AT LEAST WE KNOW THAT SOMEONE IN BIDEN'S CIRCLE LIVES IN THE SAME WORLD WE DO

Joe Biden often seems like Mister Magoo. As he obliviously makes his way through our political landscape, he believes he spots opportunities for warm cross-party relationships. The rest of us, who can actually see what's going on, know that what he's seeing isn't what he thinks he's seeing. We know that every Republican we see hates us, hates Biden, hates all his fellow Democrats, and wants "the Democrat Party" to be stripped of political power nationwide. We also know that one reason this situation persists is that the mainstream media routinely blames America's political dysfunction on Democrats, largely because the GOP has persuaded mainstream journalists that Democrats and liberals are weird, extreme, fatally flawed, and not really American.

Biden has always talked as if he doesn't understand any of this. However, someone on his staff clearly does:

As President Trump has lobbed unsubstantiated and false claims of international corruption at former vice president Joe Biden and his son, he’s often turned to one source for ammunition: conservative author Peter Schweizer. So when the New York Times ran an op-ed on Wednesday written by Schweizer about Biden and his son Hunter, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign cried foul.

In a letter sent to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Biden’s campaign called Schweizer a “discredited right-wing polemicist” and suggested the op-ed was part of a larger pattern of “journalistic malpractice.”

“Are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, wrote in the Wednesday letter, which was posted by CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

What's great about the letter is that it not only defends Biden against Schweizer's partisan attack but ties the decision by the Times to publish the op-ed to the paper's awful coverage of Hillary Clinton during the last presidential campaign (of which Schweizer's work was an integral part):



Biden is not my candidate. I worry about his potential weaknesses as a nominee and a president. But he signed off on this letter. He let it go out this way, not watered down because hey, I have a lot of pals over at the Times and this isn't fair to them. He may not get it, but he seems capable of getting it. I don't want him to be the Democratic nominee, but if he is, this letter gives me some hope.