Oh, puh-leeze! This is the pundits and news media repeating the “Biden’s too old” screeds again. First you scold Dems for being too nice and polite when street fighting is called for, then as soon as they step outside the bounds a tiny bit, you all go berserk, rending your garments and shrieking about how there is now no difference between them and the magas. Get a grip.
Absent a pardon, Hunter’s life would have continued to be hell, as the vile Republicans would never stop until they drove him into despair and possibly back to addictive behavior. You know he would never have been prosecuted at all — much less hounded by endless Congressional inquisitions — had his name not been Biden.
I guess the world looks pretty simple from the cheap seats way up high — maybe you should get down on the court with the rest of us and realize there are elbows being thrown. At least Joe didn’t appoint Hunter as Ambassador to France.
I don't think there's any good faith way someone could read this piece and conclude that I'm saying there's no difference between the Democrats and MAGA; such an argument would definitely not be in keeping with literally anything I've ever written about MAGA and the Dems. MAGA is an authoritarian menace to the United States that needs to be crushed and driven out of public life, full stop. The Democrats are the United States' sole remaining major pro-democracy party and have all manner of obligations to protect the U.S. and crush MAGA.
It sounds like we are actually in agreement that the Democrats need to be far tougher and willing to break self-defeating norms in their fight against MAGA. But for me, one of the problems with this pardon is that it breaks what should be a norm (not pardoning a family member) without advancing the fight against MAGA (and I don't think asserting the principle that Biden can use his pardon power however he wants will advance the fight, given that he's about to leave the Oval Office, though reasonable minds can differ on that point).
The day after the election I wrote that the Biden administration needed to kneecap the incoming administration by all manner of norm-breaking. I was thinking of things like leaking transcripts of Trump's conversations with foreign leaders, figuring out ways to send vast amounts of materiel to support Ukraine, holding public roundtables with military leaders to talk about their loyalty to the constitution, etc. We have waited in vain for such fighting spirit. Instead, we've gotten the Hunter Biden pardon. If Biden had been doing everything he could to kneecap the incoming admin, this might change the tenor of the pardon, but as a stand-alone it is needlessly adding fuel to the MAGA fire without providing anything like a countervailing boost to the Democrats' case against MAGA. This is not the Dems throwing elbows (which I'd love to see) so much as punching themselves in the face, though this is not the Dems doing it so much as just Biden, who is understandably but tragically concerned about his son at the expense of the larger fight against MAGA authoritarianism.
Oh, puh-leeze! This is the pundits and news media repeating the “Biden’s too old” screeds again. First you scold Dems for being too nice and polite when street fighting is called for, then as soon as they step outside the bounds a tiny bit, you all go berserk, rending your garments and shrieking about how there is now no difference between them and the magas. Get a grip.
Absent a pardon, Hunter’s life would have continued to be hell, as the vile Republicans would never stop until they drove him into despair and possibly back to addictive behavior. You know he would never have been prosecuted at all — much less hounded by endless Congressional inquisitions — had his name not been Biden.
I guess the world looks pretty simple from the cheap seats way up high — maybe you should get down on the court with the rest of us and realize there are elbows being thrown. At least Joe didn’t appoint Hunter as Ambassador to France.
I don't think there's any good faith way someone could read this piece and conclude that I'm saying there's no difference between the Democrats and MAGA; such an argument would definitely not be in keeping with literally anything I've ever written about MAGA and the Dems. MAGA is an authoritarian menace to the United States that needs to be crushed and driven out of public life, full stop. The Democrats are the United States' sole remaining major pro-democracy party and have all manner of obligations to protect the U.S. and crush MAGA.
It sounds like we are actually in agreement that the Democrats need to be far tougher and willing to break self-defeating norms in their fight against MAGA. But for me, one of the problems with this pardon is that it breaks what should be a norm (not pardoning a family member) without advancing the fight against MAGA (and I don't think asserting the principle that Biden can use his pardon power however he wants will advance the fight, given that he's about to leave the Oval Office, though reasonable minds can differ on that point).
The day after the election I wrote that the Biden administration needed to kneecap the incoming administration by all manner of norm-breaking. I was thinking of things like leaking transcripts of Trump's conversations with foreign leaders, figuring out ways to send vast amounts of materiel to support Ukraine, holding public roundtables with military leaders to talk about their loyalty to the constitution, etc. We have waited in vain for such fighting spirit. Instead, we've gotten the Hunter Biden pardon. If Biden had been doing everything he could to kneecap the incoming admin, this might change the tenor of the pardon, but as a stand-alone it is needlessly adding fuel to the MAGA fire without providing anything like a countervailing boost to the Democrats' case against MAGA. This is not the Dems throwing elbows (which I'd love to see) so much as punching themselves in the face, though this is not the Dems doing it so much as just Biden, who is understandably but tragically concerned about his son at the expense of the larger fight against MAGA authoritarianism.