Leaning Into Nihilism

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden has landed at an awkward moment for classical liberals, when many of us are transitioning from caring a lot about civic norms to caring not at all.

 

Where you are in that transition will determine how outraged you feel about the president’s act of clemency. If you haven’t yet fully shed your idealism about America following Donald Trump’s reelection, you’re disgusted. If you have, you’re wondering why the Biden family shouldn’t exploit the country’s regnant postliberalism to serve its own ends.

 

I must be near the midpoint of the transition because I see it both ways. 

 

The case for disgust.

 

“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth,” the president said toward the end of his statement announcing the pardon. But he didn’t tell us the truth in this matter. He lied, brazenly and repeatedly.

 

“He’s always been a liar,” you might say, fairly enough. But when he and his staff promised reporters, over and over (as recently as last month!), that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter Biden for federal gun and tax crimes, the president was telling a lie that carried unusual civic weight. By ruling out clemency for his son, he was vouching for the integrity of the Justice Department. So great was his faith in the justness of American law enforcement amid the right’s populist onslaught, it seemed, that he would decline to overrule its treatment of his own child.

 

“Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years, and it literally is the cornerstone of America,” Biden said in May of this year of Trump’s conviction in the Stormy Daniels matter. He trusted America’s institutions and wanted you to do so too.

 

Six months later, he hasn’t just overruled that same justice system; in doing so, he made clear that he, er, doesn’t trust it. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong,” Biden said in his statement. “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.”

 

The vague, pregnant reference there to “they” has a Trumpian demagogic stench about it. Biden implies elsewhere in his statement that he’s referring to his “political opponents in Congress” who spent years investigating Hunter, but it wasn’t House Republicans who indicted and successfully prosecuted his son. It was his own Justice Department.

 

And so Joe Biden, alleged institutionalist, will leave office affirming MAGA suspicions that federal law enforcement has political motives and can’t be trusted to behave evenhandedly. When he says at one point, “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” he sounds like a Republican hack on a CNN panel grousing about the charges that Jack Smith brought against Trump. You wanted a more populist Democratic Party? Congratulations—you’ve got it.

 

One wonders: If it’s true, as Biden claims, that the DOJ went harder on Hunter than it would have on a defendant guilty of similar crimes, why did he vow not to pardon his son in the first place? There is a case to be made that the department “overcorrected” in charging Hunter too sternly after a federal judge rejected the sweetheart deal prosecutors had offered him initially, but that case has been apparent for months. If the president was stewing all along about the alleged injustice of it all, why did he ever rule out clemency to begin with?

 

For that matter, if he believes the punishment didn’t fit the crimes, why grant Hunter a full pardon instead of commuting his sentences to something more fair? And not just a full pardon, mind you, but one of the broadest in American history, immunizing the younger Biden from all crimes charged and uncharged that he might have committed between January 1, 2014, through Sunday night—a period, not coincidentally, encompassing Hunter’s shady business dealings overseas. Only Richard Nixon has received clemency as sweeping.

 

The easy reply to that is that the president was worried that Trump’s Justice Department would eventually come for his son if he didn’t receive full immunity from prosecution. That too, though, was something he could have considered—and presumably did—when he began promising months ago not to pardon Hunter. What’s changed now, apart from the reality of a MAGA DOJ having become far more vivid in the last few weeks?

 

Frankly, I think Trump’s secret police will have bigger fish to fry than someone like Joe Biden’s son, who no longer has any political salience. Trump was always more likely to pardon Hunter himself than to sic Kash Patel on him, in fact—which is another reason for disgust at Biden’s pardon.

 

It’s disgusting in its own right, as an act of blatant nepotism by a selfish man who sabotaged his party and his country this year by prioritizing his own interests over theirs. But it’s also disgusting as a political gift to his nemesis on the eve of the federal government being turned into a subsidiary of Trump Inc. Had Trump eventually pardoned Hunter, he would have done so to “balance” pardons of figures like the January 6-ers in hopes of legitimizing the latter. See, he’s not just doing favors for cronies, his supporters would have said; by granting clemency to Hunter, he’s striking a bipartisan blow against “politicized justice”!

 

By pardoning Hunter himself, Joe Biden has done Trump’s dirty work for him. Now that the sitting president has abused the pardon power to do favors for a crony, Democrats have no leg to stand on politically when Trump starts doing the same thing next month.

 

And of course Biden has confirmed the Trumpian narrative about “the system” being rigged. Populists believe classical liberalism is a racket whose norms and institutions pay lip service to equal treatment for all while catering to the well-connected. The president placing his lowlife son above the law after two years of Democrats complaining about Republicans wanting to do the same with their lowlife presidential nominee is lab-designed to validate those populist prejudices. It’s an advertisement to Americans to lean into nihilism and stop taking liberal norms seriously at the very moment, with Trump preparing to take power, that classical liberals are desperate to rouse the public’s civic consciousness.

 

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”: That’s a maxim that I’ve used repeatedly to describe postliberal politics, but it describes the Hunter Biden pardon to a T. There’s no way to digest it without concluding that most of the president’s chatter about “norms” was an opportunistic exercise in anti-Trump political branding, not a matter of heartfelt belief.

 

It’s an egregious betrayal. However much contempt you’re feeling for him today, it isn’t enough.

 

On the other hand …

 

The case for equanimity.

 

I repeat here the question that I asked the day after the election of my fellow Never Trumpers: If you’re still hellbent on saving liberal institutions from postliberalism, who exactly are you saving them for?

 

Most Americans don’t care about institutions or norms. In a political vacuum, where two candidates on the ballot were identical in every respect except that one was liberal and the other postliberal, maybe the liberal would win. (Although at this point I wouldn’t bet my life on it.) But elections aren’t held in vacuums. When the cost of living is up, when the border is insecure, Americans view liberalism as a luxury, not a necessity. There’s no clearer takeaway from this year’s result than that.

 

And that—voters’ indifference to liberalism—is the optimistic read. The pessimistic one is that they’ve come to actively prefer postliberals. Lost in the coverage of his coup attempt in late 2020 and early 2021 was the fact that Trump at the time issued some of the swampiest, most corrupt pardons the country has ever seen. Despite that, despite the coup plot, despite felony convictions and dozens of outstanding felony charges, voters didn’t just hand him the presidency last month—they handed him a plurality of the popular vote.

 

He’s a “fighter.” He doesn’t let little things like norms stop him. That’s who most Americans want now.

