Like some other commentators, I have in recent years several times quoted a famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Recent developments in the Biden family money laundering scheme, the implosion of a boutique underwater expedition to the Titanic, and a possible coup in Russia prompt me to wheel it out once again. “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”
It fits the long-running drama over Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, I think. Miranda Devine broke news of that scandal in the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. It languished in the doldrums of official nonrecognition for years as the regime went into overdrive to keep people, especially voters, from paying any attention to it.
Gradually, however, the truth leaked out. First, the authenticity of the laptop was acknowledged. Turns out it was not “Russian disinformation,” as those 51 intelligence experts insisted. Nope, it belonged to Hunter all right. At first, the public was titillated by all the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll that pervaded that digital trove. Gradually, very gradually, however, the publicly important stuff—the money angle with news of foreign payments apparently to dear-old-dad from various foreigners—began leaking out.
Then suddenly, just this last week, the House Ways and Means Committee began dropping bombs.
Material from an IRS whistleblower—no, two IRS whistleblowers—got fed into the mix and we got such Hunter Biden classics as this WhatsApp message from July 2017 addressed to Henry Zhao, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and, wouldn’t you know it, a business partner of Hunter’s:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment [the commitment being millions of the crispest] made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight, And, Z, fi [sic] get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
I enjoyed reading that over the morning coffee while gazing at the accompanying photograph of Hunter all got up in black tie for a big to-do at the White House the other day. That was right after he, miraculously, managed to wangle the plea bargain of the century. He failed to report millions in income, yet the prosecutor agreed to reduce felony charges to misdemeanors and, essentially, to forget about the fact that Hunter lied on his application for a firearm, a felony. Nice work, Hunter!
There are some people who insist that we are still in the he-said she-said phase of this drama. It’s happened before.
Remember, years ago, when FBI lovebirds Lisa Page and Peter Strzok had their little back and forth a few days after the Trump-Russia hoax got started? Page cooed to Strzok: “Trump should go f himself.” Strzok responded, “F Trump.” Two days later, Page texted, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” “We” being not just Peter and Lisa but also the FBI. Somehow, that got diluted and interpreted out of relevance, though, and the fact that the premier police power of the country interfered in a presidential election got swept under the proverbial rug.
It might happen this time, too. We have credible allegations galore, not only of Hunter’s lawbreaking, but his father’s. According to the whistleblower testimony that the House Ways and Means Committee just released, the Justice Department tipped off Hunter Biden about a plan to search his storage unit, thus allowing him to clean it out before the feds arrived. The Justice Department also declined to execute a search warrant of Joe Biden’s guest house when Hunter was living there. They hid allegations about foreign bribery from the IRS lawyers overseeing an investigation of Hunter’s finances and lost or “slow walked” other aspects of the government’s investigation into his tangled affairs for some five years.
Preferential treatment? Assuredly not! At least not according to our American Gothic Attorney General Merrick Garland. After this latest spate of revelations dropped into the news cycle and seemed to be getting traction, even in the legacy media, Garland held a press conference in which he said, in essence, if you criticize the Justice Department you are betraying “democracy.”
It was an extraordinary performance. But here we are. Nancy Pelosi and others kept going on about Our Democracy™ when what they meant was “our oligarchy.” More recently, Joe Biden has been nattering on about “our children,” as if children belonged to the government. Now we have the attorney general of the United States insisting that the Justice Department dispenses justice impartially even though grandmothers with cancer who happened to traipse through the Capitol on January 6 are tossed into jail while Hunter Biden skates. The two-tier deployment of justice in this country is patent for all to see, but what are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the pronunciamentos of this gray-on-gray bureaucrat from hell?
Yes, Nancy Pelosi was happy to substitute Our Democracy™ for democracy plain and simple. Now we have Merrick Garland attempting the same thing with the rule of law. That went out with the advent of predawn raids by the FBI on opponents of the regime. Instead we are living with that Orwellian alternative Our Rule of Law™, which is to say their arbitrary enforcement of the laws and use of the coercive power of the state.
