The second of the two columns below provides a lesson some readers fail to understand. A lot of people may have a strongly negative reaction to someone or something in the news, and then be enraged when I write something positive. If so, they don’t understand my job. My job isn’t to just give a standard response to what everybody else has seen as well; my job is to analyze and help elucidate, quite especially regarding things that others may have missed.
In this case, I thought that overall, President Biden’s press conference last week was awful, for multiple reasons. Still, I write in a section with other writers, whom I also edit. Several other writers already were taking Biden to task on topics I thought were apt grounds for criticizing him. Yet if I had written the same basic response, mine would have been redundant. Therefore, because I thought most conservatives especially had missed the one silver lining in the press conference, I wrote about that. “Credit where due,” as the saying goes. Credit, and a little balance for our Commentary section. A column is about what the column is about, no more, and no less. If I think it helpful to write about Biden and China, then the column is about Biden and China, period — without regard to whatever else I thought about whatever else he said.
To be blunt, a lot of idiots on Twitter and other social media willfully refuse to understand that a column about “X” doesn’t have anything to do with the topic “Y” that they want covered. To refuse to understand as much, though, is to be woefully small-minded.
Anyway, the column headlines are below, with the links to the full columns embedded in the headlines. The first column was written before the press conference, the second one afterwards.
Biden’s peek-a-boo routine raises questions about his fitness (March 24): It almost seems as if White House strategists want the focus of President Joe Biden’s first full press conference Thursday to be less the substance of governance and more the question of whether Biden is physically up for the job….
Biden did pretty well on the China questions (March 25): Most of Biden’s other answers were a mix of misdirection and malarkey, but much of his commentary on China was on target. We can only hope his actions will match his rhetoric….
