Pardon Me

A recent headline in my local newspaper exclaimed in large bold letters, ‘A terrible mistake’. The quote was from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal concerning the pardon granted by former President Biden to a Connecticut man convicted of conspiracy to commit the murders of a woman and her young son who were scheduled to appear as witnesses in a murder trial back in 1999. 

Blumenthal attributed Biden’s mistake to an “oversight” but did not explain how such an oversight could have occurred? How could the name of this convicted criminal, as well as the names of a dozen other convicted Connecticut drug dealers mentioned in a related article, have come to Biden’s attention in the first place?  Who pleaded their cause? Who wanted them pardoned? Most of them had long criminal histories that included illegal firearm possession.

What reason could President Biden have had for pardoning these criminals? Perhaps he did not even know who he was pardoning and just signed the document placed before him. But in that case, who was responsible for the terrible mistake?  I suppose we will never know.

It is different in the case of the pardons meted out to Biden’s own family in the last minutes of his Presidency. Actually, these family members have so far never been accused or convicted of anything. The President took the unprecedented step of pardoning them for anything they may have done wrong since 2014.

The start date of this immunity, 2014, is very important. It was in that year that then Vice-President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, became involved in the affairs of Ukraine. At that time Biden openly bragged that he had forced the government of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption. At the same time, Biden’s son Hunter enjoyed a lucrative position of the board of a Ukrainian energy company that was the focus of the corruption investigation. In pardoning his family and his son, Biden effectively pardoned himself for any wrongdoing over the past ten years.

The pardon given to Hunter Biden late last year is somewhat different. Hunter had actually been convicted of tax evasion and a violation of Federal gun control laws. While he was still running for re-election, Joe Biden said that he would not pardon his son, but when a plea deal fell through, he had no choice. At the time progressive commentators gushed that even though the President lied, he was motivated by love of his son. Who can blame such a loving father? Who would not do the same? 

Nevertheless, it appears to me that the pardon had more to do with fear than with love. I suspect that ever since their meddling in the Ukraine back in 2014, the son had something potentially damaging on his father. Hunter’s pardon was not just for his recent convictions but went all the way back to 2014.

 I have been poring through Miranda Devine’s recent book, “The Big Guy,” about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. On many occasions Hunter claimed that over the past ten years he had worked very hard for his family. He was not going to take the fall. 

Reading Miranda Devine’s book, it is not hard to imagine that the relationships in the Biden family were not always loving especially when Hunter was addicted to crack, sex, and porn. Devine writes that at the time Hunter dropped the now famous lap-top off at the repair shop, his “life was at rock bottom. His crack addiction was out of control, and he had been bouncing between cheap motels filming himself having threesomes with hookers.”

“He was in a rage with his family. His relationship with his widowed sister-in-law Hallie had grown toxic. He accused her of cheating, and she had banned him from seeing her children until he sought rehab. He accused his father of siding with her and was on the outs even with Uncle Jim. [98]…”

He seemed to have little regard for his father and stepmom Jill. Perhaps it was the crack addiction, but Miranda Devine quotes the following words from Hunter about Jill and Joe.

“And you do know the drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shit grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.

“So go fuck yourself Jill let’s all agree I don’t like you anymore than you like me.”

He also complained to his uncle that he had been to drug rehab seven times, but his father “literally has never come to one never actually called me while in rehab.” [109].

 

In his famous little political treatise, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance diplomat and political observer, devoted a whole section to whether it is better to be loved or feared. For a number of reasons he concluded that for anyone in power it was better to be feared than to be loved. Hunter was a loose cannon to be feared and had to be pardoned.

 

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The Unjust Steward

  

President Joe Biden has been a public servant for practically all of his adult life. He served the people of Delaware as a senator for more than 40 years. Now, as President of the USA he is the servant of all the people.  Even though he is our chief executive, he is our servant, and we the people are his employer or master. 

