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OPINION
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Why Are They Teasing A Hunter Indictment Right Now?

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AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Perhaps the Department of Justice has taken to heart the conservative critique of its manifest dual-track approach to law enforcement and will actually charge the manifestly guilty Hunter Biden with lying about being a dirty, degenerate junkie on his gun background check form. And perhaps Brian Stelter, who is a potato, will get that headlining gig at the Las Vegas Chippendales.

If you are reading this that means we have not been nuked into oblivion. That’s good, I guess. Then I look at our society today and I’ve got mixed feelz.

What The Talk About Indicting Hunter Means

Sorry kids, Hunter’s not getting indicted for nothing. Sure, he’s guilty as hell but the objective truth of the matter is unimportant, whether when it comes the innocence of an accused conservative or the obvious guilt of a liberal. There are two competing possible reasons for this leak o’ convenience.

The first was articulated by my pal Jim Hanson, who thinks this is a scam designed to send a message for President Crusty to retire his shriveled rear end to Delaware. Threaten the son to get the father to quit – that’s certainly the kind of cynical play one might expect from the Deep State that desperately wants the rapidly deteriorating dementite off the 2024 ticket. But let’s get real – it’s a bluff. There’s no way they will ever pull the trigger on a gun charge against the meth-addled scion. The power is in the threat; the damage to Biden, if he is dumb enough to press on and run – which he clearly is – would be too great. Actually charging Hunter makes a bad candidate an exponentially worse candidate. He would be even more likely to lose the general, so it is self-defeating.

The second is reason is to provide cover to indict Donald Trump. And there seems to be a significant chance that the Establishment will try to do just that. Letting it be known that the Department of Justice (sic) is considering an indictment against Hunter allows them at least a fig leaf to cover their genitals of injustice.

It’s not much of a fig leaf, but it will be enough for the blue checks, the Democrats and the pool boy advocates to pretend that there is still a justice system as opposed to the clusterfark we have now.

I give them a 60% chance of indicting Trump before the election. And when they do, I think it will detonate in their faces.

I am so here for the backlash.

Hey, We’re Still Here Period

Seems like a bigger deal than it was made out to be when our senior Commander-in-Crusty sounded off about the impending Armageddon at a Democrat fundraiser – talk about taking the “fun” out of “fundraiser.” People mostly shrugged – “Oh, that crazy prezzy of ours!” – and sort of went on with dealing with the uproars du jour, like tanking 401Ks and groomy Libertarians.

So, what happens if there is a nuclear event? I know I keep coming back to the nuke issue, but global thermonuclear war seems like it deserves some focus.

At the threshold, understand that the effects of a nuclear weapon (or many of them) are so substantial and long-lasting that they really are not tactical weapons even if they are labeled “tactical.” Think of tactical as meaning, essentially, just another weapon system used to destroy enemy forces, like a conventional bomb or artillery or even a rifle. Nukes are just so big that they are really a sledgehammer being used on a fly – sure, you can drop them on massed formations or large logistics areas to destroy enemy forces, but the other effects kind of outweigh the tactical benefit. The other effects are primarily residual radiation and contamination, as well as freaking out the other side such that it attacks you with nukes and it all escalates out of control and then in a few centuries Charlton Heston is kneeling on a beach cursing you out. 

But the strategic advantage of nukes is that they are so scary that it makes the other side back off or give up. Putin would likely use a nuclear weapon not so much for the kinetic effect – that is, the blowing stuff up component – as for the information effect, that is, sending a message that the West needs to back off and not totally humiliate him. See, for him humiliation is not a minor thing, or a turn-on like for the Dispatch staff, but a life and death issue. If he looks weak, there’s a significant chance some general will have someone stick a Makarov to the back of his neck and pull the trigger.

There are a variety of ways to create a nuclear event. One is an underground blast at a test site. The Russians have not tested a nuke in thirty years (same with us), and doing so makes the point that we are entering a new and perilous phase. That would seem to be the most likely use, especially since it is not direct attack and would not require a military response.

The next step in the escalatory ladder is an above ground-test. That has not happened in Russia (or the US) for over fifty years. They could pop one off in Siberia or on one of the northern islands they used to use as test sites. There would be airborne radiation, but the information effect would be pretty pronounced. That’s a serious escalation. 

Even more serious would be blowing one off in the Black Sea. That’s about as far as they could go without it being an actual wartime use, assuming one little thing. As my pal, thriller author and frequent Townhall contributor Matt Betley has observed, because of the chemical structure of the Black Sea, a nuke there could send a cloud of deadly hydrogen sulfide floating about. So there’s that.

The next step up the escalation ladder is to detonate it in Ukraine. That’s a wartime use even if they do it on some of the plains out in the boonies. It probably kills a few people, but maybe not a lot. Or they could use it on a military formation of some kind – there may be a large formation to hit with a tactical (low-yield) nuke somewhere, like a brigade assembly area or a depot. That renders the unit combat ineffective, but it is flat-out war. 

Moving up the scale would be dropping one on a town or a city. If Putin toasts a city, like Kyiv, then it is truly on. Look for things to spin out of control fast.

That’s when all those crazy prepper guys start saying, “See, I told you so.”

There is some vague hope that the escalation would stop quickly as we take out one of theirs for every one Putin drops, basically letting the Europeans take the punch. But there is nothing that stops it from going full-blown strategic – that is, they fire off all their land and sea-based missiles and we fire off all ours. Oh, and we only have a few anti-ballistic missiles, so we might stop a few, but not enough, of the incoming ICBMs.

So, we have the dumbest human being in America allegedly in charge at arguably the most dangerous time in most of our lifetimes. Awesome. Just awesome.

Book 7 of my Kelly Turnbull series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, Inferno (cover here), is coming out now – look for it here along with all my action-packed bestsellers, including People's Republic, Indian Country, Wildfire, Collapse, Crisis, and The Split! And my most recent non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, Plus, keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP, including an extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness video, and the Unredacted podcast!

My super-secret email address is kurt.schlichter@townhall.com.


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