Listening to Obama advisor David Axelrod compare the Hunter Biden probe to Benghazi, it suddenly becomes clear that among people for whom consequence is an abstract notion the truth can only be heard in Freudian slips like this. Do you remember Benghazi?
During the blessedly “scandal-free” Obama Administration, the U.S. State Department declined urgent appeals for help from U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his security detail because giving them the assistance they needed would have elevated a situation the administration was trying to keep on a low boil.
Ambassador Stevens and three CIA officers were brutally killed because, the Obama administration wanted us to believe, anti-Islamic zealots in the American South had defiled a Koran.
Despite the congressional inquiry to which Axelrod recently referred, not a single U.S. government official was held to account for what happened in Libya. Famously, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wore sunglasses while “testifying” before investigators in a signal that “I’m kind of complying, but I’m really not.”
“What difference, at this point, does it really make,” she infamously inveighed.
Flash forward to Hunter Biden’s press conference stunt on Capitol Hill this week while defying a House subpoena. Could this have been where Axelrod got the idea? Hunter “absolutely did the right thing,” the celebrity hack told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. For all the trash-talking he’s been doing about Poppa Joe’s re-election prospects recently in print and on TV, that was a generous concession from the man with the porn star mustache.
In other words, just as the Benghazi inquiry was ultimately fruitless (because WE screwed it up), so too will be the Biden impeachment process that seems to hang on Hunter’s various improprieties, Axelrod forecasts. If so, then again, it will be the Republicans who are to blame.
As someone who has been targeted both by a congressional committee and the Justice Department, Hunter’s telling the House where they can stick it sort of makes sense to me. After all, Hunter is already facing two buckets of indictments – one for allegedly lying about being a crack-head on a gun permit application and another for a raft of tax violations – all that’s missing is the charge for the Foreign Agent Registration Act violation. Congressmen tend just to bloviate but prosecutors gotta prosecute, so focus on the bigger and more actual threat.
Whether he’s suing the people who brought his incriminating laptop to light, or instructing his lawyers to argue that it is unconstitutional to deny a crack-head a handgun, the boy sure has fight. Timid White House advisors have been complaining to their friends in the pliant Washington media about this for weeks.
Some say Hunter must fight in order to capture some of that Trump ethos of letting no slight go unanswered. His father’s low approval ratings are certainly tied to the growing sense that the old man probably lied when he said he knew nothing about Hunter’s business and the mounting stench of the shady foreign dealings ten months before polls open is getting harder to ignore.
“They’re trying to kill me,” a distraught Hunter told the electronic dance musician Moby on his podcast last week, referring to the relentless Republicans. A less emotional observer might counter they’re actually just trying to connect the dots.
But Axelrod – the John Waters of political Svengalism – has a point: if Republicans overreach, we’ll mess it up again. According to the Democracy Dies in Darkness chorus at the Washington Post, “the Hunter indictment is sound, the Joe impeachment isn’t.” Since their editorial preceded the formal launch of inquiry, it too might be more projection than prediction, but House managers still should take note. The shadow of a failed Benghazi process hangs darkly over us.
Hunter’s crimes are pretty clear, and damning. Whether DoJ manages to spare the president the embarrassment of calling his son a “foreign agent” is at this point simply cosmetic. The son took a lot of money from shady foreigners for unclear purposes. Americans deserve to know why.
Between now and next November, that question is unlikely to go away. Unless – somehow – of course – we really manage to screw it up again.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="23889 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=23889">2 Comments
Great opening line…sadly true. Equally sad is that R’s are entirely capable of screwing up again.
As long as Hunter gets his coke, his ladies of the night and his percentage of what he grifted from some of the most corrupt political figures on the planet, he is not worried about anything especially a subpoena from those horrible Republicans. This is the most corrupt administration that America has seen in 250 yrs. These evil people would even shame Caligula.