Those of us who still have PTSD about 2016 – when James Comey cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal intent but gratuitously derided her as sloppy – got a tad triggered yesterday when a special counsel cleared Joe Biden of any criminal intent but gratuitously derided him as dotty.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the news. Federal sleuth Robert Hur concluded that the president is a law-abiding guy – he returned the classified documents that he’d retained from his days as veep, he “consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation” – but, nevertheless, Hur opted to trash him. Hur had zip to indict him on criminal grounds, so he opted to indict Biden as a person.
And whether it’s fair or not, Hur’s character-smearing conclusion – that Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory” – is raw meat ammo for the MAGA propagandists who want to con voters into believing that their stable genius still has all his marbles whereas Biden does not.
I know that sounds preposterous, the notion that the most successful domestic president in our lifetimes (his policy achievements are too long to list here) is somehow worse than a sociopathic aspiring fascist with 91 felony charges, civil court convictions for rape and financial fraud, and a brain so addled that he has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and has confused his second wife with E. Jean Carroll. I know it’s tempting to say, “Surely the electorate isn’t stupid enough to fall for the ‘Biden’s memory’ meme!”
But this is America. If you catch my drift.
We’re besieged by Russian-style practitioners of half-truths, quarter-truths, and lies with a grain of truth; the goal, as so memorably coined by Steve Bannon, is “to flood the zone with shit.” Any and all ammo will be mustered, in this infauxmational fog of war, to somehow blur the stark contrast between decent Joe Biden and evil Donald Trump.
The mainstream media, with its Pavolovian reflex for “balance,” will naturally play along. Memory Lapses is a headline on page one of today’s New York Times, for starters. And rest assured, the worst lines in Hur’s exoneration report (“Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations” and “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended…and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began”) will power the Biden-is-old mantra on millions of social media feeds that reach voters below the radar.
So it behooves all defenders of democracy to resist the inevitable crackpot campaign to turn “Biden’s memory” into this year’s “Hillary’s emails.”
It will not be sufficient to dismiss Hur as a partisan. The back story is more complicated than that. Yes, he’s a lifelong registered Republican and former Trump Justice Department official, but he was named special counsel by Merrick Garland, and he previously served as U.S. attorney for the state of Maryland, sponsored for that job by Maryland’s two Democratic senators.
Still, having come up with nothing to hurt Biden in the criminal realm, Hur kicked Biden’s perceived Achilles heel with extreme prejudice. The age thing has long been raging – a Democratic donor tells Politico, “If you turn on Fox News, they’re talking about a bumbling, fumbling Joe Biden. If you go on TikTok, Instagram, there are tons of videos…It’s just consistently out there” – and now it’ll kick into overdrive.
There’s no point in denying that Biden does indeed have lapses – at a recent Nevada fundraiser, he said he’s had foreign policy conversations with French President Francois Mitterand; he meant to say Emmanuel Macron; Mitterand has been dead for 28 years – but unless Biden unexpectedly opts to quit this campaign, all foes of fascism have only one option: To push back 24/7 against the noxious notion that his flaws are somehow on a par, or worse, than the criminal defendant’s.
Soda may not be the ideal beverage, but it’s better than sewage water.
Better to have a president who remembers that he’s loyal to the United States, not the Kremlin.