely examining the 2019 Chicago mayoral election. The study helps crystallize, in a more local form than our most recent presidential shitshow, the complete corruption of the American system.
The political machine in Chicago didn’t come to an end with the death of Daley I in 1976. (If it had, it wouldn’t have been much of a machine.) In 2008, the city of Chicago and King Daley the Second entered a business partnership with a private venture group-- Chicago Parking Meters LLC-- that would handle street parking for the municipality. It was a 75 year agreement in return for $1.15 billion in taxpayer money. As city residents-- and visitors-- can attest, rates and fines have gone through the roof since the signatures were notarized. The expansion of meters moved into new neighborhoods. Eleven years on, the resulting investment outfit had already recouped all of its $1.15 billion and the LLC is looking at 100% profit on all parking payments and fines until the year 2083.
One of the principle investors in the group was the Wall Street firm, Morgan Stanley, which, at that time, employed one William Daley, son of Richard the First, younger brother of Richard the Second. Morgan Stanley then sold Chicago Parking Meters LLC to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority of Racine, Wisconsin. No wait, that’s the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority of the United Arab Emirates. ADIA owns 49.5% of the group, actually, and the other 51.5% was captured by a shadow group of who knows who with a postal address in Luxembourg.
This is the political party now back in power in the United States. Act accordingly.
I'll bet you're sorry now that you encouraged all those people to vote
They pulled out the big one in the 96th hour, but Democrats did not do well on Tuesday overall. Inexplicably to most observers, they lost ground in the House of Representatives, failed to take the Senate, and managed to flip entirely none of the state legislatures anywhere in the country.
What to make of the results? First of all, pollsters were embarrassed for the second presidential cycle in a row. Not only were they drastically off on Biden and Trump across multiple states, they fared even worse with the races in the legislative branch. Here in Iowa, the Democrats were trounced, Biden included, losing the senate race badly, and losing two of the three congressional seats they controlled going into this week. The polls had the Democrats up in each race except the heavily Republican 4th district.
The narrative of the presidential campaign throughout was not only about Trump’s racism, but the fact that he’s the leader now of a pretty distinct white supremacist movement, yet he doubled his support among African-American women from 2016, up to 8% from 4%. The candidate who, at a rally in Minnesota, praised their predominately Nordic population for its “great genes,” claimed the vote of one in every five Black men nationally. Trump, in fact, got 26% of his overall votes from nonwhite Americans. That’s the highest percentage for a Republican nominee since 1960! He said during his last campaign that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs… bringing crime,” and were “rapists,” but he did really well with Hispanic and Latino voters in 2020. Approximately 35% of them nationally went for the incumbent. In Starr County, Texas, the county with the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in the nation, he lost by only 5%. In 2016, he lost that same county by 60%. With the LGBTQ community, he raised his 14% support in 2016 to 28%.
So maybe it’s the…hmmm, what else could it be? What issues would be important to voters? Democrats ran on a very clear message this year of “We’re not Trump” and took care not to let any other message interfere with that one. They shouted down sexual harassment claims against Joe Biden while calling Trump a sexual predator. (Trump even did better with white women this year-- 55%-- than he did four years ago.) They dismissed evidence that Hunter Biden and possibly Joe were both trading on the family name in Ukraine while making the claim that Trump was monetizing his presidency and taking his marching orders from the Baltics. We know Trump didn’t do much as president to help any of these individual identity groups listed previously so it doesn’t speak well to what Democrats were offering as an alternative message.
Are Democrats going to take a lesson? Only the wrong ones, I’m afraid. Centrist congressional reps were on a conference call yesterday ripping into the Democratic Socialists in their caucus. A defeated incumbent in Florida named Debbie Mucarsel-Powell was in tears at one point. If you thought they couldn’t find anyone besides themselves to blame during a year in which the mainstream news media was suppressing stories damaging to Biden, third party voting was nil, and Bernie went all the way to the mat in his public support of the party nominee, then you’re in for a surprise.
