OPINION:
It is almost worthy of a dark Netflix series to watch how the sins of these people keep coming back and back and back to revisit them. Their sins are like hulking black vultures stooped on the branches of a dead tree outside the front of their bleak, haunted house.
All Democrats had to do was come up with a candidate who was, as former President Barack Obama once said of a certain fellow Democrat, “likable enough.”
The 2020 presidential election only needed to be a personality test. Find somebody new and shiny and likable enough, and Democrats would easily beat the Orange Monster in the White House today.
For all of the ridiculousness of Democrats these past three years, they have succeeded in keeping President Trump “unlikable enough” to a large enough swath of the electorate that the president struggles to keep his head above water in the polls.
This, despite turning in the hottest economy in history. This, despite tacking issues popular among regular voters of both parties yet that have been neglected by politicians in both parties for decades. (Illegal immigration, globalist trade allegiances and nefarious China are among those most important of those issues.) This, despite the fact that Mr. Trump is the most singularly nonpartisan president since at least Ronald Reagan.
The dirty secret is that while Democrats have done a fairly good job of demonizing Mr. Trump, that effort has come at a massive cost to them. They have spent over three years smearing the guy every single day with lies and crazy conspiracy theories that even they don’t actually believe.
If instead, they had decided to work with Mr. Trump — hardly a longtime Republican conservative doctrinaire — they could have frozen out congressional Republicans and hijacked his presidency entirely. In so doing, they could have handed their constituencies massive victories. But, alas, they could give a rat’s rear-end about actually keeping the promises they make to their voters.
And so who do they wind up with in their quest for a likable enough, shiny-new fresh face?
Pete Buttigieg? Kamala Harris? Stacey Abrams? Beto O’Rourke?
No, no, no and no.
Joe Biden! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The barnacled old senator who had been around so long that the last guy picked him because he was so old and wrinkled and white-haired. And that was 12 years ago!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
And then, in plot twists of plot twists, it turns out Mr. Biden stands credibly accused of sexual harassment and even assault during his half-century in Washington. All of which might have been placed into some kind of softening context — except we have recently endured the most disgusting drama in the history of Washington in which a nominee to the Supreme Court endured the most heinous and unsubstantiated accusations that nearly tanked his nomination and destroyed his family.
The singular lesson, Mr. Biden and all his supporters today told us back then, was that all women are to be believed, no matter what.
By those standards, the Tara Reade accusations against Mr. Biden are damning indeed. Add to it the endless film reel of Mr. Biden sniffing women’s hair, groping the shoulders of little girls and pulling alarmed women into his dirty lap in motorcycle diners.
Poetic justice, to say the least.
Now comes the biggest decision of Mr. Biden’s political career, we are told. He must pick a running mate. Desperate to find something new — anything new — to perk up his beleaguered, stale, geriatric campaign, Mr. Biden has announced he will pick a woman to be his vice president.
Who immediately surfaces to the top of the heap?
Someone young? A fresh face? Somebody with lots of fresh new ideas to balance out the old, dusty-haired Joe Biden?
No. Who else, but the Democrats’ answer to every problem? Hillary Clinton.
She, of course, remains coy about whether she would answer such a call. After all, she has to sell lots of books to replace all the influence she used to sell.
Also, it is so embarrassing. Even for a Clinton.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt on Twitter.
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