Dec
3
2024

The Pardoner's Tale

Take it away, Nate:

Robby Soave has it as the lead story on yesterday's Reason News Roundup: Joe Pardons Hunter.

Pardon me boy: President Joe Biden has issued a blanket pardon to his son, Hunter Biden, for all offenses Hunter has committed or may have committed from January 1, 2014, through yesterday. Said pardon is "full and unconditional," and pertains to any alleged criminal wrongdoing. Hunter Biden is off the hook for tax fraud and for improperly procuring a firearm while addicted to drugs; he is also protected from any future inquiry into alleged influence peddling.

This total immunity represents a complete and utter betrayal of a campaign promise. When he ran for reelection, Biden told the public in no uncertain terms that a presidential pardon was off the table. He also said, unambiguously, that he "will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process."

Nate Silver's tweet is also available at Soave's article, as are a number of other responses.

Schadenfreude is such a useful word, but it doesn't apply here. Is there a German word that expresses the concept of "a sick pleasure in witnessing partisan hacks demonstrating their obvious sycophancy"? Ann Alrhouse scratches that itch by embedding a tightly edited 9-minute montage of lavishing praise on Joe Biden for not pardoning his son.. And so will I:

How many apologies are due from these toadies? How many will we actually get?

Jim Geraghty is appropriately, and unmercifully, honest: The Biden Crime Family Gets Away with It.

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.”

That last quote is from John Harwood, once a "journalist" covering the White House for CNN during the Biden Administration.

But just a reminder from Charles C.W. Cooke: This Is Who Joe Biden Has Always Been.

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.

Don't hold back, Charlie. Tell us how you really feel.

Also of note:

  • America doesn't do aristocracy well. Kevin D. Williamson opines on The Aristocrats.

    If there’s a word for the guy with the hook who yanks vaudeville performers off the stage after they’ve overstayed their welcome, I’m the premature version of that. Too eager. When Barack Obama wrested the Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, I wrote that I was grateful at least that we wouldn’t have to write about the Clintons anymore. Now, I worry they’ll try to run Chelsea next time around. When Donald Trump announced his 2016 campaign, I wrote a piece headlined “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” and when he was dragged out of office in 2021, I capped off—or so I thought!—my Trump commentary with “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter.” But like whatever iteration of the “Donkey Kong” franchise we’re on now, some simian specimens from the 1980s don’t know when to go extinct. I’ll probably end my professional days writing about the ghastly little spawn he named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

    But the one that might hurt the most: I really thought we were done with the Kennedys.

    But, no. The Kennedys, like the Annenbergs—another family of jumped-up gangsters who spent the 20th century playing aristocrats—have become fully institutionalized, with Trump having selected nanny-molesting junkie criminal weirdo Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that great bolus of messianic pretension expelled by Millbrook into the world of dopey left-wing activism—to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s a cretin in every way that matters.

    I assume the article is paywalled, so consider this a teaser advertisement to get you to subscribe to the Dispatch.

  • It has a long-standing tradition of existence, and also of killing people. Another fat target deserving the death penalty in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the FDA. The verdict is handed down by Jeffrey A. Singer:

    It takes 10–15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a pharmaceutical company to navigate the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory process and bring a new drug to market. Many seriously ill people die waiting for the FDA to approve drugs that regulators in other advanced countries have already approved, a phenomenon called "drug lag." It is impossible to imagine how many drug remedies remain undiscovered and how many people needlessly suffer because pharmaceutical companies must divert excessive research and development dollars to the drug approval process, a phenomenon called "drug loss."

    This is not a new stance for Reason (or reasonable people generally). Back in 2021, the sainted Katherine Mangu-Ward also advocated that we Abolish the FDA. Gee, what was going on back then? Oh, right:

    Last year, hashtag activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to "defund the police" over more than 1,000 killings by law enforcement during the same period. Those deaths are tragic, and many could have been prevented with better policy. But they pale in comparison to the blood on the hands of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the last 12 months.

    Faced with the challenge of COVID-19, the FDA screwed up on nearly every level. When the agency did do something right, it was almost always by making exceptions to its normal policies and procedures.

    […]

    The FDA screwed up in prohibiting researchers from testing affected populations in the early days of 2020, when the virus might have been better contained upon arrival in the United States. It screwed up in refusing to lift requirements for mask manufacturers and by declining to allow good substitutes for masks in short supply. It screwed up by collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to protect a monopoly on testing tools that ended in a disastrous shortage. FDA staffers tasked with approving both treatments and vaccines screwed up by delaying meetings and taking days off as Americans were dying in unprecedented numbers of a disease for which the agency had potential solutions. At press time, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely available in many other nations, remained unapproved in the U.S., for reasons that are opaque to Americans desperate to resume normal lives.

    Maybe Trump and Junior could get Kevin D. Williamson to crack a smile if they managed to take Reason's advice.