“Hey, you can’t use a presidential pardon! Only I can use the presidential pardon!!”

Let’s get a few things straight right off the bat. Hunter Biden was guilty of tax evasion and weapons charges. Those facts do not change. These are federal crimes.

And last night, President Joe Biden – Hunter’s father – issued a presidential pardon on Hunter’s behalf.

And Republicans are losing their minds over it. All the usual suspects – Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jamie Comer, the usual gaggle of blowhards at Fox News, all decried the pardon. An abuse of power, they called it. Weaponization of government, that was another comment. Family before country. That was a prime one.

In those pronouncements, they forgot a few things.

1. Hunter Biden still committed those crimes. A pardon does not wipe the slate. A pardon acknowledges that crimes were committed, but that the punishment will be forgiven. It’s considered an act of mercy, of forgiveness for the contrite. And whatever you think of Hunter Biden, he has acknowledged his failures and the causes of such failures.
2. Hunter Biden has been the kick-dog for everything Republicans despise about Joe Biden. Remember the first Trump impeachment trial WAAAY back in 2020? That one where Trump tried to extort the Ukrainian president to make up some specious connection between Hunter Biden and Burisma and some Ukrainian prosecutor in exchange for Trump signing off on some Ukrainian foreign aid? (yeah, that “quid pro quo” thing). Ever since then, Republicans have treated Hunter Biden as if he took a whiz on an American flag. They attached him with spurious claims about laptops and hookers and everything in between. Heck, if they could have found evidence that Hunter Biden once took eleven items into a “ten items or less” line at the grocery store, I’m sure there’d be wall-to-wall Congressional hearings on the matter.
3. It’s not like the previous president didn’t offer a pardon for a relative. I mean, Trump did grant a presidential pardon to Charles Kushner – his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law – and you don’t WANT to know the skeevy stuff Charles Kushner did. Oh, that’s apparently future Ambassador to France under the Trump Administration Charles Kushner.
4. A presidential pardon is not absolution. The crimes Hunter Biden committed are still there. A presidential pardon is not absolution. You can’t go and say, “Well, Hunter Biden never committed those crimes.” He committed them, and that’s a bell that cannot be un-rung.
5. A President can do what he wants with those pardons. Presidential pardons are the one act a President can undertake without approval of Congress or the Supreme Court. That’s why Trump will most likely, when he squeezes his fat ass behind the Resolute Desk once again, will issue pardons like they’re Kohl’s Cash on Black Friday. My Bingo card has Trump scribbling out pardons to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, all the insurrectionists from January 6 – realistically, any and all of Trump’s cronies, past or present, will get their Sharpie-inked “Get Out of Jail Free” card. So if Trump can do it, Biden can do it as well.
6. It’s not like a Presidential pardon will drive the country into malaise. See Ford, Gerald.

I guess, in the end, whatever reasons President Biden had for pardoning his son are his own reasons alone – as both a president and as a father.

And maybe … just maybe … one of those reasons is that Joe Biden, after over five decades of public service, just finally decided that it was time to offer one big middle finger to all those Republican navel-gazers and chisel-brains who fought against him just because he dared to defeat their orange messiah in a Presidential election.

Just sayin’ is all.