Joe biden

Hunter Biden’s defense about his incriminating laptop sounds like an old joke about a trial lawyer who was accused of letting his dog bite a stranger. The lawyer’s first line of defense was that “it couldn’t happen because my dog was tied up that night.” When told there were witnesses who had seen him walking the dog, he said, “Okay, we were out walking but my dog doesn't bite.” If that fails, then, “Well, yes, my dog did give you a little nip, but it wasn't a bad one.” Then, “Granted, you had to go to the hospital for surgery, but you provoked my sweet pup.” If all else fails, “What do you mean I own a dog?

Search’s up at the Biden beach house. President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer explains, “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware.” A bevy of black SUVs and sedans swarmed around the Biden property, once the site of happy days where the Biden clan congregated, now the target of the FBI. My heart goes out not to Biden, who was obviously lax in his handling of classified documents, but to the poor slobs in the FBI who have to tromp through his various homes in search of papers that he was supposed to have handed over to the National Archives in January 2017. It’s difficult to think of a more tedious task.

It should be obvious by now that too many classified documents are floating around Florida, Delaware, and Indiana. They were removed without authorization and stored improperly under Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence respectively. Most of them, it seems, were hurriedly packed by government aides during an administration’s final days, even as the president and vice president were busy handling their official responsibilities. National security law doesn’t distinguish between the accidental and deliberate mishandling of classified documents, but the public does. They know the president and vice president bear heavy, official burdens until the moment they are replaced.

John Nance Garner, a Texan who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years, famously quipped that the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Garner wasn’t necessarily wrong. But the groundbreaking election of Kamala Harris was supposed to transform the office. After all, she was the first woman, the first black person, and the first South Asian VP. Little else mattered. She was a badass, and if you didn’t acknowledge her intersectional excellence, you were a sexist, racist goon. Even many on the right thought Harris might play an outsized role as VP, given President Biden’s cognitive frailty. As we’re now halfway through Harris’s first term in office, it’s a good time to take stock of all that's gone wrong.

Shortly after reports surfaced that President Joe Biden's team had found classified documents at his office at the Penn Biden Center this past November, the mainstream media rushed to "contextualize" the story. "Contextualize," in this case, means they justified Biden's mishandling of classified materials and drilled into readers that he was much more responsible in regard to the matter than former president Donald Trump. Biden, they said, had possession of far fewer documents overall and was much more cooperative with the Department of Justice in turning them over to the proper authorities once his team found them. Needless to say, these media attempts to downplay Biden's mishandling of classified materials relative to Trump's have not aged well.

I have a question for New Zealand’s outgoing prime minister Jacinda Ardern: can you take President Biden with you? Ardern announced this week that she would be resigning from her post, ten months before her term ends in October. She acknowledged in her resignation address that her five and a half years have been filled with difficult challenges. Since Ardern’s election in 2017, New Zealand has dealt with terrorist attacks, natural disasters and of course the Covid-19 pandemic. But Ardern stressed the fact that she is not leaving because of the difficulties of the job. Rather, she is departing because... well, to put it simply: she can’t cut it anymore.

As President Biden plans to launch his reelection campaign, he is whistling past a graveyard of recently discarded Democratic Party icons, who have either left the scene willingly or are being gracelessly kicked out. Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer. Pat Leahy. Jim Clyburn. Anthony Fauci. Dianne Feinstein. Their combined age is 500 — and until a few months ago, they were running the country. Now they’re shadows of their former selves, headed to the greener pastures of retirement, book deals or the backbenches of the House of Representatives. Over the past few months, the Democratic Party’s leadership has transitioned from the Silent Generation to a mixture of baby boomers and Gen Xers.

Cockburn came across this interesting little tidbit while he was stirring his first apéritif of the early afternoon: a Vox preview of Christopher Whipple’s forthcoming book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House, reports that President Biden is distrustful of his Secret Service team and believes the agency fabricated a story about Biden’s German Shepherd, Major, biting an agent. Major Biden and fellow White House German Shepherd, Champ, were removed to Delaware for a while following the alleged incident. Vox reports how in the book, “Whipple details how Biden was showing a friend around the White House and pointed to the spot where Major allegedly bit a member of Biden’s security team. ‘Look, the Secret Service are never up here.

President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn that in November his lawyers had found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. No doubt he was equally shocked when more classified docs turned up in his Delaware home. Yet the tone of the mainstream media seems to be that boys will be boys. Since Biden is being so cooperative with authorities after being caught red-handed, maybe this has nothing in common with Donald Trump's cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary's cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard? Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had hundreds so that's different.