Hey, Joe Biden: You need to take on that false Ukraine smear, or you’ll lose me

Since I get more messages from Team Biden than from my own family members, I’ve been repeatedly invited to answer the question they’ve asked everyone on Joe’s mailing list: “Did I make you proud” at last week’s presidential debate?

A: No, sir, you did not. And I’m not even talking about that disastrous line about punching (and punching and punching) at violence against women, though I do wish you’d leave the fake pugilism to President Donald Trump. You know, so we don’t start to suspect that both of you still think everything can be settled after class out in the high school parking lot.

Nor am I talking about the joefoolery that popped out of your mouth when you got so white-hot thrown by Sen. Cory Booker’s cheesy provocation about smoking pot that you thought it was the ’90s again just for a minute there, and that Carol Moseley Braun was the only African American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

You’re losing me, Mr. Vice President, because on and off the debate stage, you have yet to explain in a couple of clear, crisp sentences why the way Republicans talk about you and your son Hunter and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma is flat-out false, which it is. If you’re not going to stand up against this day-in-and-day-out nonsense, why again should I believe you are the best prepared to take on the anti-democratic nightmare known as Trump?

I suspect, though of course don’t know, that it’s out of devotion to your son that you haven’t said what needs to be said. That’s understandable, and even praiseworthy, but if you won’t do it, you won’t win.

And it isn’t just important for your own campaign, but for our whole country, that you clear up any honest confusion out there about your involvement in Ukraine. Because as your apparently former Senate friend Lindsey Graham has now made clear, Trump’s impeachment defense in the Republican-controlled Senate is going to be to put you on trial.

I’ve written before that I was tired of watching you be Al Gored in the media, but this is more like John Kerry’s failure to see the urgency of defending himself against the swift boat lies that mortally wounded his ‘04 presidential bid.

Like Kerry, you seem to think that saying that you have done nothing wrong is all you have to say. It’s not.

The facts are pretty simple, so why not say, “Look, I wish my son hadn’t taken that job with exactly the kind of corrupt oligarch I was working to make sure would be held accountable. But has anybody out there ever had (or been) a grown child who made a misguided decision and insisted he knew what he was doing?” Every parent in the world would get that, and non-parents, too.

Say what’s true, which is that the troubled son you love more than life should never have accepted a spot on the Burisma board of a Ukrainian oligarch, but he did.

Repeat, as often as necessary, that as the record shows and as everyone who has looked into it knows, you went to Ukraine to push out a prosecutor for being too soft on corruption, and for slow-walking or deep-sixing altogether the investigations of many corrupt companies, Burisma included.

Remind us that the reason you bragged about all this on tape, at a not at all obscure event, is that you were rightly proud of getting former Ukranian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired, and you still are. President Barack Obama and the European Union and Ukrainian reformers were all glad, and you should be, too, America.

As Norah O’Donnell of CBS recently told Biden in an interview, the president is “attacking your integrity.”

“Sure he is,” the former vice president answered, “but it’s coming from a man with no integrity, so it helps.” If you believe that, you’re too foolish to be president, and if you don’t believe it, stop saying it, since authenticity is normally your best event.

An American president, he told O’Donnell, should always “make it clear to the American people that everything you’re doing is for them.” So should a presidential candidate.

This story was originally published November 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Hey, Joe Biden: You need to take on that false Ukraine smear, or you’ll lose me."