 

“A country that reelects Trump (and Kash Patel/Pam Bondi) is not worthy of Biden sacrificing his son to a sense of justice the country doesn’t actually believe in,” comedian J-L Cauvin said in defending Hunter Biden’s pardon. Others have made the same point in stronger language. It’s fair to call Joe Biden a liar, a hypocrite, and a fair-weather institutionalist for granting clemency in this case, but if you’re knocking him for undermining liberal norms, I regret to inform you that those norms were laid to rest on November 5. There’s no public civic consciousness left to rouse.

 

In which case, why shouldn’t the president drop all pretenses about “norms” and do what he can to protect his son legally from Trump’s Justice Department? One might ask the same thing about Kamala Harris conceding the election instead of alleging that the vote was rigged against her. At what point do we regard Democrats as chumps for not leaning into the sort of political nihilism that American voters just endorsed?

 

Again: If liberals are intent on setting a good example, who is the example supposedly for?

 

A norm is not a suicide pact, as Jonathan Last put it on Monday. Norms won’t endure unless both sides—not to mention the wider electorate—see value in restraining bad behavior. Trump’s side does not. And the plainer it becomes that there’s no electoral penalty for that, the harder it’ll be for Democrats not to emulate his worst excesses if they can gain some advantage by doing so. As much as we might admire Harris morally for not contesting the election, politics is a field in which someone wins and someone loses. Based on recent American history, her party would have been more likely to win the next election if she had been less conscientious last month about conceding.

 

“Fine,” you might say, “but Democrats haven’t gained any political advantage by granting a Trumpy pardon to Hunter Biden. No one benefits from that except Hunter himself.”

 

Is that so?

 

Trump’s not-so-secret weapon has always been the spectacular volume and diversity of norm-breaking in which he and his henchmen engage. There’s forever some outlandish tweet being crowded out of the news cycle by a petty scandal, which is itself being crowded out by reports of infighting within his team, which is in turn being crowded out by a hair-raising legal maneuver or power grab or constitutional crisis he’s contemplating. Americans have grown desensitized to all of it. There’s no more marginal outrage to be felt in each new excess.

 

As a case in point, on Saturday Trump named Charles Kushner as his next ambassador to France. That’s a triple whammy of norm-busting in one swoop: Kushner is a nepotist (he’s Jared Kushner’s father), was pardoned by Trump in his first term for various federal crimes, and has no apparent qualifications for a diplomatic post with a major ally. But his nomination isn’t even close to being the sleaziest Trump made this past weekend. Kushner wasn’t even the only in-law given a job, in fact. Americans will barely notice his appointment amid the daily Trump din.

 

But when Joe Biden, establishment dinosaur and head of the “norms” party, turns around and hands a pardon to his crooked son, that feels like a real scandal. Americans aren’t desensitized to the president’s corruption; look no further than bad-faith Trump apologists like Scott Jennings, who had the nerve to sanctimoniously call for resignations over an act of executive sleaze. Biden’s legacy, and possibly his already low approval rating, will take a serious hit from this.

 

All of which explains why it’s actually silly to worry about Hunter’s pardon providing political “cover” for Trump’s forthcoming corrupt grants of clemency. No matter what Joe Biden did or didn’t do, Trump was always going to behave corruptly in abusing his pardon power and Americans were always going to not care. They know what they got when they brought the Trump circus back to town. When he frees hundreds of January 6 rioters next month, I’ll be surprised if his job approval drops so much as a point, if it drops at all. 

 

The Hunter pardon is, perhaps, a small step toward conditioning Americans to feel as numb to Democratic corruption as they feel about Trump’s. There’s some cynical political benefit to the wider party in that, no?

 

Ending the pardon power.

 

The same goes for the cries heard on Sunday night after Biden announced clemency for his son that it’s time for a constitutional amendment to limit the pardon power.

 

That advice is well taken: Thanks to the Supreme Court, on January 20 Trump will gain the authority to immunize executive branch officers for whatever federal crimes they commit on his behalf and to be completely immune from criminal prosecution himself in doing so. In a virtuous country, the pardon power is a way for the president to show mercy to repentant convicts. In a country as rotten as ours, it’s a license for the president to break the law with impunity.

 

I would get rid of the pardon power altogether if I could, as we no longer elect people fit to wield it responsibly. But America’s not going to get rid of it or even to reform it; Republican voters are too amoral themselves to ever support a constitutional amendment that would limit Trump’s power to place his henchmen above the law. And, in a way, I can’t blame them. If they get to abuse the pardon power willy-nilly to free assorted Trump cronies like Paul Manafort and miscreants like the January 6 rioters while Democrats face an outcry when they use it occasionally to spring a Hunter Biden or a Marc Rich, that’s a good deal for the GOP. It means that the norm against corrupt pardons operates mostly, although not entirely, to restrain the left.

 

The only way in theory to get those Republican voters to see the virtue of limiting the pardon power is for Democratic presidents to enrage them by abusing it on a Trumpian scale. Again, the Hunter pardon is a small step in that direction. If the outrage over it ends up generating bipartisan introspection over executive clemency power, it will have achieved something civically useful.

 

But it probably won’t, right? In all likelihood, a campaign of ever more corrupt pardons by Joe Biden over the final seven weeks of his term would, rather than inspire bipartisan disgust, generate exactly the sort of desensitization to corruption that I described earlier. Instead of rallying around a constitutional amendment to limit presidential clemency, the two parties will grow inured to them and come to expect corrupt pardons as just another perk of winning the White House, like getting to nominate federal judges.

 

Having leaned as far into political nihilism as we already have, I don’t think realistically there’s a way to lean out. Both sides will start leaning in further until the country falls over.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria Stance Is a Stain on Her Record

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

There are very few actors in the militant drama unfolding inside Syria that we could plausibly call pro-Western. There was a time when that mantle would have been applicable to some of the forces attempting to dismantle the murderous Baathist regime in Damascus, but they were snuffed out. Bashar al-Assad’s forces shelled and starved them, and Vladimir Putin’s air force pummeled them into submission. All the while, an acquiescent West facilitated the depopulation of the areas those rebel groups disputed, after which it looked away while Assad’s armies established precisely the conditions that provided the regime with a new lease on life.

 

The despot and his apologists claimed when it was not true that the Syrian civil war was a binary conflict. The West had to choose between a bloody secular authoritarianism or savage jihadists (whom the Assad regime incubated). Now that this binary dynamic has prevailed, partly because of the Assad regime’s defenders’ advocacy, they have the gall to insist they were right all along.

 

We should expect no contrition from those who think they’ve had this conflict pegged from the start despite its many fluctuating subtleties. But the reignition of the Syrian civil war over the past several days amid the advance of a Turkish-backed Islamist rebel group should also prompt a variety of reflections on how that war unfolded, to say nothing of the factors — from Russia’s diminishment on Ukraine’s battlefields, to the degradation of Iran’s Shiite militias in the region, to the illegitimacy of the Assad regime — contributing to regional instability. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to serve as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence grants us just such an opportunity.

 

The Free Press’s Eli Lake recently provided his readers with a pile of evidence indicating why the public should be skeptical of Gabbard’s instincts, but he also dispensed with some of the more unfounded accusations dogging the onetime Democratic representative. There is no evidence, for example, that Gabbard has ever been employed by or collaborated with foreign intelligence services. It doesn’t make it any better if Gabbard came to her habit of defending Moscow’s and Damascus’s abuses honestly. And if Gabbard is to be confirmed in her role, Lake notes, “The former Hawaii lawmaker will have to show that some of her positions have evolved.” Indeed, we should hope she’s undergone a wholesale metamorphosis.

 

“Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” Gabbard told MSNBC in 2019. That is a bizarre thing for any informed person to say, much less a veteran of the Iraq War. The Assad regime facilitated the introduction of insurgent elements into Iraq from the outset of the war. Sometimes, Syrian military personnel supported the efforts of former Saddam Hussein regime loyalists and jihadists to kill American soldiers. U.S. special forces even mounted raids inside Syria during the insurgency to neutralize the militants set on slaughtering Americans and scuttling the American project in Iraq. Only a truly warped worldview would lead someone to conclude that, because they oppose a U.S. mission, setbacks to that mission — even the bloodiest sort — cannot be described as threats to U.S. interests. We can only hope Gabbard’s views have shifted in the last half decade.

 

But they probably haven’t. Gabbard has promoted her belief that U.S. support for its objectives via proxies on the ground in places such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and even Afghanistan only contributes to the jihadist threat — a shockingly chauvinistic outlook that assigns all agency to the United States and none to its enemies, not just the jihadists themselves but the enemy capitals that support them. Indeed, Gabbard too often accepts at face value the pronouncements of America’s enemies, unbelievable though they may be.

 

Trump’s ODNI-chief nominee rushed to defend Assad against charges leveled by the Trump administration when she insisted that it could not be responsible for the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in which over 70 were killed and hundreds seriously injured. She mindlessly called Trump’s punitive strikes on chemical weapons targets — a key U.S. strategic objective, given Washington’s interest in preventing chemical warfare from becoming the status quo of the battlefield — “illegal regime-change war to overthrow the Syrian government.” On that front, her views stubbornly refused to evolve.

 

Gabbard also lent undue credence to Moscow’s narratives, the foremost of which was that the Russian-Assad axis was busily degrading jihadist elements in Syria while the U.S. and its allies were backing them. “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria,” the representative wrote in 2015. “But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.” She ill-advisedly added that, while Barack Obama refused to attack the al-Qaeda terrorists arrayed against both the U.S. and the Assad regime, “Putin did.”

 

What “Putin did” was execute a preview of the total warfare against civilian population centers it would later apply to Ukraine. Russian warplanes bombed hospitals and maternity wards. Moscow’s forces backed Syrian forces on the ground cordoning off whole cities and blocking the distribution of humanitarian assistance to starve out their defenders. While the Assad regime purchased its own oil from the nascent Islamic State, Russia targeted the anti-Assad opposition to the exclusion of the jihadist elements the Obama administration was (extremely reluctantly) compelled to eventually act against.

 

“Jabhat al-Nusra’s methodology positions it to rise as the Syrian opposition fragments under Russian pressure,” one Canadian government study from the period concluded. “Despite its stated intent, Russia’s intervention is helping Jabhat al-Nusra transform the Syrian opposition and establish a base for attacks on the West.” In other words, the very radicalization and consolidation effects Gabbard so often frets about when those conditions can be attributed to U.S. actions were occurring, but Moscow was the cause of it. If Gabbard couldn’t see that then, why would she see it now?

 

Retailing the baseless Russian version of events can be most charitably attributed to ideologically motivated blindness. But it’s not harmless. The attractive proposition in these Soviet-style narratives isn’t that they render Assad and Putin the good guys in a pat morality play. What proved too tempting to resist was the notion that America was the bad guy all along.

 

The Syrian civil war is the historical font from which so many of the world’s traumas have sprung. It was the training ground for Russia’s marauding militias and the sandbox in which it perfected the brutal tactics it is now bringing to bear in Europe. It was and remains a source of civilian refugees destabilizing the prevailing political compacts in the nations that surround it. It has become a finishing school for Islamist terrorists. It was where Barack Obama’s credibility was laid to rest. And it was the place where noninterventionists tested to its limits the theory that the U.S. could forever divorce itself from a fight over some of the most consequential territory on earth without suffering any blows to its permanent interests abroad.

 

All this didn’t seem particularly confusing at the time. It appeared only to befuddle those who approach geopolitics from the premise that the United States is a malignant force on the world stage, and it would be better for everyone if it retreated behind its borders. If Gabbard has given up on all that, it represents quite the evolution. But she wouldn’t be where she is today absent the paranoid iconoclasm that has come to characterize her career in national politics. I wouldn’t hold my breath in anticipation of a convincing conversion narrative.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer Wants to Ban the Red-State Model

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

 

Donald Trump swept the battleground states in 2024, which won him the Electoral College and the presidency. But he won the national popular vote in large part because he reduced Democrats’ margins in blue states. Compared to Joe Biden’s 2020 vote share, Kamala Harris did five points worse in New Jersey and Massachusetts, four points worse in New York and California, and three points worse in Illinois and Connecticut, netting Trump millions of votes.

 

Blue states have been losing residents — and House seats and presidential electors. Two of the top beneficiaries have been Florida and Texas, which each gained House seats after the 2020 Census and are projected to gain seven total House seats after the 2030 Census. Despite the influx in population, Texas remains safely red, and Florida went from a swing state to a red state.

 

Voters are fleeing and rejecting the big-spending, high-tax, anti-worker agendas of blue states, much to Republicans’ political benefit. That’s why Trump’s intent to nominate Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R., Ore.) as secretary of labor makes no sense. She has supported legislation that would make the red-state model of governance nearly impossible and empower the same unions that contribute to blue states’ woes.

