The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands, Part 876945

The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands, Part 876945
A file photo of an American flag. Yvonne Marcotte/The Epoch Times
Roger Kimball
Updated:
Commentary

How are things going in Dogpatch, USA?

The musical L’il Abner (1940) summed it up in a classic tune, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands.”

I suppose that’s a form of litotes or meiosis, ironically suggesting something by asserting its opposite.

There are some real gems in that song.

I wonder if Jen Psaki learned her trade from it?

Remember when she said that surging prices were “a good thing” because it meant “more people are buying goods ... increasing the demand”?

L’il Abner was there before her:

“The treasury says the national debt/ Is climbing to the sky/ And government expenditures/ Have never been so high/ It makes a feller get a/ Gleam of pride within his eye,/ To see how our economy expands/ The country’s in the very best of hands.”

Or how about this bit from the end of the song: “Don’t worry about the principal/ And interest that accrues/ They’re shipping all that stuff to foreign lands/ The country’s in the very best of hands.”

The absolute very best of hands.

Think about it. Our president, Joe Biden, just told the world that he “was in the foothills of the Himalayas with Xi Jinping, traveling with him. That’s when we traveled 17,000 miles when I was vice president. I don’t know that for a fact.”

No one does, Joe.

One thing that is hardening into fact, however, is that Hunter Biden’s many opportunities to enrich himself at various foreign troughs came with certain expectations—to wit, the expectation that “the Big Guy,” aka Joseph R. Biden Jr., would get his cut.

Texts recovered from Hunter’s “Laptop from Hell” tell the story.

Hunter to his daughter Naomi: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. ... But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

The New York Post, which initially broke the story about the contents of Hunter’s laptop, detailed some of the expenses paid for “JRB bills.”

The list is long.

I said that the NY Post broke the story.

And so they did, in October 2020, just weeks before the election.

But you would never know that from the “media conformists” who instantly went into panic mode, circled the wagons, and shouted “Russian disinformation” at the top of their lungs.

The fetid sinkhole known as Twitter kicked the NY Post off its site, 50 “intelligence experts” said the laptop story was garbage, and only a month or so back did The New York Times casually admit that the story was true.

The excellent phrase “media conformists,” by the way, comes from a story in The Wall Street Journal about the laptop saga.

“Twitter blocked the Post’s account for nearly two weeks,” the Journal notes, “and Facebook used algorithms to quash the story. This deprived voters of information they might have wanted to know before Election Day.”

You think?

The Journal goes on to connect the dots.

The emails recovered from Hunter’s laptop “make clear that Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name, including as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. That influence-peddling was a potential political liability for Mr. Biden, which was why the facts deserved an airing before the election.”

Yes, they did deserve airing, but the country’s in the very best of hands, so that didn’t happen.

Now, courtesy of The Associated Press, we learn that the rot surrounding Washington has insinuated itself into some alarming spots.

“Federal prosecutors,” we learned, “charged two men they say were posing as federal agents, giving free apartments and other gifts to U.S. Secret Service agents, including one who worked on the first lady’s security detail.”

The names of the men?

Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect that the game’s afoot.

Powerline’s Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker have been devoting serious attention to this story (and here, here, and here).

The men, though apparently American citizens, are likely in the pay of a foreign power, most likely Iran.

They were allegedly armed to the teeth and lavished free rent and other goodies on four Secret Service agents, all of whom are currently suspended.

According to a story in The Daily Mail that Johnson quotes, one of the agents was assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris’s security detail, another was on the “presidential protective detail, and regularly traveled with President Biden on Air Force One.”

But how did all of this come to light?

It was uncovered “by luck” during a routine investigation conducted by a U.S. Postal Service inspector.

As Johnson put it, “You have got to be kidding me.”

The country’s in the very best of hands.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball
Author
Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads.”
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