NOVEMBER 28, 2023

 

The email came in like so many others.

 WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?

For some reason, supporters of former President Donald Trump seem to think using nothing but capital letters in their notes and sprinkling exclamation points like crumbs on a coffee cake over their prose makes them more persuasive. (Pro tip: It doesn’t.)

This missive, like so many others, opened with a couple of what-abouts. The writer wanted to know why I didn’t attack President Joe Biden’s “senility” and the money Hunter Biden received from China.

Sigh.

There are several things mystifying about such notes.

Not the least of them is the detachment from reality they demonstrate.

While it’s clear that Joe Biden has seen a healthy number of spring times, there’s no sign that his mental acuity has been diminished. He is, for example, able to keep in mind who is running against him for the White House this election cycle, as opposed to a certain former president who seems to think his opponent is Barack Obama.

Of course, the best way to answer this question would be to require, under penalty of law, all presidential candidates to reveal their complete medical records.

Somehow, I suspect Joe Biden would be more willing to do that than Donald Trump would.

The Hunter Biden point is even more puzzling.

In part this is because I’ve written on multiple occasions that the business dealings of the president’s son should be investigated. That’s the way it should be for the business dealings of any member of a president’s family. We citizens have a right to know who has financial claims on or leverage over our commander-in-chief.

No president, for instance, should be entitled to keep his or her tax returns hidden from public scrutiny for a day, much less for the duration of an entire term in office. And should a member of the president’s family receive $2 billion from, say, Saudi Arabia, that transaction should be transparent as a freshly cleaned window.

As for Hunter Biden himself, he faces criminal charges, which I’ve written multiple times is appropriate. The facts revealed thus far indicate there’s a good chance he broke the law. We’ll know for sure after the trial is over because that’s what criminal trials are for. They determine guilt or innocence, with the burden of proof always on the state to demonstrate guilt conclusively.

But it’s at this point that the email—like so many others I’ve received—got interesting.

Or strange, depending upon one’s perspective.

The writer said there was no evidence Donald Trump ever did anything wrong. Only blind partisans would say otherwise.

Really?

The best test of nonpartisanship is asking if one would condone similar actions by members of the other political party.

So, what this writer—again, like so many other Trump supporters—is saying is that she thinks it would be just fine, should Joe Biden end up on the losing end of the balloting next year, if he were to order Vice President Kamala Harris to overturn the results all by herself.

Similarly, this writer believes it would be okay if Biden summoned a mob to Washington and then sent it off to disrupt the certification of election results. The writer also could live with a Biden-backing horde trashing the Capitol—leaving the taxpayers to cover the cleanup—and threatening to kill public officials who don’t bend to the president’s will.

Oh, and this writer and her squad will applaud should Biden call election officials in swing states and pressure them, weeks after the balloting, to manufacture just enough votes to put him over the top.

She and others also won’t say boo if Biden takes classified documents with him when he leaves the Oval Office, refuses to give them back, lies about having them and leaves them in places where any number of people could view them. She and her comrades will offer this silent approval even if Biden’s action puts the lives of people serving this country in danger.

Because that would be nonpartisan.

For the record, if Joe Biden did any of those things, I’d be demanding his prosecution, too.

While I tend to think both political parties provide refuge to far too many scoundrels and miscreants, I am partisan in one way.

I don’t believe anyone—including presidents and former presidents—should be above the law.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.

The City-County Observer posted this article without opinion. bias or editing,