Q: Is depravity better than the Democratic Party?
A: Yes, but mostly only because it takes less time to type "depravity" than it does to type "Democratic Party." Otherwise, there's not a lot to choose.
When Rule-of-Law Joe Biden pronounced, numerous times, that he would not pardon Hunter, his MSM sycophants went nuts about his steely virtue. Indeed, it was shortly thereafter that public health experts discovered the most dangerous place to be in Washington was between a praise-gushing Democrat and a camera. See this tape for yourself. It’s hard to know now whether all those hosannas are more hilarious or more cringe-worthy. They sure were solemn enough at the time.
Paul has already sliced-and-diced the pardon well enough to serve it with Christmas dinner, so I’d like to say that I don’t want to pile on — except that I do. Still, let me defer for the moment to Jonathan Turley, who does his own slicing-and-dicing:
It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family.
…which up until a couple of days ago was thought to be the definition of abuse of office.
It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.
Trump never said he wouldn’t pardon Jared Kushner’s father, and Bill Clinton never said he wouldn’t pardon fugitive mega-donor Marc Rich. That Biden is beneath that standard is just breathtaking. I’m usually decently good with words, but words fail me here.
(It’s something of an interruption to say this just now, but Biden’s lying was nowhere near the most dishonest or dangerous of this last election year. That “honor” goes to Kamala Harris, who repeatedly and emphatically spoke up to defend Biden’s mental acuity, both before the debate that exposed him as unfit and, amazingly, afterwards as well. Lying to the public about the mental capacity of the commander-in-chief is less dishonest (although obviously that too) than a danger to national security.)
Now let’s return to Joe the Caring Father, again through Prof. Turley’s lens:
In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.
Let me spell that out. There is credible (although not in my present opinion conclusive) evidence that Joe Biden was in on his son’s relentless influence peddling, and may have benefited materially from it. So although Hunter is off the hook for any federal crimes he committed or facilitated during the (notably long) ten-year span of his pardon, his father isn’t. Now that Merrick Garland has established the precedent of prosecuting a former President (again with gushing praise from the press about the High Principle Of It All), Hunter can’t be prosecuted, no, but his father can, and, for however that may be, Hunter can be questioned for days on end before a grand jury and a congressional committee and — now being immune from charges — he can’t invoke the Fifth Amendment. But if he lies, always a live prospect with him, he can be prosecuted, because crimes from today forward are outside the scope of daddy’s pardon.
Oh the deliciousness of it all!
Actually, of course, it’s anything but delicious, or perhaps I should say it’s about as delicious as swimming in a cesspool. But using the Justice Department as an instrument of lawfare was always going to have poisonous tentacles (which is one reason Pam Bondi is going to need impeccable sobriety, judgment and restraint whether her boss wants it or not). If the Democrats now fear their own vengeful creation, I’m sure they can find a mirror to look themselves in the face. Didn’t they just finish months of screeching at us that NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW?
Few reporters pressed Biden on the corruption scandal, but they were often met not only with denials but angry retorts from the president. When Fox reporter Peter Doocy raised it, the President steamed “Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you.”
When CBS’s Bo Erickson broke ranks and raised the scandal and drew a rebuke from Biden “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.”
They say there’s no fool like an old fool, so I guess what we’re seeing now is there’s no sanctimony like an old man’s sanctimony. Not that’s it’s just sanctimony — Biden has had a snappish streak in him his whole career. It’s evasion — evasion merely impersonating sanctimony, evasion Biden put out there knowing that his pals in the MSM would look no deeper.
Last, I want to take a guess at why the Democrats and the MSM are so eager to get past the Hunter Biden pardon and return at breakneck speed to the “whataboutism” critique of Donald Trump. I think it’s more that just the obvious partisan sniping we never stopped seeing anyway, or the normal desire to put a Really Bad Election in the rear view mirror. Instead, I think they’re genuinely shocked and fearful that, after years of hoodwinking the public, the public is onto them. Nate Silver, a smart and honest Democrat (sorry, there are some), leads his recent piece with some insight that, though significantly misdirected in some respects, nicely describes the Democrats’ deepest forebodings:
As Sean Trende pointed out on X, it hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class. Begin with the response to September 11 — the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, which were supported by bipartisan majorities. Then the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Then Brexit and the election of Trump. Then the pandemic: what was supposed to be a triumph of management for a technocratic elite instead wound up as a worst-of-all-worlds scenario with prolonged restrictions and school closures and 7 million dead — from a virus possibly caused by sloppy scientific research practices. Then massive inflation, which was supposed to be a thing of the past. Throw in here, if you like, “wokeness” and how it’s eroded trust in higher education and triggered a cultural backlash.
Of course, the experts have gotten their comeuppance. Because it was better predicted by polls and because he had already been president, Donald Trump’s win last month was treated more with resigned shrugs than with expressions of shock, even among the liberals I know.
But if you zoom out the lens, 2024 was in some ways more shocking than 2016 — and much more of a middle finger to the expert class. In 2016, progressive institutionalist types could at least console themselves by saying the public didn’t know what it would be getting with Trump, and might have had some natural desire to experiment when the alternative was Hilary Clinton, the unpopular avatar of the technocratic status quo. Well, this time around, the public saw what it got with Trump — including the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors — and decided it liked it better than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the national exit poll, 52 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance from his first term in office, compared to 42 percent for Biden.
If the Democrats can’t get to sleep at night, and they can’t, this is why.