Biden and news media — culpable incurious
Hugo Gurdon
Video Embed
When former President Donald Trump, at his town hall meeting, said Republicans should let the United States default on its debts if President Joe Biden won’t cut spending, CNN interlocutor Kaitlan Collins interjected: “You once said that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen.”
Trump (nonchalantly): “That’s when I was president.”
Collins: “So, why is it different now that you are out of office?”
Trump (smirking): “Because now I’m not president.”
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
He knows how to deliver a laugh line, and his audience duly laughed. Sickening though Trump’s cynicism is, it also has a sort of contemptuous honesty that makes some people believe he “tells it like it is” rather than the opposite, which is often the case. The combination makes comedian Dave Chappelle call Trump “an honest liar” who “tells the commoners, ‘We are doing everything [bad] you think we are doing.’”
Trump is manifestly unfit to be president, but you have to be obtuse not to see his appeal. His insouciant admission that there is one standard when you’re in power and another when you’re out — one rule for oneself and another rule for everyone else — casts a glaring light on the way Washington continues to work under Biden.
Two recent news cycles, the first about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the second about the Biden family’s financial dealings, reveal this with crystal clarity.
To undermine the Supreme Court now that they don’t control it, Democrats are smearing Thomas as corrupt with a series of flimsy revelations. One supposed scandal, breathlessly reported, is that Thomas’s rich friend Harlan Crow paid two years’ tuition at a private school for Thomas’s grandnephew. The Left pilloried Thomas because, having devoted a portion of his life and money to caring for a somewhat distant relative, he didn’t insist on bearing all the costs and let a wealthy friend contribute.
In Washington, no good turn by a political enemy is left unstoned. The Left wants Thomas impeached for years of active familial charity toward a benighted child. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Crow influenced Thomas’s work, but Democrats are fulminating nevertheless.
They aren’t fulminating and are deafeningly silent, however, as evidence piles up that Biden’s family, with his knowledge, collected millions of dollars during and after his vice presidency by peddling his name to nefarious foreigners. Biden’s son Hunter ran an obviously corrupt network for payments of at least $10 million from sources such as a front company for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The money was tagged for various Bidens, including Joe’s grandchildren.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Joe Biden claims not to have known anything or ever talked about these family business transactions, but this is implausible. No evidence has yet been produced of his receiving dirty money, but the best that can be said — and this is a stretch — is that he displayed culpable incuriosity about his son’s business dealings.
Don’t expect the president’s ideological friends in the news media to pay nearly as much attention to the Biden family wheeling and dealing as they do traducing those they regard as his enemies. Like him, they are culpably incurious. And like Trump at the town hall, it makes them smirk.