Just for purposes of argument, let’s stipulate that President Trump is a bully, a liar, a racist, a sociopath, and a useful idiot for Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
That still doesn’t absolve the media of its obligation to examine the equally powerful evidence that Joe Biden is a liar, a serial plagiarist, a foreign-policy numbskull, a political coward, and a useful idiot for the radical Left.
As for cowardice, it is beyond all reason that Biden doesn’t face repeated questions and harsh criticisms from every media outlet about his refusal to say whether he would sign a bill to pack the Supreme Court. It is one of the election’s most important issues, with momentous ramifications for the court’s independence and the nation’s future.
It is mind-boggling to see Biden change his position four different times on whether he, as president, can “implement nationwide mask mandates,” and maddening to see him skate on why he opposed Trump’s virus-restricting partial-ban on travel from China.
It defies all journalistic standards for editorial boards to not demand answers about why Biden ferried his troubled son Hunter on Air Force Two to China when Hunter was seeking lucrative business deals from entities controlled by the Communist Chinese government. More broadly, why isn’t Biden forced to answer for the entire family profiteering ring that even the decidedly non-conservative Politico dubbed “Biden, Inc.?” And if money isn’t to blame, why isn’t Biden asked why he has been so soft on China for so long?
Why isn’t it demanded that Biden renounce the Communist-terrorist-inspired Black Lives Matter organization (not the slogan) the way Trump is expected to denounce white supremacists — especially when his party’s whole convention passed without a concerted effort to distance itself from anarchic street violence?
The media hasn’t pressed Biden on his call to eliminate the individual “right to work” enjoyed by 166 million people. It hasn’t asked him to explain exactly how his campaign can say the prohibitively expensive "Green New Deal" is a “crucial framework” for policy while he says he himself isn’t for the Green New Deal. (That seems like an unsquareable circle.)
Biden certainly has skated on his role, second only to the late Ted Kennedy, in poisoning the judicial confirmation process. Was it right for him to help lead Democrats in filibustering Miguel Estrada? Why, other than blind ambition for the presidential nomination in 1988, did he completely reverse his earlier, specific statement that Robert Bork would be a perfectly acceptable Supreme Court pick? Does he countenance his Democratic colleagues’ repeated attacks on the faith of judicial nominees such as Bill Pryor and Amy Coney Barrett?
On foreign policy, it is now evident that Biden was wrong to oppose Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, wrong to oppose almost every aspect of Reagan’s policy of rolling back Communism, wrong to oppose the 1991 Gulf War, wrong to advise against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, wrong to lie about whether the American embassy in Benghazi had requested more security that was never provided, wrong to support President Barack Obama’s precipitous troop drawdown in Iraq and, in the words of former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
For his 36 years in the U.S. Senate, most of the media knew Biden as a blowhard and a bungler. Yet they won’t hold him to account. Maybe Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate moderator, Susan Page, will at least ask vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris to defend her running mate’s sorry record. If so, it will be the very first time.