Somewhere deep in my memory banks, I recall the essence of a quote from what I believe was essentially a friend of the Clintons back in the day about how they “lie even when they don’t have to” and “even when they know it will easily be exposed as a lie” at some future point. Long time observers of Team Clinton will note that is was less a strategy than a requirement: every lie required a dozen or more others to keep it afloat long enough to move deeper into future news cycles to leverage the fog of politics. It turns out, it seems, that this is a quite successful (and enriching) strategy as long as you have a large pool of loyal town criers, an obedient mass of true believers, and sufficient number of rationalizers (i.e., those not willing or just too afraid to live outside of the lies). In hindsight, two and a half decades of active Team Clinton political history can easily be seen as a shallow film of (mostly) greed atop a small sea of lies. Many were able to see it for what it was at the time…but far to many of We the People fully engaged (or, at least, enabled in silence) the forward momentum of this manipulated history in the making.
I recount that because it seems to provide a near perfect scale model for the “vast ocean of manipulated life” that currently flows from the compromised individuals and entities that hold various degrees of power over us in and around our ruling beltway. And it starts at the very top. Two recent Powerline posts are worth documenting here. The first introduces the concept of Elite Capture by the Chinese government and has several important links. (This focuses on the Biden family corruption but I hope you don’t think for a moment that such tentacles aren’t entangles throughout the beltway offices. HINT: Start with Mitch.) The second pulls quotes that point directly at the bought and paid for Chinese asset the (reportedly) 81 million Americans cast presidential ballots for:
[Peter Schweizer:] “For those wondering why Joe Biden is soft on China, consider this never-before-reported revelation: The Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China’s spy agency.”
[Francis Menton:] “Nobody could possibly miss the fact that the Bidens are behaving here like people with something big to hide. At least when a country like Qatar contributed a million or two to the Clinton Foundation, they just sent in the money. Hey, this was a ‘charity’ (even if Bill and Hillary skimmed 10% for ‘salaries’ and personal expenses). Here it’s intermediaries and shell companies and, when given to individuals it’s given in increments of say $10,000 to $50,000. Nobody would bother with this if it was on the up and up.
“And could it possibly be that the Bidens provided some sort of legitimate service for the money? No. If they did, they would immediately come forward and say what the service is. And even if you might believe that Hunter Biden provided some legitimate service (preposterous!), how about Jim Biden or Hallie Biden?
“And the fact that the banks filed some 150 SARs is significant. I have suggested to several bank in-house regulatory lawyers (i.e., my former associates) that they should file many more SARs than they do, as a way of covering their asses in the event of predatory government enforcement actions. And they have patiently responded that filing SARs is a difficult and time-consuming process. The fact that 150 of them were filed on the Bidens is truly extraordinary. Clearly the banks were not fooled by the shell companies and dividing the payments into smaller amounts.”
Here I want to repeat part of a comment I make over at Ricochet yesterday: “That it is the same people who chanted “hacked the election” and “collusion, collusion, collusion” (and any other meaningless, scripted talking points inserted into the cultivated mass delusion hysteria machine) all the way to a phony-baloney impeachment during the first Trump era now stubbornly refuse to connect the simplest of dots is quite telling. … The reflexive rejection of intellectual honesty (and lack of even a hint of journalistic curiosity) by the chattering class in favor of anti-intellectual obtuseness and defense mode gibberish in order to maintain the safe little bubble they occupy at the expense of the greater We the People perfectly illustrates the importance of the choices ahead.” As with the Clinton model, the ocean of lies under the embarrassingly thin film of raw corruption will be obvious to all. But, as with the Pelosi’s too, once you get past the moment and retire with the riches, little interest remains to right the scales of the ill gotten booty. (Or is it “ill booten gotty?)
As always, the lies at the top require multiple lies below to support the ever ongoing con. Powerline also provide a good example of this:
Pretty much everyone has figured out that the Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI are run by partisan hacks who cannot be trusted. But what about the colorless, worker bee federal agencies that just turn out data? Like, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Have they been corrupted by the Democrats, too?
… For an amazing 13 months in a row, the Biden Department of Labor has found that payrolls exceeded expectations! And, of course, beating expectations is important to the stock market and the Fed. To say that the Biden administration’s current “winning” streak is unprecedented is an understatement:
The game here is to get headlines with a “better than expected” jobs report, and then quietly revise it downward a month or two later, while at the same time announcing yet another “better than expected” report to be trumpeted by the press. It is a childishly simple dodge, but it seems to work.
