Alternate headline: Leader of the Free World — and the media — have lots of free time on their hands. How else does one explain this headline over a Newsweek feature?

This isn’t just a cute anecdote from a larger profile of important work Biden’s doing while at Camp David over the holiday weekend. This is the actual subject of the article for Newsweek — winning a video game match against his granddaughter. They want readers to rest assured that Biden’s getting his rest, or something:

How did Joe Biden relax during his first Presidents Day weekend as president? By playing MarioKart with his family.

During his weekend retreat at Camp David, Biden and his granddaughter Naomi played the racing video game, and he won. Naomi shared a video to Instagram that showed Biden competing against her on the Arcade GP DX machines, complete with chairs and steering wheels.

Biden sat on the right as Luigi, and Naomi is Princess Peach on the left, GameRant noted. Despite not being at the same gaming level as his granddaughter, the commander-in-chief came out victorious.

Good grief. If Newsweek put even just a little more intensity into its brown-nosing, the White House might need an emergency visit from a proctologist. We knew that the media coverage would be friendly to Joe Biden as president, but this is ridiculous.

Not to mention that there seems to be very little curiosity about all of this down time in the middle of a pandemic and a weather disaster in the Midwest and South. Just a day or so before Biden’s MarioKart match, his VP was claiming that their administration was “starting from scratch” on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout:

.@VP Harris: "There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations. … We're starting from scratch."@mikeallen: Are you having to adjust your sights now of what’s possible, given that?@VP: "We've gotta figure out a way. … No patience for, 'It can't be done.'" #AxiosOnHBO pic.twitter.com/opif5rjg96

— Axios (@axios) February 15, 2021

Ms Harris’ claim of “starting from scratch”, however, had already been refuted last month by Dr Fauci, the country’s top infectious diseases expert and now President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.

“No, we certainly are not starting from scratch because there is activity going on from the distribution,” Dr Fauci told reporters.

“But if you look at the plan the President has put forth, about the things he is going to do, namely, get community vaccine centres up, get pharmacies more involved, where appropriate, get the Defene Production Act more involved – not only perhaps with getting more vaccines, but even the things you need to get a good vaccine program, for example, needles and syringes.”

That’s an obvious lie. But if that’s the administration’s position, why is Pop-Pop playing video games? Why isn’t Biden working on the problem, and on the emergency response to the weather disaster rolling across half of the United States? He’s only been on the job less than a month. The media ripped Trump every time he stepped onto a golf course (which Barack Obama’s critics did as well) for not focusing on the pandemic enough. If the media had caught him playing video games, they would have shredded Trump for dereliction of duty.

This isn’t a moment to celebrate cute presidential downtime. Unless the president is a Democrat, apparently.