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The sleazy behaviour of the President's son and brother been a top-3 Republican talking point for some years now. The possibility of John Podesta's brother being a paedophile was also a major right-wing talking point. There is as much evidence that Joe Biden delivered any of the bribe-service implicitly promised by Hunter and James' schemes as there is that Clarence Thomas participated in his wife's insurrectionary plotting or that Samuel Alito participated in the petty harassment of a left-wing neighbour - i.e. none whatsoever in the legal sense, and not much in the Bayesian sense beyond the normal assumption that families stick together.
Anything that is Bayesian evidence that a prominent government official is disloyal is legitimately newsworthy. And a close family member engaging in obviously disloyal behaviour is weak Bayesian evidence that the principle is disloyal because families do, in fact, stick together and more powerful family members do, in fact, have a degree of control over less powerful family members' behaviour. This isn't a legal point, but the court of public opinion isn't subject to legal rules of evidence. Nor is employer discipline - I work for a bank, and if my wife were to get caught trading stocks on my employer's watchlist I would lose my job. If I told my wife "Please don't trade this stock - you could get me fired." and she did it anyway, I would be in a shockingly dysfunctional marriage. So my employer's compliance department assumes that she is doing it with at least my tacit approval.
The Alito incident should be less newsworthy because flying a controversial flag to troll a neighbour (and we now have tapes which, if genuine, prove that this is what is going on) is not disloyal behaviour. I am not obliged to believe a conservative Christian who insists that he has no control over his wife's behaviour. I can (and do) conclude that Alito doesn't take the kind of behaviour his wife is engaging in seriously enough to ask her to knock it off. But that just means he is a cockwomble - it doesn't mean that he is disloyal or corrupt. Given that six/seven of the nine Supreme Court justices (I am excluding Thomas, Roberts and possibly Gorsuch here) are partisan hacks appointed to rule the way their party wants, arguing about whether they are cockwombles or not is unproductive. But critically, the fact that Martha Ann Alito was trolling a neighbour rather than expressing support for an insurrection wasn't known at the time.
The republican talking point isn’t that Hunter and Jim are sleazy. The argument is that Joe was clearly involved. Now you might not believe it, but there is an obvious potential direct connection with Joe and there is documentary evidence supporting that connection. Smoking gun? Doesn’t seem. Enough to get to say more likely than not? Sure.
I don't think we disagree very much here. The Republican talking point is that Joe Biden has probably taken bribes from non-ally foreign countries in a way which is both corrupt and disloyal. Why should anyone think this? Given the lack of direct evidence unearthed by the Comer investigation, the main piece of Bayesian evidence is that Hunter and Jim are sleazy and that Joe presumably could have stopped them, but didn't. We both agree that Hunter Biden's behaviour is Bayesian evidence that Joe is a crook, and therefore is newsworthy - even in the absence of hard evidence against Joe. The question is why some people on this thread (including OP) have trouble applying the same argument to Ginni Thomas's involvement in the events leading up to January 6th.
Whats the issue with Ginni? She organized a conservative protest?
I don’t even think she’s been charged. What’s the issue here?
I 100% agree that Ginni and Clarence are both very conservative. They both organize (legally) conservative groups. In Clarence case it’s generally the Federalist Society where he’s a big swinging dick.
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Well I think there is more than that. For example we know Hunter made payments on behalf of Joe. We know Jim transferred money to Joe (allegedly as a loan repayment). We have testimony from people that Joe was involved. We have emails and texts from the participants saying Joe was involved. We have evidence that money was directed to many Biden clan members despite them not being involved in the shady business dealings (many grandparents want to send money to their kids). There is a lot more smoke here compared to Gini Thomas.
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