After spending a little over two weeks on vacation, I have returned — tanned, rested, and ready to, er … pounce. Or is it seize?

Perhaps we should ask NBC News, which reports today that Joe Biden’s critics have begun to attack his “brand” as a family man and regular guy. That’s an odd way to cover substantive allegations of influence peddling and a pattern of corruption, but YMMV:

President Joe Biden’s brand as a family-oriented public servant has been a signature political asset that for more than 50 years has helped him win the argument that, when judged against “the alternative” rather than “the Almighty,” he stacks up pretty well.

He’s never lost to a general-election opponent in a political career that’s taken him from Delaware’s New Castle County Council to the Oval Office.

But the burnish on Biden’s brand is being tested like never before, ahead of a close 2024 election. Some of the president’s Democratic allies are worried about potential fallout from a confluence of family drama that’s spilled into public view and from Republican attacks that cut at the bedrock of Biden’s longtime political appeal.

As Jim Treacher once wrote about mainstream media coverage: when Republicans screw up, Republicans are the story. When Democrats screw up, Republicans are the story.

Allow me to pounce for a bit, and then perhaps to seize. In the first place, “like never before” does some very hefty lifting in this excerpt, especially coming from a media outlet that did its best to bury reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020. When the New York Post published material from the laptop a week before the election, other media outlets didn’t just ignore it — they actively suppressed it. Most adopted the immediate position that the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” helpfully prodded by fifty-one former intel officials intent on providing cover to the Bidens.

It took nearly two years for the New York Times and Washington Post to be the first to finally report that the laptop turned out to be genuine. And it took a bit longer for other media outlets to admit that the FBI actually had the laptop for a year before the NY Post report and had used it to open a criminal probe into Hunter Biden’s activities.

“Like never before”? Whose fault was that?

And even now, the story isn’t that evidence has emerged that the Biden family operated an archipelago of limited-liability corporations (LLCs) to launder cash from questionable sources to Biden family members, allegedly even to Biden himself. The story from NBC isn’t that Biden’s Department of Justice tried to engineer a “sweetheart” plea deal for Hunter to put an end to criminal investigations into tax felonies and potential corrupt activities. It’s not even that Joe Biden kept refusing to acknowledge his four-year-old granddaughter while still trying to sell his “brand” of a “family-oriented public servant.”

No, the story is — as always — that Republicans are pointing all of that out, and that it might endanger the perception that Biden is … wait for it … “squeaky clean”:

“The recent revelations with Hunter Biden really are in conflict with the current perception of his image of being squeaky clean,” Mike Noble, the CEO of the nonpartisan Noble Predictive Insights and a pre-eminent pollster in the Southwest, said of the president.

Ahem. Questions about influence peddling by the Biden family go back for years, long predating the 2019-20 Democratic primary cycle. Biden himself even referred to it before getting into the race, claiming that he hesitated to run for president because Republicans would attack his family. The issue had become particularly acute during Donald Trump’s first impeachment, prompted by his foolish attempt to personally collect evidence of Biden corruption from Volodymyr Zelensky. Rather than look into the issue at the time, American media outlets instead shifted all the focus to Trump.

And now, thanks to the House Oversight Committee and the belated DoJ effort to inoculate the Bidens from further scrutiny, we have plenty of evidence of attempts to hide sources of income that at least correlate to connections to a CCP intel front doing business with Hunter, among other unsavory connections. And we now have testimony that Joe was far more involved in Hunter’s businesses than the media kept reporting, testimony that has forced the White House to change their denials from Joe from “I never discussed Hunter’s businesses” to more that Joe denies being directly involved in Hunter’s businesses.

And NBC News thinks the story is the status of Joe’s “brand,” and what Republicans are doing to it. Not that Joe Biden has repeatedly lied about his connection to Hunter’s businesses, not that his DoJ engineered a smelly plea deal so transparently corrupt that a judge refused to accept it, and not that the Bidens came into substantial contact with a CCP intel front and profited handsomely from it.

It’s all about the seizing.

For that reason, I’m glad to have gotten some rest the last couple of weeks. I need all my strength for pouncing, seizing, and all of the other exercises necessary for MSM reaction to evidence of Democrat scandals. Maybe I’ll spend my next vacation writing a book: Twenty Minutes of Pouncing Calisthenics to a New You.