Sit yourselves down here around the turf fire, my friends, and let me tell you the fable of the Lucky American Businessman. This American businessman came from a wealthy and prominent family, but this American businessman was not very good at being an American businessman. He was not very good at being an honest American businessman, to be precise. But he was a lucky American businessman and, as we shall see, in the end that was all that mattered.
The Lucky American Businessman (TLAB) began in business in Denver, where he started an oil-exploration company. His job in the company was not to find the oil. It was to find the money so other people could go out and find the oil. One of the people that the Lucky American Businessman found was a guy who’d become known as the “Donald Trump of Denver.” From The Washington Post:
Among the people [he] knew were two high-powered Denver real estate barons—Bill Walters and Ken Good. Walters was a flamboyant Rolex-wearing, Rolls-driving mogul known as “the Donald Trump of Denver.” Good owned the largest home in Colorado, a $10 million mansion with a special plumbing system that pumped Scotch, gin and vodka throughout the house.
Pity the poor house guest at that guy’s place who stumbles, bleary-eyed, into the shower one morning and turns the wrong knob.
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After listening to [TLAB]’s sales pitch, Walters invested $150,000 and set up a $1.75 million line of credit for JNB at a bank he owned. Good invested $10,000 and pledged loans worth $1.5 million. Good also lent [TLAB] $100,000 to gamble in the commodities market and said [he] didn’t have to pay it back unless he made money.
The Lucky American Businessman then went on to join the board of a savings-and-loan company, which coincidentally floated a bunch of loans to his friends, including the guy with the 80 proof taps. You may recall the S&L collapse as the bipartisan overture to the general economic catastrophe of 2008. When the Lucky American Businessman’s S&L failed, it cost the rest of us $1.3 billion, and his friends never paid back a nickel of the money it had loaned to his friends.
The Lucky American Businessman went on to start a methane exploration company that found no methane. He then went on to a lucrative, if ill-defined, job with a multimedia company owned by a family friend. Of this hiring, the president of the multimedia company told a newspaper, “I’m trying to find a title for him, if you want to know the truth. He’ll be learning the business, basically.”
The Lucky American Businessman then went international. He found new friends in China, and Singapore, and Thailand, and the Middle East. He was pitching a new computer-curriculum system designed to make “hunter-warrior” children enjoy, say, American history without reading any of it. There were charges that the system simply dumbed down the subject.
Then came the divorce. And what a divorce it was. It was loud, and public, and nasty. It was a luxurious buffet of tabloid goodness. It included charges that his wife stole his hair for use in making a voodoo doll. It also spun off a defamation suit during which the Lucky American Businessman testified what a lucky American businessman he truly was. In a deposition taken in that defamation suit, the Lucky American Businessman testified that, on his business trips to Thailand and Hong Kong, attractive women of the town just showed up at his hotel room so that the Lucky American Businessman could get, well, lucky. From the Taipei Times:
In a court deposition, taken in March and released this week, [he] claims that attractive women came to his hotel door looking for sex while he was on business trips in Hong Kong and Thailand. And as a big-hearted Texan, [he] merely did as he was asked. “You have to admit it’s pretty remarkable for a man to go to a hotel room door and open it and have sex with her,” said his ex-wife’s lawyer, Marshall Davis Brown.
“It was very unusual,” [he] replied. He insists he didn’t know them, did not see them afterwards and didn’t pay them. “Were they prostitutes?” he was asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
What a lucky American businessman he was.
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But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States and that his father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon the Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.
The Moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please. The pardon power is—theoretically, anyway—the only untrammeled royal authority granted to the office by the Constitution. The power was defended by Alexander Hamilton, especially in Federalist 74. His principal opponent at the nation’s founding was George Mason of Virginia, who seemed to anticipate the arrival in our politics of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and other Trumpist miscreants. According to James Madison’s notes from the Philadelphia convention, Mason argued:
Now, I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?
So if you want to argue that the president’s pardon power should be reined in somehow, you’ll get no argument from George Mason or me. But at the moment, it is virtually unlimited, so presidents will pardon their sons and daughters and siblings as easily as they pardon their ratfckers, propagandists, and bagmen. Nobody defines GHWB’s presidency, or his political character, by the fact that he pardoned his son. Hell, it wasn’t even defined by the fact that Poppy pardoned everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door so as to obscure forever his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Yet somehow, keeping his only surviving son safe from the incoming pack of wolverines soon to d/b/a the Department of Justice is enough to sully Joe Biden’s entire public career. The mealymouthed meeping of Democrats like Jared Polis and the inevitable Seth Moulton has landed heavily on my last nerve. The entire cast of Tiger Beat on the Potomac had an ensemble tantrum. Pundits like Jonathan Chait may never recover. And here comes Senator Joe Manchin, with the moldy cherry atop this dung sundae. From The Hill:
“What I would have done differently, and my recommendation as a counsel woulda been, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and pardon Donald Trump for all his charges?’ ” Manchin said of Biden’s pardoning of Hunter Biden when talking to CNN’s Manu Raju.
This is not the context in which to inaugurate a 34-count convicted felon into the Oval Office. Not the way, at all.