Andrew McCarthy’s weekly NRO column eludcidates “The ‘Biden brand’ racket.” It is educational and biting. He deserves a Pulitzer Prize for commentary of this quality week after week. The only problem is that it is kept behind NRO’s paywall.
Somebody really ought to arrange with NRO to let McCarthy’s columns run free. As the kid says in A Thousand Clowns, “And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky.”
What the heck is the “Biden brand”? McCarthy invokes his professional experience: “Such a nice word, brand. Not what we federal prosecutors in the Organized Crime Unit called it back in the Eighties. We were more inclined to say extortion. Or racketeering — say, running a protection racket, as in, ‘Nice business you have here, be a shame if anyone shut it down.’”
Referring to a work somewhat better known than A Thousand Clowns, McCarthy writes:
Pols like Joe Biden and their hangers-on — like Archer, his son Hunter’s partner in slime — don’t like to think of their “brand” as extortion. They’re more in the mold of Don Corleone’s equally ruthless but more progressive son, Michael, who swore that any year now the family business would become “completely legitimate.” In such “completely legitimate” businesses, the muscle to do extortion is the family’s “brand.” The brand’s stock-in-trade is “influence,” an aura of intimidation to which beleaguered businesses — including foreign “partners” connected to corrupt and anti-American regimes — buy “access.” That’s what they expect will protect them from the metastasizing peril of, yes, “regulation.”
If you doubt that, you can skip the 140 pages of Archer’s recent House Oversight Committee testimony and just watch the twelve-minute clip of his extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson. These two contemporaries, who spent their formative years inside the Beltway, agree without hesitation that “the business of Washington is selling access.”
The twelve-minute clip is below. It is posted as part 1 of a two-part interview. Part 2 of the interview is over an hour long and is also available on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Ep. 12 Part 1. Devon Archer pic.twitter.com/ElEzAZtBcA
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2023
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.