The new generation of Villagers take their seats at the table
Here’s how the super insider Punchbowl is reporting the news today:
Happy Monday morning. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’re only publishing the AM edition. We’ll be back to the regular schedule tomorrow.
President Joe Biden’s split screen on Sunday was stark.
Biden spoke at a memorial service for the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The high-profile speech came at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), the senior pastor there. On what would’ve been MLK’s 94th birthday, and from King’s own pulpit, Biden warned that the United States is at an “inflection point,” with the future of democracy in peril.
“We’re at what we would call an inflection point. One of those points in world history where what happens … in the next six or eight years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next 30 or 40 years. It happened after World War II. It’s happening again.”
More Biden:
“My message to this nation on this day is we go forward, we go together, when we choose democracy over autocracy, a beloved community over chaos, when we choose believers and the dreams, to be doers, to be unafraid, always keeping the faith.”
While Biden overuses the “inflection point” line, the issues of voting rights and ballot access remain big ones for Black voters, a critical group for the president if he runs again in 2024 — especially in Georgia.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Biden’s fellow Democrats were offering only tepid support for his handling of the classified-documents scandal. Some are even calling for the release of more information after White House lawyer Richard Sauber on Saturday disclosed the existence of additional classified materials at the president’s Delaware home.
“Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. Right?” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Stabenow, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, added that “this is the kind of thing that the Republicans love.”
That’s especially true right now. After a brutal public struggle last week for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans, GOP committee chairs can now focus on Biden and the probe being conducted by special counsel Robert Hur. It’s a major political gift for Republicans, who’ve wasted no time going all in.
On Sunday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) called for the release of the visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware home. And Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) have already sought any communications between the Justice Department and the White House over this issue. The White House said it received no heads-up on Hur’s appointment.
Here’s more from Comer:
“So the administration hasn’t been transparent about what’s going on with President Biden’s possession of classified documents. And we just want equal treatment here with respect to how both former President [Donald] Trump and current President Biden are being treated with the document issue.”
I will just interject here with this, which gives a teensey weensy bit more context to that bullshit from Comer:
Punchbowl could have included that but it just wouldn’t be cool and savvy enough. Anyway, back to the breathless coverage:
What’s more, few Democrats are publicly defending Biden’s handling of the matter.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the former Intelligence Committee chair, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he wants to know “whether there was any risk of exposure and what the harm would be [to national security] and whether any mitigation needs to be done” as a result of the materials being misplaced.
Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), the lead counsel for Democrats in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, praised Attorney General Merrick Garland’s actions in this case — but didn’t go much further than that.
“This administration is doing things by the book,” Goldman said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Goldman acknowledged that classified information shouldn’t have been at Biden’s home in the first place, but noted that the president isn’t accused of obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve the materials, unlike Trump.
“There is a divide and a separation between the Department of Justice and the White House that certainly did not exist in the last administration. And President Biden and his team have reached out to the [National] Archives, they’ve reached out to the Department of Justice, they have done everything they can to cooperate. And that’s in direct contrast to what former President Trump has done, where he has obstructed justice at every turn.”
Goldman also said we don’t yet know all the circumstances surrounding the document discovery.
Oh whatever. That doesn’t matter! Here’s what’s important:
We do know, however, that the timing of this controversy couldn’t be worse for Biden and Democrats in many ways. Besides allowing McCarthy to glide over the deep divides in his own conference — at least for the moment — Republicans have hit the Justice Department on how it handled the search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago versus the Biden probe.
Of course, the two situations aren’t comparable, but consistency isn’t something pols ever worry about anyway.
There you have the Church of the Savvy, as Jay Rosen puts it, in full effect.
I’ll give you Josh Marshall on that one: [Sub. only]
The headline of this Dan Balz column perhaps sums it up most nicely: Biden, Trump cases aren’t alike. The political system doesn’t care.
The deputy editor of the Post opinion section goes so far as to say that the Biden documents “should spell the end of any realistic prospect of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump” and lauds this as a wonderful thing since such charges would have been terrible for the country. Arrrghghghghg.
To state the obvious succinctly: we are the political system. We shouldn’t be afraid of stating clearly and loudly what happened here. Indeed, much of the press momentum behind this story is driven by Democratic sheepishness about it. Republican elected officials are going to town on it while Democrats try to avoid eye contact. That’s embarrassing. One instance here is at most administrative sloppiness; the other is willful theft of government documents, refusal to return them, claims to own U.S. government documents, ongoing obstruction of government attempts to retrieve the documents. Any of these Democratic elected officials should be spending whatever microphone time they have on this reiterating the gravity of Trump’s offenses.
Clearly, they think they are gaining some credibility or credit for evenhandedness but lying or actively misleading people — which is what they are doing — doesn’t make you credible. It certainly gains no credit in a capital still mostly wired for the GOP. We can’t dictate how the “political system” operates but we can choose what part we play in it.
I’m having a hard time even reading some of this swill or watching cable news right now. There is nothing new about this story being reported today, but they are still leading with it on the front pages and at the top of every hour for at least 20 minutes, regurgitating every story from the past week and throwing out breaking news chyrons as if it all just happened this morning.
I’ve seen this movie before. There’s a very special feel the news coverage gets when the Villagers see an opening to go after a Democrat. This is because they are hit constantly by the right for their “liberal bias” — because they are compelled by the facts to discuss Republican malfeasance, criminality and corruption all the time. When they can turn their focus a Democrat it gives them the opportunity to signal their partisan neutrality. And they always overcompensate.
Keep in mind, they just do this for each other. The right doesn’t care (although they are happy to use their coverage to make their own political points.) They’ll never stop screaming “fake news” whenever the media reports anything they don’t like. So this is really just a way for them to preen and pose for each other.