 

Blue states with strong government unions have a taxpayer-funded interest group entrenched in the government itself that will always demand more spending, which inevitably means more taxes. Absurd disparities between states — such as how New York’s government spends roughly twice as much per person as Florida’s — result from such constant union pressure. These unions also oppose Republican policy goals such as school choice and civil-service reform and support Republican bogeymen such as DEI, ESG, and abortion.

 

States need to be free to restrict the power of these unions, which even many supporters of the New Deal labor laws that still govern unions today, including President Franklin Roosevelt, believed should not exist. But Chavez-DeRemer co-sponsored the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would force the blue-state model of government unions onto red states.

 

That bill would force all states to engage in collective bargaining with all public employees, effectively overturning most red states’ laws limiting the practice. It would nationalize all public-sector bargaining rules by giving the Federal Labor Relations Authority power to overrule state officials if rules don’t meet arbitrarily defined “minimum standards.” It would prohibit past Republican reforms championed by Scott Walker and Ron DeSantis, such as mandatory union recertification elections, and reinstate automatic dues deduction from public employees, which Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee have ended just in the past two years.

 

Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, most Democrats in Congress, the teachers’ unions, AFSCME, the Teamsters, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer support the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Not one Republican senator does.

 

Chavez-DeRemer also supports the PRO Act, which would invalidate right-to-work laws in all 27 states that currently have them. Republican governors know how valuable right-to-work laws are for luring businesses fleeing blue states. Overwhelming majorities of Americans, including union members, support the commonsense idea that union membership should always be voluntary, but union bosses would prefer government compel their dues.

 

The PRO Act would restrict independent contracting along similar lines as California’s A.B. 5, one of those blue-state policies voters resent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 12 million Americans use independent contracting as their primary source of income, and 80 percent of them prefer independent contracting over traditional employment. Workers today want flexibility and self-control, not rigidity and union control.

 

Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, most Democrats in Congress, the teachers’ unions, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer support the PRO Act. Not one Republican senator does.

 

It would be one thing if these anti-conservative policy stances were necessary concessions Chavez-DeRemer had to make to win in her Oregon swing district. But she lost after only one term in the House.

 

It’s not as though Republican senators don’t have ideas on labor policy. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has introduced the National Right-to-Work Act, which would simply strike some words from federal labor law to guarantee that union membership is voluntary for all workers nationwide. That bill has 31 Republican co-sponsors. Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) has introduced the Employee Rights Act, which would protect workers from union intimidation, guarantee secret-ballot elections for unionization, and ensure the continuation of the independent-contracting jobs that so many workers like. That bill has 27 Republican co-sponsors.

 

It’s not a coincidence that the chamber of Congress designed to protect states’ interests has a majority of Republican senators lined up against the pro-union ideas Chavez-DeRemer supports. Red-state senators know why red states are succeeding, and it’s not because their governments are cozy with Big Labor.

 

One argument for the Chavez-DeRemer pick is that it’s a necessary token for the labor unions which at least refrained from endorsing Harris. But the cabinet position is a much bigger prize than warranted for neutrality, especially given that plenty of right-to-work conservatives went all in for Trump.

 

Over 95 percent of private-sector unionized workers today never voted for their union to represent them. When given the freedom to choose through right-to-work laws or Supreme Court decisions, union membership rates inevitably decline. Half of U.S. union members today work for government, and government unions stand in the way of Trump’s policy agenda. A Republican administration needs a secretary of labor who will stand for workers, not organized labor. The future of red states’ success depends on it.

The End of a Scam

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

 

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen.

 

Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son Hunter Biden is just the latest evidence.

 

No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing.

 

The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling business that was at the root of Hunter’s tax evasion — the president’s son wouldn’t have had any money to evade taxes on if it weren’t for all the foreign largesse.

 

Every politician ends up shading the truth somewhere along the line, and it was going to be awkward for President Biden to admit that he might pardon his son. When asked about the possibility, though, the president could have said “No comment” or “I’m not going to discuss a hypothetical.”

 

Instead, he flatly denied it, and his allies wove his denial into a narrative about Biden’s abiding commitment to our system of justice. He was “a president living the rule of law” (MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann) and “a true American who believes in democracy and the way the system is supposed to work” (Joy Behar of The View). Etc., etc.

 

Now Biden has made all the people who issued these stirring testimonials look like naïfs and hacks.

 

Their mistake was attributing any grandeur to Joe Biden. He has made a long, undistinguished career of being a middling politician from a small Democratic state and had just enough staying power to become president when he was already a has-been.

 

In sizing up Biden and Trump, the Democrat’s media supporters could have paraphrased the famous bumper sticker from a 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring two unpalatable choices: “Vote for the unimpressive hack — it’s important.”

 

Instead, they felt compelled to create an illusory Biden, an epic figure whose amazing personal qualities made him an indispensable buttress of our institutions and norms.

 

Biden was puffed up into a world-historical figure who had saved American democracy by winning one election against Donald Trump, who, of course, simply came right back to win another against Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris.

 

He was a second coming of FDR, when the truth is that he won the presidency in 2020 by default against an unpopular incumbent buffeted by a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic.

 

He was restoring faith in our system, even though he routinely exceeded his constitutional authority with his executive actions and he supported a Court-packing scheme that, not too long ago, would have been universally condemned.

 

He had the health and mental acuity to serve another four years in office — never mind his marked decline that was plain for all to see.

 

And he was, whatever else you thought of him, rigorously ethical. This was an incredible claim given the amount of money that came sluicing into the family coffers thanks to the generosity of dubious foreign actors.

 

Biden denied knowing anything about Hunter’s business dealings — a blatant lie.

 

He denied meeting with any of his clients — yet another lie.

 

And, true to form and appropriately enough, he lied about the prospect of pardoning Hunter.

 

In justifying his act, Biden issued a misleading statement about the case and implied that his own Justice Department, the institution whose integrity he was supposed to be upholding, engaged in a politically motivated prosecution of his own son. He concluded with perhaps the most galling falsehood of all: “For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth.”

 

Maybe, sunk in self-deception, the president somehow believes that, but no one else should. He’s ending his term with a self-interested act that will only serve to convince more people that self-professed defenders of our institutions like him can’t be trusted.

The Scandalous Hunter Biden Pardon

National Review Online

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

The sun rising in the morning was less likely than Joe Biden’s failure to honor his promise not to pardon his son. No matter how indignantly the president and his staff repeated this vow while he campaigned for reelection — and then while Vice President Harris campaigned after Biden was supplanted as the Democratic nominee — it was always certain that, once the election was over, Hunter would be granted full clemency. Indeed, the question was put repeatedly because Biden’s “no pardon” guarantee insulted the public’s intelligence.

