March 10, 2026

THEY HAVE NO CONTACT WITH REALITY:  In Theory.

Posted at 1:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

I CAN SEE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LENIN AND STALIN WHILE KNOWING THEY’RE BOTH MONSTERS THAT SHOULD BE REVILED IN MEMORY TO AVOID ANY FUTURE OCCURRENCES:  Political and philosophical illusions, left and right.

And the difference was not as great as the Colonel thinks if you do a deep dive into what Lenin really was and did, not his hagiography.

Posted at 12:58 am by Sarah Hoyt

March 9, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PAYBACK: Trump Denies Biden’s Executive Privilege Request. Here’s Why it’s Biden’s Own Fault.

Biden himself set the precedent for this.

Only a sitting president can assert executive privilege, and in 2021, Biden denied Trump’s request to assert executive privilege over White House documents, thus allowing the partisan J6 Committee to use them for their bogus investigation. Trump sued to stop the disclosure, arguing that the committee had no legitimate need for many of the documents, which he said were unrelated to the Capitol riot.

Then, in May 2022, Acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall informed Trump’s attorneys that the Biden White House Counsel’s Office had formally requested NARA grant the FBI access to 15 boxes of Trump documents at Mar-a-Lago. According to Just the News reporter John Solomon, the same letter indicated Biden had authorized NARA to waive any executive privilege claims Trump might raise to block DOJ access. In other words, the former president who is now asserting expansive privilege protections is the same one who, while in office, helped engineer the unraveling of Trump’s privilege claims to fuel a bogus criminal investigation.

These documents are likely to fuel a non-bogus criminal investigation.

Posted at 9:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS SEEMS RIGHT. JUST ANOTHER LEFTIST NOBODY THE PRESS IS TRYING TO TURN INTO A SOMEBODY FOR POLITICAL REASONS.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS CNN:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HORSESHOE THEORY:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

RIP: Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99.

Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.

His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and went on to, along with Butterfield, help expose the wrongdoing.

“He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”

As a deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the taping system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed that only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the taping system.

At Media Myth Alert in 2013, Joseph Campbell wrote: The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed.

The book, All the President’s Men, says that Woodward had found out about private testimony that Butterfield had given to staff members of the select committee and he called Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, for guidance.

The call to Bradlee was on a Saturday night. After outlining what he knew, Woodward, according to the book, said:

“We’ll go to work on it, if you want.”

In reply, Bradlee is quoted as saying with some slight irritation, “Well, I don’t know.”

How would you rate the prospective story? Woodward asked him.

“B-plus,” Bradlee replied.

Woodward figured a B-plus wasn’t much, according to the book.

“See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee is quoted as instructing Woodward.

And Woodward didn’t “bust one.”

Two days later, on July 16, 1973, Butterfield made his reluctant disclosure at a public session of the Senate select committee.

The following day, according to All the President’s Men, Bradlee conceded that the lead about the taping system was “more than a B-plus.”

The anecdote from All the President’s Men is suggestive of the overall minor role that the Post played in uncovering Watergate. As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, unraveling a scandal of the dimension of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WEEKEND AT MOJTABA’S: Iranian Clerics Choose Khamenei’s Son Mojtaba As Next Supreme Leader.

For everyone yammering about how stupid Trump was to back out of the atrocious Obama/Kerry Iran deal, the enriched uranium Iran holds is there BECAUSE of the deal…and all those pallets of cash.

Not only that, but RedState’s Jen Van Laar points out something else regarding Mojtaba and his new role. He’s filthy rich.

Mojtaba Khamenei owns an extensive and troubling real estate portfolio in the U.K., including two luxury apartments in London overlooking the Israeli Embassy and “a stone’s throw” from Kensington Palace, home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Bloomberg News reported in late January after a year-long investigation. He purchased the apartments in 2014 and, according to the probe, the funds for the purchases came from Iran’s oil program.

In addition, Khamenei “owns 11 mansions in Hampstead, North London, through a front man and a shell company registered in the Isle of Man.” The properties are part of a “global property empire” worth “hundreds of millions of pounds,” according to Bloomberg.

Being able to sell oil to China, Russia and others despite all the sanctions over the years was certainly lucrative for Khamenei. And, if they need any more money to continue …if they can… enriching uranium, all he has to do is sell some property.

If he still has a pulse:

Did they bring along a cardboard cutout of Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and play “Tusk” at the allegiance ceremony as well?

UPDATE: Heh, indeed.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PAY ATTENTION TO THE NORMALS? BUT WHY?

Posted at 6:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds