All The Right Idiots VERY Upset Joe Biden Pardoned Hunter

It's a bad day for the norms, and a good day for people who aren't morons.

Here is how you know that Joe Biden did a good thing by pardoning his son Hunter and Hunter’s giant hog for any and all federal crimes that convicted felon Donald Trump and his band of merry lickspittles might try to pin on him after January 20: some of the worst shithead pundits in our debased polity are galactically mad about it.

Bretbug Stephens of the august New York Times opinion section? Mad. Jonathan Chait, recently called home to his natural reactionary centrist habitat at The Atlantic? Mad. Matt Yglesias, who less than six months ago said the president should pardon his son because Hunter “is being perversely treated much more harshly than a criminal defendant to make a point”? He spent last night getting all mad online, calling on Democrats to “denounce” Biden’s abuse of his pardon power.

And this was a smaaaaaall sampling. We could have picked out any three shithead commentators at random and found enough pearl-clutching that Louis XVI’s court at Versailles might have said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, take it down a notch, you’re embarrassing yourselves.”

There seem to be a couple of different angles of attack that have left the defenders of America’s no-longer-actually-existing-but-what-we-are-pretending-is-that-they-are norms sputtering and hitching like a ’73 Pinto that someone accidentally filled with diesel.

One is the charge that Biden lied. He swore for years that he would not pardon his son, but would instead let the legal system take its course. Now he’s gone back on his word.

Which, are you fucking kidding with this? A politician reneging on a promise? Next you’ll tell us the NFL ignores all the brain damage football gives its players.

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Charges Hunter Biden Coddled By IRS Contradicted By All The Evidence. Darn!

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The other angle is pretending that the investigations of Hunter were somehow pure and not politically motivated to begin with. Which is simply ridiculous. Trump’s first impeachment was a result of his trying to lean on the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden to derail Biden’s 2020 campaign. We know these commentators know about this, it was in the news and everything. (More things that were in the news? All these things Marcy Wheeler cites on Bluesky as prerequisites for taking whines about Hunter’s pardon seriously.)

Here, to cite one example, is Chait pretending to be a political naif, in a post hyperbolically titled “Biden’s Unpardonable Hypocrisy.” Bolding ours, because what the fuck:

The most bewildering passage in Biden’s pardon statement posits some amorphous conspiracy against him by Justice Department prosecutors: “There has been an effort to break Hunter —who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Trying to break Hunter? And his father? To what end?

There is no end! Republicans just wanted to persecute a political opponent! They wanted to make him drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on defense lawyers. They wanted to cause Biden, who is famously deeply devoted to his children, a ton of heartache. They wanted all of this persecution to distract him from pursuing and enacting his legislative agenda. They wanted to drive down his administration’s favorability numbers to damage his re-election effort and those of his fellow Democrats in Congress.

This is a reminder that Jonathan Chait is paid a lot more money than we are to sit at a desk and observe American politics.

Anyway, damaging Biden’s re-election effort by pursuing his son may have even worked. There has been speculation that while the cognitive decline evident in the president’s infamous debate performance last June had many causes, the stress of having just watched his son convicted at trial was likely a big one. And that trial occurred after Republicans had raised enough political sturm und drang to get the Justice Department to walk away from the plea deal Hunter’s lawyers had negotiated. Which, we might add, it would not have done if Biden had not been respecting the norm that presidents stay out of DOJ investigations.

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Republicans Horrified That Joe Biden Tried To Teach Fuck-Up Son Hunter About Responsibility

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Hunter Biden Indicted, Putting End To America's Long National Hunter Biden Crime Spree Nightmare

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Shockingly, we’re pretty sure the Republicans didn’t really care about Bill Clinton having an extramarital affair with one of his interns either, but it sure did cause him huge personal and political problems, which was the point.

The other angle that appears to upset people is the alleged damage to the aforementioned norms. Here’s Chait, again, speaking for so many of the pearl-clutchers:

It would be tempting, but unfair, to draw a simple equation between Joe Biden’s situational ethics and that of his successor. A willingness to evade the rule of law is the foundation of Donald Trump’s entire career in business and politics, not a nepotistic exception. Still, principles become much harder to defend when their most famous defenders have compromised them flagrantly.

Biden defended these norms for four years. He stayed out of the investigations of his kid. He stayed out of the much larger and more consequential investigations of his predecessor, much to the chagrin of Democrats who wanted him to fire Attorney General Merrick Garland and replace him with someone who seemed interested in prosecuting Trump’s many felonies.

And what did Biden get for all his trouble? His defense of these norms allowed Trump to get away with everything and return to office, where he is trying to appoint blatant loyalists who have promised to pursue vengeance in his name. Because, despite what some people still like to think, there are no principles here, only power to be exercised in however the holder of that power sees fit.

We keep thinking of Ned Beatty yelling at Howard Beale in Network, telling him that

“There are no nations. There are no peoples! … There is only one holistic system of systems … There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”

If we want to update Beatty’s speech, we could say there is only Amazon, and Meta, and Twitter, and Silicon Valley, and Bitcoin. Oh, and Exxon can stay on the list.

But the point still stands: There are no norms anymore! There are no guardrails! There is only power, and the will to use it.

Which Biden did, after sitting on it for years. He foreclosed one avenue for Trump World to spitefully abuse the justice system to seek revenge against Trump’s perceived enemies. He told anyone bothering to listen that Democrats do not need to tolerate a double standard where Republicans do whatever they want without consequences while Democrats accept politically motivated prosecutions out of some misguided self-image as democracy’s last defenders. That’s just silly. It’s fighting not just with one hand tied behind their backs, but with lopping all the fingers off the other hand in some weird effort to look fair.

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It's WHATABOUT Hunter Biden Time!

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Or, to put it more simply, Biden stood up to the abuse of the justice system by dropping a giant “fuck you” on some of its egregious abusers.

Frankly, we think there are a lot more abuses we’d like to see him correct via the pardon power before he leaves office, such as commuting the sentences of all federal prisoners on Death Row. That at least would be in service of the worthwhile principle of opposition to the death penalty, as opposed to the not-worthwhile principle of pardoning Roger Stone because he knows where a lot of your bodies are buried.

[New York Times / The Atlantic / BlueSky]

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