"The people around him are similar to Biden’s aides. They would talk as if we’re living in a little bit of a fantasy world."

"Trump, in that way, with the help of his aides and his doctors have created this fiction about his health to hide the hard, cold truth that he is 79 and one of the oldest people to ever occupy the Oval Office.”

Said political historian Matthew Dallek, quoted in "Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office/President Trump has always used his stamina and energy as a political strength. But that image is getting harder for him to sustain" (NYT).

Is this even news at all? What's news to me and why I'm blogging this is that the NYT is displayed at the top of the home page as if it's the top news story of the day:

"The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban, TikTok said on Wednesday...."

"... as the White House hardens its stance.... The new demand... is a significant shift in the Biden administration’s position.... It harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company...."

The NYT reports.

I would like to link to a list or timeline showing the Biden Administration's rejection and more recent acceptance of Trump ideas/policies. There seems to be a cluster of them lately. It's causing opinion pieces like "Be careful, Biden. You might be inviting a challenge from the left" (in yesterday's WaPo).

Matt Bai knows he "should care more about Hunter Biden," but he just doesn't.

And he's telling you why in The Washington Post:

... I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration.

At least he's noticing it and admitting it publicly and feels the need to explain it (or sees some advantage in purporting to need to explain it). Whether the reasons given are sincere, we can judge for ourselves: 

"As NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America, I will tell you that we did not detect those threats."

"And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out."

Said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, quoted in "U.S. military failed to detect prior Chinese incursions, general says/The Pentagon’s disclosure that previous balloon flights over the U.S. occurred during Trump’s time in office was met with surprise by the former president and his advisers" (WaPo).

Does that mean Trump could not have known? 

John Kirby, the National Security Council strategic communications coordinator, said, "I can’t speak to what awareness there was in the previous administration. I can tell you that we discovered these flights after we came into office." He said those other flights were "brief" and "nothing like we saw last week."

If VanHerck and Kirby are telling the truth, then any discussion of what Trump did should be about why his administration did not do a better job of threat detection and not about how he dealt with the balloon and only Biden is on the hook for how he handled the balloon after it was detected.

Have all the Trump-did-the-same-thing and only-Biden-shot-it-down tweets been deleted?

"It’s estimated that some fifty million new things get classified each year, and the more than two million people with security clearances, military and civilian, can potentially add to the pile..."

"... by one route or another. Presidents do not have the power to declassify documents psychically, as Trump has suggested, but their power to do so in other ways is surprisingly broad and ill-defined, governed largely by executive orders and precedent. That reality had complicated the legal case against Trump even before Biden’s lawyers found the first documents. The President has not yet said for sure if he will run again in 2024. The affair of the documents may prove something of a stress test. Republicans would no doubt like to see all these story lines—the documents, Hunter, the Corvette, Communists—merge into a lurid fog that obscures the real line between Trump’s case and Biden’s. They are not the same, and that is something worth emphasizing. But the fact that these two very different men, for different reasons, both had classified documents in their homes should be cause for reflection about our system of secrecy, too."

 
From "The Biden-Documents Mess House Republicans are ramping up conspiracy theories, but one thing seems clear: the government’s documents system has an overclassification addiction" by Amy Davidson Sorkin (The New Yorker).

He knows you are, but what is he?

"Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?"

Writes Philip Bump in "The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents" (WaPo).

"The White House on Monday said it does not keep visitors logs for President Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Del...."

"... where his lawyers have discovered at least six documents with classified markings. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the White House over the weekend seeking an accounting of who may have had access to the property.... Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said in a statement that, 'like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal. But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.'... The discovery of classified documents has created a political headache for Biden...."

WaPo reports.

Just "a political headache." And Biden is better than Trump because Trump didn't keep White House visitors logs. Actually — I'm reading the NYT article too — it is just that Trump didn't release White House visitor logs.

"The biggest problem with the Joe Biden documents story is that we know only what Joe Biden's lawyers have told us."

Writes Byron York (at Washington Examiner).

"Biden’s Document Blunder Is Nothing Like Trump’s Crime."

 That's not sarcastic. It's sincere. It's Jonathan Chait (at New York Magazine).

Breaking into an old man’s garage.

The media is right — the BidenDocs scandal is nothing like Mar a Lago. What’s harder to break into? An exclusive private club with private security, cameras, a strict access list, and secret service protection… or an old man’s garage.

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) January 12, 2023

That made me think about the episode of "Joe Pera Talks With You," "Joe Pera Shows You His Second Fridge" — which you can buy on YouTube (here) or watch on HBO. Here's a short clip where he talks about kids breaking into garages to get beer from the second fridge. And here's an embeddable clip with Joe talking soothingly about the institution known as the second fridge:

"The second set of classified documents from President Biden’s time as vice president were discovered at a storage space in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Del., a top White House lawyer said on Thursday."

That's the ungrammatical first sentence of the breaking news "Second Set of Classified Documents Were Found at Biden’s Wilmington Home, White House Says/A statement by the president’s special counsel confirmed reports that more documents had been uncovered after a previous batch was found at a think tank" (NYT).

ADDED: "Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Thursday appointed Robert K. Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration, to handle the investigation into how classified documents from President Biden’s time as vice president ended up at his private office and home" (NYT).

Aggravating factors.

"Donald Trump’s retention of documents marked classified at his Mar-a-Lago resort has aggravating factors that might support his criminal prosecution unlike the discovery of some documents also marked classified stored at Joe Biden’s former institute from his time as vice-president, legal experts said."

I'm reading "In the case of the classified documents, it’s more serious for Trump than Biden" — in The Guardian —  and laughing.

The aggravating factor in the case of Donald Trump is that he's Donald Trump. 

Here's a tab I didn't get to yesterday that has taken on new meaning in light of the first tab I opened this morning.

Yesterday's tab: "Joe Biden is gaining ground. But Democrats want someone else in 2024" (WaPo).

First tab opened this morning: "Justice Dept. reviewing classified documents found in Biden’s post-VP office/The case echoes the investigation into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents, but details provided by Biden’s lawyer suggest key differences" (WaPo).

You see my point. I needn't ploddingly spell it out. Too obvious.

"When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink."

AP reports.

I think Biden should also have had to abstain from water. For him and only him to get water... I must say my first association was Trump getting 2 scoops of ice cream. It's just so wrong.

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 

Said Mitch McConnell, quoted in "McConnell rips Biden’s voting rights speech as ‘profoundly unpresidential’" (NY Post). 

I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me.