Papa Joe Biden is a blatant liar and the embodiment of a perverse lie that sustains America’s phantom democracy.
Solely the acquainted secure of wind-up partisans who seem on US cable information networks and foolish naifs who cling to the fantastical concept that America is a shining-city-on-a-hill mannequin of liberty, equality, and fraternity would deny the important reality of that blunt opening sentence.
That’s the reason the overwrought brouhaha over Papa Biden’s predictable volte-face to pardon his wayward son after insisting that he wouldn’t train his prerogative to wave a presidential wand and erase Hunter’s legal convictions, strikes me as lacking a bigger and apparent level.
All presidents lie. It’s the American method. It at all times has been. It at all times might be.
Certainly, there are two defining qualities that each American president should possess so as to fulfill their duties and tasks. They have to be capable of lie with an virtually pathological ease and so they have to be content material to order others to kill with out pause or a scintilla of regret.
Presidents lie about battle. They lie about peace. They lie about negotiating “truces”. They lie about “intelligence” produced by spy companies whose enterprise is deceit. They lie about bridging the schism between wealthy and poor. They lie about defending “innocents” at residence and overseas. They lie about stopping the planet from burning into extinction.
They lie about pardons. They lie after they place their hand on a bible and swear to “protect, defend and defend the Structure of the USA”. The largest lie of all is after they reassure “the American folks” – many times – that they’ll, with out fail, inform the reality.
Which raises a needed query: Why do they lie?
They mislead persuade the gullible that presidents are “peacemakers” who oppose battle reasonably than gasoline battle with cash and arms.
They mislead obscure the truth that, as president, their principal obligation is to serve the parochial pursuits of the few on the debilitating expense of the various.
They lie to advertise a fable that America is a logo of hope and freedom so as to deny the historic file that US president after president has been the unrepentant architect of loss and struggling on an virtually incomprehensible scale throughout this ever-turbulent world.
Biden’s keen complicity within the genocide being perpetrated with such ferocious and deadly effectivity within the desolate remnants of Gaza and the occupied West Financial institution is extra convincing proof of America’s defining and anti-human previous, current and, little question, future.
America’s forty sixth president has handed the litmus check that each president should go. Biden has confirmed all through his septic tenure as president that he has, all alongside, had the proper stuff all proper to be commander-in-chief.
And, like many different presidents who preceded him and are, in fact, destined to comply with him, Biden can have a shrine – euphemistically referred to as a presidential library – inbuilt his honour to rejoice his facility to lie and kill.
So, the duelling camps on what constitutes the “proper” and “left” in America who, on one hyperbolic facet, are excoriating Biden for his hypocritical assault on the “rule of legislation” and, on the opposite sentimental wing, are defending the president’s comprehensible act of affection, are each responsible not solely of naivete, however a obvious double customary which confirms their profoundly unserious natures.
Biden’s detractors wail like colicky infants that he has reneged on a solemn pledge to not grant his second, troubled son clemency as a result of they had been satisfied of this president’s once-uncompromising constancy to the “norms” that gird the American democratic “experiment”.
This may increasingly come, I believe, as a revelation to those starry-eyed chumps, however the pampered and highly effective elites in Washington, DC and past – who dictate the phrases and circumstances of the American “experiment” – have by no means needed to abide by any of your fictive “norms”.
There are an exculpatory algorithm for the governors and a decidedly completely different set of incriminating guidelines for the ruled.
Exhibit A: Not one of many grinning nest of Wall Avenue plutocrats who engineered the sub-prime mortgage racket that triggered the close to collapse of the rigged US economic system and triggered such grief and hardship amongst “Important Avenue” America had been held to even a perfunctory measure of account.
As a substitute, they had been handed golden, life-time-do-not-go-to-Rikers tickets and bailed out by the legion of “blue-collar” American taxpayers whom they broken, typically past restore.
Not surprisingly, they had been abetted on this rule-of-law defacing rating by a succession of compliant presidents.
In completely satisfied league with their grateful Wall Avenue patrons and donors, not one sitting president has ever been charged, not to mention convicted and jailed, like hundreds of thousands of their a lot much less lucky “fellow residents”.
God-fearing, law-abiding, Boy Scouts all.
I recommend the “I’m shocked, shocked that the president lied” crowd take out a tissue and dab their embarrassing spigot of crocodile tears.
As for The Washington Submit columnist and his like-minded brethren on CNN and MSNBC who chafed at Papa Biden’s U-turn however gave him credit score for saving his child from an disagreeable destiny since that’s what any father would do, apparently these maudlin apologists require reminding that poor, little Hunter is a 54-year-old married man who must be liable for his illicit actions and his pop is the president of the USA.
The scales of justice aren’t blind when your dad can carry the blindfold and take a very good, lengthy peek on the accused within the dock to seek out out whether or not they’re associated to you or not.
Papa Biden ought to spare an oz of his mercy for the deserving victims of the “miscarriages of justice” which can be rife in America’s unsparing “judicial system”, which routinely imprisons the poor, minorities, non-violent offenders, and the harmless, who, in lots of outrageous circumstances, face the loss of life penalty.
In the direction of that – dare I say it – simply finish, Biden higher carve out a while throughout his dwindling days in workplace to name the Innocence Mission – a gaggle of honourable volunteers who work laborious to free the condemned – and search its recommendation on who he ought to pardon subsequent.
That may mood the shameful stain on the “reality” and “justice” he has left behind.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