So, when he issues an executive order to forgive student loans, it  may seem magnanimous and merciful to some, but he is not forgiving payments due to him but to us. He is giving away our money, not his own. It is very easy to spend or give away someone else’s money. Moreover, he is not even consulting with our representatives in Congress on this matter despite the fact that his Democratic party has majorities in both houses. This is just a clandestine form of taxation without representation.

President Biden admits to being a practicing Catholic so he must have heard the parable of the Unjust Steward many times while in attendance at Mass. Actually, he will hear it again on September 18 when it is the gospel for the 25^thSunday in Ordinary Time. 

The parable is about a servant or steward who is a crook. He was cheating his own master or employer to feather his own nest. Realizing that his fraud is about to be disclosed, and that he will be out of a job, it never occurs to him to ask for forgiveness or repent.  Instead, he goes to his master’s debtors and reduces what they owe. He hopes that they will reward him when he is out of a job. What else could he do in the face of impending doom? As he says, "to dig, I am not able, to beg, I am ashamed.” 

 

Commentators have wondered why the master seems to “commend” the unjust steward for his criminal behavior. “And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.” Personally, I detect sarcasm here. Why would any of those debtors ever trust the steward when they know that he has cheated on his own master? Interestingly, the gospel relates that the wealthy Pharisees listening to the parable laughed at Jesus.

 

Even today, it is funny to hear people like Joe Biden called public servants. It appears that in all those years that he “served” the people of Delaware, he mainly served the interests of himself and the Biden family. Somehow, on a congressman’s salary, he became one of the richest, if not the richest man, in the tiny state of Delaware, where, by the way, most of the largest companies in America are domiciled because of favorable corporate laws. Years from now, when the FBI concludes its investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop, we may finally learn the identity of the “big guy” who would get 10% of the profits of Hunter’s business dealings in China.

 

As far as college loan debt forgiveness is concerned, it is just not fair to shift the burden to others. During the Obama/Biden administration, the government took over the whole student loan operation, and promised that by taking it out of the hands of private banks, billions would be saved. Ten years later, the program is a disaster. The Biden administration plan appears to be not only a cover-up of another progressive failure, but also, a ploy to revive the sagging reputation of the Biden administration as the mid-term elections draw near. 

 

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No Country for Old Men

“A lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions. Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation.” 

President Franklyn D. Roosevelt uttered the above words at a press conference shortly after he was re-elected to serve a second term in 1936.  Roosevelt offered these remarks on the incapacity of old age in order to justify his plan to pack the Supreme Court with new justices.  During his first term parts of his New Deal agenda had been declared unconstitutional by the Court.  Since Roosevelt could not fire or replace the existing judges, he proposed to add one new judge for every judge on the Court over the age of 70. His remarks, ironic as they were coming from a man crippled with paralysis conveniently hidden by a favorable press, did not go over well and he had to scrap the plan.

Although his remarks on the problems of old age were just a bald-faced attempt to justify his court packing scheme, I can say, at the age of 83, that there is truth in them.  Even when I retired 15 years ago, I was finding it difficult to do the ordinary tasks of my financial planning practice, as well as keep up with new developments in the field. At the time, I realized that it was time to hand over my clients to younger planners. It was time to retire.

Two years ago, when Joe Biden ran for President, it was obvious to me that he was suffering from old age. After a long, undistinguished career, the Democratic party should have put him out to pasture but since none of the other Democratic candidates had any popular appeal, Biden seemed to be the only one with a chance to defeat President Trump. His run for the Presidency was sad to watch as his advisors prevailed upon him to campaign from his basement, and make as few public appearances as possible. 

Now, after 18 months as President, his incapacity is even more obvious. He stumbles and falls. He holds few press conferences and only speaks in public using a teleprompter, and even then, he fumbles for words. At my age, I can understand. I gave up lecturing at my local senior center three years ago because it took too much out of me. But Biden is President of the United States. He carries the nuclear codes around with him. 

