Matt Taibbi something something Hunter Biden

[Landslide Lyndon]

Matt Taibi was always a smug prick. But he totally went over to the Dark Side after the "Me Too" movement and the revelations that he was a sexual predator and serial harasser.

[Landslide Lyndon]

This is nonsense on its face.

Every single "mainstream" news outlet suppressed the story.  Furthermore, those same news outlets DID disseminate a story where over 50 "intelligence officials" stating that the laptop and its contents were "likely" to be "Russian Disinformation".  This is utter garbage, and we know this today, but the actions of intelligence officials, in concert with our legacy news networks (who were all too happy to help) prevented honest discussion and exploration of this issue prior to the the 2020 election.  And it's not reasonable to believe that the 50-plus "intelligence officials" honestly believe that the story was "Russian Disinformation".  The goal of these people was to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump by any means necessary.

To those of you who want to scream "BASELESS CONSPIRACY THEORIES!", one ought to consider that the "Intelligence Community" provided a "debunking" of the story (for political purposes) prior to the election.  The dishonesty of the media is bad enough, but these "intelligence officials" were experts in the field.  There actions were no less a violation of their professional ethos than a doctor stating that a decedent's death was "accidental" to cover up the guilt of a murderer.  

And what did these "intelligence officials" do in their careers as "intelligence professionals"?  One thing they did was to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries.  Transparency?  Lyman Kirkpatrick, the former Inspector General and Executive Director of the CIA remarked that the best Covert Operations are those that remain a secret "from Inception to Eternity".  The job of intelligence officials is not just to gather intelligence; it is also to control events through the use of sophisticated manipulation.  That's what these 50-plus intelligence officials were trained to do and participated in during their careers.

Do our "intelligence officials" act domestically?  Well, COINTELPRO did happen.  But even after the Church and Pike committees, these folks acted domestically.  In CASEY:  The Life and Secrets of William J. Casey from the OSS to the CIA, Joseph Persico reveals a story where right after Casey appointed an outsider, Max Hugel, as Deputy Director of Intelligence.  Here's Wikipedia's account of what happened:

Hugel was a close friend of William J. Casey, the director of the CIA. Hugel joined the CIA in January 1981 as Casey's special assistant, and Casey later appointed him as Deputy Director for Operations, the head of the CIA's Clandestine Service. After reporters from the Washington Post published allegations by two former business associates of improper or illegal stock trading during Hugel's time with Brother International, Hugel resigned while denying the allegations.[6][7] He later sued the two associates for libel, and won.[2]

Hugel sued the McNell brothers (who made the allegations) in Federal Court and won a libel judgement for $950k.  He also went to talk to James Jesus Angleton, the former Counterintelligence Director for the CIA, who told Hugel:  "Your troubles originated inside the DO (Operations Directorate for the CIA)"  (Source:  Joseph Persico and the aforesaid CASEY bio.)  Was this far-fetched?  Persico pointed out that the people in the DO that could have manipulated events to drive Hugel's ouster were the same folks that undermined foreign governments for a living, and suggested (logically, I might add) that getting an outsider boss fired wouldn't tax their abilities too much.  

So you'll forgive my skepticism when 50-plus "intelligence officials" are used to essentially sell the public on the idea that a laptop that provides evidence of Joe Biden's improper (and secretive) involvement in Hunter Biden's foreign businesses are "Russian Disinformation".  THAT was the baseless assertion, and that is being revealed today.  It's not "Russian Disinformation" and Americans not only should be interested in the whole of the Hunter Biden story; they should be interested as to the How and Why these 50-plus intel officials (still of them) came to the conclusion that they did.  THAT would be the basis for a valid Congressional investigation, particularly into the fact that so many "retired" intelligence officials still have Security Clearances.

The story is valid.  The information ought to be presented to the American people.  Those networks and news officials that said it was disinformation ought to not just admit they got it wrong, but recognize the disservice they did the American public in "debunking" a legitimate news story and apologize to the American public for doing so.  And the investigations ought to proceed.  The Hunter Biden story isn't about HUNTER Biden; it's about JOE Biden, about why he has denied involvement in his son's businesses, and about how much "access" Hunter Biden was able to sell based on who he was and is.

Fuzzy is a conservative Christian, angry because the powers that be denied him the chance to see Hunter Biden's dick.

[Landslide Lyndon]

What right-wingers and contrarian leftists need to learn (and will eventually as a harsh lesson) is that there's no unringing the bell on this story. Rudy Giuliani and the Trump campaign already went about Hunter Biden in such a way that inoculated the majority of the public to caring about it, and you're not going to overcome that now by bringing up something about Twitter suppression or whatever. They might as well try campaigning on Hillary's emails in 2024.

A lot of the rhetoric about this story reminds me of the rhetoric surrounding the Benghazi investigation and Hillary's emails, which at the time (and bizarrely to some extent to this day) were subject to similar rhetoric regarding nobody caring (and at least on Benghazi, the polls mostly concurred with the Democratic narrative for years). Yet the investigations were largely successful politically. Hillary's favorables were tanked and she lost the 2016 election; the only price Republicans paid, maybe, is having a close call in CA-49 in 2016. Even then that might just have been demographics catching up in a D-trending area.

You can also think that allegations of corruption are worth investigating in a principled way. (You can also fight the idea that nobody cares; I think the evidence that swing voters do when it's presented in a certain way clearly exists.) But even if it's true that nobody outside of hardcore Republican partisans cares, that just doesn't mean the investigation isn't worth pursuing; it has happened in the past that voters have started caring about scandals that only hardcore partisans of one party or another cared about when some further shoe drops, or some campaign develops a strategy for getting voters to care, often many years later.

The difference is that the media were hellbent to bring down Clinton and played along with Republicans.
But four years later they had no intention to do the same with Biden and ignored the Hunter's laptop story.