Apparently the poor showing at the polls that only impacted the centrists was the fault of all the high-profile socialists who have been scaring the church folk and the farm animals, talking loud and proud about Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and defunding the police. No, it wasn’t the absence of any populist economic policy by the corporate wing of the party, or Biden telling Rust Belt voters at one point that “anyone who can learn to throw coal in a furnace” can “learn how to program.” Or the three years of time we all wasted under the trench coat of Robert Mueller and the CIA spooks. Or the repeated promise to return us to a Washington leadership that America never much cared for to begin with. Or the convention this summer starring Michael Bloomberg, Christine Todd Whitman, and the parade of Republicans.
Biden told everyone that would listen: "I beat the socialist," referring to his primary defeat of Sanders. But somehow Middle Americans, I guess, because of the negative ads, still mistook his 50 year Washington career for that of the life of Emma Goldman. Apparently voters in Florida’s 27th house district thought former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala was Hugo Chavez in a skirt. Or how about this one? Iowans thought that farm girl turned commercial real estate planner and Chamber of Commerce president Theresa Greenfield was Leon Trotsky.
Progressives actually won the presidential race for Biden. “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib delivered 100,000 voters in her Michigan district. “Squad” member Ilhan Omar also delivered 100,000 in her Minnesota district. Theirs are single-party districts during a general election but those candidates inspire their base and they turned them out. The flameout came instead in states where there are no inspiring Democrats like these, and from the so-called Lincoln Project of disgruntled never-Trump Republicans. It seems that the only Republicans that flipped to Biden were the ones that make their living in Washington. Meanwhile, the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) endorsed 22 candidates and won behind 19 of them!
It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s actually the working people, stupid. Trump didn’t deserve their support but he’s the only one of the two candidates to attempt to get it, unless you count Biden trying to persuade us all to learn how to write computer code. As a result, he turned out the working class-- sadly, the new GOP-- even as he went down to defeat by the voters and into the pit of Deutsche Bank while Biden couldn’t carry a tune.
The story and the lesson of the year-- for everyone in American politics-- was Bernie Sanders raising more money for his campaign, through an army of small, working-class donors-- than anyone else managed to raise on either side of the “divide,” even with corporate contributions included in the equation. This fact of his achievement should have made Democrats giddy with excitement, but it didn't, and it doesn’t, because what it really does is threaten their corporate hustle. The ones that are there wouldn't be there without their corporate benefactors. The Democratic Socialists are worth crying over-- but only for those weepers that reside in the diminishing American center, which is beholden to the big banks and amounts to the right wing of most every other Western nation. The socialists in Congress are an inspiration instead for the people and the better Democrats that are coming along behind them. There are going to be so many “Squad” members in the 117th Congress that their collected images almost won't fit on a t-shirt anymore.
Pretending at journalism
There remains no more doubt that the major corporate news media, with very few and mostly "right wing" exceptions, is engaged in a blatant cover-up of the Hunter Biden/Burisma scandal and doing so in an effort to protect Hunter's father. Though the FBI is now actively investigating the younger Biden for racketeering-- an indisputable fact, organizations like Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC/MSNBC, and CNN have determined that not only are the questions surrounding the story irrelevant, but that the candidate Biden should not have to answer to them. Journalists and editors have been bending over backwards with excuses to justify Biden's ongoing silence. The goal, of course, is to avoid repeating a well-reported spectacle of 2016 and a lie told over and over then and since that Hillary Clinton should not have been painted with the brush of criminality for having shielded American citizens from the details of her public work (via email) as head of the Department of State. This resolution, which was made officially or unofficially, in concert or not in concert with one another, is that there would not for a second time be an "October Surprise" permitted to boost the Trump campaign in 2020 even if there were an "October Surprise."
It should be noted that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden have denied the charges that have sprung up from a story in the New York Post over a week ago. The Post published numerous texts and emails supposedly to have been written by Hunter Biden to members of the Burisma board of directors confirming an effort he was making to persuade his father to use the offices of the Vice Presidency of the United States to aid in their business interests. Though there is no proof that a deal between Burisma and the elder Biden was ever consummated, there are texts and emails (again not denied by the Bidens) that show Hunter was adamant with his new business colleagues that any discussions that did involve the vice president be held only verbally and never put into writing. An article published last week by long-time Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi provided documentation that Joe's attempts to replace a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015 directly benefited the Burisma company.
