Observations On Some of the Day’s Lesser Stories

There has been a spate of bomb threats against Jewish institutions lately, some of them coordinated. Naturally, the Democrats are peddling the claim that the perpetrators are Trump supporters. I don’t believe the authorities have yet gotten to the bottom of the coordinated ones, but the first person to be arrested for a series of anti-Semitic bomb threats is a left-wing African-American journalist apparently motivated by spite against a former girlfriend.

For the eight years of the Obama administration, George W. Bush commendably kept quiet. Now that we have a Republican president, however, he can’t seem to shut up. He is finding new favor with the left, mostly because he can’t give an interview without being drawn into explicit or implicit criticism of President Trump. This is my advice to you, W: You had it right the first time. You think you owed Barack Obama your silence? If you don’t have anything positive to say, you owe it to Donald Trump, too. You let the press destroy you without ever fighting back. Now that we have a fighter in the White House, get off the bad guys’ team.

I don’t ever watch television news, but I would have assumed it is as biased against our president as the print and internet media. Confirmation comes from Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella at Newsbusters.

In the first 30 days (January 20 to February 18), our analysts determined that the President and his team were the subject of 16 hours of coverage on just the Big Three evening newscasts. This equates to more than half (54%) of all of the news coverage during this period.

While most new presidents enjoy a media honeymoon, the tone of Trump’s coverage was nearly as hostile (88% negative) as we found during last year’s presidential campaign (91% negative).

This chart shows the proportion of negative to positive stories on ABC, CBS and NBC:

It is remarkable that President Trump’s approval ratings are as high as they are, given the incessant campaign of vilification by the Democratic Party press.

Finally, I care little about Joe Biden and nothing at all about his son Hunter. However, Hunter has long been a public figure. He served in Bill Clinton’s Department of Commerce, was on Amtrak’s board of directors, and was a co-chairman of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee. He became the subject of controversy as a member of the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, the largest non-governmental gas producer in Ukraine, a post for which he had no apparent qualifications other than being the vice-president’s son.

So it is not unfair to note that Hunter Biden is embroiled in one of the year’s juiciest scandals. He dumped his wife for the widow of his older brother, Beau. His wife now says, in their divorce proceeding:

His spending rarely relates to legitimate family expenses, but focuses on his own travel (at times multiple hotel rooms on the same night), gifts for other women, alcohol, strip clubs, or other personal indulgences.
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Throughout the parties’ separation Mr. Biden has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations), while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

Joe Biden takes a benign view of his son’s wife-switch:

He told us in an exclusive statement, “We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.”

My only observation is that if Joe Biden had been a Republican vice president–Dick Cheney, say–this would be a scandal for the ages.