I’ve been waiting to say something intelligent and pithy about Biden’s mishandling of classified materials, but as usual, de Adder beat me to it and with style. The one editorial cartoon where Joe is using a classified document to wipe his oil dip stick next to his Corvette is priceless. This is my favorite cartoon of his so far.

As funny as the cartoons may be, the matter of controlling classified materials is anything but. I spent the last 30 years of my work life with a classification because the nature of my work demanded it. I was investigated every five years and filled out my fair share of Standard Form (SF) 86s to support those investigations. And all the yearly security classes I was required to attend. I was also caught up in the Office of Personnel Management’s 2015 data breach that included those very personal materials that were, as far as I’m concerned, just as critical as any officially classified information I was supposed to protect. Now here we are talking about an 80-year-old man who happened to have classified documents scattered around various personal locations from his time as vice president.

Of course the right will now point to Biden’s document faux pa and scream at the tops of their lungs that there’s no difference between Biden’s handling and Trump’s out-and-out theft of documents, stonewalling of returning said stolen documents, and then lying about having returned everything when in fact Trump hadn’t. Critical differences, naturally, but politics being what it is, and how lazy all journalism is and how decades of false equivalences and what-about-isms have eroded the ability to clearly define the truth, I’m certain it won’t be long before Trump’s crimes are dismissed, or else they just fade away.

How much classified and confidential information have we lost? We’ll never really know because I’m certain they don’t really know the full extent, and if they do, I’m also certain it’s been classified to hide the truth.