Making it personal
Speaking of being careful about what you wish for, now that Republicans have control of the House once again — however marginal that control may be — they can go to work on their favourite projects. Even as I type these words Republicans are rolling up their sleeves and getting ready to tackle the issues they whined about for the last two years: inflation, the price of gas, unemployment and crime.
Nah, I’m just kidding. We’ll never hear about those things again. They didn’t mean a word of any of it. They just used those issues to scare stupid people into voting for them. Republicans knew perfectly well that inflation and gas prices are worldwide problems, that the worst crime statistics are to be found in red states and there is no unemployment problem. But even though they overestimated the number of stupid people in the United States they didn’t overestimate that number by much. Their electoral feet were, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “just tall enough to reach the ground.”
So what are Republicans going to do with their time in the sun, now that they finally have it? They’re going to go after the President’s son, Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden’s name has become so ubiquitous in the mouths of Republicans the last few years that, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it’s difficult to hear it any more in an original way. It’s easy to forget that Mr. Biden the private citizen is actually a human being who has nothing to do with national politics and, unlike Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, never worked in the White House.
Even so, once again it’s become all about Hunter’s laptop and that’s all you need to know. You see, when Donald Trump tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine, Voldomor Zelenskyy, into destroying Hunter Biden’s name, he didn’t want Zelenskyy to actually investigate him. He just needed him to announce that he was going to investigate him — just in time for the 2020 election. That way Trump could hurt Joe Biden in his headlong attempt to win reelection.
Now Republicans are actually going to investigate Hunter, and they hope that someone like Jim Jordan can come up with enough nasty things to say, intoned with unpleasantly hectoring innuendo, that people will think Hunter Biden is a horrible criminal and actually guilty of something, even though there doesn’t appear to be a shred of evidence to suggest that he is.
What about Hunter’s laptop? Well, there’s nothing there really. Despite extensive speculation and scrutiny of the laptop’s contents by multiple parties, as of December 2022 there exists no clear evidence of criminal activity on Biden’s part. His tax affairs have been under federal criminal investigation since 2018 as well, and nothing has come of that either.
Don’t get me wrong here, if Hunter Biden was guilty of criminal wrongdoing then he should receive the full weight of the criminal justice system, just like anybody else. But he most emphatically should not receive more than his share either. If he’s to be prosecuted he needs to be prosecuted for something specific, and so far nothing specific has come from any investigation. Just vague accusations about his laptop. Well you’d think after two years we’d know something specific about what’s on that laptop. We don’t.
This is vintage Republican victimisation, nothing more. Republicans can’t seem to keep their vicious attacks aimed at the people they unjustly hate. Instead they make it personal by going after uninvolved family members. Donald Trump is the blueprint for these kinds of filthy politics. Most recently Trump attacked the wife of the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice. Trump attacked her just because (and only because) her husband was hired to investigate Trump’s crimes.
Not content to be mere villains, Republicans go out of their way to prove they are the worst kind of criminals. Like the Medellín Cartel monster Pablo Escobar, if you cross them they won’t just destroy you they will destroy your entire family. They do this because they want to create a chilling effect against resistance to their hateful politics. They do it because they are unregenerate, despicable assholes. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.