Appearance counts

Biden continues to be a jerk.

Joe Biden vehemently defended how he handles criticisms of his son Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine Friday night, one day after he got into a heated exchange with a man who asked him about his role in his son’s work at a campaign event.

“Every time I’ve been asked about it, my response has been, ‘This is about Donald Trump, period, period, period,” the former vice president told reporters aboard his campaign bus in Iowa Friday night, when asked about his answers to questions about his son.

That’s not for him to say. He did nothing when his son accepted a lavishly compensated job that he would never have been offered if he were Hunter Nobodyinparticular, so he (Joe) doesn’t get to say we can’t talk about it. It’s very unfortunate that we have to talk about it, but we do.

When a reporter pointed out that was not how Biden responded to a question about his son from an older man on Thursday, he said the questioner “lied.”

“He said I went out of my way to get my son the job. No one has ever said that, it is not true and I never did,” Biden said. “My son speaks for himself. He’s a 47-year-old man. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

He did though. He took a highly-paid position on the board of a foreign gas company when he had no expertise or other qualifications for the job while his father was Vice President of the US. That is in fact anything wrong. It’s wrong when Trump’s loathsome children profiteer off his position as president of the US, and it’s wrong when Biden’s kid does a parallel thing.

There’s no evidence that the former vice president acted inappropriately, and Hunter Biden recently said serving on the board was “poor judgment” but that he “did nothing wrong at all.”

But the bad judgment was wrong. He did do anything wrong at all: accepting the job was wrong.

And it’s not as if this is subtle. It’s not as if there was never the slightest reason for Hunter Biden to realize it was wrong. He can’t possibly have thought he was just a natural choice for that job; he can’t possibly not have realized that it was all about his father and connections. So yes, he damn well did do anything wrong.

“Hunter Biden spoke publicly about it,” the former vice president said. “He said that in retrospect, if he had thought about how it was going to be handled by Giuliani and company, he wouldn’t have done it but that nothing he did that he did wrong. The appearance looked bad and he acknowledged that. And that’s it, that’s all I’m going to talk about.”

This is how comfortable everyone, Democrats included, has gotten with corruption. If “the appearance looked bad” then why did it “look bad”? It looked bad because it was bad: it was Joe Biden’s son profiteering off his father’s position, by accepting a job he was offered because Burisma wanted contacts high up in the US government. That is corrupt.

Biden said he’d had “one conversation” with his son about the job. “I said, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ when I found out he was there. If you notice, nothing is said other than appearance that anything at all was done incorrectly by my son.”

But the appearance matters. You could say the same thing about Princess Ivanka: the appearance is bad when she keeps getting patents from China while her daddy is president, and that matters.

Democrats of the Biden type have gotten way too comfortable with this kind of thing.

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