According to a new CNN report, President Joe Biden is so triggered by the media coverage swirling around his son that aides are refusing to even broach the topic with him. The president is said to be ‘obsessed’ with and ‘irritated’ by the press reports.
Well, what parent wouldn’t be? Especially when House investigators have already turned up evidence of Biden’s own complicity in his son’s overseas business dealings and that evidence is slowly being corroborated by eyewitnesses – including Hunter’s former close friend and business partner Devon Archer – and bank records.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a senior Biden aide told CNN that mention of Hunter’s legal woes elicits “a level of personal angst unlike any other challenge for the president.” The aide said, “Hunter Biden is not a topic of discussion in campaign meetings. It’s just not addressed.”
Avoidance of a sensitive topic because it upsets the candidate is an outrageously stupid and dangerous strategy for any campaign. The party’s denial of reality comes off as gaslighting. In a recent interview with the American Press, Democratic strategist Bill Burton (who served as Deputy White House Press Secretary in the Obama Administration) foolishly predicted the Republicans’ investigations of Hunter Biden would backfire: He said:
From a political standpoint, I think Republicans are stupid to spend so much time talking about the president’s son. People are going to be voting on the economy. They’re going to be voting on who’s tougher on social media companies and national security. As a dad, I think it’s pretty disgusting that you would attack someone’s son like this.
I cite Burton’s remarks because as unimaginably absurd as they sound, they are a fair representation of the Democratic talking points we hear everyday on cable news – and from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
This is sheer gaslighting and I’m pretty sure Americans aren’t buying it. I hope Democrats do make the economy a major campaign issue. Although they tout the fact that the Biden administration has brought inflation down to 3.2%, consider what they’ve done to interest rates to achieve it. And consider that the 9.1% year over year increase in consumer prices reached in June 2022 is now baked into the cake. We are paying more than 15% more for consumer goods across the board than we were when Biden took office. For consumer staple items like food and energy, the increases are obviously far higher.
Moreover, the sheer audacity of asking which party is tougher on social media companies and national security is breathtaking. I’m pretty sure the collusion exposed between Democrats and the social media companies by the Twitter Files and Biden’s shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan, the most humiliating military disaster in modern memory, answers those questions.
Despite the party’s attempts to minimize it, the truth is that the story of the Biden family’s influence peddling business is growing bigger by the day and the campaign’s head in the sand approach is no longer working. They simply must address the white elephant in the room.
The Democrats’ insistence that investigators haven’t produced evidence tying Biden to his son’s wrongdoing assumes that Americans are stupid. Aside from the roughly one-third of the electorate who will pull the lever for Biden no matter what, voters are waking up to the reality of the Biden family’s influence peddling business. And they are finally beginning to grasp that, without Joe Biden, there is no business. As Devon Archer confirmed during his transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee, “then-Vice President Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his son sold around the world to enrich the Biden family.”
A recent Fox News poll of registered voters conducted between Aug 11-14 found that when it comes to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, 38% of voters believe Joe Biden acted illegally and another 25% feel he acted unethically. That’s 63%. Those numbers will increase as more evidence is corroborated.
Just 34% think he did nothing seriously wrong.
During an October 2020 interview with Tucker Carlson, former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski said: “I remember looking at [Joe Biden’s brother] Jim Biden [in May 2017] and saying, how are you guys getting away with this? Like, aren’t you concerned? And he — he looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said, plausible deniability.”
Well, plausible deniability has now given way to the theatre of the absurd and frankly, I don’t see how Joe Biden can remain above the fray for much longer. I assume Democrats are working behind the scenes on a plan B. They should be.
In a Monday Fox News op-ed, former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) writes that Biden is in hiding mode. He argues: “He isn’t sharing his vision for the future. He is hiding – hiding from the press, hiding from the scandals and hiding from his own incompetence as a commander in chief.”
He notes that Biden skipped the Iowa State Fair and lounged on the beach the weekend that Maui burned.
Chaffetz reports:
Though Biden has begun hiring fundraisers for the 2024 campaign, his operation is a tiny skeleton crew of staffers working exclusively out of his home state of Delaware. That puts them closer to his homes near Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, but far from the center of gravity in swing states or the nation’s capital.
As of last quarter, he had just four people on the payroll, all working out of the party offices. In July, the campaign announced the hiring of a few fundraisers, but there seems to be little urgency to mount a full-scale campaign and the first primary votes are five months away.
He concludes that Joe Biden will not run in 2024. He may be right. I, for one, hope Biden hangs in there because I fear a Michelle Obama or a Gavin Newsom candidacy, but we’ll cross that bridge if/when we get to it.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.