Opinion

President Joe Biden loves his son. That’s the long and short of it. The son’s a firstclass mess. Former drug addict. Peddled influence he didn’t have. The laptop. The pictures. The child he denied. The plea deal that collapsed. Now the special counsel will do his business. Can it get any worse?

Dear Annie: My motherin- law has been diagnosed with cervical cancer back in our home country. My husband planned to pay all the expenses for her care, including treatments, hospital visits and food. His three older sisters live near his mom (one lives with his mom). He said his sisters are poorer than we are when comparing our hourly wages. I said the expenses should be divided by all the children -- or at least the richest sister who owns a house and a tourist van. This has led to a major argument between my husband and me. He said that I am being selfish and cruel and that if it were my parents with cancer, he would sell our house to help them.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a new day -- on Aug. 28, 1963.

The first Republican presidential debate was feisty and substantive. Fox News overwhelmingly focused on policy issues that voters care about. A debate was seriously overdue; the television networks have shut out coverage of policy issues like they are protecting the public from a deadly plague.

The Milwaukee debate was a travesty. Not that the moderators asked the wrong questions (though, seriously, UFOs?) or that the candidates gave the wrong answers -- rather, the entire format is guaranteed to elicit the kind of behavior that least conduces to good leadership.

Dear Annie: I’m turning 50 this year and plan on having a large party. Last year at my birthday, I told both my sisters that I was having this party and expected them to come. They both agreed to come.

What about Hunter Biden? Well, what about him? If the president’s son is found to have cheated on his taxes, the most serious accusation so far, then punish him. This is an interesting story but not a very important story until it’s determined that his father, President Joe Biden, helped him or profited from any illegal scheme.

Creators Syndicate Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet who died in Baltimore at just 40 years of age in 1849, will long be remembered for the poem he published in 1845 about a raven that entered his home and haunted him from a perch above the front door. A few generations later, a member of Poe’s clan would similarly haunt Yale.

“America,” wrote novelist Thomas Wolfe, “is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.” We’re having more than our share of trouble doing the fundamentally right things, let alone achieving miracles. But a properly bipartisan bill pending before Congress would at least do the fundamentally right thing for tens of thousands of Afghans, most of them women and children, whose families risked their lives helping us confront al-Qaida and the Taliban, and who now depend on us to offer them the permanent safety they deserve.

Dear Annie: My father-inlaw has been living with us for the past two years, as he is in the process of buying a new house. The housing market has been tough, and it’s taken longer than expected. What was at first going to be a six-month stay has extended well beyond.