Wall Street Journal editorial writer Barton Swaim contrasts the “fealty” of leading party members and media organs to President Trump, on the one hand, and President Biden, on the other. When it comes to Biden, Swaim observes:
The deficiencies of Mr. Trump are different from those of Mr. Biden, but the latter’s personal culpabilities and political liabilities are what any normal, uninvested person would call grave. Mr. Biden’s cringe-making decline is on display nearly every time he appears in public; examples are too many, and too painful, to describe. His diminished state might be funny in a novel or a movie, but in the real world it’s a continuing invitation to bad actors to engage in devilry and expect no consequence.
And yet with a tiny number of unremarkable exceptions, Democratic politicos say nothing.
The stupendously incompetent pullout from Afghanistan occurred early in Mr. Biden’s term, and the horrors it produced have destroyed any other presidency—a bomb killing 13 Marines; a retaliatory drone strike killing zero terrorists and 10 civilians, including seven children; a White House affecting unconcern for hundreds of Americans trapped inside the country; Afghan citizens pitifully clinging to a departing U.S. military plane, some of them falling to their deaths; former Afghan allies left at the mercies of the Taliban; billions of dollars worth of military equipment abandoned in the field; women and girls forced to drop out of school. Forgive the indecorousness, but it is undeniable that this calamity was a consequence of some combination of senility and incompetence. Yet the number of high-level Democrats who expressed more than vague “worry” and “concern” is somewhere between small and nonexistent.
You might have expected a credible Democrat, maybe a retired military officer, to challenge Mr. Biden in a primary. But no; the party rearranged its traditional primary schedule to begin with South Carolina and so make any primary challenge nearly impossible. I await the stream of articles in the New York Times and Washington Post about Mr. Biden’s “iron grip” on his party.
The Hunter Biden revelations would have generated calls for resignation in a time of more sanity and less rancor. Text messages indicating the young Mr. Biden was selling access to his father, a maze of shell companies seemingly meant to hide transactions, strong evidence that the Justice Department monkey-wrenched an investigation into that activity—none of it provokes curiosity on the left. That one of the associates Hunter badgered for payment works for a company with ties to the Chinese government is also, for Democrats and the left’s pundit class, a matter of no interest.
This newspaper’s editorial page managed to provoke Mr. Trump into many all-caps condemnations. Has any center-left outlet provoked Mr. Biden into one of those fits of rage for which he is famous?
The leftist journalist Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” to be published Tuesday, relates some episodes that reflect poorly on President Biden. The passages I’ve been able to glean, however, look mild—mainly a lot of unflattering things said about Mr. Biden, anonymously, by allies and aides. That these rather gentle slights have attracted so much attention isn’t a measure of their severity. They remind us, rather, that for 2½ years no one on Mr. Biden’s side has dared to say anything disparaging of him.
Now that’s what I call fealty.
Swaim’s column is “Joe Biden’s ‘iron grip’ on his party.”
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