Far-left website Salon has an article today asking an obvious question: Why is the mainstream media so gentle with Joe Biden?

The two most important roles for journalists during political primary season are to cull the herd of the weakest candidates and take their best shots at the frontrunner, to test his or her readiness for the general election. That’s a public service for the political ecosystem.

So a profoundly weak frontrunner should be the ultimate in big game for our top political reporters.

Instead, mainstream journalists in the best positions to demand answers — during sit-down interviews and televised debates — have been remarkably gentle with Joe Biden.

They ask about his decision to authorize the war in Iraq, but not about the many documented times he has lied about why he made that decision, and when he first realized the war was a mistake.

They ask questions about his fitness for office, but let him off with glib answers about push-ups rather than assertively confronting him with examples of his consistent and troubling incoherence — even when he is in the process of giving them fresh examples.

They only lamely push back when he insists that he will be able to get Republican leaders to compromise with him — even when he cites examples that actually support the opposite conclusion.

They don’t press him on his support for the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, which made it much harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, and made it impossible to discharge student debt. Does he acknowledge it had devastating effects on the middle class? Have his views changed? They don’t ask.

They don’t question him about his long history of attempting to cut Social Security, or ask him whether and when he stopped being a centrist deficit hawk.

They let him associate himself with Barack Obama, but don’t make him address the administration’s many failures and betrayals, such as the way Obama embraced Bushism on matters of national security, and embraced neoliberal economics. Would he appoint the same roster of people to run his foreign and domestic policy? What reason is there to believe he wouldn’t?

These top reporters don’t hesitate to grill Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, often with gotcha questions and Republican talking points.

So why are they so easy on Joe? I can only speculate.

I think part of it is that they’re a bit awestruck. (“Joe Biden commands a boardroom,” the New York Times editorial board wrote about its collective interview with him.)

Part of it is that when Biden answers questions about his fitness by saying “look at me,” our elite journalists are simply not rude or direct enough to say: “Yeah, we look at you, and what we see someone who often can’t complete a coherent thought.”

Maybe, like Biden’s fellow candidates — who have also failed to sufficiently confront him in their debates or take out negative ads — they are worried about blowback from Biden’s supporters.

Maybe they just can’t bring themselves to help Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Most likely, these journalists — the most elite of the journalistic elite — are just plain comfortable with Biden, and don’t feel remotely antagonistic, because he reflects their centrist, Washington cocktail-party ideology.

The article then goes on at length to evaluate Biden’s positions in these areas. It’s an interesting read, but chances are you already know the details (and even this article underestimates how sleazy the Biden clan is).

It’s possible that the media are soft on Biden because he and the aging Democratic establishment are effective at bullying the chattering class. You feel like you are watching satire seeing the Boomer anchors on network television talking about concerns about the Biden family’s corruption, among other things, as if they were merely conspiracy theories. You’ve never seen journalists so un-curious about some politician’s hell spawn getting a high-dollar no-show gig (in a former Soviet state, no less) since Chelsea Clinton got paid in the upper six figures for writing a couple paragraphs for NBC periodically. And Biden just carried on about how we shouldn’t discipline China on trade, but you’d have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that has anything to do with his son banking mondo pseudo-sovereign fund investments there.

Yet I think the important point here is that it kind of doesn’t matter if the mainstream media ask Biden a tough question or not. They can’t hide that he’s going senile. People see that in debates, where he can’t put together a coherent answer and even seems unsure about where he is at points. People see that on YouTube videos of his interactions with voters at town halls and other campaign events, which have attracted many millions of views. The guy would turn 82 during his first term in the White House and he already acts like he needs to be in assisted living. If he actually won, he’d most certainly be a one-term president (if he even made it that long), so his entire presidency would be one long Democratic primary. He’d be a lame duck from day one, and the real question is who would be pulling the strings in the background. Kamala Harris gets this, which is why she’s sucking up to him trying to be his No. 2. It’s a joke.

