Appearance counts
Joe Biden vehemently defended how he handles criticisms of his son Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine Friday night, one day after he got into a heated exchange with a man who asked him about his role in his son’s work at a campaign event.
“Every time I’ve been asked about it, my response has been, ‘This is about Donald Trump, period, period, period,” the former vice president told reporters aboard his campaign bus in Iowa Friday night, when asked about his answers to questions about his son.
That’s not for him to say. He did nothing when his son accepted a lavishly compensated job that he would never have been offered if he were Hunter Nobodyinparticular, so he (Joe) doesn’t get to say we can’t talk about it. It’s very unfortunate that we have to talk about it, but we do.
When a reporter pointed out that was not how Biden responded to a question about his son from an older man on Thursday, he said the questioner “lied.”
“He said I went out of my way to get my son the job. No one has ever said that, it is not true and I never did,” Biden said. “My son speaks for himself. He’s a 47-year-old man. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
He did though. He took a highly-paid position on the board of a foreign gas company when he had no expertise or other qualifications for the job while his father was Vice President of the US. That is in fact anything wrong. It’s wrong when Trump’s loathsome children profiteer off his position as president of the US, and it’s wrong when Biden’s kid does a parallel thing.
There’s no evidence that the former vice president acted inappropriately, and Hunter Biden recently said serving on the board was “poor judgment” but that he “did nothing wrong at all.”
But the bad judgment was wrong. He did do anything wrong at all: accepting the job was wrong.
And it’s not as if this is subtle. It’s not as if there was never the slightest reason for Hunter Biden to realize it was wrong. He can’t possibly have thought he was just a natural choice for that job; he can’t possibly not have realized that it was all about his father and connections. So yes, he damn well did do anything wrong.
“Hunter Biden spoke publicly about it,” the former vice president said. “He said that in retrospect, if he had thought about how it was going to be handled by Giuliani and company, he wouldn’t have done it but that nothing he did that he did wrong. The appearance looked bad and he acknowledged that. And that’s it, that’s all I’m going to talk about.”
This is how comfortable everyone, Democrats included, has gotten with corruption. If “the appearance looked bad” then why did it “look bad”? It looked bad because it was bad: it was Joe Biden’s son profiteering off his father’s position, by accepting a job he was offered because Burisma wanted contacts high up in the US government. That is corrupt.
Biden said he’d had “one conversation” with his son about the job. “I said, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ when I found out he was there. If you notice, nothing is said other than appearance that anything at all was done incorrectly by my son.”
But the appearance matters. You could say the same thing about Princess Ivanka: the appearance is bad when she keeps getting patents from China while her daddy is president, and that matters.
Democrats of the Biden type have gotten way too comfortable with this kind of thing.
The Democratic primary is so depressing. The path to a good result seems to be shrinking fast, especially since Warren overtook Biden then cratered.
The only thing that’s somewhat reassuring is to look at this point for past primaries and see how quickly and dramatically things can change. Well, that and the fact that Biden’s strong lead is with under 30% of people supporting him, so 70% want somebody else.
At this point I’m just hoping for someone competent who can beat Trump. Biden is so mealy mouthed that he might end up making Trump look relatively competent when they debate. I wish Obama or someone could get him to pull out. But it’s going to be hard to do when he’s consistently in the lead.
This whole sorry saga reminds me heavily of Nhlanhla Nene.
Siyabonga Nene, Nhlanhla’s son, and his business partner Muhammad Amir Mirza had approached the Public Investment Corporation for a business loan when Nhlanhla was in charge there.
The plan was that their company, Indiafrec Trade and Invest would use the money to buy a 50% stake in S&S Refinery LDA in Mozambique.
The thing is – Nhlanhla was in fact furious with his son for the attempted use of him as a connection, and it was only after Siyabonga resigned from Indiafrec Trade and Invest that eventually the loan went through.
Siyabonga so far as anyone is aware, never saw a cent of that money – but this was enough to sink Nhlanhla’s political career, just as Nhlanhla was being praised all over the place for his role in resisting state capture when this story came out.
Nene resigned over this.
So I look at Joe Biden – and what Hunter did was so much worse. The Ukraine basically had a gun to its head in the form of Russia, keeping in good with America is an existential necessity for them, this is a big chunk of what makes Trump’s corruption where Ukraine is involved so bad. It is essentially threatening a nation with its own obliteration if it doesn’t play ball.
You’ve got a ruling class that sees nothing wrong with saying “You’ve got a nice country there Ukraine, it would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”
It throws the entire basis of US foreign policy into doubt. Is it there to protect the interests of the US on the world stage, or is there so that the president or vice president’s kid can get rich? Or so that the president can gather blackmail material against his political rivals?
And recognise Ukraine is where they got caught, we can’t know how many cases like this there are across the world. I mean I think we can be pretty clear that Trump was willing to allow genocide against the Kurds – for the sake of his business in Turkey. I don’t think the Ukraine situation is all that isolated.
This should disqualify Biden and Trump, and raise serious questions about how deep this rot goes – with it appearing at the very top of both parties. It staggers me that Americans aren’t more angry about this.
Every lawyer knows that lawyers have an ethical duty to avoid conduct that gives even an appearance of impropriety.
Hunter Biden is a lawyer.
Therefore, Hunter Biden knows that he has a duty to avoid conduct that gives even an appearance of impropriety.
Q.E.D.
And that is exactly why Joe Biden would say, “I hope you know what you’re doing”: because BOTH Hunter Biden and Joe Biden know perfectly well that what HB was doing gives at least an appearance of impropriety.
“It staggers me that Americans aren’t more angry about this.” Me too, Bruce, me too.
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