We're left to believe-- from the words of the Democratic Party's presidential nominee-- that Biden Jr., a recovering cocaine addict who was drummed out of the military, was hired by a Ukrainian oil company based on merit and not on the strength of his last name and not on his government connections that reached all the way into the Obama Oval Office. When Donald Trump Jr. says this story would be front and center in the New York Times if the name in the story were his and not Hunter's, it's impossible to argue the point.
The news organizations suppressing the story claim the materials obtained have not been "fact checked" and have not been sourced, although the New York Times, as just one example, has published Donald Trump's tax returns without knowing their source. In 2016, someone unknown still to all of us, including the editors at the Times dropped a copy of his returns into the mail addressed to the Times newsroom and they have since been scoured over and published. Simultaneously, these news outlets, some of the most powerful in the country, have suggested that the Burisma documents are part of a "Russian disinformation" plot, although they have no evidence of this either and U.S. intelligence officials have stated that there is no known evidence. A Washington Post op-ed claimed that "we must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation-- even if they probably weren't." Wow. On CNN, Christiane Amanpour, when asked by a member of the Republican National Committee to cover the story, replied, "We're not going to do your work for you." Again, wow.
Biden calls it a smear, without going further into specifics, and his team referred to it as an attack against Biden's "only living son," a sleazy reprieve of the candidate's ongoing tendency to pimp his other son, the dead one, during his campaign. When Joe tells Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that he "gives you (his) word as a Biden," it's only natural for some of us to ask what that name is worth-- and how long and in what ways it's been used as currency.
Glenn Greenwald, who left his position this week at the Intercept, a news organization he co-founded, because the editors demanded "softening" changes to stories he filed on this topic, submitted nine questions to the Biden campaign to which they have yet to reply, including, and I paraphrase...
1. Does he claim the emails or texts released by the Post are fabricated?
2. Does he know if Hunter did indeed drop off laptops at the Delaware repair store (where these documents were reportedly sourced)?
3. Did Hunter ever ask him to meet with Burisma executives and did he?
4. Did Joe ever know about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son (and brother) in which Joe was a proposed participant?
5. How could Joe justify expending so much energy as VP traveling to Kiev and demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why was the replacement a crony of the Ukrainian president with no previous legal experience? And was this action of demanding the firing in exchange for keeping open the tap of $1 billion in U.S. aid (which Biden once admitted and even bragged about doing in a speech) really done to combat corruption in Ukraine and not to benefit this private company? (The Taibbi report strongly supports the view that there were major antagonisms between the prosecutor and Burisma before his firing.)
The national news media, along with Facebook, and particularly Twitter-- the primary source of information for people in politics-- have completely silenced the report-- and done so during the month that directly precedes the national election. Twitter has taken the extraordinary step of locking the account of the New York Post because it has been leading the charge on this story. The Post is the oldest newspaper in the country (founded by Alexander Hamilton) and currently the 4th largest. Again, neither of the Bidens has even disputed the facts of the story nor the claim that Hunter took his laptop to this repair store, where they eventually wound up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani. It's out of bounds for all of these outlets to label this "disinformation" when nothing has been issued to dispute the authenticity. The story of three laptops being left at a repair shop owned by a friend of Giuliani is unusual and suspicious, but why aren't the Bidens denying then that Hunter ever did this?
The suppression is what makes it worse. Generally, truths, when they're affirmative in one's telling, do not get suppressed. We're fools if we believe that Joe did not know his son was trading on his name to benefit himself financially even if he was not directly involved himself. The "promise" of getting access to Joe was the crime Hunter committed. That's a major problem even in the unlikely scenario in which that's all this story was. There's no proof that Joe was in on it, but we're left to conclude that he did because of what has transpired since with his obfuscation. It takes a lot of gumption for his supporters to continue calling Trump supporters "sheep" when they're doing it during a wholesale cover-up of a Biden family criminal hustle.
