RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-end-of-a-scam/

Biden was never a wonderful guy, and definitely not the savior of democracy, no matter what his media supporters said.

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen.

Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son Hunter Biden is just the latest evidence.

No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing.

The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling business that was at the root of Hunter’s tax evasion — the president’s son wouldn’t have had any money to evade taxes on if it weren’t for all the foreign largesse.

Every politician ends up shading the truth somewhere along the line, and it was going to be awkward for President Biden to admit that he might pardon his son. When asked about the possibility, though, the president could have said “No comment” or “I’m not going to discuss a hypothetical.”

Instead, he flatly denied it, and his allies wove his denial into a narrative about Biden’s abiding commitment to our system of justice. He was “a president living the rule of law” (MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann) and “a true American who believes in democracy and the way the system is supposed to work” (Joy Behar of The View). Etc., etc.

Now Biden has made all the people who issued these stirring testimonials look like naïfs and hacks.

Their mistake was attributing any grandeur to Joe Biden. He has made a long, undistinguished career of being a middling politician from a small Democratic state and had just enough staying power to become president when he was already a has-been.

In sizing up Biden and Trump, the Democrat’s media supporters could have paraphrased the famous bumper sticker from a 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring two unpalatable choices: “Vote for the unimpressive hack — it’s important.”

Instead, they felt compelled to create an illusory Biden, an epic figure whose amazing personal qualities made him an indispensable buttress of our institutions and norms.

Biden was puffed up into a world-historical figure who had saved American democracy by winning one election against Donald Trump, who, of course, simply came right back to win another against Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/02/liar-in-chief-president-biden-cloaks-his-legacy-in-infamy-with-the-hunter-biden-pardon/

President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.

Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.

In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.”

In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/05/drain-the-swamp-for-the-economic-benefits/

There’s not much Donald Trump could ever do as president that will generate more resistance and hatred than bleeding the fetid capital swamp. It’s arguable that there’s nothing he could ever do as president that would be better for the republic.

Trump’s decision to make administration appointments from figures who are outside of the establishment adds to the loathing that so many in the political-media establishment already directed toward him. Various grifters, vipers and unprincipled schemers from both parties have spent their adult lives seeking seats of power, comfort and endless tenure in the capital. To see the secretarial positions, directorships, administrator posts and bureaucratic jobs that they have for years lusted after filled by outsiders makes them angry. No one should feel sorry for them, though. They are a drag on both our civic health and our economy.

In regard to the latter, the damage is more extensive that most would ever guess. A research paper updated during the first year of Trump’s initial term that measured the “cost per regulator” in the bureaucracy reached some appalling yet unsurprising conclusions about Washington’s impact on the private sector. According to the authors, “one regulator costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year.”

Here are a few more choice findings from the paper.

“Each $1 million change in the regulatory budget is associated with a change of about four regulator jobs.”
“A 10% cut in the regulatory budget results in a loss of 21,756 regulatory jobs.”
That same cut “provides for an additional $1.2 trillion in GDP annually over the five-year window, or $244 billion annually.”
“Each regulator costs the U.S. economy $11 million annually.”