… [Kevin Roche:] “I have posted repeatedly about the Biden administration’s constant issuance of false initial employment-related numbers, followed by extensive downward revisions in succeeding months. But since only the initial reports get any attention from the media, all the public sees are the initial lies, not the later corrections. So we got the April report today from the Bureau of Laborious Lies and miracle of miracles, once again the number of new jobs exceeded expectations by about 50,000; 235,000 versus 185,000 expected. Hmmm, but then March’s initial numbers were revised down by 61,000 jobs and February’s by 78,000. January had already been revised downward. You see the pattern. So the revisions were far more than the supposed over-expectation number for April, which will inevitably be revised down in future months.
… Here is what this combination is telling us. There is no real economic growth. There is no improvement in quality of life. Productivity is the most important thing for real economic growth. And labor costs are often the single biggest cost input for any good or service, so we aren’t getting any inflation relief.
Welcome to the Biden economy–no growth, lots of inflation, but there is massive growth in government statistics lies.
Here I will resist diving into those lies known to have only limited life before being exposed but are played to get past certain milestones (i.e., elections). Thanks to the true believers and rationalizers inside our perimeter, these are very effective and then the truth largely ignored when exposed well after the goal is achieved. Recent examples again from Powerline: “RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION” MEMO WAS A BIDEN CAMPAIGN OP and THE DIRTIEST TRICK, TAKE 2. The unmistakable point…one surely to be lost on those true believers and rationalizers…is: “The euphemistically-titled ‘intelligence community’ stands exposed: it couldn’t possibly be more corrupt.” The important corollary here is: That corruption is a one-way street…always working to benefit the powers of the uni-Party.
[SIDE NOTE: I finally sat down last weekend and watched the 2016 movie 13 Hours for the first time. This was prompted by a recent reading of Sharyl Attkisson’s book STONEWALLED: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington. As for the movie, the extreme emotional reaction to the human cost of incompetent, corrupt, and/or blatantly anti-American leadership in DC is hard to avoid. When combined with the fuller story from two relevant sections of that book – Benghazi and Benshazigate – the picture of how little energy was focused on the emergency at hand and how much was immediately and exclusively focused on crafting a ridiculously shallow lie to be planted in the news cycles to save the election of 2012 is maddening. That all the appropriate players – both in government and in the media – performed their parts as scripted is par for the course. That We the People largely just chalk this up to irrelevant ancient history and didn’t learn from the patterns involved the next time around is, unfortunately, where we are today as a people. But I digress.]
The last bit of compromised government news I wanted to document this week has to do with the spy balloon China deployed over the continental United States a few months back. Again, via Instapundit, it seems the primary focus in the halls of power was not so much on the blatant act of spying but on protecting the interests and feelings of those spying on us:
A recent report from Reuters alleges that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has already been implicated in several scandals, was purportedly prioritizing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. The report, supported by leaked emails and inside sources, proves what many on the right feared all along: Joe Biden was far more concerned about not offending China than our national security.
…rather than punishing China for its flagrant violation U.S. airspace, Blinken instructed his subordinates to temporarily halt significant measures concerning human rights and trade.
…Last month, we learned from three unidentified Biden administration officials that the Chinese spy balloon was allowed to fly over the United States for an entire week and was able to acquire and send secret intelligence to Beijing regarding a number of military bases in “real time.” We’ve known about Joe Biden’s cushy relationship with China since before the election, and it should surprise no one that the actions of the administration repeatedly give an unsettling impression that they are in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party. …
It seems everything our government told us during the “balloon” incident was a lie. When exposed, the safety net for feeble minds is to move on and pretend it didn’t happen or that it really didn’t matter…again with the stubborn refusal to connect the simplest of dots and learn the lessons for future use.
All of this from a mostly quiet week of my own selective path of news consumption. It is hard to watch the massively manipulated world that the masses around me choose to believe and accept. I do realize that the constant barrage of lies is overwhelming to the individual…the path of least resistance is to just “believe and accept” and go on with everyday life. In a world that has chosen that path, it is no small curse to always see the lie – not always the full truth but definitively the lie – in real time.
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A few weeks back I came across an interesting passage in Solzhenitsyn’s Apricot Jam:
… German aircraft kept flying over Soviet territory, while Stalin accepted Hitler’s apologies for his “young and inexperienced” pilots. What about 1941, when the Germans suddenly needed to look up their World War I cemeteries on our side of the border? It’s all right, go ahead and look . . . What an intelligence coup they made out of that! … – Page 251
Those Germans had nothing on today’s China…they currently own our Oval Office, the Cabinet, significant parts of the Congress, and our air space. The similar passage written from the other side of our current abyss will seem just as silly. It is even today.
the philo t. custis institute 