Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

Over the past few weeks, the Hunter Biden Laptop Story has evolved at a breakneck pace. It has gone from a Russian Disinformation campaign to a confirmed thing that is real but irrelevant to a thing that is real and potentially important.

What happened? Why is this now an approved story and why is it now being covered when it was suppressed aggressively for 18 months prior? What does it imply about current positions and what the future plans might be? Since everyone is a dirty liar and a crook to boot and we now have to play Kremlinology with our own government, these are reasonable and legitimate questions.

A common interpretation of these developments is that the Complex is getting ready to oust Biden. They need a pretext for that and they don't want that pretext to be something that could blow back on them - like the election itself, the "Trump was Putin's stooge" narrative, internal corruption, etc. The laptop is a nice fit for this because it involved someone else they can pin most of the blame on (Hunter) and then gracefully get rid of Biden because of the taint of conflicts of interest and its general seediness.

That's certainly possible, but I am not convinced it's correct. There is another option that would be similar to things they've done before. The Laptop Story was a problem during the campaign and it's still out there as an overhang - and not just for Biden. Something has to be done. So now, during the early part of an election year where they are probably going to see major losses anyway, they are deciding to address it.

So far, it has followed a normal progression. First it didn't exist, then it existed but didn't matter, now it exists and it might matter. Next it will exist and be investigated, then it will have existed but it didn't matter. The press will write its thinkpieces about the implications of The Laptop. The "investigators" will report about how there is stuff that looks bad, but it actually isn't. They will conclude that Hunter is a bit seedy and flirted with conflicts of interest but that it was all on him and didn't really affect anything. Then, having successfully concluded that it's unseemly but not dangerous, the story volume will wind down.

When anyone brings it up in the future, the press can play the familiar game of, "this is an old story and we already covered it and there's no there there because we did our jobs and investigated it thoroughly. If you're still bringing it up, you're a conspiracy theorist who can't accept the truth that you were wrong about The Laptop."

The point might not be to take out Biden or to protect him. They may just be trying to sanitize the story and dismiss further discussion when the time comes. We don't need to re-adjudicate the past, after all. This is a familiar tactic and based on its development, it kind of smells like a rollout of the same type they used to derail most of the sub-stories around the collusion fraud.

I certainly don't know what the truth is, but "they finally want Biden gone and will use the laptop to do it" is not the only possibility.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments