President Joe Biden often likes to tout his involvement in passing the Violence Against Women Act. So, naturally, the president was on hand to speak about the issue this week at an event marking the bill’s reauthorization.
With his trademark eloquence, Biden emphasized how the reauthorization took aim at revenge porn, which he described as “a new civil rights cause of action for those whose intimate images were shared on a public screen.”
“I bet everybody knows somebody,” the president explained, “that in an intimate relationship, what happened was the guy takes a revealing picture of his naked friend, or whatever, in a compromising position and then blackmails.”
True enough, Mr. Biden. Who among us, to pick a random hypothetical from the aether, has not had to face the scandalous repercussions of intimate, illicit photos surfacing after we left a laptop uncollected at a computer repair shop in the sleepy state of Delaware?
Cockburn shudders at the thought that such pictures, which could include anything from indelicate images of his sexual conquests and large appendage to his casual, right-before-bedtime crack pipe, might not only be seen publicly but also could carry potential consequences. And not just for him, mind you: that’s the thing people always lose sight of in matters involving revenge porn — when such photos come to light, it affects not just you but also your loved ones.
Why, Cockburn can only imagine how ashamed he would feel if, let’s call it what it is, filthy revenge porn in any way hurt the presidential aspirations of his former vice president father, or the lover-cum-sister-in-law of his deceased, war hero brother, or even the estranged stripper-mother of his drug-induced, Southern love child. To say nothing of the harm it would do to Cockburn’s own professional reputation among his Ukrainian financier buddies (who are going through a lot at the moment as it is). That the release of such photos should classify as a civil rights issue is putting it mildly!
Of course, as noted above, Cockburn is only imagining worst-case-scenario hypotheticals. There’s no way anything like this could happen to anyone in real life, especially someone as respected and admired as, say, the president’s son Hunter.
Indeed, according to one insider with intimate knowledge of Hunter Biden’s photo library, “Is it blackmail if you feel no shame about it?”