I do not want to make a list of mistakes President Biden has made since taking office. But I would like to point out what he hasn’t done and is obviously incapable of doing. He is not capable of being the leader of the free world. Russia invades Ukraine and where is the impassioned appeal for peace from the President of the United States.? Where is the appearance at the U.N. calling for a cease-fire and a peace conference? Two members of that organization are launching missiles at each other. Soldiers and civilians are dying every day. Where is the outrage on the part of our President? What has happened to the summit meeting with Vladimir Putin?

Rather than become a world-class leader the President has become a world-class denier. He takes responsibility for nothing, and just blames others. He denied that the retreat from Afghanistan was a fiasco. He blamed President Trump for 250,000 Covid deaths during his term in office and claimed that alone made him unfit for the office. Now that over 700,000 Covid deaths have occurred since he took office, he expresses no regret and assumes no responsibility. He and his advisors claimed that inflation was only transitory but now that gasoline prices are at an all-time high, his party re-names a multi-billion spending bill, the Inflation Reduction act. 

From the day of his election, I have believed that President Biden would not be able to complete his term of office, much less run again in 2024 at the age of 82. Old age will continue to take its toll, but there is also the possibility that circumstances might lead Democratic party leaders to force him to step down, especially if the upcoming mid-term elections turn out to be a disaster. 

Eight years after Franklyn D. Roosevelt uttered the words cited above, he was running for an unprecedented fourth term in the midst of WWII. His party pushed his nomination even though leaders knew he was a dying man. James Farley, an astute politician, and one of FDR’s long-time supporters resigned from his leadership position in protest over the impending nomination. He thought the Democratic party would be unfaithful to its principles if it nominated Roosevelt for another term that would likely kill him.

 “anyone with a grain of common sense would surely realize  from the appearance of the President that he is not a well man and there is not a chance in the world for him to carry on four years more and face the problems that a President will have before him; he just can’t survive another presidential term.”

The above quotes are from Bret Baier’s 2019 book on Roosevelt, Three Days at the Brink, FDR’s Daring Gamble to Win World War II.  According to Baier, Farley thought that “Democratic politicians were taking the easy way out, protecting their own hides at the expense of the national good.” 

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Hall of Shame 2021

  

        

We are in the award season. There are the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes and others where entertainment people appear dressed to the nines to pat each other on the back. Major League Baseball has just conducted its annual voting for its Hall of Fame. Time Magazine has recently named Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, as its 2021 Person of the Year.  

Since 2014, The Weekly Bystander has been nominating  qualified candidates for the  “Bystander Hall of Shame.” As usual there can be many nominees for 2021. New York seems to be a spawning ground for nominees starting with disgraced  former governor Andrew Cuomo, and his brother Chris Cuomo who lost his coveted post at CNN for ethics violations, both personal and journalistic.  Of course, former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio has finally departed with the reputation as the worst mayor ever to serve in the Big Apple. 

But why bother with nominations when the clear winner for 2021 is President Joe Biden whose first year in office has been truly shameful. Actually, Biden has practically nominated himself. You may recall that during the 2020 Presidential debates he blamed President Trump for the Covid deaths of over 200,000 people, and insisted that “anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” 

 

A few weeks ago an editorial in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that there have been over 400,000 Covid related deaths during the first year of the Biden administration. Nevertheless, the President refuses to remove himself from office.

I am not blaming President Biden for the Covid deaths during his administration but his induction into the Hall of  Shame is due to his blaming others, and then not taking any responsibility himself. 

Just as shameful is his consistent refusal to give former President Donald Trump any credit for the development of the vaccines that he now believes should be mandated for every American.   It is as if Operation Warp Speed never existed. 

 

A few days ago he put the icing on the cake by claiming that dealing with the pandemic was not a matter for the Federal government but should be left to the states.

 

Blaming President Trump for Covid deaths will go down as one of the most shameful deeds  not only in Joe Biden’s long career, but also in the history of the USA. He could have gone a long way to heal the Nation’s divisions by awarding former President Trump and Vice-President  Mike Pence the Presidential Medal of Honor for their efforts in promoting the speedy development of the vaccines.