Beyond that, it doesn’t matter what lengths the media go to protect Biden because younger generations have now officially crowded out the Baby Boomer generation in terms of voting, and these voters favor far-left, socialist candidates. All the ridiculous game playing that has taken place in previous primaries to keep establishment Boomer voices in Washington is losing its power organically.

Take a look at these charts:

If you take Generation X out of the picture, Millennials and Generation Z were responsible for over a quarter of the votes cast in midterms. Baby Boomers had their highest turnout in the midterm election, and they were still outnumbered by younger generations.

I am not sure it is a given that Baby Boomers will necessarily support establishment candidates either. You have some subsets of liberal Boomer voters, like retired school teachers, who are dealing with problems they have never dealt with before, like the potential loss of public pension income. I have no difficulty seeing these voters pulling the lever for a bona fide socialist like Sanders, and Sanders is wisely pointing out Biden’s past positions on cutting entitlements. Sanders may need to build momentum in early races for that reality to obtain, but it could happen.

Right now, Sanders is pulling ahead in polling in early voting states, and he’s not even out campaigning thanks to the Schiff show, which so far is doing nothing useful except making Biden’s corruption a household conversation and reinforcing generational fault lines in the Democratic base.

This is quite the exchange (video below). Elizabeth Warren is confronted at a campaign event by a father who is upset with her proposal to bail out student borrowers, noting that she’s punishing people who “did the right thing” by saving money for college or taking on extra work to pay for their kid’s education (like him). He asks if he can have his money back, to which she snidely replies “of course not.” Watch until the end, after the guy has moved on, to see the mocking expression on her face. This is why all the endorsements in the world couldn’t get this woman elected. She acts like he’s comically irrational for pointing out that her policy idea is unfair. Watching how she can’t process anyone disagreeing with her, however, I kind of wish she would succeed as the nominee just so we could watch Trump make her ugly cry on national television during a debate. Unlike a Harvard classroom, not everyone you encounter in the real world is a fawning sycophant.

Fairness is an important question when it comes to policy choices. The lack of generational fairness in student loan jubilee proposals is not the only issue here. In bailing out student loans, the government would be rewarding students who over-borrowed and used student loan proceeds for non-educational purposes. (These would be classified as “living expenses,” and yes, you can borrow money for vague purposes in addition to tuition. The money is distributed directly to schools, who will then cut a check or refund to the student borrower. This is why a lot of young adults rode out the Great Recession and its aftermath on college campuses, and why a bunch of them have moved back home now that they actually have to pay for those days.)

The problem with pseudo-socialist politicians like Warren and Sanders (who is unquestionably dominating the polls in early voting states now) is that they do explicitly reward bad behavior and punish responsible behavior. In economics, we call this moral hazard. When you can pass the cost of your behavior on to a third party, you max out the bad decision-making. It’s the core of why socialist societies eventually fail.

Like most people in the United States right now, I have yawned my way through headlines about the ongoing impeachment circus. The pointlessness of this exercise is hard to escape. The Senate is not going to vote to remove Trump from office at all, let alone mere months before an election, so this entire episode is nothing but a colossal waste of taxpayers’ time and money. It’s January 22 and Democrats are still trying to milk a short phone call from last July because blah blah blah just like Watergate! All to protect the dumpster fire that is Joe Biden’s campaign, when he’s probably not even going to be the nominee because he’s Silver Alert material. The whole thing is absurd beyond words, and so are the people invested in it.

Beyond the direct cost, the opportunity cost of Democrats using Congress to re-litigate the 2016 election over and over and over and over and over again is outrageous. These people, and the mouth-breathers who elected them, have mostly paralyzed an entire branch of government for several years over jack shit.

Given our roaring economy, the impeachment circus has primarily made me think about all the things that could have been accomplished if Democrats had merely moved on and focused on finding areas of consensus, as our Founding Fathers intended the deliberative branch of government to do.

It’s somewhat shocking the magnitude of pure bullshit President Trump has had to deal with as the executive of this country. To say that any normal human being would have said fuck this and moved to the beach is an understatement.

