Wanna know how crazy things are? Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the voice of sanity when it comes to the Israel-Hamas War.
Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean.
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Joe Biden recently told a group of children that he has “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.”
Sounds sweet.
It’s not.
People who read and watch Republican-leaning news outlets have long known that the president has a seventh grandchild, the product of Hunter Biden and his former girlfriend, Lunden Roberts. Hunter, who lives at the White House with his dad, has abandoned his four-year-old daughter Navy Roberts. He has refused to have anything to do with her. Joe, her grandfather, also pretends his granddaughter doesn’t exist, as though he were Grover Cleveland in the 19th century. (Even old Grover didn’t get away with unpersoning his illegitimate baby.)
Last week, the New York Times broke the liberal media’s silence on the story, shocking Democrats. Among the yucky details: Hunter went to court to block the little girl from using her father’s surname, Biden. This is serious stuff: parental abandonment increases the odds that Navy will suffer from health problems, addiction and suicidal ideation as an adult.
Democratic operatives quickly went into damage-control mode, dissembling and making excuses for a politician who has branded himself as our national grandpa—kind, decent, inclusive and loyal to his family to a fault.
It’s a “private family matter,” Democrats say. But there’s nothing private about any First Family—especially not this one. A White House that releases photos of the six grandkids’ Christmas stockings hanging from the fireplace can’t demand privacy when people ask WTF.
What about Donald Trump? He’s no paragon of virtue, liberals deflect. But Trump’s flaws don’t include hypocrisy; he never claimed to be a big family man. Biden does.
Another Democratic talking point: Lunden is a Trumpie. She hobnobs with right-wingers! How can Joe associate with Navy? There’s an easy retort to that one: Hunter ghosted her. You can’t be picky when you’re low on friends.
Because it undermines the president’s political brand, the Navy Biden Roberts issue won’t go away. Voters are finally beginning to ask whether Biden’s carefully crafted Irish-American just-a-boy-from-Scranton charm was malarkey all along.
Of course it was.
Behind Biden’s carefully-cultivated nice-old-man persona is a vicious SOB who screams and curses at his aides. He’s a sadist who enjoys humiliating people in front of their colleagues. He’s a colossally abusive boss; the difference between him and Amy Klobuchar is that the press covers up for him. “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” Biden screams at White House staffers. “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” are other standard Bidenisms.
The fact that Joe is a mean old man shouldn’t come as this much of a shock. After all, this is a man who fist-bumped Mohammed bin Salman shortly after the Saudi dictator lured a Washington Post columnist to his consulate so he could torture him to death, chop his body into pieces, dissolve the chunks and dump the acidic gristle into the Istanbul sewer system. That gesture required a barrel of cynicism and one hell of a cast-iron stomach, not to mention a total lack of ethics. Biden chuckled when a reporter asked him whether MBS might commit another murder like the one of Jamal Khashoggi. “God love you,” Biden laughed. “What a silly question. How can I possibly be sure of any of that?”
Ha ha.
“The president’s cold shoulder—and heart—is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,” Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote. And she doesn’t shock easily.
The truth is, Biden has always been a cruel person. Democrats don’t want to see it and, if they do, they won’t admit it, so they’re no different or better than the Republicans who stand behind Trump no matter what. Team Politics demands that fans of a party pay fealty in the coin of denial, policies and principles be damned.
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee presiding over Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court, Biden repeatedly failed to protect his witness Anita Hill, who credibly accused Thomas of sexual harassment, from his Republican colleagues’ smear campaign. As if throwing Hill—an intensely private, shy person terrified of becoming the center of a political firestorm—under the bus wasn’t bad enough, he brought key corroborating witness Angela Wright to Washington yet never called her, leaving her to watch the hearings at her lawyer’s office. Hill was scarred, Thomas corrupted the court, and Biden moved on.
As chairman, Biden’s duty was to his witnesses, whom he abandoned. As a Democrat, his duty was to try to prevent Thomas from joining the court. Instead Biden sided with Thomas and his fellow senators.
Biden stands accused of staggeringly scurrilous misdeeds, including accepting millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for changing U.S. policy. But no single event showcases his willingness to screw over an innocent person to gain political advantage like his slanderous account of the circumstances of the deaths of his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972.
“A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,” Biden told an audience in 2007.
In 2001 he falsely blamed an “errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive” and “hit my children and my wife and killed them.”
He told this phony story over and over.
Curtis Dunn, who was driving the truck that struck Neilia Biden’s stationwagon, died in 1999. He had not been drinking. The accident was her fault; she blew through a stop sign; Dunn’s truck had none. Dunn stopped immediately and raced to help Biden and her children.
What kind of man would make up a story like that? Who would smear an innocent man just for fun? The same kind of man who would unperson his own granddaughter.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Next Time Write a Letter to the Editor
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Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered, chopped up and dissolved in acid, is scheduled to meet with President Joe Biden. Biden is visiting the Middle East in order to ask Saudi Arabia to ramp up oil production to make up for the shortage of Russian oil created by his sanctions. If I were the president, I would be nervous—especially since he just published an op-ed justifying the trip in the Washington Post.