 

At a rare press conference yesterday, President Biden claimed that he had accomplished more in his first year in office than any other President in history. This rank hyperbole can only be viewed as a shameful attempt to cover a variety of misdeeds that would have led Democrats to impeach President Trump over and over again.

 

Who can forget the chaotic manner in which our troops withdrew from Afghanistan? Who can overlook the chaos on our southern border that Vice-President Kamala Harris was supposed to take care of? Policy mistakes and failures are not necessarily shameful, but failing to acknowledge that inflation exists or that the government has anything to do with it is shameful. President Biden wants to tax the rich, but inflation is a cruel tax on everyone, rich and poor.

 

Finally, President Biden came into office last year after winning a narrow victory in a hotly contested election. His party had a slim margin in the House of Representatives, and a 50/50 Senate.  He claimed that he wanted to heal and unify the Nation but then went on not to court the opposition but to vilify his opponents. Senator Mitch Mc Connell said after President’s Biden’s recent speech in Georgia that he did not recognize the man he had longed worked with in the Senate. It is hard to say whether the President’s failure to seek compromise is his fault or the fault of his handlers, but it is a shameful departure from the long course of  American politics.

 

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Election Humor 2021

 

While watching the reports of the election results Tuesday, I felt that political commentators on both sides were missing a very important reason for the Republican surge. Of course, dejected liberal pundits were hard pressed to come up with an explanation, but even the zealots on Fox news, who repeatedly recited a litany of unpopular progressive positions, missed the point. Democratic politicians and their media allies seemed to be totally lacking in a sense of humor. 

In Virginia the Democrats brought in all their big guns in support of Terry McAuliffe, and all seemed to be deadly serious, and totally lacking in humor. Despite his declining poll numbers, smiling President Biden appeared twice but who, even in the friendly media, pays attention to his boring speeches except to listen for the inevitable gaffes or failures of memory.

 

Vice President Kamela Harris appeared and gave her usual impression of a scolding school marm as she warned, in deadly seriousness, about the importance of the election for the 2022 and 2024 national elections. She predicted that as Virginia goes, so goes the nation. I suppose she will now go back into hiding but it would have been nice to hear her exhibit a little deprecatory humor while she ate crow after the Republican victory. 

 

The Democrats even brought in former President Obama, the most sanctimonious politician of all, from his multi-million-dollar sanctuary on Martha’s Vineyard. Does anyone outside of the inner sanctum of Democratic politicians pay any attention to Obama? Is it possible to listen to his teleprompter speeches? The McAuliffe campaign must have paid him a bundle to appear, but the money was obviously wasted. 

 

Worst of all was the Democratic candidate himself.  In his non-concession speech Terry McAuliffe was pathetic as he tried to cover up his impending defeat. There was no hint of humility or self-deprecation. His introduction of his family was embarrassing to watch, and his stupid little victory dance made him look like an unfunny clown.

 

Switching around the channels I found the same total sanctimony and seriousness among the panel on CNN, as well as in the demeanor of obviously disappointed Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Most pathetic of all was a clip of joyless Joy Reid when she exclaimed, in all earnestness, that the Republicans were very dangerous people. Wasn’t she aware that a couple of days before the election, Democratic supporters had staged a fake Republican white supremacist rally?

 

Where has political humor, especially satire, gone? Why have liberals, who once were the champions of political satire abandoned it? The opportunities for satire today are greater than ever. Consider, the following op-ed by Paul Levy that recently appeared in a Wall Street Journal about Biden’s position at the University of Pennsylvania, entitled “Professor Biden and His Ambassadors.” 

 

 

"Amy Gutmann, Penn’s president, awaits Senate confirmation as U.S. envoy to Germany, and David L. Cohen, until July chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees as ambassador to Canada. 

