Liberal: Quietly Seeking Biden Backups
“Relatively few people outside the White House totally buy” President Biden’s talk of a second term, observes Gabriel Debenedetti at New York magazine. “Ambivalence about Biden’s age and political standing is fueling skepticism just as the image of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris, dips even further than his” — and there’s “no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden’s future.” So Bernie Sanders and other top 2020 Dems are keeping their powder dry for 2024, as are several governors such Jared Polis (Colo.) and Jersey’s Phil Murphy (“whose national ambitions are among Washington’s worst-kept secrets”). Yet the prez worries about another Donald Trump run, with the query Biden posed before jumping into the 2020 race — “If I don’t run, who’s going to beat him?” — remaining “an open question half a decade later.”
Libertarian: Depp-Heard & Campus Sex Courts
The “messy and salacious” conflict exposed in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial brings “to mind the sort of student hookup disputes that frequently occur on college campuses and were previously adjudicated in accordance with ill-conceived federal Title IX guidelines, where obvious instances of unwise behavior on both sides were frequently ignored in favor of simplistic victim-perpetrator narratives,” Robby Soave notes at Reason. This boiled down to believing all women and nothing about “basic fairness.” Thanks to the Biden administration, “such campus adjudication is expected to make a comeback” with “new guidance any week now.” Trouble is, as trial shows, “trying to account for all the ways in which one embittered partner has harmed another in an attempt to assign abuser and abused status is a highly fraught exercise.”
Border beat: Joe Owes Judge Who Saved Title 42
With “support for President Biden’s handling of [immigration] at just 37%” in an ABCNews poll, and “worry . . . rising fastest among Democrats,” The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley says Biden should send “a bouquet” to the judge who saved the Title 42 rule that allows many illegal migrants seeking asylum to be sent back. Immigration “may not be the primary source of” Biden’s sinking ratings, “but it isn’t far down the list.” And “reversing Title 42” will “appease progressives,” not average voters, who “have long been somewhere in the middle [on immigration].” And while “there remains strong support in both parties for better border security and for leniency toward people who are here illegally, “there’s no guarantee . . . that this bipartisanship will survive the current administration.”
Conservative: Media’s Clinton Coverups
The day after Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook “implicated her at the top of a conspiracy to link former President Donald Trump with a Russian bank in 2016,” there was “no mention of it” in most mainstream media, grumbles R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. at The Washington Times. “This is the way the Clinton news has been reported for years. One or two newspapers report” Clinton scandals; the rest are “mum for, say, days or weeks or months or years.” Tyrrell’s American Spectator “published the first Troopergate story about Arkansas state troopers pimping for” Bill Clinton, “and the media said nothing until the Los Angeles Times was coerced by me to publish.” It’s still the same now that Hillary again “has been caught in a lie, perhaps the most shocking lie of her career.”
From the right: Democrats’ Baseless Lies
“Two apparently unconnected pieces of recent news are elements of a single phenomenon — the Democrats’ vicious strategy for winning and holding power,” asserts the Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon. One is the Clinton-created Russian-collusion hoax; the other, record early voting in Georgia — despite Dems’ “Jim Crow” claims on the state’s voting laws. The “connective tissue”: “Democrats are willing to hurl the most vicious and baseless calumnies at Republicans in their ruthless pursuit of power.” The Left “never apologizes” for calling the right “racists and anti-democratic schemers,” just moves on to “deploying whatever dishonest contingency comes to hand.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board