Compare and Contrast

If you want a concrete example of why things have deteriorated so much in this country, that half of us prefer a slimy, traitorous criminal over a dedicated public servant who has accomplished an amazing amount in his 14 months in the White House, I think you could do little better than examine the different treatments currently being reserved for two topics:  Hunter Biden's laptop and the recently discovered gift of $2 billion dollars to Jared Kushner, from the murderous dictator Mohammed Bin Salman.

Let us briefly review the two cases:

OIn October, 2020- of course in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election- the right wing New York Post "revealed" a bizarre story about a laptop abandoned at a repair shop by Hunter Biden, showing massive illegal dealings between the Biden family and both Chinese leaders and supposed Ukranian "oligarchs."  This claim was naturally accompanied by a blizzard of stories in the right wing media and the mainstream press, intended to sink Biden in the election.  That stream of endless claims of criminality has continued to this day- a year and a half later, in spite of the fact that, as I reported recently:

There has to date been no real evidence that this laptop ever existed.  Not a single trustworthy person has ever admitted to having identified it.

The hard drive that allegedly came from this laptop passed through the hands of several Republican operatives and dirty tricksters with long histories of fabricating Democratic scandals, before being turned over to the FBI.

In fact, the hard drive cannot be verified as having ever been in the alleged laptop at all- we have no real idea where it came from.

And finally, after all this time, not one single sentence from this laptop that incriminates the Bidens has ever been revealed.

On the other hand, we have the verified fact, revealed two days ago, that Jared Kushner was just gifted two billion dollars by Mohammed Bin Salman, a corrupt, murderous dictator who Kushner's father in law served faithfully during his term as President.  This is not speculation, or the ravings of partisan hatchet men; there is no question that it happened.  So what is the response after those two days?

I see a single opinion piece in the Washington Post on the subject today; Google searches reveal an almost complete abandoning of this story, less than 48 hours after we heard about it.  The general media attitude about this massive, open bribe seems to be, hey, they're Republicans, it's all okay if they sell our country down the river for a couple of billion.

And there you go.  Republicans will still be screaming about the nonexistent story of Hunter Biden's laptop in November of 2024, and the press will go right on treating it as a real story.  Meanwhile, open, massive bribery and betrayal of our country at the very top level, if it implicates Republicans, will go utterly ignored.

The lesson from all of this is one I have harped on for so long, and it has been treated far better than I could by people like Driftglass. It is years past the time when the mainstream press can be considered the dupes of the Republicans; they are their collaborators in the great Republican project of destroying any remnant of democracy we still have.  And as I have repeated ad nauseum, the Democrats could beat the Republican party out of existence without hardly trying; what they cannot do is beat the Republicans and the press working together.