Just a Merciful Father
Let’s examine Biden’s innermost feelings: The digital front page of The New York Times this morning leads with a piece titled “How Biden Changed His Mind on Pardoning Hunter.”
“The threat of a retribution-focused Trump administration and his son’s looming sentencings prompted the president to abandon a promise not to get involved in Hunter Biden’s legal problems,” reads the subheading—the type of sympathetic portrayal I have a hard time imagining would be extended to Donald Trump if he did something similar.
To back up: On Sunday night, Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon for his son, Hunter, legally letting him off the hook not just for the kinda-silly gun charges of late but for all crimes he may have committed between January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. (“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth,” wrote Biden, who I don’t think intended to be funny, in the statement announcing the pardon. “They’ll be fair-minded.”)
There are two issues here: The first is that the pardon does not encompass just the stupid charges—lying about drug use when purchasing a gun, a crime libertarians don’t really believe should be a crime, and owning a firearm despite being an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance”—but that it also covers Hunter’s influence-peddling business dealings in Ukraine. (He started doing business consulting/serving on the board for the Ukrainian company Burisma in 2014, the date the pardon starts, for keen observers.) The second is that Joe Biden repeatedly lied about this pardon, claiming over and over again that he did not believe anyone, let alone his own son, to be above the law.
Here’s a beautiful supercut of both Biden’s own words and the fawning media’s credulousness:
SUPERCUT!
Corporate media: Obviously Biden would never pardon Hunter pic.twitter.com/gJRhASCAUs
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 2, 2024
“It was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push,” write sympathetic-seeming Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush, for The New York Times. “A pardon was one thing he could do for a troubled son, a recovering addict who he felt had been subjected to years of public pain.…Several people close to Mr. Biden said the decision created a conflict between two core identities: the anguished father trying to protect his son, and the president who takes pride in standing on principle.”
“Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty on the tax charges—after a weeklong gun trial in Delaware in June that rehashed the family’s darkest days—had further embittered Mr. Biden and several of his family members, who believed that Hunter was targeted only because of his last name. At that time, the anger within the family pushed the idea of a pardon from the notional to the plausible, according to several people familiar with the president’s thinking.
It was at that point Mr. Biden, who was, among other things, deeply concerned that the pressure of the trials would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon. It appears that there was never serious consideration of anything short of a full pardon, such as a commutation of his sentence, they said.”
It’s not a stretch to say that mainstream publications would not extend nearly the same amount of understanding and benefit of the doubt to Trump if he did the same. And Biden, who much of the press somehow believes is just a good guy trying his very best, has made a decision that has sacrificed norms and trust in the system for the sake of his screw-up kid. It’s all a fitting end to an administration that frequently deceived the American people.
At least now Hunter can focus on his art.
Supreme Court tackles Tennessee law on gender transitions: Tomorrow, the court will hear a challenge to a Tennessee law that bans medical providers from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgery for gender-transitioning minors. Crucially, the law allows minors to receive some of those treatments if the underlying condition being treated is not gender dysphoria.
The question the judges are dealing with is “whether the law makes dis
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