Traps For Biden

Okay, Mitch McConnell actually congratulated Joe Biden for winning the Presidency once the Electoral College certified the President-elect's win, after having said that he would recognize a winner once the electors actually voted.  But I'm not going to give McConnell brownie points for being consistent.  Mitch Mac is acknowledging Biden's win because he wants to give Georgia Republicans an incentive to vote in the U.S. Senate double runoff election on January 5.  If they think Donald Trump still has a chance of being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election as a result of voter fraud, they have no reason to vote in the runoffs or expect them to be fair and secure, which helps the Democrats and makes it more likely that they can win both seats and, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's vote, control the Senate.

McConnell is craven and power-mad, but he's nowhere nearly as nefarious as Trump, who forced Attorney General William Barr out of his post in order to put a caretaker Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department and facilitate the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Biden's son Hunter (above) - something Barr was reluctant to do.  (Barr also wouldn't report that Hunter was being actively investigated until after the election so as not to include the vote.) Such an appointment would ensure that investigations of Hunter Biden's business dealings will dog his dad for at least a year and prevent him from getting anything done.  Biden's Attorney General would be powerless to stop such an investigation.

So what, you say?  It's the son being investigated, not the father.  Except that Hunter is accused of trading in on his dad's previous position as Vice President in his dealings, meaning that Uncle Joe would be deemed guilty by association.  Or guilty of worse.  One caveat, though - any special prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden would have to actually find something.  There's no real evidence that Hunter did anything wrong.

Give Biden credit for not being distracted by any of this.  Give him credit also for going hard after all of the Republicans who backed Trump's futile attempts to overturn the election in his speech to the nation after the Electoral College declared Biden the winner of the election.  My only concern with Biden's speech was his constant throat-clearing, which, surprisingly, did not lead Trump to start tweeting insinuations about Biden's health in the middle of a pandemic.

Biden moves on, having appointed Pete Buttigieg to get us moving again; Mayor Pete is Biden's choice for Secretary of Transportation.  (Maybe Martin O'Malley can get the ambassadorship to Ireland.)  I'll have more on Mayor Pete later.