It's All Connected Somehow

Thursday morning, news broke  the Biden administration had secured the release from Russian prison of Olympic medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner. As you surely know, last February, Griner had been arrested at a Moscow area airport arriving with a tiny amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, for which she was sentenced to nine years in a labor camp.

Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine very shortly after Griner's arrest, relations between the U.S. and Russia have been at their lowest point since what, the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Berlin airlift? The only two things President Biden had to offer in exchange for freeing Griner were looking the other way as Russia pummeled Ukraine, and/or handing over a Russian arms merchant convicted in U.S. courts in 2011 for his role in supplying weaponry to various revolutionary and terrorist groups around the world.

Biden traded the latter for Griner, and quickly Monday morning quarterbacks (power forwards?) here lambasted the administration for not also securing the freedom of Paul Whelan, a Marine imprisoned by Russia since 2018 on accusations of being a U.S. spy. 

Lost in the criticism of President Biden for not winning Whelan's freedom is the fact that his administration at least tried to include Whelan in the deal, whereas there was no indication that Donald Trump, who happened to be president in 2018, ever gave one bit of thought to Whelan before last Thursday.

He has, of course, had plenty to say about him since, taking some time away from his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him. At the moment, his story is that it was stolen by Twitter, because it didn't cooperate with right-wingers' efforts to whip up a scandal around Biden's son Hunter. 

You may recall that the New York Post published an exposé concerning a laptop containing compromising material Hunter Biden had supposedly left at a repair shop and never picked up.

The compromising information dealt with Hunter trading on his father's name in business (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka must be shocked, shocked!), his drug use, and, we are now told, dick pics. If Papa Biden wasn't eager for this stuff to be spread across the internets, and if the folks then in charge of running Twitter thought it was tawdry, sketchy bullcrap, the incoming Republican majority in the House plans to make every effort to make daily headlines of this stuff from the moment the 118th Congress arrives in D.C.

Struggling to make the Hunter Biden laptop story seem relevant to anything going on today, the Republican conspiracy manufacturing mill is grinding away at full speed. Congressboob James Comer (R-KY) postulated on the GOP propaganda channel that there was somehow a direct link between Hunter and (did you ever imagine that I'd ever get back to the topic of today's cartoon?) Brittney Griner's release:

 “[W]e fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China. You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia, is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

You may rest assured that the Republican Truther squad will not rest until they have found how Hunter Biden fast-tracked the trademarking of Ivanka Trump-Kushner's couture line in China, authorized Don Jr. and Eric's tax cheating at the Trump Organization, and masterminded the fraud at the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

All part of a plot to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace in Kenya.