Tuesday’s Washington Post happily topped the front page with “Jan. 6 panel urges charges for Trump” and then added an “explainer” story inside on page A-4 headlined “What the Jan. 6 committee’s criminal referrals mean.”
Opposite those Trump-pounding stories on page A-5 was the latest pro-Biden puff piece by Post reporter Matt Viser, who sounds like a Biden adviser. The headline was “For Bidens, holidays are both somber, celebratory.” Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the tragic car accident that took the lives of Joe Biden’s wife Neilia and their daughter Naomi.
Viser reported the Biden family attended a memorial mass on Sunday at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington. Naturally, the Viser story also touched on Beau Biden dying of brain cancer in 2015. Liberal reporters can’t stop raising these tragedies to build sympathy.
As Biden went into the memorial mass and emerged from the church, he was surrounded by his family. Those with him included his son Hunter — the only person in that 1972 car crash who is still living. Hunter and his brother, Beau, emerged from that crash injured and tightly bonded together, until the day Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, another tragedy in a family that has known plenty of them.
The crash, Hunter has written, is one of his earliest memories and most consequential of his life....
Viser relied on several Biden family memoirs to tell this story. According to a book by the president's sister Valerie, their brother James bought a department store Christmas tree and smuggled it into the hospital for the Biden boys.
While Hunter and Beau spent that Christmas some 50 years ago in a hospital room — one lit by their uncle’s contraband tree — the family now tries to gather for a Christmas Eve dinner, one that this year will likely be spent at the White House.
In the early years, Hunter has said, those gatherings seemed designed mostly to help two boys heal from unimaginable tragedy.
“I grew up watching, without always fully appreciating, my entire family perform the most selfless deeds on our behalf, without any real benefit to themselves,” Hunter wrote in his memoir. “Everyone took a turn as a hero in our story; everyone performed a kind of magic act.”
Biden remains a proud Irish American and a professed respecter of fate, but insists he is still an optimist. “My dad,” Hunter wrote, “understood something rare, something truly genius: trauma gave us the gift of each other.”
The pull quote for this article was Hunter’s “magic act” sentence.
Underneath that valentine was a “Retropolis” article seconding that emotion: “Nixon called Biden after tragic crash: Pair shared a minute of solace amid abounding grief for the new senator.” Michael Ruane’s story quoted from Biden’s autobiography Promises to Keep.
PS: Back on page A-2, the Post published a blatantly one-sided press release headlined “Biden aims to cut homelessness 25% by 2025: Plan would combat racial inequity, push affordable housing construction.”
