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This column, by Alexander Burns, the head of news at Politico, is a rich example of the DC logic that only Democrats have agency and it’s only to Democrats that standards, norms, rules or whatever else apply. “Joe Biden’s Parting Insult: The president delivered a vote of no confidence in a justice system preparing for siege.”
It is a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim the government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites. It is a promise-breaking act that subjects Biden’s allies to yet another humiliation in a year packed with Biden-inflicted injuries.
Republicans are like the weather. Destructive and unpredictable, perhaps capricious and sometimes dangerous. But who shouts at the rain? Those are the deeply carved grooves into which our elite media narratives all turn. How else do you explain the vastly bigger press uproar over Biden’s pardon than a notorious charlatan who’s promised to abuse his power at every opportunity being on a fast track to take over federal law enforcement?
Before getting to my main point, let me address a subsidiary one. I get people who don’t think Biden should have done this. I disagree. But that’s a respectable opinion. In the abstract, at least, it’s not best practices … until you look at the details. What I don’t get, what I think is as close as you get to being objectively wrong, is a different but seemingly common criticism. It’s the people who say that it’s one thing that Biden pardoned his son for his two ongoing criminal cases, but that it was a step too far to issue a blanket pardon going back a decade covering more or less anything that happened during that period.
As I said, if you don’t think Biden should have issued this pardon, fine. But if he did, he certainly had to and was unquestionably right to issue it as a blanket pardon. The Trump administration absolutely would have found something else to charge Hunter Biden with as payback for the pardon. They may have done so without Biden issuing the pardon at all. Trump and his top lieutenants, including his FBI director nominee, have all said they come into office wanting payback. It would be insane to issue a limited, specific pardon and then leave his son at the mercy of the Trump DOJ. This logic is so obvious it all but amounts to a mathematical proof.
Kash Patel himself repeatedly promised to launch new investigations and bring additional charges against Hunter Biden if Trump won the election. The two stories connect. They’re one story.
This brings me back to a more general point. Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structural hostile to the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean every journalist individually, of course. But the establishment media generally — the Times, the Post, the Journal, CNN and the business news channels, all of them, and for the reasons we’ve discussed countless times. Democrats should do this not simply because it’s true but because it relieves them of the embarrassment of imagining otherwise, of speaking up for or passively allowing themselves to be identified with institutions in an age of distrust and anti-institutionalism. The status quo, the paradoxical identification, puts Democrats in the position of a jilted spouse, perpetually discomfited, let down. It’s not only damaging directly. It signals an enervating weakness. It’s time to move on. Have some some self-respect. And act accordingly.