Posted on 01/14/2023 7:36:38 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
In 2020, America elected Joe Biden to be not-Trump—a role for which he seemed well-suited. In 2016, the country voted for burn-it-all-down upheaval. Trump was the tribune of those who felt betrayed and misled and mistreated. Four chaotic years later, alarmed voters fled into the arms of an aging former vice-president and senator—a man they had twice rejected as a presidential contender—who seemed the personification of the steady hand.
No one expected Biden to be transformational or extraordinary, but we did need him to be the anti-Trump in the most important ways. We needed him to be sober and responsible, to play by the rules, and to uphold the primacy of law and procedure. And he delivered.
But the revelation that, like Trump, Biden mishandled classified documents, including storing them in his garage next to his Corvette, drags us back to precisely the world in which Trump is most comfortable. Like all reprobates, Trump’s default justification when caught out is “everybody does it.”
The great loss here is not that this makes it more challenging to bring criminal charges against Trump for his contempt of the law regarding classified materials, the tragedy is that this is a victory for the kind of cynicism that Trump has popularized.
The man who was dismayed by the spectacle of classified documents splayed out on the floor of Mar-a-Lago has been transformed into the tetchy pol explaining that documents locked next to a Corvette were hardly “sitting out on the street.” That is demoralizing for those who believe that Biden’s chief accomplishment–and purpose–as president has been to restore a modicum of trust to a nation that has been sunk in suspicion and bitterness for too long. Being not-Trump demands better.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
The “we” you’re referring to does NOT include the tens of millions of voters (including myself) who consider Biden to have been “declared” the winner of what was a fraudulent and therefore a stolen election.
I feel bad for her eyeliner.
I never once heard Trump say “everybody does it”. And Mona Charen, who I haven’t seen or heard in years, has turned into another angry old harpy.
It was policy too.
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