It's not just this story. As Trump said to Stahl last weekend for their CBS broadcast interview, Biden has gotten nothing about softball questions from the news media. It was establishment Democrats, during the primaries, that first raised the issue of Biden's cognitive decline-- not Trump and not Bernie Sanders. As recently as this week, Biden referred to Trump as "George," saying "another four years of George," presumably fading back to George W. Bush, but maybe it was even the George before that. We're just going to ignore anything that could potentially damage the candidate. Twitter and social media were the only "independent" and wide open platforms for information, with no info there needing to be "blessed" by the political powers-that-be, and of course, that has now been erased and we're told that we can't trust what is truly independent-- and truly democratic. Populism, as we wrote last month, is the new bogeyman. If the opposition to Trump is the corporate press and the tech platforms, we're screwed for sure.
We're forced to return to 2016 and to recall that this same thing happened with Hillary Clinton. When she was bowled over by defeat on election night, the blame for the loss did not go to the candidate herself or to her campaign team as it should have, but to James Comey, the head of the FBI, for having had the gall to re-open an investigation into Clinton's email suppression during the month preceding the election. It's an ongoing strategy to blame the messenger, to blame the leaker, to blame the whistleblower when actual crimes are revealed. Clinton committed a crime and she did so on purpose-- she conducted business for the State Department on private email servers so that the facts of what she was doing would not be accessible to open records law. If that was not the intent of what she was doing, it was at least the fortunate outcome. We can only assume then that her illegal act was conducted to disguise even more illegal or unethical acts. This is also the story of Julian Assange, jailed in Britain and awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for the offense of leaking proof of our military's war crimes in the Middle East, as well as the story of Edward Snowden, still under protection in Russia after several years for exposing illegal eavesdropping conducted on all of us by the National Security Agency. We wind up with a situation in which the exposers are hounded and/or sit in prison with no focus paid to the crimes that these whistleblowers-- these heroes-- have exposed. FBI director James Clapper lied directly to Congress when he told the body that we didn't engage in what Snowden later revealed we did, but nothing has ever happened to Clapper. Today, he's a highly-paid analyst on CNN.
Like in 2016, reporters and editors are willfully forgetting their ethics because 1) they want Trump to lose, almost universally so, and 2) because they live and work in a social environment in which they're fearful of being accused, as some of them were in 2016, of helping Trump to win. But neither should be their fucking concern! It's pathetic to witness such cowardice. It's a legitimate concern today, unfortunately, that you can be de-platformed and knocked off Twitter for the offense of what amounts to doing your job to the utmost, but some of us gave up real careers in journalism because we believed in never making this compromise of pursuing truth for the sake of financial and careerist opportunism. To repeat, Greenwald just had to leave a news organization that he founded because they were suppressing his accurate and pointed reporting, and he refused to succumb to it.
It's very possible that this Burisma information was hacked and not acquired via the computer repair store, as we have been told, but it doesn't matter if a crime was committed to bring contents like this to public light. As a fundamental principle, only two questions are ever to be asked when deciding to go ahead with a story: 1) Is the information authentic? and 2) Is it in the public interest? This is how we were able to read the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks cables, and the Snowden NSA documents. And of course, the irony is that reporters make lucrative careers in Washington based on "leaks," but they're typically the ones given out by anonymous CIA spooks and skeezy insiders that protect the establishment. It's a defense actually of the claim of "fake news." If you accept these verdicts about what's legitimate news from these organizations without a large-sized grain of salt, you are being irrational.
Meanwhile, Trump resurges in the polls during the final three weeks of the campaign while making none of his arguments louder or more vehemently than the one he's been making consistently for four years, and the one-- to me-- that he's made most convincingly-- that the traditional news media and the Washington political establishment are conspiring against him. Any sensible American, even against a wave of opposition by "talking heads" on their televisions and phones, should be able to appreciate that these news agencies are concocting excuses not to report on this story. It's not just the old grey lady news outlets either. It's the supposedly left-wing independent media that is so in the tank for Biden that they can't see the harm they're doing-- to their future, to our future, and even to Biden directly. As Taibbi and Greenwald, two beacons by direct contrast, have both pointed out this week, "The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it's true."