If Anyone Else Had Done This, Bombs Would Be Raining down
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A long awaited report about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was butchered in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, places the blame for the murder squarely on the ruling crown prince. If it were any other country, this would be an act of war.
The Articles of Impeachment Should Have Been These Instead
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Donald Trump deserved to be impeached. He deserves to be convicted in the Senate.
Every president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors that could justify impeachment.
But not on these charges. Not for threatening to withhold $400 million in aid that we shouldn’t have been sending to Ukraine in the first place, not as long as 38 million Americans are poor. Not for trying to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden; American voters have the right to know that the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and his son are on the take.
Certainly not on the nonsensical count of contempt of Congress, which punished the president for the crime of using the legal system to defend himself.
Impeachment is a political process that only has legitimacy when it’s bipartisan. In 1974 Democrats drafted wide-ranging articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. They appealed to constituencies across a wide spectrum of interests: corruption, financial fraud, bribing witnesses not to testify, privacy violations, opposition to the Vietnam War.
The Nixon articles were crafted in order to attract support from Republicans. The media claims that the GOP has never been in thrall to a president as slavishly as it is to Trump but people who remember Nixon know better. Still, Nixon’s hold on Capitol Hill Republicans eroded as the latter realized they could no longer defend conduct like his wiretapping of and siccing the IRS on political opponents.
Nancy Pelosi’s microaggression-based articles of impeachment against Trump couldn’t peel away a single House Republican.
Here are the articles of impeachment I would have drafted instead.
- Racist foreign policy. President Donald J. Trump’s comportment as head of state and top official in charge of foreign policy has brought shame, contempt and opprobrium upon the United States of America. He has used his Twitter feed and spoken comments in order to insult foreign heads of state and call them names. A brazen racist, he has referred to sovereign nations in Africa, and Haiti, as “shithole countries.” If the U.S. should set the highest standard of conduct, Trump’s sets the lowest, recklessly destroying our relationship with the world. Threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea, a nuclear power, is the kind of behavior that sparks conflicts. Few Republicans want another pointless war.
- The President may be psychotic. The president’s temperament and demeanor not only fail to rise to the bar expected of the office of President but bring disrepute upon the citizens of the United States he is tasked with representing. Anticipating the possibility that we might someday face a situation similar to that in England under King George III, the Founding Fathers conceived impeachment in large part as a way to remove a head of state who might be mentally ill, addicted to alcohol or other drugs or, in the flowery language of the time, indulge in “frequent and notorious excesses and debaucheries, and…profane and atheistical discourses.” A president not in full command of his mental faculties is an albatross; his tenure represents a threat to national security. Under the War Powers Act, the president has the right to deploy troops. He may decide whether a condemned prisoner is pardoned or executed. He can unilaterally order a nuclear attack without provocation. Although it is impossible to determine whether President Trump is mentally ill or under the influence of narcotics, his behavior is so unsteady that it is only prudent to plan for the worst and remove him before he causes a catastrophe. Republicans know he is dangerous.
- He endorses murder. After the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul, President Trump repeatedly sided with the murderers. “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. The president’s statements makes it impossible for other countries to take us seriously when we pontificate about human rights. Republicans cannot and do not find what happened to Khashoggi acceptable.
- He endorses fascism. After white nationalists and other bigots gathered at a violent right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulting in the murder of a peaceful progressive activist, President Trump pretended there was equivalence between neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protesters. There “were very fine people, on both sides,” he said. No there weren’t. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died fighting fascism during World War II. President Trump dishonors them and increases the chances that fascism will rise again. Republicans do not agree with neo-Nazis.
- He is lining his own pockets at the public trough. Call it “emoluments” if you want to make voters’ eyes glaze over, call it what it is if you want to speak plainly: bribery. Trump has visited his own properties 400 times, filling rooms at full price with his retinue at taxpayer expense. Saudi Arabia has bailed out his failing hotels. He even suggested his own resort as the site of a G-8 summit. When foreign officials pay our president, they are buying influence. Republicans wouldn’t tolerate this behavior from their employees. The president is our employee.
- He kidnaps children—and loses them. The Trump Administration forcibly separated 5,400 kids from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Many were locked in cages. After federal courts ordered them returned to their parents, the White House admitted that they couldn’t locate them. They were lost. Thousands may be never be reunited with their families due to neglect and bureaucratic incompetence. Trump has asked for two years to find them. Even anti-immigration Republicans do not agree with stealing people’s kids.
I can think of other impeachable offenses—continuing and expanding Obama’s drone assassination program, backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal proxy war in neighboring Yemen, airstrikes against Syria. But this column isn’t about what I care about. It’s a list of articles of impeachment that might have had a chance of attracting bipartisan support and thus resulting in Trump’s conviction in the Senate.
Instead, Democrats have indulged in a pro forma charade that will set an awful precedent, tempting the House of Representatives to impeach every president of the opposite party over every little thing. They’ve trivialized an only-in-case-of-emergency process into a rushed lark, ignored what really matters and squandered the opportunity to hold the president to account for his many crimes and sins.
Enjoy your “win,” liberals. Like your decision to abolish the judicial filibuster for nominations to the bench—in 2013 some Democrats actually thought there would never be another Republican president—you will soon rue it.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
