Surprise! President Biden has pardoned his son.

 President Biden has pardoned his son for a variety of crimes that Hunter appears to have committed over a long period of time.  I never had any doubt that the father would pardon the son.  He almost certainly had to do it, given his responsibilities as a parent, but it, none-the-less, requires the subordination of his responsibilities as president and that is the rub.  The fact that the President lied repeatedly, during his recent abortive effort to get re-elected by vowing that he would not to do it, is merely the jabber of a failed politician.  The elder Biden’s more important failure was during the decades that father and son were milking the American people for riches and living high on the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.  I might excuse some of it, if either one of them had done anything that merited praise, but they have not.  Hunter is merely a drug-ridden wastrel, and his father is a failed politician who never got anything, other than crass domestic political machination, right.  I am at a loss to decide where the father’s greatest failure lies, but his pardon of Hunter is not it.  I am torn between his current policies regarding Gaza and Ukraine, but I definitely believe that he warrants much criticism for his decisions over the years that have contributed mightily to the debilitated state of the world today.

The pundits are going to have a field day for a week or so as Republicans bellow “I TOLD YOU SO,” and Democrats attempt to “turn the page.”  I doubt that there are any Americans anywhere that are actually surprised at the President’s action.  I contend that we have, deep down, all known, all along, what is what, about all of this.  Our protestations to the contrary are as artificial as most of the other commentary that attempts to pass as the national dialog.  We are, after all, the root cause of all of the problems that we face throughout society to include our acceptance of corrupt, idiot leaders.  I contend that this IS a democracy and our national government truly reflects the will of the people.  The problem being that we don’t like what we are doing to ourselves and we refuse to see our own role in the travesty.  We adamantly insist that it is “the other’s” fault.  Half of us now want Trump to take the lead and redress all of the problems created by Biden and “The Donald” is already busy changing everything that Biden tried to do just exactly the way Biden did four years ago when he took over from Trump’s first presidency.  

Our elections are a series of binary choices.  I much prefer that to the confusion that a parliamentary system offers, but our political system depends on our generating intelligent candidates for the office of president and we are failing to do that.  Instead, we are electing partisans that reflect the current mindless opinion of just over half of the citizenry and that citizenry is increasingly partisan rather than national in outlook.  We are Democrats and Republicans before we are Americans.  This is NOT a new development.  It has happened repeatedly during our several centuries of existence.  The aspect of the situation that we are now in, that is different, is the nature of war.  Always before in our history, we dilly-dallied along, pissing on each other, until an outside threat came along that made us all Americans.  We then cooperated to defeat “the other.”  Nuclear weapons on satellite guided ballistic missiles have changed the viability of that approach to the problems that we face today.  Nuclear obliteration is literally a push-button away.  The sign on the bathroom door is NOT the most important challenge that we face, and our precious feelings are nowhere near as important as we now think.

Biden pardoning his son is not as important to our longevity as is the standard of living of people living outside of our non-existent borders.  What we need to understand is that we can not have a good life unless the rest of the world manages to live a decent life.  Hunter and Good Old Joe’s transgressions are old news that we cherish because we understand them.  World peace is beyond our ability to conceive, let alone promote effectively.  Nuclear weapons makes that situation more dangerous to our longevity than Joe pardoning Hunter.