 

The inevitable came on Sunday night, at the end of a holiday weekend. Biden has largely faded into irrelevance since his party dumped him after his disastrous debate performance in late June. But, by then, a jury had already found Hunter guilty on felony gun charges in Delaware, and the president’s son was staring at a September trial on criminal tax charges that would implicate his father because they were based on the millions Hunter derived from the Biden family business of peddling Joe’s political influence. Consequently, the prospect of a self-interested presidential pardon remained a campaign issue, and Biden’s post-election betrayal of his commitment not to grant one was always going to be major news.

 

The president knew the pardon would be scandalous. There are signs that he tried to soften the blow to his legacy. Following Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the election, Biden’s Justice Department moved swiftly to dismiss the criminal cases it had brought against the president-elect. Legally, it was not much of a concession — longstanding DOJ guidance proscribes criminal prosecution of a sitting president. Politically, however, leaving the cases open and forcing a Trump-led DOJ to dismiss them would have been messy for Trump; by relieving his successor of that headache, Biden appeared magnanimous. Perhaps the public could be persuaded to look at the preordained Hunter pardon as part of a clemency package — an ending of both the Biden and Trump cases that would turn the national page from a deeply divisive era.

 

If this was the play, it’s not working.

 

Biden’s half-century political career is littered with mendacity, self-dealing, and crass calculations. The president could have looked the country in the eye a year ago and said he was issuing a pardon because he had already lost his older son to cancer and could not bear the imprisonment of his drug-addicted, habitually self-destructive younger son. Yes, it would have been an abuse of power. It would even further have put the lie to his pretensions that his name is synonymous with integrity. Americans, however, are a forgiving people. They’d have understood a father’s love for his (now 54-year-old) child if the president had just been honest about it. But that is not the Biden way.

 

Hunter was in these straits because he has lived a life of privilege. Despite his substance abuse and debauchery, he made millions selling access to his father, with his father’s knowing assent, to agents of foreign powers — including corrupt and anti-American regimes. To the great frustration of investigators, the Biden Justice Department steered their probe away from the president, narrowly focusing on Hunter’s tax crimes (which were too blatant to ignore). Prosecutors dragged their feet to ensure that the financial crimes stemming from Joe Biden’s time as Obama administration vice president could not be charged due to the lapsing statute of limitations.

 

Hunter had also lied about his drug abuse on a federal form in obtaining a gun which was lost near a school. The average American would promptly have been indicted — and certainly would not have had the Secret Service come by the gun dealer’s store to try airbrushing the evidence. But this was the president’s son, so no charges were brought for years; then, with the statute of limitations running out, the Biden DOJ tried to make all of Hunter’s legal troubles disappear in a sweetheart plea deal: In exchange for guilty pleas to two puny tax misdemeanors (with a Biden DOJ recommendation of no jail time), all the tax felonies would be dropped, while the gun charges would be “diverted” and then vanish.

 

The deal imploded when an alert federal judge questioned its stark irregularities. Embarrassed by the scandal, the DOJ had no choice but to prosecute — but all the while knowing that a pardon was ineluctable.

 

Hunter’s litigation strategy made that clear. He would admit no wrong and went to trial on the gun case despite overwhelming evidence and certain guilty verdicts. In the tax case, he pled guilty during jury selection in order to spare Democrats a trial spotlighting the lucrative Biden family business in the weeks just prior to the election. In the unusual arrangement, though, Hunter refused to acknowledge guilt and pled guilty to all nine counts. He never tried to work out a more reasonable plea with less prison exposure because he knew he didn’t need to worry about such details. Dad would take care of it.

 

And now the president has done just that. But not before tending to the politics.

 

Biden’s DOJ tried to make the case disappear before the campaign heated up. When that didn’t work, the president let his son be subjected to two prosecutions because a pardon at that point would have wounded his reelection effort. It would also have stepped all over the effort to prosecute Trump and then build a campaign around the theme that Trump was a unique danger to norms and the rule of law. Then in the campaign stretch run, with his son theoretically facing 25 years’ imprisonment, the president vowed there would be no clemency because an election-eve pardon would have set him up as the scapegoat if Harris lost. And now, with the election finally over, here comes the pardon.

 

The president is as predictable as, well, the pardon of his son. Naturally then, we were treated in his Sunday night pardon announcement to the laughable claim that Hunter was singled out for prosecution (by Biden’s own DOJ!) because of politics. The truth, of course, is that he was given preferential treatment because of politics. Biden spent decades writing laws increasing the penalties for federal gun and tax crimes and urging their stricter enforcement. It is late in the day for him to be shocked that he got what he legislated for.

 

It fits Biden’s legacy well: a tawdry move by a tawdry man that will be remembered best for easing Trump’s way to issue more controversial and dubious pardons of his own and minimize the blowback from an increasingly cynical public.

Let’s Not Go Overboard

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has every reason to be skeptical of Trump’s appointment to lead the FBI, Kash Patel.

 

Patel has cultivated an image of himself as a Trump flunkey — the author of a sycophantic children’s book about our “king” and a profiteer capitalizing on MAGA merchandise. He has also promulgated his intention to use the levers of the justice system to dole out vengeance against Trump’s adversaries, irrespective of constitutional niceties.

 

Patel has leveled sharp criticisms against the agency he has been tapped to lead, some of which have merit. But just because Patel is a critic of some aspects of an institution that demands reform doesn’t render him a good candidate to do the reforming. And because the Trump adviser’s attacks on the FBI speak to his qualifications more than does his résumé, the U.S. Senate is amply justified in applying uncompromising scrutiny to this nomination.

 

But in the pursuit of a searing rhetorical flourish, Bolton’s opposition to Patel’s nomination went a bit overboard:

Beria’s crimes extended beyond his instrumentality to Stalin’s political cult. According to post-thaw testimony, Beria used the domestic security apparatus he controlled to abscond with unsuspecting women on the streets who would be delivered to his soundproof rape room. Beria was among the foremost architects of the Great Terror, the author of many death warrants and extralegal executions unauthorized by any official edict. He engineered the show trials, the forced confessions, and the duress and abuse that produced them. “The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale,” one former Soviet prisoner observed. “He industrialized the Gulag system. Human life had no value for him.”

 

Patel may not be the best qualified person to lead the FBI — indeed, his pick may signal Trump’s determination not to properly reform federal law enforcement, but to wield it as his own political tool — but Bolton is correct that the “FBI is not the NKVD.” And it will never become the NKVD because the United States is not the putschist Bolshevik regime.

