BIDEN'S DOCUMENT SCANDAL

 Just a week ago, Joe Biden seemed to riding pretty high.  Oh sure, the Republican party was retaking the House of Representatives, but it was doing so with far less members than they had hoped for, and the clown show of multiple votes that were held to appoint a Speaker of the House made the party look weak.  Also, inflation finally seems to be letting up, and Biden's approval ratings were starting to rise.

But last week a story broke about how classified documents were discovered in his old office from his days as vice president during the Obama administration.  A further search found more documents in his garage.  While the White House tried to shrug all this off by saying that the documents were "inadvertently misplaced", it was not a good look. In fact,  shortly thereafter Attorney General Merrick Garland was compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Not surprisingly, this was all catnip to the right wing media, who immediately called Biden a hypocrite for previously condemning Trump for his hoarding of classified documents.  Calls for his home to raided, like Trump's was, rang all over right wing media outlets.

Part of me wants to quickly point out that what Trump did was far worse; he took hundreds of classified documents to Mar-o-Lago, compared to the ten or so that Biden had.  Perhaps even worse, when Trump was told by the Justice Department that he needed to return the documents, he did not return all of them, eventually prompting the FBI raid on his home.  Unlike with Trump, there is no reason to believe that Biden intended to hold on to these documents, and he promptly returned them.  Also, in an interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, Trump asserted that the documents in his home were declassified, because the president has the power to declassify documents just by thinking about it.  Isn't it then reasonable to say that the documents found in Biden's possession were  declassified because then president Barack Obama thought about it?  That's only fair, right? 

But jokes aside, this is a serious matter: Biden clearly was sloppy in his handling of the documents, and while that doesn't brand him the criminal that I think it does with Trump, it looks bad.  Sadly, this could be the "Hillary's emails" scandal of the next election. Since most Americans don't follow politics that closely, many of them will just hear headlines about Biden and classified documents and assume he did the same thing as Trump.  Of course, we have no way of knowing how much this story will affect the American public's feelings about Biden, and it may turn out to be more like the "Obama's tan suit scandal" than Hillary's emails.  One thing though, the timing of this couldn't be any worse, because this could be the break Trump needs; now Merrick Garland is the tricky position of possibly prosecuting an ex president for the same crime that the current president will be widely perceived to also have done.  So, like so many other times in his life, Trump will probably walk away from doing something terrible unscathed and emboldened.  How such a horrible person can have so much luck throughout his life is the best argument against the existence of a god that I can think of.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRAZY 30%

 

As a progressive, I couldn't help laughing at now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pathetic four day bid for the speakership, in which he went down in flames 14 times before finally eking out a victory.  And to get that victory he had to make concessions to the far right Freedom Caucus, a group of house members on the extreme right.  So my amusement at McCarthy's string of losses is tempered by the fact that the house is now about to get down to business, and for many of those members that means attacking the Joe Biden regime with baseless investigations and holding up things like the debt ceiling vote, which could have catastrophic economic consequences.   While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, who condemned Donald Trump in congress after January 6th and then quickly flew out to Mar-o-Largo to kiss his ring, it will be hard to watch him trying to appease the extreme members of his party for the next two years.   

What the whole voting debacle shows is that there is a significant wing of the Republican party that see the role of government in America only as funding the military and protecting their guns.  Or, as former House Republican speaker John Boehner put in back in 2010 when he had to deal with the extreme Tea Party movement in the House, they only want “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

The sad fact of the matter is that about 30% of the American electorate are on the extreme right, and because they own one party and vote faithfully, they are able to have an influence far beyond their numbers.  Just look at how the supreme court recently overturned  abortion rights despite those rights being supported by around 60% of the American public, and you can see how a determined minority can slowly but surely drive the country in their direction.  And it's not just abortion rights, the 30% are the ones who think that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, reject coronavirus vaccines, believe in Qanon, think that the earth is only 20,000 years old and marinate themselves in right wing media exclusively.  Quite simply, they hold the rest of the country back, trying to return the country to a past where white straight Christian men ran everything.

Is there anything the 70% of sane people in this country can do about this?  Not much other than vote and wait; the Republican party currently has a serious problem with younger voters, who strongly disagree with them on nearly every major issue.  The party is literally dying out as their voters age.  (And the old notion that people get more conservative politically as they age has never been proven true).  Someday the Republican party will have to start tempering its beliefs or time will throw it in the dustbin.  Sadly, the 30% will go down fighting all the way.