President Joe Biden participates in a pull-aside meeting with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Tuesday, June 14, 2022, at the Philadelphia Convention Center in Philadelphia. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
An American Embarrassment
Voters, evidently, were tired – tired of the Trump chaos and tired of the chaos by Democrat opposition to Donald Trump. President Joe Biden failed on the job, accuses Holman W. Jenkins in the WSJ.
(Joe Biden) wasn’t elected to enact a woke agenda, nor to go all supine when somebody compared him to FDR.
But Mr. Biden did bring to the presidency one inestimable virtue: 50 years of Washington experience. This was borne on the shoulders, however, of a character who relied on family tragedy and a Delaware rotten borough to maintain a career that once had a fellow senator (Barack Obama) saying, when Mr. Biden started talking, just shoot me.
Mr. Jenkins mentions the superb irony of Mr. Biden pardoning his son and then running off to Angola, whose richest person is the daughter of its long-serving former president.
Who in America will admit to believing Joe’s promise not to pardon Hunter? Americans are very forgiving. Few would begrudge the act were it not for “the ridiculous lies and rationalizations that came with it.”
Even the New York Times on Sunday night felt the need to roll out a short article to dispute Mr. Biden’s claim that “political opponents” somehow scuttled a “fair” plea deal to end the Hunter charges.
Hunter Biden scuttled his own deal when he couldn’t get the implausible blanket immunity he would later receive from his father after a judge discovered the provision improperly secreted in a side deal the Biden Justice Department struck to spare Hunter’s gun charges altogether.
Indeed, Mr. Jenkins continues, saying that anybody else would have jumped at the deal Hunter effectively rejected.
Anybody that is, who wasn’t a president’s son and couldn’t count on a pardon after spending an enjoyable few weeks playing the courtroom martyr, victim, and center of attention in the middle of his father’s re-election campaign.
Joe Biden Didn’t Act Alone
The press covered up for him every step of the way.
In Bob Woodward’s new book, Woodward goes to great lengths to point to Mr. Biden’s preoccupation in the White House. It was his “real war,” claims Mr. Woodward.
Take Woodward’s Observations Seriously.
In 2019, when Mr. Biden’s campaign was struggling to launch, the Trump Ukraine impeachment was a twofer for his progressive opponents because, thanks to Hunter, Biden dirty laundry would be aired too. Then, when the pandemic arrived and party leaders realized the election was being handed to them if they could stop Bernie Sanders, Hunter almost blew things up again when his laptop surfaced.
50 Years of Washington Experience
Joe Biden has always “relied on family tragedy and a Delaware rotten borough to maintain a career that once had a fellow senator (Barack Obama) saying, when Mr. Biden started talking, just shoot me.”
The truth is, Hunter scuttled his own deal when he couldn’t get the implausible blanket immunity he would later receive from his father, after a judge discovered the provision improperly secreted in a side deal the Biden Justice Department struck to spare Hunter gun charges altogether.
An Absurdly Permissive and Uncritical Media Environment.
(Joe) Biden had already gotten away with saying his son did nothing wrong even as his administration was weighing charges. He said his family received no money from China. He said Hunter’s laptop wasn’t his son’s but a Russian plant. America would have benefited if Mr. Biden had told the truth for once: He wanted to spare his son a future prosecutor trying, say, to turn a single, legal nondisclosure payment into 34 imaginative felonies as his own allies did with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Jenkins wonders how a Biden presidency might have gone if it had been forced to grapple with dilemmas rather than invent lazy rationalizations knowing the press would embrace them.
Historians may charitably write off Mr. Biden’s many bad choices to dotage or manipulative aides. What excuses will they make for the media?
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