You should definitely crosspost that to the strategies thread! Very useful!
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this is airing now on my local npr station, but it’s worth checking out so far… Not sure when it’ll be up on their site, though?
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I left Twitter (well before it became X) because Elon enabled a torrent of transphobic harassment that even my blocklist of 275k accounts couldn’t handle. I don’t exist to be a punching bag for bigots, thanks.
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The Biden administration had several major accomplishments that they can be proud of, but right now it seems like the president is intent on trashing his own legacy in these final months. Refusing to limit weapons transfers to Netanyahu despite Israel very clearly not meeting the basic humanitarian demands that the Biden administration had set, encouraging Ukraine to start using antipersonnel land mines despite years of American policy trying to get them off the battlefield, and now a full and unconditional pardon for his son despite many assurances that he wouldn’t issue one.
Yes, Trump is way worse by every possible metric but there’s still no excusing this pardon. Hunter may have been targeted as a political tactic but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s factually guilty of serious crimes, especially the millions in intentional and blatant tax dodging. President Biden’s repeated earlier denials that he would issue a pardon were very clear and definitive, and no relevant facts have changed since he made them.
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My primary concern is that this pardon will be used by the media to distract from Trump’s fuckery.
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None? None at all?
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I’ve touched on this in a different topic and won’t repeat myself here other than to make this point:
Biden was convicted of trying to stiff the IRS for some $1.4 million in unpaid taxes. He ultimately settled and paid his tax bill plus penalties.
The myriad investigations and prosecutions against him for the past 6+ years have cost over $7 million in taxpayer dollars. These would have likely never even happened had Trump not decided to use him as a punching bag to try to hurt Joe Biden. Does that seem like good fiscal responsibility or justice served to you?
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Not relevant to the current cases, no. Without Biden’s interference Hunter would already have received his sentences this month and the cases would be over, before Trump was ever sworn in. And it’s not exactly a new fact that Trump was always going to nominate bad folks to run the Justice Department.
If you’re talking about issuing preemptive pardons that would only prevent new, future charges brought by Trump’s appointees then ok, fine.
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In theory that’s what he’s tried to do, given that there is no such thing as a pre-emptive pardon: a blanket pardon is the best available.
You really believe Hunter will be safe in prison under a Trump DoJ? Because the evidence is that Biden, with much better information than we’ve got, does not believe that.
We know Hunter’s guilty. He pleaded guilty. In normal circumstances some of the charges he’s already been punished for by paying the fine, and others normally never get charged in this way in the first place. But even taking that into account, in normal circumstances, Biden would take the high moral ground and let the system do its thing.
The system can no longer be trusted to do its thing: anticipatory obedience is already happening. Hunter has been tried, plead guilty of those things he was guilty of, and the person who has just been put in charge of part of the mechanism of justice is a swivel-eyed lunatic (well, another one in a crowd of them) who has already stated clearly that he’s going to go after Hunter for all the made up shit they said he did.
You know what I think the pardon is not going to do? Stop them. They have already proven that they will make shit up for their kangaroo courts. What this will do is give Hunter a chance to seek refuge, which I’m expecting him to do, because while a majority of the US population is in the firing line one way or another, Hunter is wearing a very big target with his specific name on it.
I fully expect Hunter, at the least, to be watching the inauguration from a safe country.
Is it fair that he gets a chance to escape when so many don’t? No. Is it fair that he doesn’t face that justice he deserves? No. Is there a point to quibbling about this when the tanks are about to roll down the Champs Élysées.
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Once could argue he already faced the justice he deserved. He paid his dues to the IRS, and only after taking years and spending millions of taxpayer dollars picking his life apart, the Trump-appointed special prosecutor was able to find some weak sauce shit to charge him with.
I’m not saying he didn’t commit a crime, he did of course. Just that these kind of crimes on their own aren’t the kind that your average federal prosecutor wouldn’t bother with except as an enhancement to other charges because they are such weak sauce charges not worth the time and cost to prosecute on their own.
The real hypocrisy here is with the Republicans who are suddenly all up in arms about someone not paying taxes or someone trying to exercise their 2A rights.
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At this point we don’t even know for sure if he was going to be sentenced to prison at all. But we would have known that very soon if the process had played out, and after that Biden always had the option to commute the sentence instead of issuing a full pardon. Commutations are more common than pardons, after all, and are typically more appropriate than full unconditional pardons if the convict actually committed the crime. Now Hunter doesn’t even have a felony on his record.
This is far from the biggest mistake of the Biden administration, and obviously pales in comparison with what Trump already did and had promised to do, but it’s still tarnishing his legacy, IMHO.
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A felony on his record greatly limits the number of places he can get to to claim asylum. That may be a consideration.
I wonder that you may be getting upset at the wrong thing: I submit that the real WTF is not that Hunter was pardoned in these circumstances, but that there is a good argument that it was necessary in these circumstances for his safety.
As I will repeat: if Harris had won, I do not think there would have been a pardon. Because there would have been no need for one.
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Whether fair or unfair, there will be plenty of things to tarnish his legacy when historians look back on it 30 years from now. I suspect many controversial aspects of today will be looked at differently (such as the Afghanistan withdrawl), while others (Gaza, running for re-election) will continue to be looked at negatively. I think the only people who will treat this as any more of a blip on the radar will be that same tiny percentage of people who are still mad at Bill Clinton for pardoning his half-brother.
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I think Biden can afford to lose your vote.
This is fiddling while Rome is burning.
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And letting Drumph escape justice.
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That was a team effort.
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Good points, although I’m not sure about #3.
Ugh, I find that so depressing and disappointing. I don’t trust the charming or charismatic, I assume they are trying to put one over on people. I want a stereotypical boring accountant type wonk. I don’t want to have a beer with them, I want them to just do their job and not be in our heads all the time. I know this writer is probably right, but dang humanity is just disappointing that people need that.
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His appointment of Merrick Garland was a huge mistake.
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