The end, as Hemingway’s character observed, came gradually at first. We’ve moved on now to the “suddenly” part. It’s not, I fancy, unlike what happened aboard that swank, if ultimately unseaworthy submersible, the part described in headlines everywhere as a “catastrophic implosion.” Descent by PlayStation was gradual until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Great column Roger. Sadly, most people don’t care. Even worse, some people are fully on board. Thanks to the clandestine takeover of the education system, more and more of our youth has come away with a very high opinion of Marxism----to the extent they also feel that censorship is a good thing, and cameras EVERYWHERE is a great thing.
It’s not just the idea of people at the top getting away with murder, the free pass has trickled down to the bottom. Everybody, everywhere is no longer subject to the rule of law. Unless, that is, the person is a member of the middle class, or perish forbid, the White middle class. “Shut up and pay your taxes! You homophobic racist!”
Our topsy-turvy world was foretold long, long ago. And this is only the beginning. It IS going to get worse. Are some people coming to their senses? Certainly. Right now 4 out of 10 Californians want to move out of that socialist utopia, and who can blame them? The same goes for other utopias in New York, Illinois, Washington, and Oregon—to name a few. Will it be enough? I doubt it. But I can applaud the reasoning at the same time.
Back in the day there was just one guy who heeded the warnings. He and his sons built a very large boat and stocked it with all kinds of useful critters and things to survive the coming flood. Today there are many more Noahs out there. Again, will it be enough? I don’t know. Most of me doubts that too. But people have to try. What worries me is that the forces bringing all of this on are trying very hard to gain total control over all currency. If they are successful it will be very difficult to buy nails, boards, and caulking.
Edited: After posting my comment, I came across this article at Zerohedge----
The opposite of love is not hate but apathy. We are apathetic about our nation, what it was and could have been again.
When you write that “We are apathetic about our nation”, you do not speak for this humble reader. Perhaps some day you will adopt a fighting, rather than a defeatist, attitude.
When a nation’s intelligence community runs continual psyops against its own people, then the constitutional system is broken. The only institutions worth saving are the basic ones set forth in the Constitution, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. How these branches are constituted remain up to the People through their elected representatives.
The only reason we have an Attorney General is because George Washington had one. The entire DOJ is not required by the Constitution. Neither are all other departments of the executive branch. The Constitution does not require any federal court other than the Supreme Court.
The reason things happen gradually and then suddenly is a corollary to the laws of energy. In politics, abuses of power are attracted to the most vulnerable parts of any system where the barriers against abuse depend almost entirely upon the honor of the people who operate that part of the system. We have seen those barriers begin to collapse - at first slowly such as former Justice Kennedy’s votes on SCOTUS regarding the 14th Amendment and same sex relationships, the intelligence community’s total misanalysis of al Qaida in 1997-2001 and then Iraq in 2002 and 2003, and then the resulting cover-up that led to the creation of a larger IC through ODNI, Treasury’s misanalysis of the 2007-08 mortgage securities and banking crisis, Obama’s IRS war on the Tea Party through the IRS, lawfare and the resistance that created a shadow government to subvert Trump in 2015-2021, CJ Roberts’ pretzel logic vote to sustain the Obamacare penalty as a tax, McCain’s petulant vote against repealing Obamacare’s enforcement provisions simply to retaliate against Trump, the total misanalysis of Covid and the ineffective response led by the public health bureaucracy, the mainstreaming of the Russia hoax, the Ukraine phone call ploy, the rigging of the voting systems by one party to benefit their vote collection efforts, conspiring to cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop because it would reveal our current president as corrupt, and the J6 psyop to describe it an insurrection rather than a riot.
Yes, things are accelerating because there are much fewer honorable men and women guarding the weak points of our current political systems. In turn, the energy being applied against these vulnerable spots is accelerating because it is feeding upon itself - just like the repeated failures of a company like Bed Bath & Beyond or Sears to control costs and price things correctly suddenly spin out of control and cause its finances to collapse.
Interesting that Mr, Kimball believes our gradual descent into collapse is approaching the moment of complete sudden failure.
So do I.