For years I have viewed Joe Biden as a typical "swamp creature," a cipher as both a U.S. senator and as vice president, usually wrong, undistinguished except for the political mean streak he showed in the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas Supreme Court justice hearings. Certainly he wasn't somebody I'd vote for to become U.S. president.

But I also had some sympathy for him because he had some really rough things happen to him in his life. First was the death of his (first) wife and daughter in a horrific car accident only a few weeks before he was first sworn in as a senator. Then, he was a single father raising two young sons (both injured in that same accident), commuting between D.C. and Wilmington, and that's tough to do. Later in life he lost the "good" son Beau, who served with distinction in the military and later was elected Delaware Attorney General, to cancer.... while the still-living "wastrel" son Hunter did drugs and sex and personally profited on Joe's good name.

Joe just seemed like an ordinary guy, perhaps elevated a little above his natural talents, "lunchbox Joe" and "Amtrak Joe," the kind of guy you'd like to have as a next-door neighbor.

Last summer a friend and I were discussing Joe's corruption, most evident in Joe's own admission that, as he put it at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, "I’m telling you, you’re [Ukraine] not getting the billion dollars... I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor [Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the corrupt energy company Burisma and was planning to question Hunter] is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired."

I commented that when Joe released his tax returns for the presidential campaign I went through them and I couldn't find any direct evidence that Joe was personally benefitting from Hunter's cashing in on Joe's connections. When Joe entered private life and Joe and Jill received advance royalties and proceeds from sales of their books, their income went up sharply (into the millions of dollars) and they could certainly afford a luxurious lifestyle. But it appeared to me that Joe's corruption was mainly for the benefit of his children and relatives, not for himself or Jill.

However, something kept troubling me: One of the most difficult decisions parents can make when faced with a child, even an adult child, who is hooked on drugs and is making absolutely terrible life choices and who has become corrupt, is to "pull the plug", withdraw all support ("tough love"), wait for the child's life to crash and hit bottom and then wait until that child is finally willing to set himself straight and enter recovery, Then the parents can extend their support and love to help that recovery. Clearly Joe and Jill had not yet made that painful decision - Joe's getting a prosecutor fired to protect his son was certainly an extreme measure of support - and they continued to be "enablers" of Hunter's destructive behavior. As I said, "pulling the plug" is a really difficult choice to make, a very good reason to be sympathetic toward the parents' plight.

Then Hunter stupidly failed to reclaim his damaged MacBook Pro from a repair shop. As abandoned property, its hard drive was sent to the FBI (in December 2019, and the FBI did nothing). Then in May or June of this year, a copy made its way into the hands of the Trump campaign, information from which they have released this week as their own "October Surprise." So far, the info on the drive has revealed that Hunter was selling his dad's connections and influence for hard cash (in both Ukraine and China), that Hunter was paying for many expenses of the Biden extended family, and that Joe was receiving "kickbacks" of up to 50% of the bribes that Hunter took in.

Rudy Giuliani has clearly laid out this trail of corruption in a podcast, available in this YouTube video here. You may disagree with Rudy's description of the "Biden crime family," but Rudy is an experienced prosecutor of mafiosi and I agree with this characterization. The truth is on the immutable hard drive. The corruption is extensive, to many members of the Biden extended family, and no doubt we'll learn more as the Trump folks reveal it in the days before the election.

Once the truth was out, any sympathy I had for Joe Biden went right down the toilet. Joe personally profited from selling his influence overseas (via Hunter), corruption of the first order, totally unacceptable behavior for a vice president of the U.S. But more to the point, Joe was never going to "pull the plug" on Hunter. He was going to continue to enable Hunter's destructive behavior as long as the money kept rolling in. What kind of dad allows himself to profit from his own son's destruction? Only human scum.

And Joe has poisoned his entire extended family. Which among them (except grandchildren too young to understand) did not realize that Joe was profiting (by bribes) from his V-P office? And in his presidential campaign, which of Joe's senior campaign officials did not know about Joe's corruption? None, I would surmise.

Joe now has zero moral authority to lecture anybody about decency - not his family, not his friends, not the public, certainly not President Trump.

Until recently the Democrats (aided by the media) were perpetrating a fraud, offering up for president a weak candidate with advancing dementia, who would be unlikely to last a single term in office. Now they a perpetrating a double fraud: A candidate exhibiting signs of dementia who is himself a fraud.

We have a two-tier system of justice in this country... the federal government is too weak-willed and corrupted at top levels to see that any of these malefactors will be imprisoned for crimes which, if you or I committed them, would put us in the pokey for life. So I have for them a "voter's curse"; May you become impoverished by spending all of your ill-gotten bribes in legal fees trying to stay out of jail, after which you will have to making a living honestly; and may Trump defeat Joe in a crushing landslide affirming that no corrupt politician should ever occupy the office of president of the United States.

About the author: Nick Chase is a retired but still very active writer, editor and webmaster, and records classical music concerts for radio broadcast. You can read more of his work on the American Thinker website and at contrariansview.org.

Image credit: Official photo, processed with FotoSketcher.