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As The Motte's most rabid Trump partisan: I really don't care. I'm not sure what people expected.
Maybe this will finally end years of gaslighting about Hunter and Joe. The idea has always been that Hunter traded money for connection to Joe, and Joe was in on it, and took a cut. The rest of Hunter's crimes were just personal antics, of a kind any normal person would have received worse punishment for. But it wasn't really "political" except from bungling Republicans who couldn't sell the connection from Hunter to Joe, so made it look like all this uproar was over dick pics et al.
Personally I like the pardon power and am glad it exists. This is probably a much better outcome than the alternative. The example of other nations shows thay prosecuting presidents and their families is much likelier to lead to coups and crises than genuine justice and law.
The uproar about Hunter Biden always felt farcical. From Clinton's emails to Mar a lago documents.
Temporary talking points and weapons that you're supposed to look down on for the enemy but the other way when it's your team.
Typical political shitflinging. It means nothing, was noise, is noise, and will continue to be noise. Useful for filling the air and giving the playmakers background latitude, however.
Hunter Biden wasn't farcical inherently, the DOJ's handling of his cases were. They decided to go for the least important crimes he committed, the gun, the taxes, and ignore FARA and anything else that put the microscope anywhere near Joe (see also the total lack of investigation into the classified documents found in Joe's garage, basement, and Chinese-funded university office). Hunter has never been about Hunter any more than busting any street dealer for dope is about that dealer. The target of a legitimate investigation is the Biden crime family whos head and chief operating officer was, for most of the most know relevant potential crimes, vice-president Joe Biden. Joe ran an open air corruption market getting his failson sinecures in return for official government acts, as well as his brother, and his wife.
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Joe built his political career on peddling political influence to foreign nationals. Hunter was both the ultimate proof, and a terrible distraction because Republicans couldn't close the sale. It looked like political cornball. If this had been 60's, this would have dwarfed Watergate. But nobody cares anymore because every politician does it, and every politician does it because nobody cares.
Sadly, selling out Americans and the working class has been a pasttime of the oligarchy for the last 60 years, agreed.
Hopefully tariffs will begin to reverse the trend, but we will see!
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There is considerable evidence that Hunter was selling access to Joe. That is, by itself, quite illegal and highly objectionable.
It gets worse when "illegitimate foreign influence" has been a consistent talking point against Trump and anyone else who went against the Blue Tribe policy consensus.
It gets worse when Trump was impeached for attempting to direct the justice department to investigate the evident corruption.
It gets worse when the Justice Department evidently slow-walked investigations and attempted to cut sweetheart deals to provide political advantage to Biden.
It gets worse when The federal government and state governments have been bending and outright breaking laws in an attempt to destroy Trump legally and politically.
It gets worse when this is not a recent problem, and in fact Trump made opposition to it central to his campaign in 2016.
The media is, of course, in no hurry to assemble the facts into a coherent, easily-digestable normiefeed narrative. That doesn't change the weight of the actual facts. There is path dependence here, and the result is that you will never, ever get trust and cooperation across the aisle in this area ever again.
Do you think Kushner soliciting billions of dollars in Saudi money while Middle East envoy (almost certainly for a word in Trump’s ear) is corruption that deserves to be investigated? Everybody seems to do this.
Damn, that sounds pretty bad. I wonder why no one ever bothered to look into that? Hunter Biden pretty clearly engaged in money laundering and tax evasion in an attempt to conceal earnings from his illegal activities. Did Kushner do that? If so, why has he not been charged?
...On a deeper level, it seems that this topic highlights a salient difference between our perspectives. I do not "trust the system". I am opposed to the "manipulation of procedural outcomes." I am in fact opposed to corruption, but at the moment it seems to me that corruption is best opposed through an adversarial process, not a cooperative one. I think Biden's corruption is best prevented by Republicans prosecuting him. I think Trump's corruption is best prosecuted by Democrats prosecuting him. The Democrats have shot their wad, and have nothing to show for it. Now I want to see the Republicans take a good, honest swing. I am not swayed by arguments that "everyone does it", because I have observed that these appeals to informal "norms" are one of the primary mechanisms by which procedural outcomes are manipulated. If Kushner is corrupt, which I do not particularly believe, Democrats have had ample opportunity to prosecute him and their failure to do so is their own failing. It seems to me that the best path toward low corruption is to enforce the laws fairly but mercilessly against Democrats where my side is able, and trust self-interest to compel Democrats to do the same to my side where they are able. To the extent that corruption has been normalized among our elites, with a common understanding that a blind eye should be turned to bribery and influence-selling, defecting on that understanding seems like an excellent way to break it for good. And since that understanding seems entirely against the public interest, this seems like a good thing to do.
