“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
HL Mencken
It’s impossible to overstate how dangerous things are for our nation at this moment. And sadly it’s very hard to be optimistic about whether a solution to our predicament is possible. There is no silver bullet available to quell the seditious satisfaction millions derive from a rabidly unhinged President they demand lead them further into the abyss his incompetence and immorality always descends to. However bad he was yesterday won’t be as awful as tomorrow, and tomorrow will always be better than the next day it becomes. Regardless, the wretched core will never harbor second thoughts; MAGA, like any other totalitarian steamroller, only accelerates and never reconsiders. Every day we allow it to move forward is scorched-earth yardage we will have to replant. Five more years is the whole ball game.
All that said, merely replacing a moron with a far more functional and accomplished brain farter, or one far less corrupt opportunist, is certainly not the campaign mission statement one wants to see next November as we fight to save the republic. Perhaps we should demand our best to clean up the mess our worst has made? Shouldn’t we at least aspire to refreshing excellence instead of a stale track record. This is no time for mediocrity and moral ambiguity.
Joe Biden has seen more than his share of both luck and triumph, misfortune and tragedy. If nobody in Hollywood would consider Trump’s self-parody and reality outrageousness as the basis for a serious movie script, a narrative of Biden’s life story would surely get green-lighted. Elected to the US Senate at the preposterously young age of 30, Biden has been front and center for near every seminal event since Watergate. Perhaps no living pol possesses more stature than Delaware’s finest, who served loyally for eight years as our first black President’s VP.
Yet and still, Biden has endured searing tragedy. In 1972 his entire young family was involved in an auto accident that killed both his wife and daughter, leaving him a widower with two young boys. In 1988 Biden came as close as one can to early death himself as doctors successfully caught a brain aneurysm in the nick of time. Just several years ago he again buried one of his children, this time his eldest son Beau from cancer.
Through it all Biden has straddled the line between populist hyperbole and savvy statesmanship, fierce allegiance to the little guy and comfortable lunches at the Palm with donors surely picking up the tab. In short, despite a lifetime of most often admirable public service, he is a target-rich environment for Fox/AM character assassination. He, like Hillary Clinton, provides more than enough for the signature false equivalence of Sean Hannity or Rushbo to equate. The current Ukraine imbroglio involving his son, Hunter is example A.
Mykola Zlochevsky served two stints as a top Ukrainian public servant, both in the embattled country’s energy sector. His most recent post was as ecology minister under the kleptocracy of Russian puppet Victor Yanukovych, who was swept out by reformists in early 2014. During Zlochevsky’s tenure as ecology minister a plethora of energy companies were granted license approvals critical to their activities. Most would become spokes in Bursima, a company Zlochevsky later established, which became the country’s largest energy producer, making its owner a multi-millionaire. One hardly need be a conspiracist to connect those dots.
After the thoroughly corrupt Yanukovych was ousted, with confronting Russia’s incursion into the Crimea the top priority, NATO allies were adamant that any program to furnish the new regime in Kiev with economic and military resources start and end with the confidence that Ukrainian government was no longer the cesspool it became under the previous leadership. To this end, US Vice-President Joe Biden was tasked to put the elbow on the nation’s legal apparatus, which he did with enthusiasm, later boasting of using pending Western aid as a hammer to promote reform. At the end of the day most all agreed, while what replaced Yanukovych was far from perfect, it was a night and day improvement.
Under such circumstances it made perfect sense for any Ukrainian business facing such scrutiny to make cultivating ties to significant US players a priority. Rather than simply wait passively to be put under the microscope, get proactive and enlist those who can provide luster to your defense, credibility to your enterprise. It’s doubtful anyone would serve such a strategy better than the son of the point man for the entire inquisition!
By all accounts Hunter Biden has struggled to make his mark. Addiction, financial and emotional challenges have dotted his adult life with frailties responsible for many a failure. And while his father was inarguably one of America’s most powerful and connected, until he hit the lecture circuit etc. after leaving office in 2017, he was by no means wealthy enough to provide his son with financial certainty. Hunter needed to make his own living., and he was never much concerned about the optics created by his career path. A stint as a K Street lobbyist here, as a “counsel” for a New York law firm there. One has to put food on the table, no?
Most recently, Hunter Biden was a business partner of Chris Heinz, heir to his family’s ketchup fortune and John Kerry’s stepson, who does have the financial wherewithal to be a bit more choosey about where to work and who to work for. When Hunter Biden accepted an invitation to sit on Bursima’s board of directors, Heinz was immediate and adamant in his opposition to the idea. In fact, when Hunter Biden ignored Heinz’s objections and accepted the slot, it ended their business relationship. And while the Bidens have implied there were other reasons for the dissolution, Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi left no room for doubt, declaring that working for Bursima was “unacceptable” and “a lack of judgement in this matter was a major catalyst” for Heinz ending the partnership. Hunter Biden’s father never raised such concerns, the total sum of his reservations expressed in a passing “I hope you know what you’re doing” admonishment to his son. This despite the pressing concern by his own staffers, understandably worried about appearances.
It can be argued that, years ago as the new Secretary of State was setting up her operation for overseeing Foggy Bottom, had a White House staffer looked her dead in the eyes and called her a foolish diva for insisting her business emails proceed through a server at her home, providing careless fodder for GOP muckrakers, we would all be sleeping better. Now we have a leading candidate for the most important Presidential nomination in our history with a very similar scenario brewing on his stove. Whether either is “fair” is irrelevant; the Fox/AM weaponization of false equivalence is the bedrock of its nihilism, providing them bullets is no longer an option.
Assessing the Biden candidacy already requires one to issue a number of passes for resume hiccups and stumbles his assets presumably outweigh. Moreover, he would be 86 years old at the end of his second term. Now his inexplicable failure to take his son to task when it mattered most will be a constant counter-narrative to the vital business of impeaching the worst blight on our system we have yet experienced. Unlike, most of the slop Trump and his Fox/AM line cooks toss at the wall, this clump has more than enough truth to it to make for a sticky mess. Food for thought. BC