 

The Soviet Union was established as a terror state. It was a lawless entity insofar as its every act was justified on the basis that the proletarian revolution had a monopoly on legitimacy. Jacobinism and its prescription for permanent domestic conflict against an evolving cast of internal enemies was baked into the Soviet self-conception from the jump. The Trotskyites who rewrote early Soviet history in the West comforted themselves with the notion that Stalinism was a perversion of the revolution, but Beria and his NKVD represented the full flowering of Vladimir Lenin’s terroristic enterprise.

 

Patel could not transform the FBI into a Chekist organization even if he wanted to (although merely wanting to would constitute more than sufficient grounds for the Senate to deny his nomination). Even if Patel is a bad fit for the Bureau, his critique of how that apparatus has conducted itself in recent years deserves a fair hearing. That should not be lost in a scattershot attempt to denounce Trump’s appointees that does collateral damage to America’s durable constitutional protections on liberty.

 

Donald Trump’s conservative skeptics will need to reserve all the credibility they can retain during the president-elect’s second term in office. They should jealously husband it.

Post-Election, the Transgender Movement Continues to Deny Reality

By Rhyen Staley

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

 

Following the national election, author Joyce Carol Oates posted on X that the “‘transgender issue meant a good deal to some voters,” and that she can “only conclude that many voters were made to hate & fear by rightwing media caricaturing & demonizing them.” According to Oates, the real problem was the “‘scapegoating” of transgender individuals over a fabricated or embellished moral outrage by conservative media.

 

Since then, more pundits and influential individuals have posited similar conclusions — either people do not understand the transgender issue or they are making a mountain out of a grain of sand. Some are claiming both.

 

While parents and community members may not always be deeply versed in queer theory and its tenets, they are tuned in enough to know it is a destructive force that leaves kids and society worse off, not better.

 

For many voters for whom the “transgender issue meant a good deal,” it is very real in their lives, in their children’s schools, and in their community.

 

The pervasiveness of queer theory and its tenets in the K–12 education system is not a myth meant to “scapegoat” a small group of individuals; it is a tangible fact for a lot of families around the nation.

 

For example, Parents Defending Education has documented over 1,100 school districts across the country that have policies in place that dictate that teachers and staff are to hide a minor student’s gender transition from parents. These policies, covering over 12 million students, often include language that gives males access to female-only locker rooms and bathrooms. In some cases, these policies state that students on overnight trips can choose to share sleeping quarters based on their “gender identity.”

 

In fact, families from Colorado’s Jefferson County Public Schools are suing the district over its policy of assigning students to overnight housing based on “gender identity” as opposed to sex. The suit comes after an eleven-year-old female was assigned to share a bed with a male student on a school trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and sixth-grade males on a school-sanctioned camping trip were assigned to a cabin where an adult biological female who identifies as “non-binary” shared the accommodations and monitored the showers.

 

Even more alarming, Seattle Public Schools’ Nova High School and Meany Middle School allow the school-based health center provider to offer students “gender-affirming care,” which includes access to hormones and hormone therapy and “referrals for gender-affirming surgeries.” Seattle Public Schools also has a policy that requires staff to keep gender transitions a secret from parents.

 

Not only does this far-left radical ideology end up in district policy, but it also permeates curricula for the youngest of students.

 

Chicago Public Schools’ health-education guidelines start injecting queer theory and its tenets into course content as early as pre-K. By fifth grade, students are taught about puberty blockers, and in sixth grade, they are taught to use pronouns properly.

 

In America’s heartland, West Des Moines Community Schools’ “Shared Language” webpage features far-left language such as “binder” and “binding” (as in chest binders), “coming out,” “drag,” and “genderqueer.” It states that the intent of the site is to “leverage language in achievement of belonging,” but the glossary is “NOT to be used to advance any agenda besides the four objectives above.” It would seem pretty clear that if these words are being promoted as “shared language” in the name of equity, they are advancing a queer agenda.

 

The implementation of this ideology is not only limited to the academic setting but is also starting to colonize athletics as well. As a result, it is putting young girls and women at increased risk of physical harm by males, as well as robbing them of opportunities and accolades.

 

In 2022, North Carolina high school volleyball player Payton McNabb was on the receiving end of a hard hit from a male opponent. She sustained a brain injury and long-term complications as a result.

 

Additionally, during a 2023 high school field hockey game, a female player suffered injuries to her face and mouth from a ball hit by a male opponent. That same Rhode Island school forfeited their game with the same school this fall owing to a male still being present on the roster.

 

While people like Joyce Carol Oates downplay parents and the public’s concerns over the transgender issue and the implementation of queer theory into society, many families have to deal with the destructive reality that the ideology has wrought in their lives.

 

The far left’s postelection reaction has revealed that, as a collective, it appears it is not willing to engage in self-reflection and introspection; especially when it comes to transgenderism and its impact on families.

 

Most Americans still judge ideas based on their merits and outcomes; those same Americans sent a very clear message to proponents of queer theory and transgenderism this last election: leave our children alone.

This Is Who Joe Biden Has Always Been

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

There have been many highly irritating features of Joe Biden’s hapless presidency, but chief among them, undoubtedly, has been his apologists’ deep-seated need to turn the man into something that he is manifestly not.

 

The nature of partisan politics guarantees that flawed political candidates will be transmuted by their champions into saintly men of destiny. But the arrival of Donald Trump has pushed that tendency beyond its limits. Just as Trump’s many serious flaws have been exaggerated into cliché — Trump is not Hitler, and does not come close to being so — so his opponents’ virtues have been extrapolated into heaven. To the honest eye, Joe Biden was a midwit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth’s Last Honest Man. After he won the White House, this second characterization was foisted upon us with abandon.

 

It was never true. Worse still, it was the opposite of true. Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he would be pardoning his wayward son, Hunter, for both the federal crimes of which he had been convicted, and the many other crimes whose prosecution remained pending. In much of the commentariat, this development elicited surprise — not least because, on a whole host of occasions, President Biden and his team had stated flatly that no pardon would be forthcoming. Some of this surprise was performative. But much of it was not. Once again, the press and its brothers in the Democratic Party had been undone by their own credulity. If one repeats a lie often enough, the old saw goes, one eventually comes to believe it. And Joe Biden is an honorable man.

