Is Joe Biden 'no better' than Trump?

At The Week, Damon Linker discusses how the Trump campaign can use the sex assault charges against Joe Biden.

The Biden campaign's effort to portray itself as a moral reset from the debasement of the Trump years will run into this counter-message like a power sander. The Trump campaign will strip it away with a barrage of paid ads, prime-time cable news diatribes, and a hailstorm of tweets — all of it repeating the message (illustrated with clips from and about the Kavanaugh hearings) that Biden and his fellow Democrats are every bit the BS artists that Trump is, only they won't admit it. They'll lie about it, right to your face.
 To Democrats this prediction may sound implausible. 

There's no way that Trump, a man whose mendaciousness is well established and total, can possibly succeed in portraying Biden as more dishonest than he is. But he won't have to show that Biden is worse, just that he's no better.

Emphasis added.

One of our last dinners hosted before the quarantine was with a very old friend of mine -- smart, in a position of considerable community responsibility -- who didn't say how he voted. But he wasn't all that concerned by Trump. All the politicians were corrupt, dishonest and evil, he said. At least with Trump, there are no illusions.

It's troubling that Trump's appeal is rooted in cynicism. What's scarier is: That cynicism might not be entirely misplaced. 

Soon, foreign nationals may have more ability to influence elections than you do

At least, that's what I take away from Paul Sherman's Wall Street Journal piece today. There's a case winding through the courts in which foreign nationals—both residents of New York—are suing to be allowed to make contributions to political campaigns, saying they have the right to do so under the First Amendment.

On Dec. 12, the Supreme Court passed up its first opportunity to announce whether it would take the case. Some observers take this as a hint that the court is going to let the D.C. panel's ruling stand. That would be a mistake, and a sharp reversal from the hard line the court has taken recently on speech-squelching campaign-finance laws. 

The panel's ruling stemmed from a conviction that "foreigners" are different and that foreign speech poses a unique threat to the American political system. As to the first point, foreigners surely are different—they can be prohibited from voting, holding elective office, or serving in certain roles of government authority. But none of this has any bearing on whether their speech is entitled to First Amendment protection. After all, corporations are not allowed to vote but, as the Supreme Court recognized in Citizens United, they are still permitted to speak out about candidates.

Sherman is a cheerleader for letting foreign citizens contribute to American campaigns, but man this seems like a bad idea. If the Supreme Court affirms his vision, it will—in recent years—have allowed both corporations and foreign nationals unlimited power to promote American political candidates of their choosing. You know who this crowds out of the game? Actual, flesh-and-blood voting American citizens—folks whose political cash contributions are necessarily small, for the most part, if they exist at all.

I'm not sure how to write this without sounding like a paranoid crank. I really don't believe that free speech is a zero-sum affair. I'm not a nativist. I do believe that the best answer to bad speech is more speech.

But yeah, I'm concerned that a group of wealthy citizens of China or Israel or Russia could get together and bundle their contributions to tip the balance of an American presidential election. I'm concerned that if money equals speech, then it's often impossible to answer bad speech with more speech in any meaningful way. And I'm concerned that—again—actual flesh-and-blood regular American citizens are going to wind up the least influential players in the political process.

On the last count, it's possible that's already happened. But it should be resisted at each and every turn.

Vote Michael Untermeyer for Philadelphia City Council. Because otherwise, black dudes will try to have sex with white women.

I dunno. Is there another message I'm supposed to take from this?

 (Hat tip: Hickey)