Anyone who has seen the movie “Wag the Dog” is familiar with exactly what is happening in the 2020 presidential election. In the film, a major scandal drops about the frontrunner just about three weeks before the election. The candidate is not able to deny the allegation, so the campaign engages in a holding action, inventing a war to distract from the scandal just long enough to win. What we don’t see, because the movie ends, is what happens to the scandal after the election.
Joe Biden finds himself in a similar situation with less than two weeks to go before the election. Seven days after the New York Post dropped its bombshell story, complete with damning emails that show at the least that Biden has lied about his knowledge of his son Hunter’s sketchy business deals overseas, and at most that he illegally profited from them, the media is helping him ignore the story. No denial of any substantive fact in the story has been made by Biden, and yet his media lackeys are silent about it and social media companies are hiding it from voters.
Here’s the thing. This could work. We are one week into the scandal with two weeks to go. The first seven days were spent with news outlets making baseless claims that this was all Russian disinformation. That narrative has now blown up as the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and sources at the FBI have said there is absolutely no evidence supporting the theory. The claim was nonsense, one might even call it disinformation, but it ate up seven crucial days.
Presumably in Thursday night’s debate, the email scandal will come up, at least from Trump. If Biden continues to refuse to deny the story then the media will need a new angle to protect him, we are already seeing it develop. The new story will be, “OK, the emails are real, but there isn’t anything truly damning.” Then we may move to, “OK, there is damning stuff about Hunter, but not Joe.” If each of these news cycles last a few days, they might pull a damaged Joe over the finish line. But that will not be the end of the scandal.
Donald Trump and his justice officials will still maintain power for more than two months even if he loses. Does any sane person think that Trump will back off of this investigation? Furthermore, if as it now seems clear the emails are real, and the reference to “the big guy” receiving a payout does refer to Biden, then we are looking at a situation where Biden may have not just a cloud over his win, but possibly even charges brought against him.
This is something voters need to consider in casting their ballots. We have no idea what the potential damage from these emails truly is in large part because the media has stuck its head in the sand on the story. They won’t be able to do that forever. In the worst-case scenario for Biden, progressives could see their goal of a Kamala Harris presidency long before they even hoped was possible. Biden has said his presidency will be a bridge; it could end up being a very short one.
The realization that this scandal will not be over by Election Day, that in fact it likely will just be getting started, truly reveals the malfeasance of our news media in burying the story. They don’t care about the truth, they care about beating Trump. Once that happens expect the old warriors of the legacy media to suddenly find their integrity again and push the story as if they had never run away from it.
The Biden email scandal is not going away. The only question is whether it plays out with Biden as president-elect, or as a failed candidate. Should it be the former, conservatives will continue to press the story, and this time without a shot clock. Hiding the truth for three weeks is not such a difficult task for our powerful corporate media, but hiding the truth forever is a different matter. Wouldn’t it be better if we knew the truth now?
