Two Stories
At least one of them true
Impossible
At about 5 P.M. on December 12th, 2023, walking on Boynton Avenue in San Jose:
I picked it up, returning us to our regularly scheduled reality.
The Tragedy of Joseph Biden, A Conjectural Account
Joseph Biden was a powerful political figure with two sons. One died tragically, the other was a disappointment, incompetent and irresponsible, but his father loved him. As fathers love their sons, even disappointing ones.
His father gave him the job of selling access to his father. Access to powerful politicians is valuable even if they only meet with you, listen to you, never promise to do things for you. Whether the father was corrupt, whether in exchange for money he did things he otherwise would not have done, we do not know. It is not a part of this story.
The father had other people he could have trusted to do the job. That would have left his son achieving nothing, a higher income equivalent of the kid who drops out of college to live in his parents basement and spend his time smoking pot and playing video games. And Joseph loved his son.
Incompetence might not have been a major problem but irresponsibility was. The son left a laptop full of damaging evidence, mostly against him but some arguably against his father, in a computer repair shop, never got around to picking it up. A copy of its contents ended up with his father’s political enemies.
The father, by this time Vice President and a future presidential candidate, had enough allies in the security services and the media to maintain the fiction that the laptop files were not trustworthy evidence, might be the work of foreign enemies, at least long enough to get him elected President.
The son’s irresponsibility was not limited to losing the laptop. He also earned quite a lot of money — access to a Vice President is valuable, to a President more valuable — and neglected to pay taxes on it. He claimed large deductions for purported business expenses that were obviously, provably, not business expenses. He might have gotten away with it, slipped under the radar; the IRS cannot afford to check all, even most, claimed deductions. If he had not been the President’s son.
He was charged with the deliberate failure to pay more than a million dollars in taxes, convicted (this is where my story moves into the future) and sentenced to ten years in prison.
His father lost the election. A president, even a lame duck president, has the power to pardon a convicted criminal. He had publicly pledged that if his son was convicted he would not pardon him. But Joseph was old, his political career over, and he loved his son.
The father won the election. A president has the power to pardon a convicted criminal. He had publicly pledged that if his son was convicted he would not pardon him. Pardoning him after the election would weaken the President and his party for the next four years, doing it at the end of his term not so much. But four years in prison …
Joseph loves his son.
I've known politics is corrupt all too often, since at least when I was a teenager in Illinois, as I watched a local ballot in a small town (2500 or so) 'steal' votes on paper ballots and no one seemed to care. She kept a pencil lead under one of her long fingernails and either spoiled ballots by marking a vote that voided the actual vote for that office or by making a vote for her favored candidate (party) when an office had been skipped.
But decades later the corruption somehow seems to be even worse than Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall over 100 years ago. And not only do few seem to care, too many not even in the 'system' seem to embrace it.
Well, 250 years is a pretty long run for a republic, I guess.
I think Hunter Biden has done some horrible things and likely deserves to--and will--be in prison. I'm a conservative who would be glad to weaken the democrats for several years. That being said, if Joe Biden pardoned Hunter on his way out of office, my reaction would be just a shrug. I don't think people will hold it against him.