When Barack Obama insisted that, if you like your doctor then you can keep your doctor, it was not just Democrats in the press insisting it was so. Fact checkers, analysts, editorials, news anchors, and reporters sprung into action to insist it was so.
When Joe Biden insisted he would not pardon Hunter Biden, the same thing happened.
The American press corps rushes Daniel Dale and every imaginable resource to fact check a Donald Trump joke and gets the vapors when he uses the phrase “bloodbath” to describe the economy should he lose the election. But when any Democrat makes any utterance, it is always presumed to be true until proven otherwise and always then understandable.
When Ted Cruz took his family to Mexico as the power went out in Texas, he was denounced for not staying in Texas to engage in performative theater to show he cared. But when Gavin Newsome shut down California restaurants and still hung out at the French Laundry, a famous restaurant, he got a pass.
Republicans must always virtue signal to perform for the press and the Democrats are always assumed virtuous.
If a Republican city councilman in BFE, Alaska says something racist, every reporter in Washington shoves microphones in the faces of Republicans expecting them to denounce it. When the Democrat city councilmen in Chicago stand with Hamas, Democrats in Washington can breathe easy knowing Manu Raju will be stalking Susan Collins instead.
Thus it was and ever will be.
For years, the New York Times, CNBC, and CNN paid John Harwood to be an objective analyst. No matter that all of us on the right knew he was deeply biased against us and processed every story charitably towards the Democrats — he was objective dammit! or so the news networks would insist.
Harwood was not alone among the “objective” press. They all believed this or, at least, said it.
Now, it is totally understandable that a father would pardon his son if he had the power. It is totally and sympathetically understandable for Joe Biden to do this.
But when those of us on the right insisted as much, we were lectured that Biden had principles we did not understand.
No, just like with his health and cognitive decline, those of us on the right knew, and we were instead lectured that Trump was some unique shatterer of norms and we were too biased to understand what we were getting.
Joe Biden is pardoning Hunter Biden. We all knew he would. But some dogmatically insisted it would not be so. Now they will excuse it as understandable, which gets me to Kash Patel
Christopher Wray is going to be fired. The Democrats can scream all they want about Donald Trump shattering norms, but Joe Biden just used the presidential pardon power to benefit his son.
Among his son’s crimes was buying a gun while a regular user of illegal narcotics, which is a crime, and ditching the gun into a dumpster inside a gun free zone. Then there are the tax issues and prostitute issues. We all get lectured on gun control by the press and Democrats, but few of them cared about Hunter Biden’s gun crimes.
The press, not the Democrats, assured us the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian hoax. They also insisted the Steele Dossier, which was a Russian hoax, was real. Many of those people had ties to the FBI and various news outlets. One prominent peddler of the Hunter Biden laptop now has a nice job as a reporter at CNN.
What too many of us on the right see as biases that benefit the left, the left and media both see as norms. But they are not norms. They are systems and constructs put in place by the left to benefit the left and then labeled “norms” by the media. These norms benefit the technocrats and elite and no one else.
Donald Trump is not a shatterer of norms. He is the shatterer of systems and constructs put in place by the left/media to benefit their own kind.
He will appoint Kash Patel to the FBI to clean that house and root out those who carried water for Democrats, going so far as investigating parents of school kids who had the audacity to complain to local school boards about what their kids were being taught. And when Democrats scream that this shatters norms and precedents, we can all point to Hunter Biden’s pardon.
You cannot have “norms” and only bind Republicans to them. A press that covered for Biden for four years of mental decline cannot now express outrage and have everyone else forget the last four years or even the last sixteen.
You may like your norms, but you cannot keep them because of Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.