“Well, they’ve done it again,” said my buddy Al (of Al’s Coffee Shop), when I stopped in last week. Al was scowling and rattling the cups and saucers, as he served my customary volcanic, mega-caffeine mocha-java supremo.
“What have they done now, Al?” I asked. “Don’t tell me the League of Transgender Moms has denounced coffee as another symbol of white supremacy. No! Surely not that!”
Al scowled as he put my cuppa-joe on the counter in front of me. “No, not yet,” he said, as he tried to regain his customary bonhomie. “But They are at it again,” said Al, pushing a newspaper over to me. I scanned it briefly, but saw nothing very alarming.
“What’s is it, Al?” I asked. “Is Hillary making another try to become the first female Pope? Or are she and Kamala planning to take over the Democratic ticket for the ’24 elections? Boy! (or Girl! in this case) Wouldn’t that be something?”
“No, wisenheimer!” said Al, indicating an above-the-fold item in the paper. “It’s the ‘dime-bag’ of cocaine that the Secret Service found in the White House. It’s become the latest ‘shiny object’ for politicians, reporters, educators, preachers and graybeard analysts to chase after, while really serious matters – like the politically corrupted DoJ, and the Biden Family’s millions from China and Ukraine – are totally forgotten.”
“Yes, I’ve seen and heard some reports about the dime-bag,” I replied. “But it didn’t look like much of a deal. Everybody knows Hunter Biden is a total crackhead. He probably brought the stuff into the White House and forgot where he left it. After all, he’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. He’ll almost certainly be fingered as the perp in this case. Who else would be that dumb?”
Al assumed his impression of a school-master patiently lecturing a slow student: “Maybe Hunter will be shown as the coke-leaver, but I doubt it. That would have come out by now, if it was the plan. But the story keeps changing every other day – including reports of where the dime-bag was found.”
“More than that,” said Al, “this is a real masterpiece in the ‘shiny object’ category. There’s something in it for every inch of the political spectrum. Conservatives can jump up and down about illegal drug use. Liberals can tsk-tsk about the lack of White House security. Republicans can demand more investigations and speculate on who brought the drugs in. Even Democrats can use this as a club to knock Joe Biden out of the ring for the ’24 ticket. They don’t want him to run for a second term because his numbers are in the dumpster and he could lose the election.”
I had to admit that Al had made a good point about the Shiny Object ploy. Democrats use it whenever they want the public’s attention to be distracted away from something they’d like to keep under wraps. Right now that would include almost every aspect of Good Old Joe’s entire presidency, which has been a disaster from one end to the other. It’s so bad that even Yellow Dog Democrats don’t want to defend Bidenomics, inflation, high interest rates, the idiotic student loan forgiveness proposal, crippled fossil-fuel production, high gasoline prices, the hard sell on $70,000 electric cars, federally-funded shipments of illegals all over the country, et cetera, et cetera.
Drugs have been attractive shiny objects that Democrats dish out, periodically, to keep the hoi polloi distracted and Republicans occupied with trying to fix something that Democrats have no intention of fixing. Recently I saw a report about a new program in Portland, Oregon, that will supply drug users with clean implements and “safe” drug supplies – all in the interest of good health, of course. One critic said Portland was trying to solve the drug-use problem by safely killing off the druggie population.
At this writing the Portland proposal has been put on hold, but it looks a lot like a derivative of the Biden administration’s federally-funded crack-pipe proposal of 2021, when some stoned twenty-somethings in Joe’s inner-circle proposed supplying “hygienic” pipes to crack-smokers. Wags called it the Hunter Biden Reclamation Program. (Al called it the dumbest idea he had ever seen – coming close to an attack of apoplexy.) Conservative TV news-channels validated the Shiny Object strategy by covering this rubbish wall-to-wall.
Did Good Old Joe really plan to hand out “clean” crack-pipes? One would think not even Democrats are that dumb. (But one could be wrong.) It was probably just a distraction, with short-term and long-term utility. In the short term it kept media, politicians, and the public distracted for days or weeks – maybe even months. In the longer term, Medicinal Joe got to look wise and statesman-like – as his team has always claimed he is – by booting the crack-pipe plan and assuring us that nothing like that would ever happen under his governance. He even suggested (with his signature lopsided grin) that only Republicans do dumb stuff like that – by way of reminding us how lucky we are that he’s saved us from them.
But drugs – either inside or outside of the White House – are not the only Shiny Object put in play by the Biden Brain Trust. Every week we’re hammered by news of another horrible mass shooting that has taken the lives of ordinary people who had no idea that they would suddenly die by unexpected gunfire at a party, a mall, or a business which they frequent. These highly publicized events draw comprehensive media coverage, to the exclusion of everything else.
