A Little Crack in the Media

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

 

By and large, the press is still insisting adamantly that the Republican House has absolutely “no evidence” of any wrongdoing by President Biden — or, in the case of terminally dishonest figures such as David Frum, pretending that the GOP wants to impeach Biden purely because his son is a drug addict. But, at the margins, I’m seeing a few signs that these positions will not hold for too long. In the Washington Post, David Ignatius argues that Joe Biden should not run again in 2024:

 

I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.

 

Why? Partly because he is old. And partly because:

 

Biden has never been good at saying no. He should have resisted the choice of Harris, who was a colleague of his beloved son Beau when they were both state attorneys general. He should have blocked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which has done considerable damage to the island’s security. He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.

 

Indeed.

 

Axios homes in on the same problem — albeit without using the word we usually use to describe people who say things that aren’t true:

 

Just before the 2020 election, Joe Biden and his campaign said his son Hunter hadn’t made money from China — and that Biden hadn’t met one of Hunter’s Ukrainian business associates while he was vice president, except for maybe a brief hello.

 

Which matters because:

 

Both of those claims were false, according to recent sworn testimony by Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer.

 

As Noah Rothman has observed, the Democratic Party has thus far contrived no better response to the evidence that the House has discovered than to insist over and over that “Joe Biden did nothing wrong” — an insistence whose adamance has remained constantly but whose exact meaning has been updated on-the-fly as the details have slowly emerged. As is their wont, many in the press — hello, Philip Bump!

— will echo this approach to the bitter end. But not all will, if just out of a desire for self-preservation or to protect the political interests of the Democratic Party. At last, perhaps, we are starting to see the emergence of that second group. Watch this space.