Why now, Joe?

Normally when someone must release a troubling bit of information to the public they do so on a Friday afternoon. The story, whatever it is, gets bundled up with other bits of flotsam while people are distracted with navigating Friday rush hour traffic and anticipating their weekend distractions. They may come across the story and set it aside for a while, intending to get back to it later.

Before you know it, Sunday rolls around and the public sees reactions to the story on the morning shows. The news has had time to age a little, people have had time to process it, but since it's already over 24 hours old, it no longer has the same degree of urgency.

For some reason, pResident (not a typo) Biden released the "I'm pardoning my son" tidbit on Sunday evening. If he had intended to set off a journalistic tactical nuke at the beginning of the weekly news cycle this is how he'd go about doing it. I’d like to paraphrase a now-famous quote and say that I’m not sure what Joe intends to do anymore and I don’t think he does either. Except that in this case I think he might, or his handlers do.

When I first saw the report I imagined one of those old black and white movies showing a grizzled newspaper editor wearing a visor and armbands calling the print room downstairs on the phone and yelling at them to "Stop the presses!"

I'm sure there were journalists all across the country who eagerly set aside whatever else they were working on and started putting together something brand new. I'm also sure that every single one of them knew that this would happen sometime before 1/20/25 anyway and so maybe they already had most of it written down.

There have already been an uncountable number of packets transmitted across the internet and photons flashed across television screens on this story. The ones I've seen so far focus on the themes of Joe's dishonesty and hypocrisy, questions of legality and the inevitable "Republicans pounce." 

I'm not a journalist, thank God, but I've gotten fairly cynical and more than a little suspicious in my old age and my first thought was, why now? Initial reports indicate that he discussed it with his family such as they are, over Thanksgiving, that he made the decision on Friday or Saturday, wrote it up and released it on Sunday.

Why the rush? He couldn't have waited until Friday, 12/6/24?

Not if he didn't want people talking about it. What will they be saying, and what kinds of questions will they be asking?

The pardon covers everything Hunter did or may have done from 1/1/2014 through 12/1/2024. That covers a lot of ground. It's been said that Ukraine has a bit of a corruption problem and that Burisma Holdings is no bastion of honesty itself. Hunter went to work for Burisma in 2014. Apparently they valued his expertise in the extraction, processing, sale and distribution of fossil fuels. I’ve underestimated that boy.

Now reports are surfacing that perhaps as much as 50% of all U.S. aid to Ukraine has been embezzled. Former Polish deputy minister Piotr Kulpa has alleged, “US aid programs are a mechanism to ‘write off large sums of money that finance shady systems under the Democratic Party’s control.’”

If that's true, then the DNC has profited handsomely from the U.S. support of Ukraine. How buddy-buddy are pResident Biden and the DNC right now? He's still wearing the tire marks from where their bus ran over him. He's always been an angry, spiteful little man, he's got a big axe to grind and this might be his way of getting some of his own back.

Hunter is reportedly in the process of writing a tell-all book. If he's been pardoned then he'll have no need to invoke his 5th Amendment protections and he can name names.

Maybe we can add those names to the ones included in the anticipated release of the Epstein and Diddy files, Kash Patel's exhumations in the FBI, and the Hegseth/Bondi housecleanings. 

Image: Louise Palanker