Democrats' Circular Firing Squad
Biden's biggest defeat could come at the hands of his own allies.
With Friends Like These
I dunno if you guys have noticed, but it’s been a pretty bad couple of months for Joe Biden. A shambolic and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan was punctuated by a drone strike executed on bad intel that led to the death of an aid worker and several Afghan children. France recalled its ambassador over a foreign policy kerfuffle. The migrant crisis overwhelming our immigration system at the southern border is getting worse. What seemed in late spring like imminent victory over the COVID pandemic has regressed into a quagmire against the Delta variant. Inflation is the highest its been in decades. Through it all, Biden’s approval rating had been impressively positive and resilient for the first six months of his presidency; but is now underwater.
Long story short, Biden needs an unambiguous political win, and he needs it soon.
So then why, for God’s sake, are Democrats insisting on torpedoing his legislative agenda?
I’m willing to grant that most of Biden’s current, uh, challenges, are of his own making. The disaster in Afghanistan was largely due to his own recalcitrance and unwillingness to heed better advice. Ditto for the southern border. He’s fairly limited on what he can do about COVID at this point, but even his tough rhetoric has thus far not been backed up by action — e.g., OSHA has not yet released emergency regulations mandating vaccines, which was the backbone of Biden’s plan.
But one thing that’s not Biden’s fault is the incompetence and petulance of congressional Democrats; particularly those to the left of the median member.
President Biden accomplished a pretty impressive feat last month — his infrastructure initiative actually received bipartisan support. Mitch McConnell and 18 other Republican Senators voted for it. This should be the easiest legislative victory in recent history, but House Democrats are insisting that they will not vote for this bill unless another, much more expensive, bill is passed in tandem.
The problem is, there is no appetite for the more expensive bill. But House Democrats have never been famous for their handle on basic math. They’re strutting around and flexing their muscles as if they have supermajorities in both chambers; seemingly unaware of the fact that the margin in the House is three; and the margin in Senate, you might’ve heard, is zero.
And they’re doing all of this while a necessary increase in the debt limit and a government funding bill looms a mere six days away.
So just to recap: Joe Biden is languishing in bad news, much of it of his own making, while his congressional allies are screwing around and are seemingly on the verge of robbing him of his lone major legislative accomplishment while also raising the possibility that they could tie a government shutdown around his neck because they can’t get their own caucus on the same page. It’s staggering.
My feelings on the current state of the Republican party are well-documented, which makes seeing this sort of incompetence from Democrats all the more depressing. America would be much better served if we had two serious, competent political parties. But as things stand now, we don’t even have one.
Joe Biden started his term with an incredible amount of good will from a large majority of Americans; but at this rate we’re going to see him on his knees like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, pounding the ground with his first and shouting “You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!”
Sit Back Down
A new book out by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger apparently “finds evidence” that “some of” the material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, made famous by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post last October, is genuine.
The New York Post, along with many others in right wing media, is taking this opportunity to spike the football and use this whole scenario as proof that the media — especially social media — operates to the benefit of Democrats.
Well, no.
Look, there’s no denying that much of the so-called “mainstream media” tilts leftward; but that’s almost entirely due to the fact that most people in media are themselves left of center. It’s not a scandal, per se, it’s just the data.
But let’s review: On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before the presidential election — the New York Post ran with a story — provided to them by Rudy Giuliani — that purported to show Hunter Biden had introduced his father to a member of an advisory board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
It should be noted that the Senate actually investigated this accusation before this story even came out, but that’s not really what’s at issue here. What’s at issue is how the story came to light.
The story goes that Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, took his laptop to be repaired in Delaware, where he promptly forgot to pick it up. The legally blind owner of the shop supposedly recognized Hunter Biden, and noticed a Biden Foundation sticker on the laptop. So when the laptop wasn’t picked up, instead of wiping the hard drive and selling the computer for parts — as is normal procedure — this shop owner supposedly goes poking around through his customer’s personal files. And while poking around in these personal files, the shop owner supposedly notices some emails pertaining to Ukrainian energy company Burisma — even though the emails never mention “Burisma.” So the shop owner alerts the authorities to this supposedly obvious corruption scheme; but before handing over the laptop to the FBI, this shop owner makes a copy of the laptop’s contents (which is a crime), and provided that copy to Robert Costello, the lawyer for — wait for it — Rudy Giuliani.
What a crazy coincidence, right?
Even assuming the utterly implausible steps to get to that point — that Hunter Biden is an incredibly stupid criminal who practices terrible OpSec; who took his broken laptop to an incredibly nosy and unethical (but impressively politically-informed and civically-minded) repairman; and that repairman (even unethically!) happened across evidence of wrongdoing such that he alerted the federal authorities — even assuming all of that for the sake of argument, why is this repairman making copies of hard drives and providing them to Rudy Giuliani's lawyer? It raises more questions than it answers.
But wait, it got even dumber.
The only reason the New York Post knew about this laptop is because Steve Bannon — you guys remember Steve Bannon? Ol' Sloppy Steve — told them about it. And then Rudy Giuliani gave them the copies of the hard drive.
And this, it should be noted, was all in the Post’s story. The New York Post did not hide, much less deny, that the sources for the story were the president’s personal attorney — who had publicly admitted that he’d been trying to uncover precisely this kind of story for years — and the president’s former advisor and campaign manager.
It just never passed the laugh test. (And I don’t believe there has ever been any sort of corroboration of that hilariously implausible story about the computer repairman. It just doesn’t add up.)
And so at the time, media outlets were — rightfully! — extremely skeptical of the story. Twitter (and Facebook as well, if I remember correctly) really cracked down on the sharing of the story so as to not be seen as participating in a political act on behalf of a particular candidate. Which, if you ask me, is totally appropriate given that it was clearly an attempt by a presidential campaign to launder an oppo dump through the media.
The fact that the email could be genuine is not a defense for the incredibly unethical — and poorly executed, for that matter — manner in which it became public. And it should be worth noting again that these accusations were investigated and nothing of note was uncovered.
So all that’s left is the New York Post and others in right wing media complaining that much of the media wasn’t willing to go along with a hatchet job by a presidential campaign.
They’re pretending it’s vindication, when it’s really just evidence of their own animosity.
Still Crazy After All These Years
Donald Trump released a statement Wednesday night that, even by his incredible standards, is absolutely insane:
Whenever I see Joe Biden and congressional Democrats blowing it, I worry that they’re making a second Trump term easier and more plausible. But then I see these completely unhinged ravings of a lunatic and think — surely America wouldn’t elect that guy president, right? Right guys? Guys?
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Wednesday’s answer:
Category: First Ladies
Clue: In 1890, at age 5, she met her future husband in an Independence Missouri Sunday school class.
Bess Truman
Today’s clue:
Category: American Cities
Clue: Peyton Manning repeatedly gave mid-game shout-outs to this city near the confluence of the Missouri and the Platte Rivers.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughter seems to be doing pretty well at grasping the concept that she has a little sister in my wife’s “belly.” Sometimes it’s really cute and sweet, like when she hugs and kisses my wife’s stomach. But sometimes it’s just funny (and less anatomically accurate) such as when she tries to push food and pacifiers through my wife’s belly button.