Master and Commander

For months, Republicans have been wasting everyone’s time with their obsessive pursuit of Hunter Biden, churning up every detail of his tawdry life and trying to connect it to a hidden pattern of misbehavior in the White House.

Turns out they should have been focusing on the president’s dog instead.

This got lost in all the news from Capitol Hill, so in case you’re not caught up, it seems that Commander, the president’s handsome German shepherd, has been serially attacking Secret Service agents for a while. In the latest biting incident, on Sept. 25, an agent required medical attention. (This after Biden’s other dog, Major, was sent to live in Delaware after displaying similarly irascible tendencies.)

Before I make a larger point about this, let me stipulate that I am the owner of an impossibly sweet pit bull mix who, while never having hurt anything larger than a cicada, has an unfortunate habit of snarling and lunging at smaller breeds and petrifying their owners. So I know what it is to love a misunderstood dog.

Let me also say that I’ve always found President Biden to be deeply compassionate (the polar opposite of his predecessor), and I’m sure this extends to his pets. I can understand completely why he’d be reluctant to banish a dog who’s clearly rattled by the singularly strange circumstances of life in the White House.

All that said, if Commander were your dog or mine, and he had a habit of clamping down on police officers or mail carriers, how many attacks do you suppose it would have taken before the dog was removed from our custody? Two, maybe three? The answer is definitely not eleven.

At this point, I can hear the president’s defenders screaming: So what? Republicans just tried to wreck the country (again)! Only a falsely equivocating, democracy-hating moron could waste time picking on Biden’s dog!

Fair enough. But here’s why I think you’re wrong.

There’s a familiar sense of entitlement in this Commander business. New presidents often— always, if you don’t count Donald Trump— come into office talking about the people’s house and what a privilege it is to live there, about how much they appreciate federal workers and how transparent they intend to be.

Then they settle in, and something happens. After a few years of being waited on every minute of the day, they start to see themselves as inseparable from the job. They begin to see the house as their house, rather than ours. They see the agents that protect them as furniture.

This is the mindset that so often undoes a presidency, especially in its second term, should Biden be lucky enough to earn one. (It will take some luck.) Presidents become mired in avoidable controversies when they begin to think everyone else is there to serve them, rather than the other way around.

That’s never been Joe Biden, and I don’t think it is now. But his aides shouldn’t dismiss the Commander fiasco as just another “dog bites man (and woman)” story. They should see it for the warning flare that it is.

A president in our house, on our dime, ought to live by the same rules as the rest of us. And if Biden can’t see why it’s wrong to put his own protectors at risk, then somebody needs to work up the courage to tell him.