2020 watch: Why Biden’s Gaffes Don’t Matter

Ed Rendell explains at The Hill why gaffes aren’t killing Joe Biden: “Average Americans don’t think that what we insiders consider a gaffe truly is a gaffe — or they really don’t care whether candidates are prone to gaffes.” The problem didn’t impede “the electoral success of Ronald Reagan” or George W. Bush. Biden’s gaffe-making is “already ‘baked in’ ” with voters, who see them not as “outright lies” but “the result of a faulty memory or some confusion about the facts.” Plus, President Trump “probably makes misstatements two or three times a week, at least.” Finally, Rendell notes, mistakes are common: Finishing a hit on Biden’s faulty war stories last week, MSNBC correspondent Garrett “Haake signed off by saying, ‘Well, that’s the mood of the people here in Iowa’ — but he was actually in South Carolina.”

Ex-prosecutor: What Is Justice for McCabe?

By “pleading with top officials not to indict him for lying to FBI agents,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s lawyers are asking for treatment that figures like Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn didn’t receive, notes Andrew McCarthy at National Review. Flynn “may well have been confused and distracted” (McCabe’s excuse) when McCabe and his boss, then-Director James Comey, sent two agents to interview Flynn on his first day on the job. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “got every courtesy,” the FBI scheduling her interview “well in advance” and permitting her to bring a “phalanx of lawyers.” But then Comey and McCabe ruthlessly pursued Flynn and several other Trump associates for minor offenses. McCabe is hoping for mercy he wasn’t willing to offer.

From the right: Comey Owes America an Apology

“Audaciously arrogant” FBI ex-chief James Comey has asked for a “sorry we lied about you” message from his critics, but “Comey is the one who owes the American people a sincere apology for abusing his position as FBI director,” Gregg Jarrett declaims at Fox News Online. The IG report found so many examples of Comey lies, misstatements, and excuses that “he is lucky he was not indicted. Yet.” The report states that “former Director Comey failed to live up to his responsibility,” breaking multiple rules as he copied, kept and leaked government documents and mishandled classified info, yet Comey in his own “contorted world” “is the victim.” He isn’t out of the “legal woods” yet, though: Another IG report is coming soon, and “Attorney General William Barr has vowed that no one is above the law, not even law enforcement” — especially “self-righteous” former officials who “continue to play the victim.”

From the left: Why Did Gillibrand Fall Flat?

“On paper,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who dropped out of the presidential race last week, “should have done better,” argues Susan Matthews at Slate; what was behind “her lackluster performance”? “Her platform was centered on issues like paid family leave, reproductive rights, and fighting sexual harassment and assault” — yet she “never even caught on among women.” Maybe it was “overtly feminine self-presentation” or resentment over “her call for Al Franken’s resignation” or her 2017 comment that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky scandal. In the end, Matthews suggests Gillibrand failed the nation’s too conflicted on #MeToo issues: “In singularly attaching herself to a political disaster of an issue — a moral, legal, procedural morass we are still fighting over nearly every aspect of how to think about — she refused to let us work around it.”

Culture beat: What We’re All Missing About Greta

“Lost in the hype about the Swedish activist” Greta Thunberg, 16, “is that her parents, the media, and the climate alarmist left are basically engaging in child abuse,” fumes Tiana Lowe at The Washington Examiner. The girl started suffering depression “as a child, by her own admission, in part because she learned about climate change at age eight.” Autism, OCD and other diagnoses followed — then mutism and eating disorders. Asks Lowe, “Does it seem healthy to place a child with this many mental illnesses under the spotlight of public scrutiny, with a sole focus on the very phenomenon and associated alarmism that triggered her in the first place?”