Narrative-shaping establishment minions are scrambling to make us understand that former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter simply couldn't have engaged in textbook corruption in Ukraine and China. More importantly, any investigation into said allegations is beyond the pale - especially if it might ruin the left's chances of dislodging 'orange man bad' from the Oval Office in 2020.

On Friday, the New Yorker's resident anti-Kavanaugh crusader Jane Mayer spent the better part of 2100 words lashing out at the effort to investigate the bidens, reducing credible allegations to a "conspiracy theory" despite direct evidence that at minimum, Joe Biden leveraged his office to get a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired.

Shokin was investigating Burisma holdings, an oil and gas company paying Hunter Biden $600,000 per year to sit on its board next to a former CIA Director - when the younger Biden's only apparent qualification was having been born right. If you think that's odd, you may be a conspiracy theorist.

To discredit Shokin, Mayer repeats the well worn claim that "European and US officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he [Shokin] was lax in curbing corruption." Perhaps, but let's see some evidence from the period leading up to his ouster that doesn't include high-level hearsay.

A Ukrainian court ruled in 2018 that a Ukrainian law enforcement agency "meddled in the electoral process of the United States in 2016" so dismissing everyone who brings that up as a "conspiracy theorist" is not going to work https://t.co/RPmqheqAry — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 6, 2019

In short, Jane's latest diatribe does little to address the merit of the allegations against the Bidens. Instead, she seeks to delegitimize conservative journalists reporting on it, such as The Hill's John Solomon and Breitbart's Peter Schweizer - calling them "political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives" who are engaging in disinformation.

"Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016," Mayer writes.

Schweizer went a step further. His chapter implied not just that Burisma was a crooked company but that the end of a Ukrainian criminal investigation into it on January 12, 2017, was in some unstated way connected to Joe Biden’s visit to the country four days later. In this way, Schweizer floated the possibility that, as Vice-President, Biden had abused his power to protect the company or his son from prosecution. Yet Schweizer provided no proof of causation nor evidence of illegality . -New Yorker

Where she does address the Biden-Ukraine scandal, Mayer makes unexplored claims such as "The Burisma investigation had been dormant under Shokin," without noting that Shokin said in a sworn affidavit "The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings , a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors."

We suppose it's entirely possible that Hunter Biden and John Kerry's stepson coincidentally landed a $1.5 billion contract in China all by themselves just two weeks after Joe and Hunter flew there together on Air Force Two. Again, however, you might be a conspiracy theorist if you suspect otherwise.

And while Hunter's lucrative Ukraine dealings were outrageous enough in 2014 for ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl to ask Obama's then-press secretary Jay Carney about the "appearance of conflict," such questions are apparently the stuff of 'conspiracy theory' according to Mayer.

Another glaring red flag is the pass given to the Bidens for lying about Joe's knowledge of Hunter's dealings - with Joe claiming the two "never spoke" of them, and Hunter later telling the New Yorker the two had discussed Burisma "just once."

Of course, when a Clinton Foundation board member tells a Trump campaign aide that Russia has dirt on Hillary - a rumor he later repeats to an Australian diplomat, let's kick off a multi-year counterintelligence investigation on the premise that Trump is working with Russia and not call it the actual conspiracy theory it turned out to be. We can only imagine what would turn up if an unbiased FBI and a special counsel spent over three years similarly pursuing the Bidens.

It's OK when we do it...

When it comes to President Trump and anyone else whose name has been so much as uttered in the same breath, hearsay and 'concerns' are enough to launch investigations.

To that end - for someone who thinks "evidence of illegality" is the standard by which claims should be investigated, Mayer peddled several eleventh-hour sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh - most notably that of Christine Blasey Ford, whose claim has largely unraveled after the people she says were at a High School party where Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her can't recall the incident, and have in fact denied it happened or otherwise refuted her account (Mayer also co-wrote a 1994 book, Strange Justice, used in a similar eleventh-hour attack against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas).

For Biden, we suddenly require proof behind dots even a caveman could connect.

Meanwhile, the leftist journo was also called out by Meghan McCain on "The View" for her defense of former Democratic Senator Al Franken, who resigned after eight women accused him of sexual misconduct.

In summary; pay no attention to that man behind the curtain if he's a Democrat, and you're a conspiracy theorist for even thinking of looking.