The Sherlock Holmes question of the week is: Why did the New York Times finally admit that the Hunter Biden laptop was genuine? Here are five possible answers:
1) Roger Kimball suggests it’s a prelude to Joe Biden’s own people removing him from the Oval Office. The laptop clearly indicates that Biden is corrupt, as many said during the 2020 presidential campaign. That “fact” has to be established, and now it has been, albeit in paragraph 17 or 22 or 35 of a long article that many people will never read. It’s now a matter of record in what used to be called “the newspaper of record”—but is now, truthfully, just another sleazy hack political rag.
Kimball’s thesis requires multiple steps, which makes it unlikely. Before “they” can dump Biden, “Kamala [Harris] will have to be dealt with first,” says Kimball. They need to dispose of her the way the Democrats had to dispose of Vice President Spiro Agnew before they could get rid of President Nixon.
How are they going to do that? Actually, it’s probably not so difficult: Harris almost certainly has enough baggage in her past to kill an elephant. But unpacking that baggage takes time, and it would have to be done before the next Congress convenes. Under the 25th Amendment, if the vice president is removed or dies, the president appoints a new vice president, subject to the approval (by majority vote) of both houses of Congress. A Republican House is not likely to confirm a Democrat acceptable to a cabal of inner circle Democrats plotting to depose Joe Biden.
Moreover, if Biden catches onto the plot, he could tell his would-be ousters that if they dump Harris (his gold-plated insurance policy) he’d appoint someone like Newt Gingrich as vice president. Or maybe Tucker Carlson. If he did that, however, the current Democratic House could simply decline to approve him. Then, if the cabal removed Biden (while there was no vice president), under the Succession Act of 1947, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would become president. President Pelosi would then appoint a new vice president, which the Democratic House and Senate would approve.
All of that is theoretically possible, of course, but it’s a bit convoluted, and the clock is ticking, so Kimball’s hypotheses are unlikely.
2) It’s possible that an errant staffer, ticked off at the Times for some reason, inserted the paragraph, deep down in the article, when no one was looking. Again, possible, but not likely.
3) Maybe the Times, sensing a change in the mood of the American people, wants to be able to say, soon, or at least in years to come, that, yes, they told the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop. Maybe. But again, not likely.
4) Maybe Hunter Biden will soon be indicted, and largely because of the information found on his laptop. Maybe it would just be too embarrassing, given the likely publicity over such an indictment, not to have fessed up to the authenticity of his laptop.
5) Maybe the Times is simply coming to grips with reality, the reality that the Republicans might impeach Biden, and the paper might as well be on record as having told the truth about the laptop, albeit verrrry late.
Impeach the president? Yes! It’s entirely possible, even likely, that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives would move to impeach him. There are certainly ample grounds: He simply isn’t taking care to see that the laws are faithfully executed, especially on the southern border. Biden has abandoned all semblance of enforcing immigration laws. Illegals are pouring across our southern border (more than 2 million in Biden’s first year in office, and they’re still coming), bringing crime, disease, and—perhaps worst of all—fentanyl. Enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman, and child in America. It’s a scandal—perhaps the scandal of our time. Biden should be removed for that alone. And he may be!
It’s true that some might argue that the “Take Care” clause of the Constitution (Article II, Section 3) doesn’t impose a duty to take care that the immigration laws are enforced but is merely a grant of power that the president can choose not to exercise. However many “scholars” may support that argument, it is—how to put this delicately?—not likely to be a winning argument in a Republican House of Representatives getting rid of a man who many think was not duly elected anyway . . . which requires a digression.
Some people, perhaps many people, lost friends when they claimed that the 2020 election was stolen. Their former friends said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to support that claim.
But how do we know—or rather, how do they know? If you ask them, they will tell you only what they have read or heard from the media, media that we know now (well, we knew it all along) are dishonest: we know that because that is the import of the New York Times’s confession of error. The awful truth is that you, Mr. and Mrs. America, wherever you are, have no idea whether the election was honest or not, because your only way of determining that is by what you read and hear from the media—which is shamefully dishonest and was totally in the bag for Joe Biden.
6) Maybe the Times has reformed. Maybe it’s going back to just reporting the news. Dream on. Try searching its website for “Zelenskyy bans political parties,” or for any formulation of the sense of those four words. Zelenskyy appears to have banned 11 parties in Ukraine, but not the Nazi party. Other news outlets ran that story on Sunday. Why not the New York Times? Maybe they were too busy flagellating themselves over the Hunter Biden laptop story. Maybe. But maybe not.
So why did the Times confess their error on the laptop story? Who knows? But it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know they’re up to no good.