There is no better commentator in the United States than Victor Davis Hanson. He combines brilliance with logic, common sense, and an ability to articulate his brilliant, logical common sense in an easy to understand way.
And Mr. Hanson’s latest commentary on the impending House impeachment inquiry, which is titled “How Biden Will Circle The Wagons” is no exception.
Here is how it begins…
The strategies of saving the Biden presidency from an impeachment and a Senate trial despite overwhelming evidence of his corruption are starting to emerge.
The Family is confronted with damning evidence from the laptop, from the testimonies of Hunter’s business associates Bobulinksi and Archer, from Ukrainian oligarchs and Viktor Shokin, from IRS whistleblowers, from FBI writs, from a likely pseudonymous Biden trove of 4,000 emails to his son and associates, and from the absolute paranoia of a White House that must constantly change its narrative of denials to adjust to a growing portrait of utter corruption, bribery, and perhaps even the treason of warping U.S. policy to fit Biden family interests.
The Defense in Depth
One of their strategies is to deny, then hedge, then ignore, then grow silent—and repeat the wash/rinse/spin cycle of stonewalling as many times as necessary to evade the mounting truth.
Insidiously Joe Biden has retreated from his once loud protestations that he supposedly had no idea of what Hunter and his associates were doing. Such a patently dishonest denial set the model that the President would have no compunction about lying to the American people until the evidence of his wrongdoing becomes overwhelming.
But this first line of defense did not crumble for years—only to be replaced by a second line of denial: Biden may have known of Hunter’s shenanigans, but he had no business interests with him. That was another blatant untruth.
And that additional stalling also allowed Biden to ignore the closing walls of incrimination for even more months. When these two forward lines of defense collapsed, as the Biden consortium knew they eventually would, a retreat to a third line of defense followed: yes, Joe knew, after all, of Hunter’s miscreant shakedowns; and, yes, Joe, after all, conceded that from time to time he did meet Hunter’s business associates, and upon requests made phone calls to Hunter’s clientele. But he did not profit from such knowledge and associations. Instead an upright old Joe from Scranton was playing along with the “illusion” of influence peddling: Scranton naiveté is not D.C. criminality.
…and here is how it ends:
The DEFCON 1 Option
There is a final nihilist gambit. If Biden is confronted with his own email evidence of corruption, tapes of his agreement to financial exchanges, bank accounts with large foreign deposits, and direct testimonies that he received cash, he has one last refuge: the “Hunter did it all!” ruse.
Hunter is all too aware of his own danger. Collate his mischievous recent grifting artistic career, the Malibu-renting Hunter trying to plead poverty to reduce child-support payments, the mysterious cocaine that turns up in a West Wing cubicle, his laptop anger at his Mr. Big Guy’s and Mr. 10 Percent’s underappreciation of Hunter’s bagman role, and Hunter’s threat to call the President of the United States to testify that a now trapped Hunter is innocent of everything.
The resulting picture that emerges is an out-of-control Hunter—who lost a laptop, a crack pipe, and an illegally registered handgun—now very worried that he will become Joe’s scapegoat.
Hunter still believes he is a Samson that can pull down the Biden temple upon them all—if the alternative is that he is the only Biden to stew for years in jail.
Remember, Hunter also knows his father all too well—Joe’s long resume of plagiarism, greed, arrogance, corruption, lying, and fantasies—and so rightly believes at some point Joe might easily shrug, and in one of his “senile” moments, utter, “Well, no Joke, man—it was all Hunter’s stuff, not mine.”
That get your attention? I suspect the answer is that, yes, it did. And there is a ton more of equally compelling commentary in between, which is why I strongly urge you to use the link (here it is again) and read every word. You won’t regret it.
I’ll end with two questions, and my answers to them (you can supply your own):
1. Would hunter biden really do that? Would he collapse under the weight of his own legal woes and serve up Papa Joe and the others who have benefited from his actions (the actions that, it certainly appears, he was sent out to perform on their behalf?)
My initial answer was that he would not; that biden wouldn’t flip on his own father. But then I thought about all the behavior hunter biden has engaged in over all these years that I also would not have thought a decent, or not so decent, and/or reasonably intelligent person would have engaged in – let alone video taped and emailed continually about, thus running the risk of exposure (which, of course, has occurred). And I’m not so sure.
2. Who would believe anything Joe Biden says about his business relationship with hunter biden and the money that sprung forth from it?
My initial answer – and it has not varied since – is that, other than the most obtuse or most partisan people out there, what possible reason would there be to believe a word that comes out Joe Biden’s mouth?
As Mr. Hanson has pointed out so eloquently, every story Biden and his people have told so far about this has been a lie. And every time the lie has been exposed, a new story has come out which, right up to the present, has also turned out to be a lie.
When someone lies to you over and over and over again, at some point, no matter how much you want to believe that person, you have to acknowledge reality. And Joe Biden’s serial lying is at that point.
