Obsession with laptop

Editor, Gettysburg Times,

Thanks for placing Michael Reagan’s column “big media is overdue for a colonoscopy” next to mine (“Some Good News for American Democracy?”). Nothing could have better illustrated my point (“a diet of show trials like Hunter Biden’s laptop.”) Well, maybe Bud Nason’s column from the previous day (“Twitter and the Constitution”).

What is this Republican obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop? Or the oft repeated story that “the liberal mainstream media” has “conspired” to “suppress” this story?

In fact, the liberal media has given this non-story more attention than it deserves. The Times and the Post both assigned top reporters who struggled to identify what the story was. And we have a stolen laptop that might have belonged to Hunter Biden that has a chain of custody that makes everything found on it utterly worthless (it has been accessed so many times by so many people it’s literally impossible to identify the origins of most of the emails). And nobody has yet been able to articulate a clear statement of what it supposedly shows. We’re literally at a level of, “Well, we know Hunter was incredibly corrupt so this certainly must show his corruption.”

Then there’s the supposed “collusion” between Twitter and Democrats to “suppress” the original New York Post story. A bunch of Twitter employees (quite properly) debating whether this story violated rules about using hacked material, whether it’s a disinformation campaign, etc.

The double standard is howlingly funny. First, any time a conservative complains about liberal media bias and doesn’t mention that Fox and OAN are mindless cheerleaders for Trumpism, they should simply be ignored. Even worse is Nason complaining about the Dems’ violating the Constitution (which they aren’t) and ignoring the out-in-the-open theft of the Constitution being practiced by the Republicans. The Jan. 6 committee fails to provide Trump protections for a congressional hearing that he’d receive in a criminal trial. According to Nason, this invented offense is so serious that nobody connected with the committee should ever be allowed to hold a federal government job. Seriously. But the president calls a secretary of state and orders him to invent 12,000 votes out of thin air or plans the nomination of phony slates of electors or candidates promise that when they’re elected, they will rig things so well the Democrats will never again win an election? None of those are a problem for Bud.

Leon Reed,
Gettysburg