Hunting Hunter

 

"The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice” – G.K. Chesterton

The New York Times, a publication that cannot be accused of favorable opinion toward its bête noir, former President Donald Trump, has very late in the game stumbled upon Hunter Biden’s laptop, months after the New York Post brought it to public notice. The Times assures us that the laptop and its contents are not, as had been previously supposed, a Russian hoax.

The Post’s reports on the content of Hunter Biden's laptop were generally dismissed by America’s left of center media as a political plot engineered by Russian spooks.

Hunter Biden is the most recent bad boy of American politics. In the postmodern period, erotic misbehavior has not been a bar to political advancement. Former President John Kennedy apparently suffered from what some would regard as a compulsive sexual disorder, as did former President Bill Clinton, known for illicit behavior in the oval office with one of his aides.

Power very well may be an erotic aphrodisiac. How else does one explain the Marquis de Sade, an upper class French cultural revolutionist?

Wherever money, sex or drugs could be found in foreign places – Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan, Russia -- Hunter Biden could be found sopping up all three like a thirsty sponge.

"Over the course of 14 months,” Fox News has reported, a “Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records.” His lifestyle could not have been possible had he not sponged, without protest from dad, on his father’s status as Vice President of the United States.

Hunter Biden’s comeuppance in the Times has come very late in the game, conveniently for his father, after Biden Senior had attained the presidency.

“A comprehensive report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden’s tax filings published by the New York Times on Wednesday night," the New York Post recently observed, “confirmed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop.” The FBI is looking into Hunter Biden’s tax reports.

Following the Times’ belated acknowledgement that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop were not an invention of Russian disinformation specialists, the New York Post commented editorially:

"In the heat of the presidential race of 2020, the Times never missed a chance to cast doubt on the laptop, saying the information was 'purported' and quoting a letter from former Democratic officials who claimed — with no evidence — that it was Russian disinformation. As recently as September 2021, the Times called the laptop ‘unsubstantiated’ in a news story…

"Readers of the Times have discovered in March 2022 that Hunter Biden pursued business deals in Europe and Asia, and may have leveraged his father’s position as Vice President to do it. Hunter also may not have properly registered with the government or declared all his income. All legitimate topics of discussion about a presidential candidate’s family, no?" 

The New York Post’s commentary on the New York Times’ belated discovery of the Hunter Biden laptop has some zingers in it – “Readers of The Post have known this since October 2020" -- but then Schadenfreude does have its privileges, and the laptop is a smoking Gatling gun.

Following the money coursing through Hunter Biden’s emails and other unearthed documents, one finds, The Epoch Times reports, “In the space of just one year, now-defunct Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy paid him [Hunter Biden] nearly $6 million for consulting and legal fees. The company was owned by Chinese billionaire Ye Jianming, who mysteriously disappeared in March 2018. After the company folded, a woman called Bao Jiaqi, who appears to have served as a company secretary, emailed Biden to say that he should take any remaining money from an offshoot company, Hudson West IV, run by Ye associate Gongwen Dong. Bao told Biden, ‘Nobody will care whereabouts of nobody’s money.’ … CEFC China Energy also paid Hunter Biden $1 million to find a U.S.-based attorney for Patrick Ho, another Ye associate whom Biden later called “the [expletive] spy chief of China.”

“Additionally, Biden’s company received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the widow of Russian oligarch Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. The circumstances of those payments remain unclear to this day.”

The question before the house is:  Given all the moral sludge – the brash, undisguised public pursuit of money and power – does the present clearly established record compromise either or both Bidens, the father, now the President of the United States, and the son, an established bunko artist?

The New York Times and other news outlets, weeping for six years over former President Donald Trump’s moral turpitude, should consider assigning a reporter or two to probe the question. Very likely, neither father nor son will be compromised by their greed and lust for power because people who have no shame are used to sloughing off as outworn platitudes rigorous moral imperatives.