 

Ms. Gutmann isn’t a donor. Mr. Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, gave more than half a million dollars to Democratic campaigns and political causes between 2017 and 2020…

 

After Mr. Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, Penn created the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global engagement and appointed Mr. Biden to the bespoke position of Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Mr. Biden was paid personally for this job--$371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 before launching his campaign,

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer… described Mr. Biden’s position as “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big ticketed events.”

 

A letter writer in today’s WSJ quipped that the description seemed to fit Biden’s current position.

 

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Quote of the day: "Round up the usual suspects!" Claude Rains in Casablanca.

COVID deaths: Who's to Blame?

  

     

 

In the Presidential debates last year candidate Joe Biden blamed President Trump for the deaths of 225000 Americans during the Covid pandemic. To my mind it was the lowest point in Biden’s long lackluster career in politics. In fact, his charge, echoed by his running mate, Kamala Harris, and many other prominent Democrats, could easily make the top ten list of dirty, despicable campaign smears in American history.

 

Typically, neither Biden nor Harris blamed Democratic governors like New York’s now disgraced Andrew Cuomo for the high death rates in their states. Even now, they still refuse to blame Cuomo after it was revealed that his administration fudged the death figures to avoid looking bad. Nevertheless, Democratic New York and New Jersey still lead the nation in deaths per million. New Jersey is the leader with 3077 deaths per million, and New York is second with 2863. 

 

During 2020 I kept close count of the coronavirus figures and even ran a spread sheet that compared state by state results, as well as country by country results. I put a couple of posts on this blog to show that it would be hard to blame individual politicians. Other factors were more relevant. After election day, I stopped counting. Perhaps, I sensed that the figures would no longer matter.

 

Last week, the death toll from Covid climbed to over 700000 in this country. When President Biden took office in January 2021, the death toll was 400000. But who blames President Biden? Who blames the President for the recent surge that thankfully seems to be abating? The blame has been shifted to anti-vaxxers. Speaking of vaccines, neither Biden nor Harris has ever given President Trump any credit for the incredible and speedy work on the vaccines that has been labelled one of the marvels of medical history. Kamala Harris was the original anti-vaxxer when she insisted that she would never take a vaccine developed during the Trump administration.

 

Out of curiosity I took a look at the figures at the end of September. In the United States so far there have been about 43.3 Million people who have tested positive for the coronavirus. The death toll of about 711000 is 1.62% of those who have tested positive. The death rate is well below the world average of 2.05%, especially when you consider that the USA results help considerably to bring down the world average.

 

The USA figure also compares very well with countries like the United Kingdom and Italy with national health systems. In the UK there have been 7.8 Million cases and 136741 deaths for a death rate of 1.75%. In Italy there have been 4.9 Million reported cases and 130807 deaths for a death rate of 2.79%.

 

From the beginning scientists have argued that the number of people actually infected must be significantly higher than the reported cases. I have seen all sorts of multipliers but the latest seems to indicate that the number of cases should be multiplied by 2. In other words, at least 80 Million Americans have been infected and over 79 Million have survived. 

 

A columnist in my local newspaper recently reported on his bout with Covid. He had been vaccinated but thought little of it when he developed symptoms of a postnasal drip. However, he decided to get tested after spending time with a granddaughter who subsequently tested positive. Sure enough, he tested positive and even though his symptoms did not get worse, he made a brief trip to the hospital to get antibody treatment because he had certain co-morbidities. That was it. He quickly recovered and went about his business when doctors told him he could not infect anyone after 14 days. He became one of the more than 99% of Americans who survived Covid infection.

 

Of those who have not survived, the great majority were elderly or laden with co-morbidities like diabetes or obesity. Newspapers and other media can always feature exceptional anecdotes, but the data has always suggested that the young and healthy are not at any more risk than during a normal flu season.

 

In the past I have refrained from blaming anyone for what is a world-wide pandemic, but Joe Biden was wrong to blame President Trump back in 2020 and he is equally wrong in not giving him any credit now for initiating Operation Warp Speed that produced the vaccines in record time.   

 

 

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