Hunter’s pardon is the legacy of Joe Biden’s weakness

So Joe Biden decided to go out by doing the thing. And why not? For all the people who praised him for being noble and restrained, for insisting that no one is above the law and the court process must play out, what did they really do for him in the end? Plunge the knife blade under his shoulder blades with slightly less force than Nancy Pelosi? A betrayal is still a betrayal, regardless of the motives — and there are consequences for that; in this case, the consequences stand to Hunter Biden’s benefit. He is pardoned, with a vengeance.

Karine Jean-Pierre insisted it would never happen. Jen Psaki praised the president to high heaven, as a mark of his high character. Rachel Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC fooletariat claimed that the Hunter Biden verdict and decision not to pardon put proof positive that Democrats were the party of law and order, while Republicans were the party of self-dealing and corruption. And yet — as we all expected, it still happened.

The most insulting aspect of this is not the act of a pardon itself. Joe Biden’s statement — obviously drafted and sent to the press by staffers who, unlike the president, can string together more than one coherent sentence after another through most waking hours — insists that his son was being unfairly targeted in a politicized prosecution. This is, actually, a fair point. The federal gun crime — lying about being a drug user on a federal form — at the center of his Delaware court case is prosecuted rarely, typically only included in cases that are parts of a larger criminal prosecution. If the president’s pardon was narrowly tailored to the gun case, it would be a thoroughly defensible position, even if going against the “no 👏 one 👏 is 👏 above 👏 the 👏 law” rhetoric.

Except it isn’t. It’s a blanket pardon covering a decade of activity, a decade which includes Hunter’s incredibly long list of crimes regarding taxes, bribery, sex, drugs and more — more that we probably won’t ever fully know about, thanks to the sweep of Joe Biden’s pen. This puts the lie in bold: it’s not just a father’s understandable defense against a targeted prosecution of a president’s son, throwing the book at someone over a minor crime because of his last name; it’s an intentional, purposeful move to avoid justice under law — and to save your own skin from your involvement in any potential future investigations.

Democrats and their media cogs will write this off as the action of a loving father. But it isn’t. It’s doing the same thing that these partisans have always done — give Hunter Biden a pass, treating him like he’s a dysfunctional teenager instead of a pompous fifty-four-year-old prick whose day job is as a corrupt artist and night job is “sober-ish” in the mid-Atlantic sense. The Big Guy is cut from the same hypocritical cloth. He won’t even meet his granddaughter — I have. She’s lovely and polite — and I gave her a fruit snack. Joe should try it sometime.

Love sometimes requires you to be tough, to require honorable consequences, especially in the face of addiction of all forms. But Joe Biden is not tough or honorable. He just wears the aviators to make him look like he is. No one ever really bought it — and now we know for sure.