The drone head-scratcher -- a wonderfully apt end for the Biden Administration

Confusion and lassitude battle to a draw with incompetence and deceit. To see Joe Biden's "legacy," just look up.

For about a week now, we’ve seen, first on Fox and now pretty much everywhere, stories about unidentified drones, apparently each the size of a car, flying low over heavily populated areas mostly in the Northeast. New Jersey and New York seem to be the main areas of interest.

I have no clue what these things are and I haven’t seen one. The only facts that seem obvious to me are (1) they want to be seen, since they’re flashing their lights at night where they know they’ll be noticed, (2) the Biden Administration’s professing complete ignorance about what they are, whose they are and what they’re doing can’t possibly be true, not at this stage of the story and not with the surveillance capacities we have, and (3) we’ve long since had the technology to get these questions answered — not that it takes a lot of technology. You just send up a smaller drone with a good flight range, follow one of these things until it gets short on fuel and lands, meanwhile having intercepted its signals to and from its operator. Then alert our people about what we’ve found.

If an aging brief writer can figure out this much, the authorities figured it out long ago. But Biden’s people continue to maintain it’s all a big mystery. I haven’t seen my TV so full of blank faces since Justice Brown-Jackson was asked at her confirmation hearing if she could say what a woman is.

So what’s going on? A smart Facebook friend notes, “Ex-military drone pilots are now speculating (on Joe Rogan and Charlie Kirk) that these may be reconnaissance operations searching for ‘CBURN’ (chemical, biohazard or radioactive material).” That makes sense; the areas being overflown are densely populated commercial and finance hubs, and some military sites, that would make juicy terrorist targets on Christmas, New Year’s or, especially, Inauguration Day.

But again, I don’t know.

My point is that all this is a wonderfully fitting metaphor for the Biden Administration as it sputters to its end. Months ago it became clear that Biden is mentally unfit to be a Presidential candidate, much less President. But snoozing serenity and Kamala Harris’s good “vibes” are still with us, along with the country’s normal if foolish complacency. No one in the MSM seems all that concerned that tomorrow morning we could wake up to some high-tech version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The person to deal with it won’t be JFK in his forties. It will be the never-all-that-sharp-anyway Joe Biden in his eighties, the man who has a tough time finding his way out of the Rose Garden.

I should confess that I’ve become complacent too. I believe in evidence, and, truth be told, we have almost no hard evidence of actual or imminent danger. Despite my somewhat suspicious mindset (I was a federal prosecutor for years when defendants’ routine deceit was the daily diet), I’m largely as much vulnerable to complacency as the next guy. Much of the genius of the Left’s takeover of culture, particularly in education and the media, is how brilliantly gradual and patient it has been. The formerly high standards that bred caution, strength and readiness have been dumbed down one small step at a time — but it’s been going on for three generations. So if we have a Chinese spy balloon spending lazy days gathering intelligence as it floats across the entire country, well, as Alfred E. Biden Newman told us, “What me worry?”

In other words, we’ve been conditioned to think these drones are no big deal whether they are or not.

To be clear, I do not believe that the drone saga is being staged to divert attention from a slew of other stories the Administration would just as soon get buried — the Hunter Biden pardon; the confession of Crystal Magnum that her Duke lacrosse rape prosecution was a bunch of lies to prop up a racist pogrom by Democratic DA Mike Nifong; the fact that illegal immigration was grossly out of control during the Biden years (as Paul has detailed); Alvin Bragg’s repulsive and failed racist prosecution of Daniel Penny; or that Democratic shill George Stephanopolous and his employer ABC just got slapped with a $15,000,000 settlement for falsely claiming — during the campaign of course — that Trump had been found guilty of rape.

Still, there is one story that’s being pushed out of the news by the drones, a story I think critically important, both substantively for the harm it does our country and symbolically for the corrosion of standards of justice it bespeaks. I hate to sound like a broken record on this (see my posts here and here), but the hundreds of clemencies Biden has handed out to criminals — and hence their imminent return to our communities — gets uglier the more you look at it.

But we need to look at it anyway, both for what it means now and what it tells us about what further abuses of the pardon power Biden has coming up. Jim Geraghty does so here:

CBS News goes two minutes into its interview with commuted convict Sabrina Morgan before mentioning the crimes she pled guilty to, “participating in a conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime and maintaining a premises for the purpose of storing, distributing and using methamphetamine” as part of a “$4.3 million conspiracy to distribute large quantities of methamphetamine and heroin.”

Guns and meth. What could go wrong? Of course meth can kill you and whomever you’re selling it to, with guns or without. But simply to listen to the White House cover story for these clemencies, you’d think it was nothing more than a bunch of chipper sophomores smoking a joint.

As Geraghty shows, it’s anything but. “Meet some of the beneficiaries of Biden’s mercy, he writes. “Unless you live near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., you’ve probably never heard of the “Kids-For-Cash Scandal”:

Michael Conahan, 72, was convicted along with former judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 74, of funneling juvenile defendants to two private, for-profit detention centers in exchange for $2.1 million in kickbacks.

Conahan pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges and was sentenced in 2011 to 17½ years in prison. However, he petitioned the courts for a “compassionate release” during the COVID-19 pandemic, writing that he was “in grave danger of not only contracting the virus, but of dying from the virus.”

He was released to home confinement in Florida under federal supervision in June 2020.

Sandy Fonzo, who famously confronted Ciavarella outside federal court over the suicide of her son after he was placed in juvenile detention, called the development “deeply painful.”

“I am shocked and I am hurt,” Fonzo said in a statement. “Conahan’s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son’s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power. This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”

This is what we’re dealing with. In Joe Biden’s world, it’s “mercy.”

Mercy for whom?

But wait, there’s lots more:

Rita Crundwell, the former Dixon city comptroller convicted of embezzling $53.7 million from the city — pegged as the largest municipal theft in U.S. history — is among one of roughly 1,500 people granted clemency by President Biden . . . .

Crundwell was taken out of city hall in handcuffs April 17, 2012, accused of stealing millions of city funds across her tenure in office. She used the funds to pay for a lavish lifestyle raising champion quarter horses, a $2 million tour bus, jewels, furs, multiple homes and other trappings while Dixon struggled to pay for infrastructure and other projects.

Who does Ms. Crundwell think she is? Hunter?

And then this:

[Biden’s list] also included another infamous Illinois fraudster: Eric Bloom, who bilked investors out of more than $665 million in the biggest financial fraud case ever tried in Chicago.

Bloom, 59, got a 14-year sentence in 2015 for wire and investment advisor fraud as head of Sentinel Management Group Inc., which used customers’ money to take out a massive loan for Bloom’s own risky portfolio, which crashed.

Bloom strung along key investors in 2003 by artificially boosting their returns at the expense of less favored clients, costing them all more than half a billion dollars by the time the scheme fell apart in 2007.

Prosecutors declared it the largest financial fraud case ever prosecuted in Chicago’s federal court.

If this is the biggest fraud in Chicago, of all places, we’re not talking about peanuts.

Read the whole Geraghty article, if you have the stomach.

The reason I return to this topic is not just to show you what a brazen sham these Biden clemencies are, although that’s certainly worth remembering. Nor is it just to give you a peek at what’s to come as Biden’s political accountability dwindles and the partisan pressure grows to open the pardon floodgates to his buddies. It’s to further illustrate why Biden or any other President simply cannot be trusted with sole, unreviewable and unremediable power to grant clemency. Our criminal justice system simply must be more serious and more sober than that, lest it have a jack-in-the-box clown waiting to pop up at the end.