By Gail Collins / The New York Times
OK, I’m pretty sure when you began your week, you weren’t thinking, “Gee, I hope Joe Biden follows up Thanksgiving with a pardon for his delinquent son.”
I can’t really argue that this was a good move, particularly considering how many times Biden promised it would never happen. There are, however, a couple of lines of defense.
One is the whole Biden story. He’s been with us so long — so veeerrry long — that we’ve sort of forgotten how he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash back in 1972 and how Beau, the star son of that first marriage, died of brain cancer, leaving Hunter as the only surviving child.
While there apparently hasn’t ever been a presidential pardon for a son before now, we have had some other incidents that make the Hunter story look sort of second-rate.
Remember, for instance, Donald Trump’s pardon of Charles Kushner, father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, after he pleaded guilty to a deeply, deeply disgusting crime involving the hiring of a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law into a motel so …
OK, not going into detail. You can read about it in the stories covering Trump’s announcement that he’s going to make Kushner the ambassador to France in his next administration.
Truly, compared with that, Biden’s decision to let his son off the hook for tax offenses and having lied about his drug use when buying a gun seems less shocking. At least he didn’t make Hunter ambassador to a major international ally.
The big problem with Biden’s badness is that he’d specifically promised never to pardon Hunter and that he blamed the about-face on “raw politics” that “led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Nobody believes that, Joe. If only you’d said: “Look, I know this is wrong, but I can’t stand the idea of my troubled son being shipped off to prison. Other parents will understand. I’d rather risk the stain on my reputation than let anything else happen to my boy.”
We’d have known it was wrong, but we’d at least have appreciated that it was true.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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