No, Dr. Jill Biden isn't too educated

We spent four years ignoring the fact that Melania Trump posed nude — rather salaciously, in fact — while Biden isn’t even president yet and they’re going after his wife for being too educated.

Illegitimate, unworthy, arrogant, whore. Like clockwork, a new Democratic administration faces a Republican party re-energized at the prospect of demonizing yet another Democratic woman and her husband.

It’s a process honed over thirty years of attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton, and raised to an art form against Michelle and Barack Obama. Make the attack personal, and lie often, in order to best delegitimize.

That’s how Al Gore ended up a liar, John Kerry effete, Barack Obama a Muslim, and Joe Biden a senile old man who stole an election. And the women are an even juicier target. In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton was a commie lesbian murderer; then in 2016, she was a dishonest and “over-prepared” warmonger. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren was too focused on substance and inauthentic, and Kamala Harris was both too serious AND laughed too much.

And last, but never least, are the kids. Chelsea Clinton was a dog, Joe Biden’s son a thief, and the Obamas’ daughter a floozie.

Which takes us to the Bidens. This week we learned, courtesy of the GOP mob, that First Lady -elect Dr. Jill Biden is an overeducated snob, and that incoming White House deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon is a foul-mouthed hussy. Biden outraged Republicans because she earned a PhD, and O’Malley Dillon because she called congressional Republicans “a bunch of fuckers” (though she said it in the context of arguing that working with Republicans was still a laudable goal).

The Republican noise machine was beyond verklempt. GOP members of Congress, who spent the last four years defending Trump’s foul-mouthed bigotry and boorishness, were suddenly the Miss Manners police, demanding that O’Malley Dillon apologize (which she did). But Dr. Jill Biden was their real prize. What better way to undermine the incoming President than to demonize his wife? But this time, they chose an odd source of criticism: her doctorate degree.

The incoming First Lady has a doctorate in education, and prefers to be called “Dr. Biden” in professional settings. It was bad enough, for the GOP, that Biden was an educated woman, but demanding recognition of that fact was a diploma too far. The re-education of Dr. Biden began with an piece in the Wall Street Journal, snidely written by Joseph Epstein:

Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.” A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.

Next up was Fox News, whose host called Dr. Biden “borderline illiterate”:

And not to be outdone, the National Review devoted their entire home page to attacking the incoming First Lady with seven articles questioning her education:

Mind you, our current First Lady, Melanie Trump, has no graduate degree, but she did do a number of pretty salacious nude photo shoots that no serious person on the left traffics in. In the grand scheme of right-wing moral outrage, you’d think Melania’s nudies would outweigh Jill’s parchment. But none of this is legit. They don’t care about Dr. Biden’s degree, any more than they care about Michelle Obama’s falsely-alleged use of the word “whitey.” It’s about delegitimizing the man by denigrating the woman. (Though, eventually, the denigration of the woman takes on a life of its own, such as was the case with Hillary Clinton. The initial attacks were to take down her husband; but eventually, the right realized that attacking Hillary was profitable, and enjoyable, in its own right.)

And that’s why Republicans scream about O’Malley Dillon’s use of the f-word, while ignoring Donald Trump’s racist railing about “shithole countries,” or calling Congressman Adam Schiff “Adam Schitt”:

It’s also why GOP members of Congress expressed outrage over the fact that Biden OMB-nominee Neera Tanden allegedly wrote some “mean tweets,” while ignoring the orange elephant in the room, their own tweet-obsessed boss. The lack of self-awareness — the rank hypocrisy, really — is stunning.

Republicans really make the best snowflakes. They do outrage better than anyone, and excel at creating grievance where its merited least. Our country has over 300,000 dead from a virus that Donald Trump at best ignored, and at worst, cheered on. And Russia conducted possibly the worst security breach in American history, and put bounties on the heads of US troops in Afghanistan, while Trump has remained silent about both. Still, the man and his party never seem to pay a serious price. (Though, in all fairness, Trump did lose the election — but not by nearly enough, and the GOP did unsettlingly well in congressional races.)

Democrats are simply not nearly as good at selling the truth as Republicans are at spinning a yarn. And until we figure out how to change that, the outrage will continue.