Another leg in the political race to the bottom.
Another leg in the political race to the bottom.
J oe Biden claims that gasoline producers are illegally colluding to rip off Americans, that there is “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies.”
There isn’t any such evidence, of course. That doesn’t matter. As an oil executive once told me in a different context: “We’re an oil company. You can say anything you want about us.”
That’s true.
More to the point, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump.
If you go back through the news clippings of the Trump years, you’ll find about 453,681 examples of sentences such as “President Trump today asserted without evidence,” or “Trump claims, contrary to the evidence,” that sort of thing. Some of these were tendentious, but often they were true. “Donald Trump claimed without evidence” is almost a redundancy. Trump didn’t care about evidence even on those rare occasions when the evidence was on his side.
Biden, who resembles Trump much more closely than partisans on either side are ready to admit, is big on making assertions that are contrary to the evidence, too, e.g., his longstanding false claim that his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver. Biden peddles outrageous lies for political purposes and has for the whole of his very long career. Remember his claim that Mitt Romney intended to put African Americans “back in chains”? That’s typical Joe Biden poison.
The man doesn’t give a fig for the facts of the case.
Energy prices, along with many other prices, are under upward pressure because of economic factors that are reasonably well understood. There is no evidence of the collusion that Biden blames for it, but you won’t see that fact mentioned much outside of the pages of the Wall Street Journal or this magazine. No evidence is necessary when denouncing an oil company.
The media double-standard is an old and tiresome complaint from conservatives, but that doesn’t mean conservatives are wrong about it. This has serious consequences: NPR publishes breathless accounts of “exploding bullets” that don’t quite exactly actually exist and nobody bats an eye, but if your right-wing uncle on Facebook hits “like” on a tasteless attack on Hunter Biden, it’s a disinformation campaign that means the end of democracy as we know it.
Still, there is more in play here than media bias.
President Biden has launched a federal investigation into oil and gas companies on grounds that are entirely pretextual — and, even as dumb as he is, the president must know that the investigation is completely unwarranted. Put another way: The president is using federal law-enforcement powers to harass innocent Americans, threatening them with litigation or criminal charges in order to deflect attention from the part his own policies have played in exacerbating inflation and other unwelcome economic developments.
That is an abuse of power, and a naked one. In a sane world, that’s precisely the sort of thing you’d impeach a president over. If misusing federal police powers with malice aforethought in the pursuit of political gain isn’t a presidential misdemeanor, then there are no presidential misdemeanors, and everything is permitted.
Of course, conservatives who spent years defending Trump’s lies and distortions as political necessities and excusing every abuse of power on the same grounds — “He fights!” — are poorly positioned to complain about Biden. Those so-called conservatives (in truth they are anything but conservative) who have contempt for the rule of law, institutions, and procedure — who believe, like Sohrab Ahmari, that right-wing politics should be an exercise in “enmity” in which rightists work toward “discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions” at whatever price — can hardly complain about a politically motivated investigation or two. The doctor can hardly protest his own prescription.
At this point, the usual cliché-addled nincompoops will weigh in with the usual denunciations of the Marquess of Queensbury. But what we end up with in such a fight is not the bruising victory of conservative governance but instead an ever-escalating arms race of petty corruption, a political and moral race to the bottom in which there is no prize for getting there first. Banana-republic stuff such as Biden’s phony gasoline-price investigation ends up being not just a common mode of politics but the only mode of politics.
Unfortunately, the lesson too many on the right seem to have learned from left-wing demagogues is that Republicans should be more like their rivals; the Democrats, being impervious to education and example, seem to have taken approximately the same lesson from the Trump years. And so they will countenance Biden’s abuses — this one and others — as a matter of political necessity.
As usual, we have failed to understand that virtue in public affairs isn’t some airy-fairy consideration for the afterlife and the history books — it is an eminently practical concern, because it is impossible to maintain a free society without it.