Pun Salad

The six most boring words in my kind of journalism are, “Imagine if this were a Republican.” 

Highlighting pro-Democratic media bias is Sisyphean work—and so I will here duly insert: Harrumph, harrumph, etc.—but there is more at work in the media’s predictably gentle approach to the shenanigans of the Biden clan, which are, do note, not limited to the antics of the president’s son, Hunter. It is not only Hunter who has shady dealings with far-flung oligarchs and princelings. And Biden’s misdeeds are right there in the open.

Consider the president’s effort to persuade our good friends in Saudi Arabia to delay planned production cuts that might contribute to even higher gasoline prices. The president did not ask the Saudis to reverse the policy, but rather to postpone its execution by one month—meaning after the midterm elections.

The shape of the thing is Trumpian: The president has tried to persuade a foreign government to provide him with political assistance to help him through a difficult election. But the style of the thing was not Trumpian, and you don’t hear any outcry about this scandal because almost nobody who matters thinks it is a scandal. I am 100 percent confident that some of you will respond that this is in some very important way entirely different from Donald Trump’s “perfect” telephone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he tried to bully the Ukrainian president into launching an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. I am not persuaded that this is the case. And Trump was impeached over that matter. Biden will be criticized, if at all, in only the most charitable of terms.