This logic has been a huge part of the value of Trump generally, in my eyes. We all knew the system was corrupt, but no one involved was interested in burning their own meal ticket, and so all involved cooperated in maintaining and concealing the corruption. The solution was to feed the system something it couldn't cooperate with, and this has worked astonishingly well. The system can conceal its corruption and it can suppress attacks on its legitimacy, but it can't do both at the same time while also fighting a war with itself. And so, we see the perceived legitimacy of large parts of the system outright collapsing, and direct attacks on major institutions are now within the Overton window.
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As i said, mostly noise.
If you think broad-based consensus on the legitimacy of the justice system's interactions with politicians isn't something that we should consider terribly important, then sure. It's not as though such questions have been a chronic flashpoint for the Culture War over the last decade. I'm sure it'll be fine.
If your reality predicts collapsism stemming from the Hunter Biden Pardon, go for it, it is your reality, and a useful rhetorical weapon.
So look, you can take the position you do, but engage in good faith, don't snarkily dismiss people as "living in their own reality." I am annoyed by this comment not because you're being rude to @FCfromSSC (he can take it, and he and I don't agree on much politically) but because it is the sort of comment that's been flying a lot lately, the Twitter-dunk, the dismissive "Wow," the failure to engage except to the minimum degree necessary to snidely express your contempt.
Don't do this.
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The biggest issue is Biden's blatent lying about it to collect on the facade of justice when expedient and avoid the consequences when not. This is what tears at the credibility the most, not the pardon in itself.
Moderation in all things. You need a stalemate here, which has been perilously broken on both sides by the left now inside of a year. Yes, escalation in prosecuting the opposition's family leads to bad outcomes. But so does flagrantly demonstrating that overt familial corruption and enrichment are given a blank cheque, as long as one obtains / stays in power. The family in power gets to break laws sell influence and avoid prosecution as a perk, is a bad overt admission.
By both prosecuting Trump on nonsensical charges & by pardoning Hunter who was overtly criminal and corrupt after repeatedly stating letting it play out was the justice-based approach, the left has broken both sides of what should be a schelling point of stability.
I don't really mind Biden lying about it, I don't take the word of politicians to be all that sacrosanct. Politicians lie all the time, and I don't just mean in small ways that amount to fodder for a rant on facebook. A reasonable person would have accepted the possibility of Biden lying; and people who earnestly posted pro-Biden No Pardon propaganda made themselves easy marks.
I agree with you overall, but I'm struck by the helplessness of the frame the discourse has taken. Biden lied, Biden pardoned Hunter, Biden prosecuted Trump, Biden demonstrated that the first family gets to break laws and get away with it... but, voters legitimized this. Final responsibility lies with the American people. Even if we take 2020 and fraud and Hunter's laptop and say, "Americans were cheated, it wasn't our fault," people up and down the line endorsed all of this. Biden chose to run again and the Democratic party allowed him to. RFK tried to primary Biden and was thoroughly shut out. Millions of Democrats turned out to vote for Biden in the primaries, record turnout, far exceeding what Obama got in 2012. Biden tanked the debate, and while they made him stand down from re-election, nobody made him stand down, or even offer a plausible explanation for why he should remain in office if he's not fit to run.
Whatever people are saying now, they endorsed this, the American people allowed this to happen. Yeah, Biden lied, but at a certain point that should have been priced in. It's naive that it wasn't. And the Democratic electorate had every opportunity to change course and didn't.
It's not about you minding it. It's the audicity of this specific propoganda. This particular lie carried an incredible amount of water across the media, specifically to discredit Trump by contrast as a subversion of the rule of law, and to counter serious accusations of a politicized justice department
See supercuts like this: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1863563615858577505
In a world where this wasn't a not just major campaign theme, but an active judicial attack on Trump, no the lying wouldn't have mattered so much. If this was just a test of Biden's trustworthiness or integrity, that's one thing. Its the context of Biden using the lie to provide attack ground and further discredit criticism of his judicial weaponization, that make his lies so bad here.
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