Are mass shootings more common now, than previously? Or do we simply hear more about them because of 24/7 news coverage? More news organs are certainly on the scout for the conflict and violence that sells news copy. As I’ve observed in previous writings, “All is calm” is not a story. “If it bleeds, it leads” is still the watchword of editors everywhere.
There is no doubt, however, that murders in the USA took a decided leap upward from 2019 to 2021 – increasing to levels not seen since the late 1990s, as the table in Appendix A shows. Things improved slightly in 2022, but the murder-level is still close to what it was 25 years ago. Some critics blame the COVID pandemic’s decreases in employment for the increased crime-levels. Conservatives blame liberals’ soft-on-crime policies, saying that you’re bound to get more crime when you turn the crooks loose. Why liberals find it politically valuable to do this is the real question.
My view – conspiratorial though it might seem – is that gun-control is the underlying motivation to liberals’ easy-going approach to crime. Every time another mass-shooting incident occurs, an orchestrated chorus of demands for “common sense” gun-control arises – blaming guns, not bad people, for these terrible crimes. Rarely is there any realistic admission that gun-control laws disarm only law-abiding people. Criminals pay no attention to those laws. So in this case, the Shiny Object of mass-shootings actually has an underlying purpose that goes well beyond political distraction.
“But what else is going on that Joe and his gang don’t want us to notice,” Al asked. “It’s got to be something pretty risky and dangerous.”
I agreed, and suggested that the continuing flood of illegals pouring across our southern border is certainly such an issue. How much news have we seen or heard about that lately? In fact, according to the Mainstream Media, the alien-invasion isn’t even happening. It’s a total cover-up. 200,000 aliens are still walking in every month, from dozens of countries, and the feds are flying them into small airports all over the country, in the dark of night. (Is this a great country, or what?)
All that is bad enough, but it’s not the most dangerous thing Joe wants to distract us from. That would be what reporters call “The Big W.” The word on the street is that Bomber Joe wants to go to war with the Russkies. He says it’s to “help” Ukraine, but I think it’s his Hail Mary pass to save him and his party from a complete rout in the 2024 elections.
Will he actually play the War Card? My crystal ball is busted, so I don’t know. But my rational self simply can’t believe Joe would risk a real shooting war against a dangerous, nuclear-armed foe, six thousand miles away, that has sent 140,000 troops into Ukraine. The small force we might send would almost certainly take heavy casualties. It would be disastrous. Surely Generalissimo Joe – doddering and out of touch though he might be – would never take such a gamble.
What he might do, though, is make a warlike show – sending weapons, but failing to actually engage. To make this look credible, he needs to keep anyone from examining the details too closely. If Joe can keep nosy reporters from being too nosy, he’ll be able to act all commander-in-chiefy without risking any actual battle losses.
This is where the crack-pipes, mass shootings and other Shiny Objects come in. The Biden consiglieres keep tossing them out there to keep the 3 Ps – press, politicians and public – from understanding where Joe wants to take us. And we won’t need a crystal ball to tell us that we really don’t want to go there.
“For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (I Corinthians 14:8)
*********
Appendix A. USA Murders by Year
| Year | Per 100K Population | Annual % Change |
| 2022 | 6.55 | -5.00% |
| 2021 | 6.9 | 5.82% |
| 2020 | 6.52 | 28.64% |
| 2019 | 5.07 | 1.19% |
| 2018 | 5.01 | -5.90% |
| 2017 | 5.32 | -1.32% |
| 2016 | 5.39 | 8.91% |
| 2015 | 4.95 | 11.37% |
| 2014 | 4.44 | -1.79% |
| 2013 | 4.53 | -4.33% |
| 2012 | 4.73 | 0.54% |
| 2011 | 4.71 | -1.24% |
| 2010 | 4.76 | -5.23% |
| 2009 | 5.03 | -7.34% |
| 2008 | 5.43 | -4.78% |
| 2007 | 5.7 | -1.98% |
| 2006 | 5.81 | 2.90% |
| 2002 | 5.65 | -15.52% |
| 2001 | 6.69 | 20.87% |
| 2000 | 5.53 | -0.72% |
| 1999 | 5.57 | -9.66% |
| 1998 | 6.17 | -7.95% |
| 1997 | 6.7 | -8.47% |
| 1996 | 7.32 | -10.15% |
| 1995 | 8.15 | -8.39% |
| 1994 | 8.89 | -5.88% |
| 1993 | 9.45 | 2.21% |
| 1992 | 9.25 | -4.73% |
| 1991 | 9.71 | 4.40% |
| 1990 | 9.3 | 4.40% |
