Papa Joe Biden is a blatant liar and the embodiment of a perverse lie that sustains America’s phantom democracy.
Solely the acquainted steady 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 felony convictions, strikes me as lacking a bigger and apparent level.
All presidents lie. It’s the American manner. It at all times has been. It at all times will probably be.
Certainly, there are two defining qualities that each American president should possess with a purpose to fulfill their duties and duties. They need to be capable of lie with an nearly pathological ease they usually have to be content material to order others to kill with out pause or a scintilla of regret.
Presidents lie about conflict. 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 house 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 individuals” – many times – that they’ll, with out fail, inform the reality.
Which raises a obligatory query: Why do they lie?
They deceive persuade the gullible that presidents are “peacemakers” who oppose conflict somewhat than gasoline battle with cash and arms.
They deceive obscure the truth that, as president, their principal obligation is to serve the parochial pursuits of the few on the debilitating expense of the numerous.
They lie to advertise a fable that America is a logo of hope and freedom with a purpose to deny the historic file that US president after president has been the unrepentant architect of loss and struggling on an nearly 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 doubt, future.
America’s forty sixth president has handed the litmus take a look at that each president should go. Biden has confirmed all through his septic tenure as president that he has, all alongside, had the appropriate stuff all proper to be commander-in-chief.
And, like many different presidents who preceded him and are, after all, destined to comply with him, Biden can have a shrine – euphemistically referred to as a presidential library – inbuilt his honour to have fun his facility to lie and kill.
So, the duelling camps on what constitutes the “proper” and “left” in America who, on one hyperbolic aspect, are excoriating Biden for his hypocritical assault on the “rule of regulation” 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 commonplace 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 have been satisfied of this president’s once-uncompromising constancy to the “norms” that gird the American democratic “experiment”.
This may increasingly come, I think, 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 totally 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 prompted such grief and hardship amongst “Major Avenue” America have been held to even a perfunctory measure of account.
As a substitute, they have 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 have been abetted on this rule-of-law defacing rating by a succession of compliant presidents.
In pleased league with their grateful Wall Avenue patrons and donors, not one sitting president has ever been charged, not to mention convicted and jailed, like thousands and thousands of their a lot much less lucky “fellow residents”.
God-fearing, law-abiding, Boy Scouts all.
I counsel 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 chargeable for his illicit actions and his pop is the president of the USA.
The scales of justice aren’t blind when your dad can elevate the blindfold and take a superb, lengthy peek on the accused within the dock to search 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 might 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 demise penalty.
In 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 bunch of honourable volunteers who work exhausting to free the condemned – and search its recommendation on who he ought to pardon subsequent.
Which may mood the shameful stain on the “reality” and “justice” he has left behind.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.