 

He’s not, of course. He never has been. He’s a liar, a blowhard, a partisan, an asshole. He’s not decent. He’s not straight-talking. His election did not represent a return to normalcy — or anything like it. That the ultimate defense of Biden has always been “but Trump” is — or, at least, ought to have been — rather telling. Donald Trump is a bad man; that Biden’s Praetorian guard has been obliged to triangulate around him is devastating. Nobody praises George Washington by comparing him to someone else. One does not establish Mother Teresa’s piety with sordid references to others. Their merits are merely announced — as one might announce one’s arrival at a fixed point in space. Joe Biden’s merits cannot be treated like this, because Joe Biden’s merits do not exist. They are projected, contrived, fantastical. When one examines the proposition even briefly, one sees that Biden is to Rectitude as Kamala Harris was to Joy.

 

At its highpoint, the Biden Delusion brought with it some truly preposterous claims, which culminated in the insistence by a collection of self-serious historians that Joe Biden had been the 14th-best president in the history of the United States — ahead of Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant, no less. In a series of encomia over the summer, Biden was relentlessly described as “consequential,” as a paragon of “uncommon decency,” and even as “the man America needed.” His flaws were explained away as myths. His imperfections were attributed to a childhood stutter. His corruption and indulgence were recast as a father’s love for his son. When he lied — and boy did he lie — his words were simply ignored. The logic undergirding this process was circular but seductive: Biden had to be good, because he had to win, and he had to win because the other guy was bad, so, clearly, he couldn’t be bad himself, because if he were bad then he might not win, and he had to win because the other guy was bad. Capiche?

 

It didn’t work. Now, as before, Americans do not much like Joe Biden, because they can see that there isn’t much to like. Now, as before, Americans do not much admire Joe Biden, because they can detect that Joe Biden isn’t admirable. Now, as before, Americans have resisted the urge to collapse ecstatically into paeans about his integrity, because they can sense that this claim is a façade. Yesterday, Biden rewarded their skepticism. Having lied incessantly about his desire to pardon his son, Biden not only issued the pardon anyway, he had the gall to adorn his decision with the assertion, “For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: Just tell the American people the truth.” Evidently, he hasn’t kept up with the times. Nobody believes any of that these days.

The Biden Crime Family Gets Away with It

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

On the menu today: This isn’t just about Hunter; this is about Joe. A review of White House transcripts reveals ten times that either President Biden or White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphatically assured the public that there was absolutely no chance that the president would use his authority to pardon his son Hunter for his various crimes — six felonies combined, six misdemeanors. This was predictable, and predicted, because no matter how many times Joe Biden looked you in the eye or television camera and gave you his “word as a Biden,” the overwhelming majority of us knew it was — to use one of the president’s terms — “malarkey.” To be a Biden is to be above the law, and that’s been clear for a long time.

 

You know whose life got a lot easier late last night after news of the Hunter Biden pardon broke? Trump’s choice to be the next FBI director, Kash Patel. Because Senate Democrats are going to argue that the country can’t have partisan politics and personal loyalties and connections to the president mucking around in the justice system. And Senate Republicans are just going to laugh.

 

Hey, look at the bright side, you probably didn’t stick your neck out arguing, “People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves. . . . They can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”

 

A Predictable Pardon

 

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, July 27, 2023:

 

Q: Thank you. If I can go back to the first question of the briefing. I know you said not a lot has changed since yesterday and that it’s a personal matter, but from presidential perspective, is there any possibility that the President would end up pardoning his son?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: No.

 

Q: Well, is there (inaudible)?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I just said no. I just answered. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, September 15, 2023:

 

Q: And just a brief second one. Would the President pardon or commute his son if he’s convicted?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So, I’ve answered this question before. It was asked of me not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And I was very clear, and I said no. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, December 8, 2023:

 

Q: One more on this. Only because you’ve said it before, I just want to re-up in — in light of these new charges. You’ve said before that the President would not pardon his son. Is that still the case?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Nothing has changed. That is still the case. [Emphasis added.]

 

President Biden, in an interview with ABC News’s David Muir, June 6, 2024:

 

Muir: As we sit here in Normandy, your son Hunter is on trial. And I know that you cannot speak about an ongoing federal prosecution, but let me ask you, will you accept the jury’s outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is?

 

Biden: Yes.

 

David: And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?

 

Biden: Yes. [Emphasis added.]

 

A written statement from the president, June 11, 2024:

 

As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, June 12, 2024:

 

Q: So, you’re not ruling out that he would commute the sentence?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Look, what I’m saying is that the President — the Pre- — I have not spoken to the President about this. And what I’m saying is he was asked about a pardon. He was asked about — he was asked about the trial specifically. And he answered it very clearly, very forthright. As we know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet. I don’t have anything beyond what the President said. He’s been very clear about this. [Emphasis added.]

 

President Biden, during a press conference in Fasano, Italy, June 13, 2024:

 

With regard to the question regarding the family, I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. He has overcome an addiction. He is — he’s one of the brightest, most decent men I know. And I am satisfied that — I’m not going to do anything. I sa- — I said I’d abide by the jury decision, and I will do that. And I will not pardon him. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, August 14, 2024:

 

Q: You’ve said from the podium that President Biden would not pardon his son. If Vice President Harris is elected, would he tell her also to not pardon his son?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I — I mean, that’s a hypothetical that I — look, the president — I can speak for the president, and he said he would not pardon his son. And I’m just going to leave it there. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, September 5:

 

Q: Good. How are you? On Hunter Biden changing his plea, does the White House have a comment at all? And does that change the president’s calculus on pardoning his son?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So, on your first question, I — I’m not able to com- — to comment at this time. On your second question — which was, I guess, part of one question — it’s no. It’s still no. [Emphasis added.]

 

Karine Jean-Pierre, November 7:

 

Q: Secondly, his son, Hunter, is also up for being sentenced next month. Does the president have any intention of pardoning him?

 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no. [Emphasis added.]

 

That adds up to ten times that either President Biden or his primary spokeswoman stood before the country and assured Americans that he would not use his pardon power to effectively wash away Hunter Biden’s convictions on tax evasion and gun charges.

 

And then last night . . . “Eh, never mind.”

 

In June, a jury convicted Hunter Biden of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying he was not a drug user, and illegally having the gun for eleven days. Then in September, Hunter Biden pled guilty to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses, including, “willfully failing to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes,” and “filing false business deductions in order to reduce the very substantial tax liability he faced as of February 2020.” Those deductions were money spent on “exotic dancers” and “escorts.”

 

(Jill Biden, October 27, 2020: “Decency is on the ballot.”)

