May
20
2025

Welcome to Tapperworld, Where Houses Lie

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[I seldom recycle Amazon Eye Candy, but this is the third time around for today's. I'll also recycle my previous Consumer Note: it is described at Amazon as a "George Orwell Quote". It is not. The actual quotee has an amusing article at American Thinker: George Orwell is stealing my work.]

All that for a bit of outrage, exemplified by an excerpt from a National Review editorial on Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis.

Thus far, we have learned that, despite its members’ indignant insistence that all was well, Joe Biden’s inner circle knew full well that the president was unfit for office before his first term was even halfway complete. Among the revelations that have been made since Biden retired are that he frequently forgot the names of his staff and his friends; that his own cabinet was unsure if he would be capable of dealing with a crisis; and that, at one point, his aides privately discussed whether he would need to be put in a wheelchair should he win a second term. Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper described the administration’s conduct like this:

The White House was lying not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers. They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors, about how bad things had gotten.

It does not require too great a leap to wonder whether Biden’s prostate cancer was also concealed.

Wait a minute, Jake. The White House was lying? No.

Instead, it's Jake Tapper who's lying. Or at best, intentionally obfuscating the facts. Houses don't lie, people do. What are their names? What exactly did they say? When did they say it?

Ah, well. Let's skip over to Brianna Lyman at the Federalist who nails it: Biden Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jake Tapper’s Anonymous Sourcing Even More Scandalous. About Tapper's book (with co-author Alex Thompson), Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, out today:

In one excerpt of the book, an anonymous Cabinet member admitted that “For months, we didn’t have access to [Biden]” while another anonymous Cabinet member said there was a “deliberate strategy by the White House to have him met with as few people as necessary.”

If Tapper and Thompson truly intended to confront the cover-up, they wouldn’t have shielded the very people who helped orchestrate it. America already knew there was a cover-up. The only value this book could have offered was naming names — something it fails to do. What good is any “revelation” if it protects the guilty and arrives only after the damage is done?

Ah, the "White House" not only lies, it also strategizes! Deliberately!

I remember Senator Howard Baker's famous drawled query during the Watergate hearings back in 1974: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

OK, I realize Biden "knowing stuff" might be an iffy concept. I still want names of the actual liars and conspirators. It doesn't seem that information will be forthcoming from Jake Tapper.

Also of note:

  • Hanna Trudo, all is forgiven! Hanna's thinking about running for US Congress from my district (NH-01), and she recently tweeted:

    The "we are no longer free" thing kinda seemed like an exaggeration.

    But maybe less free, something J.D. Tuccille writes about at Reason: Americans, especially women, feel less free. They're not wrong.

    "For the third year in a row, Americans are less satisfied with their personal freedom than the rest of the world, including their peers in other wealthy, market-based economies," Gallup's Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray reported of survey data on May 14. "While Americans have been less satisfied in recent years, satisfaction with personal freedom has remained higher and steady worldwide. A median of 81% across 142 countries and territories expressed satisfaction with their freedom in 2024."

    Specifically, Americans' satisfaction "with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives" started falling after 2020, when it was 85 percent; this was comparable to the peak 87-percent median recorded in the 38 developed, democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a bit higher than the 80-percent median recorded globally. U.S. satisfaction peaked several times over the past two decades at 87 percent, making 2020 unremarkable.

    As of 2024, after a brief and mild pandemic-era dip, OECD residents' satisfaction with their freedom stands at 86 percent and the global median is at 81 percent. Satisfaction with freedom among Americans, by contrast, has plunged to 72 percent.

    Note the data J.D. is working from is pre-2025, so not directly related to Hanna's Trump-blaming. Still…

  • But when they get behind closed doors… Jesse Singal blabs an open secret: Of Course Liberal Institutions Are Engaging In Illegal Hiring Practices On The Basis Of Race.

    Harvard University initially received plaudits for its resistance to the Trump administration. After all, the list of demands the administration sent Harvard — apparently accidentally — was insanely onerous. They weren’t the sort of demands Harvard, or any university, could actually accede to while remaining a center of learning in any real sense.

    Last week, though, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is escalating its conflict with Harvard (or as I call it, Tufts on the Charles), perhaps most menacingly with the potential of a federal civil-rights violation investigation.

    The turnaround has been quick:

    Harvard has basked in acclaim from White House critics for fighting back so far. After Mr. Trump threatened the school’s federal funding, Harvard sued the administration, and legal experts said the university has a strong case.

    But behind closed doors, several senior officials at Harvard and on its top governing board have acknowledged they are in an untenable crisis. Even if Harvard quickly wins in court, they have determined, the school will still face wide-ranging funding problems and continuing investigations by the administration.

    Some university officials even fear that the range of civil investigations could turn into full-blown criminal inquiries.

    "Tufts on the Charles", heh!

    I won't be happy until I see Steven Pinker perp-walked into a Federal courthouse.

  • As opposed to Democrats, who aren't expected to take the national debt seriously at all. Eric Boehm observes: Not Even the Moody's Downgrade Can Make Republicans Take the National Debt Seriously.

    In a world where federal policymakers were treating America's national debt with the seriousness it deserves, Friday might have been a crucial turning point in Washington.

    First, the House Budget Committee voted down President Donald Trump's tax proposal when four Republican members of the committee broke ranks over concerns about how the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit and the debt. "This bill falls profoundly short," said Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), one of those four GOP members, during the committee's debate on the bill. "It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits."

    Hours later, Moody's Ratings seemingly agreed with those objections when the credit rating agency downgraded the federal government's debt—a signal to investors that buying Treasury bonds is a riskier bet than it used to be. In a statement, Moody's said that the downgrade reflected the fact that Congress and the president "have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," and noted that "current fiscal proposals under consideration" would not do anything to reduce spending and deficits.

    Also not taking the national debt seriously: American voters, who keep reelecting incumbents anyway.

  • Mister, we could use a man like … Ebenezer Scrooge again. Jeff Maurer speaks wisely: "Some People Are Lazy Dirtbags" is the Magic Phrase that Lets Democrats Talk About Medicaid Work Requirements.

    Republicans in Congress are making work requirements for Medicaid part of their budget bill. This is popular; 62 percent of Americans support work requirements for Medicaid. And, honestly, I’ll bet that number would be higher if a lot people weren’t thinking of Medicare and wondering “how do you force a bunch of 85 year-olds back to work — how many greeters does Walmart need?”

    Many on the left think that Medicaid work requirements are bad policy; their main point is that the cost “savings” come overwhelmingly from eligible Medicaid recipients who fail to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. I agree with those analyses — adding a work requirement to Medicaid is like “family style” dining in that it sounds great but sucks in practice. A lot of deserving people will get hurt by the effort to root out the undeserving, and the government won’t reduce costs so much as move them around.

    Jeff is convinced that implementing a work requirement for the able-bodied moochers wouldn't be worthwhile. I'm open to that argument, but see Cato: Medicaid’s Funding Formula Rewards Overspending and Fuels Fraud

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