According to Paul Nolette, associate professor of political science at Marquette University, President Trump’s administration has been sued by state attorney generals more times than any president since Ronald Reagan. As of August 2019, there were 88 lawsuits pending against Trump from these folks. (And I think more have been filed since then.)

But does that just mean the Trump administration is bad at working with states? Nope. Most of these lawsuits are coming from political actors in states loaded with political rivals. (In fact, some of these individuals have been political rivals of the Trump family for decades at the local level.) New York State has filed more than 50 lawsuits against Trump. California is close behind with 46. Maryland follows with 43, Massachusetts with 41, and Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Illinois, and Connecticut between 36 and 32 suits. (See link from Fortune above.)

So not only are extreme amounts of federal tax money being used to gum up the Trump administration with lawsuits, millions and millions of state taxpayer dollars are being used to do the same. This is money that isn’t being used to improve your kids’ schools. Or roads. Or to help the growing homeless populations in those states. It’s being tossed into a black hole of lawyers’ fees for literally no other reason than the people involved have microscopic manhoods.

This is on top of a multi-year long special counsel investigation, which found that no American “colluded” with the Russians in their nefarious scheme to flood Facebook and Twitter with *checks notes* memes, but that Paul Manafort, who worked for Trump for like a month, cheated the IRS. The investigation cost many, many times what the federal government could ever hope to recover from Mr. Manafort, and domestic terrorism was revived in the meantime. Such a stunning victory for truth and the American way.

Then we had a years-long inspector general investigation into the people investigating Trump, who discovered that the FBI was stuffed with lawfare- aficionados who went to the extent of breaking the law in trying to create a perpetual investigation on the campaign and later the presidency. They falsified and withheld evidence from the FISA court on numerous occasions to keep the sham going after their claims to probable cause dissolved weeks into their investigation. Even the top brass of the FBI were fired for perjury over leaks to the press, also intended to keep the lawfare going. Their political spats utterly consumed the agency, all the way up its hierarchy. And now we have a prosecutor appointed to investigate the investigators and their exhaustive levels of wrongdoing.

So Congress is obsessed with petty political investigations. A number of state attorneys general don’t even do anything to protect people in their own state anymore, because who cares about banks or the environment or child predators when there’s a personal obsession with Trump to feed like a cocaine addiction with an agency budget.

Then you have the dozens of independent political operatives that have sued Trump or tried to manufacture outrages du jour. Or the people he appoints to positions. Bogus rape claims, creepy porn lawyers taking over MSNBC and CNN. Spew and sue, spew and sue, spew and sue.

You have to be a madman to look at all of this and say, hey, these folks are good citizens. We should have people like this engaged in drafting important policy because they seem well-adjusted and knowledgeable. The fact that the Democratic Party has been taken over by people who think Venezuela has an ideal form of government goes to show you how much this high-dollar bratty behavior has metastasized anything resembling sanity.

At some point, an economist should attach a dollar figure to “the Resistance.” Where would the economy and financial markets be right now if Trump didn’t have to put up with this bullshit and could simply focus on governing the country? What is the total dollar amount spent on frivolous lawsuits? What about the cost of all the political staffers billing taxpayers for years on end of this? Legions of them. It’s obviously in the billions of dollars now. Your money, pissed down the drain, because Democrats are sore losers even four years down the line.

The funniest part of all of this is these folks think they are on the right side of history, as if later generations have ever admired people who file frivolous lawsuits. History is certainly going to remember them, but probably not as white knights saving democracy.

There is not a single Democratic candidate for president who supports school choice. Yet a May 2019 poll by Education Next revealed that 70% of black Democrats support targeted vouchers, 60% universal vouchers, and 55% charter schools. Some of my favorite homeschooling blogs these days belong to black homeschooling mothers, who are some of the most aggressive education advocates out there. I have suggested on this blog many times that charter schools are the equivalent of this generation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). School choice has become a major civil rights issue, not just an education issue.