 

One more example for the “it turns out” election: As it turns out, Joe Biden was perfectly willing to use his presidential power to pardon criminals to protect his son all along.

 

The president even had the audacity to claim, “I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

 

If you’re issued a full pardon, you are indeed interfering with the justice system’s decision-making. Sure, you allowed the Justice Department to proceed, but what did it matter? You had that full pardon in your back pocket the whole time.

 

Of course, President Biden just issued a written statement last night; he didn’t answer any questions about this decision. He then flew to Luanda, Angola.

 

Roughly one year ago, I wrote, “There are a lot of men who go into strip clubs. There are significantly fewer who get the stripper pregnant. There are a lot of men who get a woman pregnant unintentionally. There are fewer who get into long, messy battles about paying child support for the child of that unexpected pregnancy, and exceptionally few who are legally permitted to pay child support in the form of paintings. There are many men who have lost a beloved brother. There are very few who promptly started an extramarital affair with their late brother’s widow.”

 

Remember, President Biden described his son as “one of the brightest, most decent men I know.”

 

In the summer of 2023, when Hunter’s daughter Navy was four, we were told that President Biden finally recognized that he had seven grandchildren, not six. The following December, the Biden family abandoned its tradition of hanging stockings by a fireplace in the White House for all the president’s grandchildren.

 

It is as if, in every conceivable circumstance, year by year, Hunter Biden chose the single-most destructive option available. If almost anyone else on Earth made decisions like these, they would end up in the direst of circumstances, probably either behind bars or dead. But Hunter Biden has managed to escape the worst consequences, over and over and over again, because he’s been the son of a powerful senator, then the vice president, then a likely presidential candidate, and then the president.

 

Last night, Nate Silver fumed, “Why do you think Trump(ism) gains a following? Well, actually, that’s complicated. But part of it is because elites of all political stripes are absolutely out for themselves and complete moral hypocrites. And Democrats stake a claim to moral superiority when Trump does not.”

 

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it over the weekend, despite the denials from campaign-finance managers, the Harris campaign may have finished with $20 million in debt at the end of the race after all — despite raising roughly $2.15 billion once you throw in the money raised by the Biden campaign beforehand.

 

Hey, maybe, just maybe, the Democratic Party isn’t led by good, honest, honorable, and ethical people.

The Sadly Predictable Trajectory of the Hunter Pardon

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

Those of us who write about politics for a living spend a lot of time searching for the animating principles that motivate actors in American public life. A cynical sort would call that a fool’s errand. It is truer than it should be that politicians often respond to more atavistic impulses, and their rationales can often be parochial or even base. But it does violence to the civic compact when Americans come to expect that their elected representatives will, of course, prioritize themselves and their families over the country. The pageant surrounding Hunter Biden’s indictment, conviction, and pardon cements that pernicious impression.

 

When it came to Hunter’s sordid conduct, the voting public never believed the president. Despite the administration’s protests in its defense and Hunter’s, staggeringly large majorities believed the president’s son was guilty of the charges against him. A majority said they thought the government had provided Hunter with more favorable treatment than a less well-connected figure would receive from the Justice Department (because he was). And when a jury convicted Hunter Biden of the charges against him despite the government’s best efforts, most voters approved of that outcome. They told pollsters they believed that the president had benefited from his son’s indiscretions and that his interventions on his son’s behalf were inappropriate.

 

It’s reasonable to presume that voters never believed the president or his allies when they repeatedly assured their critics that Hunter Biden would never receive a presidential pardon. But that didn’t prevent Biden administration officials from saying, over and over again, that Hunter would receive fair justice.

 

“No,” the president said plainly when asked last year if he would commute his son’s sentence. “Yes,” he later added after David Muir inquired whether he had “ruled out a pardon.” His first press secretary refused to even “entertain” the “hypothetical” reporters kept asking about. His second couldn’t deny the contention enough, perhaps because the White House’s denials were so unsatisfying. “It’s still a no. It will be a no. It is a no, and I don’t have anything else to add,” an exacerbated Karine Jean-Pierre said as late as September. “’Will he pardon his son?’ ‘No.’”

 

Democrats insisted Biden would not do what he did last night, not just because it was so unseemly. They did so because it was politically advantageous and because the president’s action on his son’s behalf would betray the degree to which this administration had pulled on strings behind the scenes to secure Hunter Biden’s future all along. Indeed, the “full and unconditional” clemency granted to the president’s son, which immunizes him from any future prosecutions by Donald Trump’s DOJ, are reflective of the corrupt “sweetheart deal” Hunter was offered from the start.

 

Voters cannot be surprised by the fact that Democratic denials proved hollow. They watched Joe Biden sacrifice whatever political self-preservation instincts he possessed as he kept his last surviving son so close regardless of Hunter’s myriad liabilities. The president’s failure to successfully shield Hunter from the consequences of his own actions, Democrats argued, was a display of Joe Biden’s commitment to the rule of law. But now that the inevitable has occurred, Democrats are compelled to retreat to negative partisanship’s unsatisfying shibboleths to keep the party’s dispirited troops in line.

 

President Biden had no choice but to pardon his son, what with Donald Trump’s “intention to weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department,” the Bulwark’s Kim Wehle wrote. If the pardon isn’t indicative of the extent to which Joe Biden is a better public servant than Trump, it is at least evidence that he’s no worse than Trump. The “vast majority” of Trump’s pardons were granted to personal acquaintances or those of his allies, New York Times correspondent Peter Baker wrote, including Jared Kushner’s father, Charles. And if all that fails to grab you, at least the MAGA movement’s leading lights are rending garments this morning.

 

Perhaps the Daily Beast’s readers take some solace in seeing their adversaries properly owned, but there’s little comfort here available to anyone else. Voters may conclude that the use of the president’s absolute pardon power is less a check on other competing articles in the Constitution but a tool to insulate the great house to which the executive branch has been entrusted. If it comes to be seen as an instrument of corruption, voters will come to regard it — and those who wield it — with contempt. They may have reached that conclusion already.

 

The Hunter Biden saga has been an exercise in dissimulation of the worst sort — the kind that everyone recognizes is a farce. Joe Biden, his aides, and his allies all knew they were retailing a fiction when they promised Americans Hunter Biden would not receive special treatment, and their audiences knew they were being sold a bill of goods. The rote performance of it all is a sad coda to the Biden era. The outgoing president marketed himself as a remedy for what Democrats insisted was the corruption that prevailed in the Trump years. All he succeeded in doing was convincing the public that the misuse of presidential authority is the bipartisan status quo.