Charlie Pierce has a reminder that the standards, they are double.
Sit yourselves down here around the turf fire, my friends, and let me tell you the fable of the Lucky American Businessman. This American businessman came from a wealthy and prominent family, but this American businessman was not very good at being an American businessman. He was not very good at being an honest American businessman, to be precise. But he was a lucky American businessman and, as we shall see, in the end that was all that mattered.
I wish I could quote the entire piece; it’s a master class in quiet seething rage. Neil Bush bumbled from company to company, trading on his name and family connections. (Not the first presidential relative to do so; all of the angst about Hunter’s business dealings fails to acknowledge the precedents.)
Among other things,
The Lucky American Businessman then went on to join the board of a savings-and-loan company, which coincidentally floated a bunch of loans to his friends, including the guy with the 80 proof taps. You may recall the S&L collapse as the bipartisan overture to the general economic catastrophe of 2008. When the Lucky American Businessman’s S&L failed, it cost the rest of us $1.3 billion, and his friends never paid back a nickel of the money it had loaned to his friends.
Anyone else might have seen their career on the downslope, but no…
The Lucky American Businessman went on to start a methane exploration company that found no methane. He then went on to a lucrative, if ill-defined, job with a multimedia company owned by a family friend. Of this hiring, the president of the multimedia company told a newspaper, “I’m trying to find a title for him, if you want to know the truth. He’ll be learning the business, basically.”
The Lucky American Businessman then went international. He found new friends in China, and Singapore, and Thailand, and the Middle East. He was pitching a new computer-curriculum system designed to make “hunter-warrior” children enjoy, say, American history without reading any of it. There were charges that the system simply dumbed down the subject.
While he was traveling abroad, it seems the luck businessman got really lucky — although it blew up his marriage. From the Taipei Times:
In a court deposition, taken in March and released this week, Neil claims that attractive women came to his hotel door looking for sex while he was on business trips in Hong Kong and Thailand. And as a big-hearted Texan, Neil, the third of five Bush children, merely did as he was asked.
"You have to admit it's pretty remarkable for a man to go to a hotel room door and open it and have sex with her," said his ex-wife's lawyer, Marshall Davis Brown.
"It was very unusual," Bush replied. He insists he didn't know them, did not see them afterwards and didn't pay them.
"Were they prostitutes?" he was asked.
"I don't know," he said.
That was not the only marital mishap, but moving right along…
This quote removed because no Presidential Pardon was granted — Pierce got that part wrong — but the rest still holds.
The founding fathers had disagreements about the power of pardoning and whether presidents should have it, but…
The Moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please. The pardon power is—theoretically, anyway—the only untrammeled royal authority granted to the office by the Constitution. The power was defended by Alexander Hamilton, especially in Federalist 74. His principal opponent at the nation’s founding was George Mason of Virginia, who seemed to anticipate the arrival in our politics of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and other Trumpist miscreants. According to James Madison’s notes from the Philadelphia convention, Mason argued:
Now, I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?
Pierce also weighed in on the pecksniffian moralizers with:
In pardoning his son, Hunter, the president got straight to the point.
The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases. 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. 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. Enough is enough.
emphasis added
What’s the point in playing by the rules when the rules only work one way? IOKIYAR. Semper IOKIYAR. Does anyone believe the Trump administration is going to let bygones be bygones when the cruelty is the point and retribution is job one?
But the true news bookend to the Hunter Biden pardon was the announcement that Kash Patel, the living embodiment of the president-elect’s unslaked thirst for vengeance, would be nominated to head the FBI just as soon as they can figure out a way to shuffle Christopher Wray offstage. (Take no meetings in the upper floors for a while, Mr. Director.) Wray is in the middle of a ten-year term, and to install Patel the president-elect would have to fire Wray, for which I am certain he could concoct a reason. But still, putting Patel in charge of the FBI would finish the process of turning the Department of Justice into the Pequod. From The New Republic:
Patel has said he wants to go after government employees who leak information to the press, as well as journalists themselves. On Steve Bannon’s podcast in December, he said that he and other Trump loyalists “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said to Bannon. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Pierce began this piece with a sentiment which sums it up for me:
I myself always have thought “Because fck you/him/her/them, that’s why” to be a perfectly adequate explanation for any action taken. So I am ready and willing to attribute most of the weekend’s news to that most durable human motivation. The difference is that the president-elect is saying, “Because fck you, that’s why” to democracy while the current president is saying, “Because fck you, that’s why” to the president-elect, and that, frankly, makes all the difference.
emphasis added
There are lamentations that this will tarnish Biden’s legacy. What legacy? You can see Biden’s ‘legacy’ already being set in stone by the right wing and the MSM. Here’s how they’re trying to shape the narrative with talking points like these:
It’s part of the same reflex punditry that trashed Jimmy Carter but made Ronald Reagan into a saint. Biden gave us competent leadership and had one of the most productive terms in office against impossible odds and total obstruction from the GOP and idiots within his own party. Democrats can’t get a break from the MSM press, and the right wing is determined to discredit and destroy their accomplishments by all means fair and foul.
Joe Biden is seeing everything he believed in trashed and rejected. He put his faith in the American People. Many have chosen instead Trump’s agenda of Retribution, Corruption, and Destruction, while others couldn’t be bothered to show up.
If as the end of his term nears he decides to pardon his son and to hell with the scolds and pearl clutchers, I have no problem with that. It may not be the ‘right’ thing or the expected thing, but it’s a human thing and given what he’s been dealing with all along, I will give him this one.
I am reminded of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones is confronted by a huge guy with a sword...
