Too late to be pardoned
I don’t subscribe to The New York Times, but I do receive their daily newsletter that provides a glimpse at the paper of record’s current headlines, a chunk of an article or editorial, and occasionally a whole article or editorial. Today’s newsletter contains this synopsis of the paper’s coverage on President Biden’s recent pardoning of his son Hunter Biden:
It may be the holiday season, but Times Opinion writers did not receive the pardon in a very festive mood. They weighed in saying things like this: President Biden “dishonored” his office (the legal writer Jeffrey Toobin, in a guest essay). The pardon was “disgraceful” (the columnist Bret Stephens) or “a profound failure” and “quite disreputable” (the columnists David French and Ross Douthat, respectively, in a conversation about the pardon).
Collins offered “a couple of lines of defense” — but even she called it a “sort of second-rate” pardon.
Douthat raised another “quasi-defense,” that the pardon “confirms a general mood of cynicism” — but it is a mood that is “so deeply entrenched that it’s not likely to be deepened that much further by one more act of self-dealing by an already-unpopular president.”
I have not read any of those opinion pieces in their entirety. But my initial response was, Come on, Joe, you are not the guy to do this. Except he is the only guy who can do this at the time being. And my reason for thinking all that was a sense that Hunter Biden had been prosecuted (persecuted?) as much for who his father is as for what he had done. After all, the oft-cited line of reasoning from experts has been that most individuals tried under his circumstances would have been offered a plea deal as opposed to prison time. But most people’s circumstances are not those of Hunter Biden’s and never have been. His circumstances have allowed him to live the life he’s lived, which has included along with tragic personal losses benefits and gains. His being pardoned is a product of his circumstances just as his sentencing would have been.
So here we are surrounded by nepotism on the right and the not so left to actually be the Left. It’s like a song by Stealers Wheel, only less catchy because we can’t all be nepo babies, can we? And so I think that Douthat line of thinking about “a general mood of cynicism” sounds pretty accurate and is probably an idea that should be promoted in discussions about why Donald Trump won an election and Kamala Harris did not. Just as the Biden pardon gives the impression that there are two sets of justice for American citizens — those that are connected and those that are not — , media coverage of the pardon and of the two recent presidential campaigns in general suggests that there are two sets of political standards for our current political parties, where one candidate’s vibing to a playlist and issuing wild promises of a brutal nature is a policy platform and another candidate’s 80-page PDF of policies is dismissed as just vibes.
In an article titled “6 Reasons Why Joe Biden Pardoned Hunter Biden,” Time Magazine’s Philp Elliott wrote:
Yes, Joe Biden flip-flopped with zero apology. Yes, he was running around the world — literally — telling everyone the justice system worked for both his son and his rival, Trump. Yes, he would take guff from some of the same folks whose approval Biden has chased for decades. But voters rendered their verdict on Biden’s by-the-books approach when they chose to return Trump to power. Heck, Trump repeatedly floated mass pardons for those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress. Voters decided that was appealing — or at least not disqualifying — and chose to give Trump the keys again.
Yet, while probably true, that line of reasoning is unsettling to say the least. In running against Donald Trump in 2020, Joe Biden largely positioned himself as a binary to Trump’s corrupt lust for power. Joe promised to be the adult in the room, to not throw ketchup tantrums and to restore some sense of normalcy. Joe Biden, as a white male, was also able to make such promises to voters in ways that Kamala Harris couldn’t, at least not in the same result producing manner, but throughout his presidency, Biden also couldn’t shake very real criticisms from the actual political Left that he wasn’t the binary promised. While making headway on workers’ rights and renewable energy sources, his high road approach eroded in Gaza. And, while the dogged prosecution of Hunter Biden’s every action suggests an unmoored and bloodthirsty Republican party, Biden’s pardoning of his son corrodes from within not the Office of the Presidency as so many pundits seem to fear and have tried to articulate but the binary veneer between two old men: the one threatening to throttle democracy and the one everyone once hoped might be able to stop him.
The most apt response I’ve seen to Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son is Devorah Blachor’s “Template for Trump Supporters Outraged over Hunter Biden’s Pardon” at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I also find it to be the most depressing response because of how the last line cuts to the quick and how a parody site that specializes in quick satire is now somehow one of the last voices for context.
A lot of people are in denial about where we are as a nation, and a lot of peple are peacocking in that denial, presenting ornamental claims based on honor and norms as if they still hold some merit in the discourse. But that discourse is largely dead. And Blachor gets that.
The McSweeney’s piece is seven paragraphs long plus one damning sentence at the end. Each paragraph shares the same unified structure and technique. Here’s a sample from the beginning:
Unbelievable! President Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, the worst criminal to ever walk the face of the earth. Whatever happened to law and order in this country? How could such a thing possibly happen in a nation that [ELECTED A MAN WHO WAS CONVICTED OF THIRTY-FOUR COUNTS OF FELONY / ELECTED A MAN WHO WAS FOUND LIABLE OF SEXUAL ASSAULT / ELECTED A MAN WHO REJECTED THE PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER AFTER HE LOST / ELECTED A MAN WHO LITERALLY CALLED FOR A TERMINATION OF OUR CONSTITUTION AND NO ONE EVEN REMEMBERS]?
And here’s a sample from near the end:
It used to be that being the president of the United States meant something — that this was a person we could look up to and trust to do the right thing. How did we get to this place of lies, deceit, and immorality? What could we have done differently? I guess we probably should have acted long before it got to this point. We should have put a stop to our nation’s descent into complete venality as soon as it started, like maybe when [HE WAS IMPEACHED THE FIRST TIME / HE WAS IMPEACHED THE SECOND TIME / HE CAME DOWN THAT FUCKING ESCALATOR].
The non-bracketed portions of each paragraph are in the voice of a Trump supporter feigning dismay and confusion at what Biden’s pardon has done to the Office and the nation. This frantic voice clings to the semblance of norms and recoils at their seeming destruction. But this voice much like our media fails to contextualize the current epoch.
The bracketed portions read as editorialized corrections, or amendments, that cut through the bullshit in ALL CAPS. What’s in the brackets makes clear that the repulsed Trump supporter is either ignorant of recent history or entirely full of it. I guess a third possibility is the perspective of an amnesiac. Regardless, the point is that Joe Biden is in no way a Prime Mover. He’s too late in the chain. Moreover, the scales don’t balance, as in the pardoning of Hunter Biden while not good for a democracy’s health pales in comparison to what’s already been done to it. Would his being sentenced to several years in prison have saved anything? Would it balance out the Supreme Court? Would it curb an authoritarian for the highest bidder style government? The answers are likely a no because the nation has never experienced a shortage on martyrs and fall guys.
The level of traditional media concern seems disproportionate to the act, at once too large for the singular action of the Office and too small given the context of the nation’s current plight. The final flailing of the Fourth Estate aimed at the one man in the room they hoped still took them seriously.
