This good man

The only thing Boris Johnson didn’t do in his desperate attempt to cling to power that finally failed this week was unleash a mob of armed Brexiteers on Parliament.  He did everything else:  he acted as if the rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to him.  He was contemptuous of facts and spewed lies as if exhaling them were as natural as breathing.  He sacrificed everything and everyone in a single cause:  himself.  His party didn’t matter.  His friends were forgotten.  His political allies were expendable. 

All the pundits this week echoed the same refrain:  Sound like anyone we know?  Half of them celebrated the parliamentary system’s ability to expel poison from its system, and the other half reached back to Watergate to celebrate the time our system worked in something of the same way. 

All of them, of course, were obsessed with the two “bad boys” as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have been referred to so many, many times.

Ignored in all the backslapping has been this good man, Joe Biden, the president we elected by a wide margin of both the popular and electoral vote in 2020.  What was Joe Biden doing while Boris Johnson was dissembling yet again and Trump was readying himself for a trip to the political hustings for yet another of his insane white supremacist rallies?

Joe Biden was speaking at the White House about a 10 year old girl who was raped in Ohio, but because she was six weeks plus three days pregnant with the rapist’s child, had to travel to another state to get an abortion.

“She was forced to have to travel out of the state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life,” Biden said at the White House. “Ten years old — 10 years old! — raped, six weeks pregnant, already traumatized, was forced to travel to another state.”

The Washington Post reported that Biden “grew visibly upset” as he lamented that a 10 year old girl “should not be forced to give birth to a rapist’s child.”

When was the last time you ever heard or saw Donald Trump get “visibly upset” about anything other than his loss of the election of 2020?  Oh, excuse me.  There have been reports of his club-throwing tantrums on the golf course when he has missed a shot, although never when he lost a game, because Donald Trump hasn’t lost any golf games.

Joe Biden and his calm, sure leadership of not only this country but the western world since Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine has gotten lost in the political brouhaha about idiots like Trump and Boris Johnson and even pip-squeaks like Ron DeSantis, who has been busy trying to make his mark by picking fights with the Walt Disney company over their gay-friendly politics and his “don’t say gay” law in Florida.

I had to physically resist the temptation to type a half-dozen exclamation points at the end of that last sentence.  The world is at war in Europe for the first time in three quarters of a century, the American west is once again ablaze in fires caused by climate change, the Supreme Court just ended the right of women to choose to get an abortion, and Ron DeSantis is trying to make a name for himself by picking teeny-tiny little fights over what children should be taught about human sexuality?

Anytime Washington political reporters find themselves with nothing better to do they crank out a piece on dissention among Democrats about how Biden isn’t doing enough about this or he’s doing too much about that or he’s not forceful enough or his age or even a Bidenism he uttered while speaking somewhere about something.  It’s politics as usual, of course, but given what we are facing as a country, it stinks.

We should thank our lucky stars every single day that enough of us came out and voted for him in 2020, and we should work like hell to make sure it happens again.  Nobody is writing about Joe Biden’s goodness as a man and a president.  Well, I am.