Welcome back to the weekly Carnival of Fools — the lucky 13th performance, as it so happens, and thus always an auspicious moment to subscribe. (I just checked my December calendar and, as it turns out, 2024 is truly my “lucky year” — note scare quotes — as I’m scheduled to write for you on both December 24 and December 31. Therefore expect seasonal sentimentality from the first installment, followed a week later by something saturated in boozy New Year’s Eve ennui.)
In the meantime, for those who feared we might enter December all logy and hung over from a carbohydrate-stuffed Thanksgiving break, I hope you kept to the lean meats and green beans instead, because we’re suddenly off to the races in the final month of the year. Chicago residents got an early start during the holiday break on reacquainting themselves with outraged disbelief; the rest of you had to wait until Sunday night, when Joe Biden finally did what we had been promised approximately ten thousand times by both the media and Biden’s own administration he would never do: He pardoned his criminal of a son, Hunter.
We Told You So, You Fools
In doing so, Joe Biden surprised absolutely nobody at National Review. Just ask Andy McCarthy or Jim Geraghty, who explain it in hydrochlorically acidic terms. Ask Noah Rothman, as he sighs with despair. Charlie Cooke is happy to tell you, twice. I’m really just here on Tuesday morning to broom up the scant few entrails left after the feast of outrage. But still, there is more to say.
The pardon is sweeping in its ambit. It is not merely a pardon of Hunter Biden’s tax conviction or a commutation of his (once upcoming and now null) sentencing for an illegal firearm possession. It pardons Hunter for all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” (The news of this broke midafternoon on Sunday, December 1; my first thought, naturally, was “Hunter Biden now has seven hours left to knock over a string of 7-Elevens and become a legend.”)
Surely there is a reason for the broadness of the pardon and its decade-long time window. Despite the wording — which gestures to Hunter’s tax plea in Los Angeles and his conviction in the Delaware gun case — it is impossible not to cynically assume that it is meant to preclude government investigation into his (and his family’s) series of deeply shady foreign consulting deals, ones that certainly lined Hunter Biden’s pockets and may have lined others’ as well.
The fact pattern here begins — quite luckily, given the time window of the pardon — in May 2014, when (even before being fully administratively discharged from the U.S. Navy for a June 2013 positive cocaine test) Hunter Biden had secured a position on the board of a Ukrainian oil company named Burisma. How did he get such a lucrative position? One can only assume it was due to his decades of oil industry expertise acquired in the service.
The Luck of Reilly
Let’s take a break for a moment and briefly marvel at the strangely divergent career of Hunter Biden, at least from the moment he failed his final drug test in June 2013 and was gently cashiered from the U.S. Navy. At that point he — by his own confession as well as that of his family — promptly became addicted to crack, separated from his wife, had an affair with his brother Beau’s widow, got the widow addicted to crack, and embarked upon a self-videotaped drug spree that ended with his getting another woman — with whom he was two-timing the drug-addicted widow — pregnant and mindlessly leaving a laptop full of shame at a Delaware computer repair shop.
And yet, at the same time, this man was mysteriously failing upwards, drawing so much money from various consulting and board associationships of the sort you would swear a barely functioning drug and sex addict wouldn’t have the time for. The IRS didn’t get around to investigating his strange income sources and building a case until 2019 and 2020 — after Trump had become embroiled in an impeachment scandal directly related to his pressing Ukraine for information about Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian ties.
After special counsel David Weiss slow-walked a prosecution until 2023, after the statute of limitations on several potential charges against Hunter Biden had conveniently expired, Hunter was offered a sweetheart plea deal that would have immunized him from prosecution on not only his gun charges but all other unrelated matters (including Burisma) — a deal that would have gone through had not a Delaware judge questioned its absurd overbreadth.
In other words, Hunter Biden is a man to whom a truly unusual amount of solicitude has been shown by the federal government and justice system in all its forms. We are talking, after all, about a man who was allowed by the court to make child support payments in the form of his own dubiously valued paintings. (We no longer talk about the scandal of Hunter Biden’s selling his own shabby artwork to nominally “blind” purchasers in what was clearly a cash-for-access transaction, but spare a thought for the buyers: How would you feel about having made that long-term investment right now?)
It would be folly to pretend that the reason for all of this is anything other than Hunter Biden’s last name. President Biden can therefore spare us his fatuous mewling that Hunter “was singled out only because he is my son.” He has in fact heretofore been protected from justice in ways far beyond what any typical American could reasonably expect precisely because he is Joe Biden’s son. And now he will be protected forever.
There is no happy ending to share with you here. The normally temperate Jim Geraghty titled his Monday Morning Jolt “The Biden Crime Family Gets Away with It,” and the choice of words strikes me as apt. They will likely get away with more, as well: Beltway insiders are already laying bets as to whether and when Biden will issue a preemptive pardon to his brother James — a man every bit as embroiled in lobbying and nest-feathering under the Biden family aegis as Hunter was, albeit with a much lower profile. That all of this, however corrupt, is entirely constitutional is of no comfort to me: I draw consolation solely from imagining Hunter Biden waking up yesterday morning, on December 2, 2024, and shivering in fear as the cold realization dawned on him that, from here on out, he has to live a crime-free life.
Some Thoughts on the Unfolding Crisis in Syria
On Saturday night, the world was shocked by the news of the fall of Aleppo, the ancient Syrian population center nearly bombed into oblivion by the Assad regime half a decade ago. Its downfall came without warning to a band of Turkish-backed Sunni rebels with all the least savory jihadist associations. (Many are forgivably unaware of the geographical details of dusty Middle Eastern countries, so if you weren’t up to speed on the region’s chronic instability, I can assure you that at least former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson did not need to ask “What is Aleppo?”)
It is a matter of enormous importance, and I wish I had more to say about it. I know only that I’ve lived through at least two Syrian civil wars, I didn’t pretend to understand either, and I’m not about to start now. But that’s out of resignation to my own ignorance as well as the sheer fog of war, not out of any lack of interest or desire to spend more time than we as a nation often do to understand matters of national importance bubbling over in obscure crucibles halfway across the globe.
What I’m Listening To: Little Stevie
I rarely promote my music podcast Political Beats around here. It’s a loving exploration of the discographies of the great popular music artists of the modern era with my co-host Scot Bertram as well as a monthly guest from the wide world of politics, journalism, or punditry who wants to escape all that for awhile — great for music nerds, but perhaps not what most readers are looking for.
I depart from that this week because I want to throw a question out there. We are covering the career of Stevie Wonder for the December edition of the show, and that puts me in the position of a happy child who already knows the Christmas gift he’s getting and is now just musing happily about unwrapping it. Wonder’s development from a child prodigy into a young man struggling for artistic independence from Berry Gordy’s Motown “factory” approach and then into one of the most influential and effortlessly joyful soul, funk, and pop artists of the Seventies is a story I’ve been dying to tell. (I care a lot less about telling the story of “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” mind you.)
But I can’t decide: Should this be one episode or two? Here’s his complete recorded discography in a YouTube playlist I arranged to help you decide.
Until next week.