Which rabbit-hole will the incoming tiny House GOP majority choose to dive down first? Spin the wheel

6. How the Office of Congressional Ethics and FBI oppress grifters and terrorists.

Something tells me they won't bother to investigate the Afghanistan withdrawal because it was so long ago

The irony is that's the one substantive thing on this list that probably actually merits some investigation.

Balls were dropped. People were left behind. Biden said there'd be no airlift from the top of the U.S. Embassy like there was in Saigon, and then there was. A bomb went off at the airport, shots were fired, people died.

On the one hand, you can say the airlift campaign was impressive in how quickly it came together and how many were successfully evacuated. On the other hand, it was all undoubtedly messy.

But the blame is widely shared, over multiple Administrations of both parties, and the public doesn't care anymore, barely remembers Afghanistan, and the ones who do still care to remember know that we had to leave somehow.

From the top and clockwise:

5. Dr. Anthony Fauci's work during the pandemic

With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic long behind us, and Dr. Fauci himself now retired, the political salience of Dr. Fauci declines by the day to your average reality-based voter. But there is a loud and obnoxious MAGA faction that wants to milk the political disagreements of pandemic-era public health policy in America for as long as they possibly can.

Lockdowns, face masks, vaccines, the combating of disinformation and the suppression of quack cures: Any time an official uttered a single syllable of rationality on COVID, they made themselves into an instant target for MAGA harassment. One such official, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, was actually the target of a kidnapping plot. Dr. Fauci is the big kahuna in alt-right COVID conspiracy theorizing, and I would wager that he and his office have probably received more death threats than any U.S. government official ever. And probably helped save more lives than any other official ever, too.

Of all these threatened MAGA "investigations," pursuing such an obviously good-natured public official is most likely to backfire tremendously. So of course I hope they do it.

2. "Hunter Biden's laptop"

From what I can discern about this massively propagandized story, the laptop is "real," i.e. a physical laptop that Hunter Biden once had - even though Giuliani never provided the original hard drive for vetting by independent analysts, a decision which limited the verifiability and media reach of its potential value as a pre-2020 "October surprise" story (and has generated all sorts of weeping and gnashing of teeth on the Right).

Okay, let's assume that Hunter Biden in fact once had his hands on this laptop of mysterious provenance and chain-of-custody.

But how *much* of it is real? The question matters, as this "laptop-from-hell" was filled with all kinds of crap from evidence of personal drug use (Hunter Biden's already repeatedly admitted his drug problems) to cavorting with prostitutes (eh, consenting adults) to child porn (yes, that would be a big deal). Anyone who knows anything about a computer or has downloaded a single file in their lives knows how easy it is to plant evidence. Apart from the more salacious material, the most serious of which I strongly suspect was planted, this is a "her emails" level of scandal.

But unlike Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden never ran for President. Unlike Trump's own kids, Hunter Biden was never made a member of his father's Administration. He's never held public office, and he never will. Apart from his last name, he's a totally unimportant figure - a target for local law enforcement, if anything.

3. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas's handling of the southern border

Illegal immigration is a totally vexed issue that seems destined to never be solved, for all sorts of reasons, including the fact Congress hasn't generated political consensus in favor of any kind of immigration reform for over two decades.

The other major factor is that long as some Central and South American countries remain unsafe and unstable places that people want to flee, a certain number of refugees and economic migrants will try their luck heading north.

All of which is to say there's an ongoing crisis on the southern border. People have died. People will die. Just as they did before and during Trump. At least Biden has halted the expensive and futile "border wall" and is not throwing kids in cages. It's really the least that can be done to make the situation a little more humane. So naturally, Republicans want to rage and fume. But these are, bottom-line, policy disagreements, more naturally resolved (or, if history is a guide, not resolved) at election time.

1. 2021 Afghanistan war withdrawal

Was the withdrawal rushed, chaotic, shambolic, embarrassing? Sure. But there's no good way to lose a war.

Mistakes were made and Republicans will milk the details for whatever they're worth, even if the voting public largely doesn't care anymore. But the big picture favors Biden, hands-down.

Withdrawing troops from a conflict is well within the authority of the Commander-in-Chief, particularly as it occurred along a timetable established via a treaty signed by *Trump himself.* Query: Why did Trump pick an Afghanistan withdrawal date that would fall either on his own term-limited second term or else upon the first term of his Democratic successor? It doesn't take a political rocket scientist to figure that out.

The Afghan War is a miserable, epochal, bipartisan failure of multiple Administrations, and along with the equally appalling Iraq War, is one of the two crowning jewels of the "War-on-Terror" lunacy embarked upon by G.W. Bush (a Republican, lest it be forgotten).

President Biden had the sense and the balls to end the madness and bring this dismal chapter of American history to a close. Good.

4. Attorney General Merrick Garland's management of the DOJ

This one is a total scream. By all objective measures, Garland's DOJ has been consummately professional and circumspect in its actions, most particularly in pursuit of the sprawling wreckage of criminality that the Trump Administration left in its wake. That includes, most notably, the Jan. 6 rioters, the classified documents Trump stole, and, increasingly, the role of Trump himself in Jan. 6.

There's always a risk of "politicizing" a Department whenever that Department pursues a political figure. That's inescapable.

But note that the DOJ is *not* pursuing Trump for mere policy disagreements, of the sort that form the basis of most Republican complaints about Democratic "corruption." Rather, the DOJ is pursuing discrete violations of law. Its work isn't finished by a long shot. Arguably, the DOJ has been moving *too* slowly. Regardless, House Republicans are of course going to try to gum up the workings of justice as much as they can and do their best to run personal interference for the former President.