The Great Unmasking
By now, you've likely heard a lot about Glass House Joe Biden's 'oopsy' storing of classified documents in his Delaware home, and perhaps a bit about his "Corvette defense." The Left-o-sphere's first inclinations to claim "False Flag!" was quickly wiped away by tacit admissions of guilt by Biden and his team, and a Special Counsel was appointed to look into the matter (AG Merrick Garland, who would but for Mitch McConnell be a Supreme Court Justice, backed himself into a corner on this).
The legacy media immediately started its excuse making and equivocating, all of which is merely fancier iterations of Joy Behar's Kinsley Gaffe:
There are differences in what happened. Well, we all know that Trump is a liar and a thief. It’s not that big a jump to say he obstructed and he lied. We don’t think Biden is a liar and a thief, so we give him the benefit of the doubt.
Mighty white of her to speak on everyone's behalf, no? But, at least she’s consistent.
The investigation, just now starting, is going to be hampered by a stark revelation: that there are no visitors' logs for Biden's home.
The White House Counsel offered wholly-expected spin as a defense:
Like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal.
And a dollop of whataboutism.
But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended.
Here's the sleight-of-hand in that second statement: Trump, whom the dig is aimed at, did keep WH visitors' logs. His sin was not publishing them.
And, yes, it is a "sin." The reason why is also what makes Biden's "personal" defense so infuriating.
The President is a public servant. One with enormous power, and every President has freely assumed that job and all that it entails.
Including the temporary suspension of a "personal" (aka private) life. Not in the sense of cameras and microphones in the bedroom, but in the sense that a President is obligated to maintain transparency and accountability.
A President is alway on duty, even on vacation. Even if Biden asserts that he never uttered a work-related word at his home, something that'd not only be wholly unbelievable, but also a dereliction. Transparency and accountability would demand that records be kept of who he might have interacted with while on vacation.
That is, if we continue to embrace the idealized and increasingly fanciful premise that our politicians are our "servants."
A few years ago, I went to a small birthday party of a friend of a friend of a friend. Also in attendance were several people who worked at the UN. Low-mid level types though they were, they radiated (more like oozed from every pore) a sense of smug "we are the ones who matter, who run the world." This, with some exceptions, is the vibe I get from our leaders, in Washington and in many state capitals. The "of, by, and for the people" precept is something to be mouthed in public and scoffed at in private.
Across this and the previous decade, we've witnessed reveal after reveal that our public "servants" have doublethinked the word into its antonym.
In a serendipitous bit of irony, the first result I got when Googling "the servant becomes the master" was a book, "When the Servant Becomes the Master: A Comprehensive Addiction Guide." What greater metaphor for the near-total subsumption of our lives by the government that was created to preserve our liberties and keep government small and confined?
Those addicted to government have empowered those they've elected to be their masters rather than their servants. The masters have stopped pretending, and even their past efforts to keep this reality hidden from view are being abandoned.
Like leaves falling from a tree, the various veils and masks are falling away, showing us more and more of the authoritarian rot that lies beneath. Biden’s lack of visitors’ logs at his Delaware home is a bigger scandal than his mishandling of classified documents, and a tell-tale of his contempt for the nation.
Oh, did you think that this was going to be about COVID masks and mandates? Forgive my bait-and-switch, or the wee smirk that accompanied the title's appearance in my brain pan.
Continuing my recent trend of afterthoughts, ponder this nugget from triple-purple-hearter John Kerry, the (hat tip to James Taranto) ‘haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam,’ speaking to the gaggle of Best-and-Brightest at Davos. Where, I presume, there’s far less concern for the unwashed masses alive today than for their self-aggrandizing self congratulations.
We, a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives, are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. I mean it's so, almost extraterrestrial to think about saving the planet.
As his former boss noted, ‘they are the ones they’ve been waiting for.’
Barf.
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Peter.
A third of Biden's presidency has been spent at his private residences - 165 days. It's now plainly obvious he goes there not to escape the "pressures of the job" - but to avoid the scrutiny of who he's meeting with and what he's doing. As for the discovery of classified documents - from his time as vice president - it should not be a big deal, except Biden MADE it a big deal by ordering the raid on Mar a-Lago and then conflating Trump's documents with a criminal act. And of course, for what purpose was Biden, as a former vice president, holding those classified intelligence documents on Iran and, of all places, Ukraine? Especially those held at his namesake Penn-Biden center office, where unquestionably some kind of "business" purpose was performed. Those documents were there not as an administrative oversight, scooped up in a mad dash out the door - but for a specific purpose.
Peter, is “Barf” a verb or interjection?