"Griner, of course, is an international celebrity by now. A black lesbian sports star who was jailed on what sounds to any reasonable person like a bogus charge — and certainly not one that deserved a nine-year prison sentence. Whelan is a white middle-aged businessman imprisoned on an espionage charge — a profile that pushes literally none of the buttons for the Democratic base that Biden depends on. Given those alternatives, Biden’s evident decision to pander to the impulses of the left was embarrassingly predictable. What’s even worse, though, is what Biden was doing the night before the world learned that he had bought the freedom of a woman who is a cause célèbre on the left by freeing a man who made a living dealing deadly munitions. He was attending a vigil for “all victims of gun violence” at a church in Washington, D.C."