If you are a black Democrat, you have an array of filthy rich white politicians – many of whom sent their children to elite private schools, costing tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition – telling you that you are part of the problem for wanting to provide your child with the best education available. Elizabeth Warren wants to outright ban charter schools. One can only imagine what she thinks about homeschooling, but I bet she wants to ban it too.

There is not a single Democratic candidate with a strong position on the right to self-defense. If you are a black Democrat, you have an array of filthy rich white politicians telling you from behind the walls of their gated communities that you cannot be trusted to own a firearm. Instead, you should put your faith in cops to come into your neighborhood and protect you from harm.

There is not a single Democratic candidate with much faith in the earning power of minorities. If you are a black Democrat, you have an array of filthy rich white politicians telling you about all the nifty handouts you will receive if you vote for them. The idea that a black voter might not be interested in welfare but instead care about a building an economy with opportunities and honest social mobility is beyond them. Of course, most of those Democratic politicians have gotten rich from working in government. But don’t you dare ask them how! (Don’t ask them how they will pay for their spending bills either!)

And let’s not even get into views on the role of the church in civil society or importance of families and children. If you are a black Democrat, you hear a lot about how important it is for you to be able to abort your children. In fact, Bernie Sanders thinks abortion is your top concern when it comes to “family” planning. He loves to remind people about how (he thinks) black and brown women need abortion the most.

According to Pew Research Center, blacks are one of the biggest voting blocks being left behind as the Democratic Party debates flavors of socialism and other extreme perspectives:

White Democrats remain more likely than black or Hispanic Democrats to describe themselves as liberal. In 2019, a majority (55%) of white Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters identified themselves as liberal, an increase of 27 percentage points since 2000. Among white Democrats, 19% called themselves very liberal in 2019, compared with 6% in 2000.

By contrast, more black Democratic voters continue to characterize their views as moderate rather than liberal. In 2019, 43% of black Democrats called themselves moderate, 29% called themselves liberal and 25% called themselves conservative.

Since 2000, the share of black Democrats who describe their political views as liberal has changed little, while liberal identification among white Democrats has nearly doubled.

Among Hispanic Democratic voters, 38% described their political views as moderate in 2019, while 37% called themselves liberal and 22% conservative.

This is a big deal for the Democratic Party heading into the next election. Even a small change in black turnout makes it mathematically impossible for a Democrat to be elected president. That shift may have already taken place, as there are now many prominent black Republicans in politics and in conservative media.

Religion goes a long way to explain the gap in beliefs between white and black Democrats. From a Pew Research survey on religion in America from last year:

The religious profile of white Democrats is very different from the religious profile of racial and ethnic minorities within the Democratic Party. Today, fewer than half of white Democrats describe themselves as Christians, and just three-in-ten say they regularly attend religious services. More than four-in-ten white Democrats are religious “nones,” and fully seven-in-ten white Democrats say they attend religious services no more than a few times a year. Black and Hispanic Democrats are far more likely than white Democrats to describe themselves as Christians and to say they attend religious services regularly, though all three groups are becoming less Christian.

This poll’s methodology has some obvious problems (which I discussed in an earlier post), but the overall message is clear. As the far-left leaning Democratic Party has become broadly less hospitable to practicing Christians, it has also become less hospitable to racial minorities, their political priorities, and their values.

It’s pretty clear at this point that the only Democratic strategy on this front is to hope that black voters hate Trump as a personality more than they care about preserving their own culture (much like they like to fantasize about white evangelicals doing, which approximately never happens in reality). Poll numbers suggest that this is not enough, however. With the exception of Biden – who is an incredibly weak candidate on so many levels – every single Democratic candidate is radioactive with black voters.

This notion that black voters can remain active in a party that is being held captive by heretical white millennials in Portland and Los Angeles and Brooklyn, because they are adept at forming social media mobs, and their white Boomer pied pipers seems a bit much to fathom. They have basically nothing in common.