Context drives perception. What may be perceived as a strength in one scenario may be an Achilles’ heel in another.
Privilege raised Hunter Biden up. And privilege, which enabled his long addiction, may send him to prison for lying about that addiction on a gun application.
For many Biden watchers, his conviction Tuesday on three counts related to that lying was a long time coming. With his slick-backed hair, handsome face and easy grin, Biden has the air of the ne’er-do-well younger son in all those Hollywood movies. No doubt it was a role he played in real life, smoking crack, making questionable business deals and leaving a trail of damaged female lovers in contrast to the good older brother, Beau, who served in Iraq and died of brain cancer.
Hunter Biden has said that the trauma of being severely injured in a car crash that also injured his brother and took the lives of his mother and sister when he was 2 — compounded by losing his brother to cancer — led to his addiction. But lots of people endure such tragedies and worse. They do not turn to drugs. They don’t have multiple sex partners, including family members. They don’t fail to pay their taxes — all this not because they’re necessarily so noble but because they’re pragmatic. They understand that screwing up will increase the problems they already have.
My guess is that Biden would’ve become an addict with or without the trauma. Alcoholism runs in the Biden family, and President Joe Biden, like a lot of people who grow up among alcoholics, is a teetotaler. For years, Hunter Biden skated away from the shattering consequences of his actions as others, namely the women in his family and ex-girlfriends, struggled to pick up the pieces. But you pay for what you do in this world, sooner or later, one way or another. Biden has had to face the music for a crime that is rarely prosecuted, no doubt because he is his father’s son. And that father, as president of the United States, won’t pardon him or commute any possible sentence, precisely because he is the president of the United States.
The verdict — which turned on Biden’s texts and memoir about his drug use at the time he declared he was not an addict on the application — was a just reminder that words have precise meanings and that if you cannot be precise on an application or a text or a book, then maybe you shouldn’t be committing words to posterity.
Now the son has become the sacrificial lamb for those who say this proves there is no vendetta against former President Donald J. Trump and that the legal system is fair. Even so, some of the Republicans have been spinning this as a bone the Democrats are throwing them to hide the real malfeasance of the “Biden crime family.” Other Repubs are gleeful at the Biden family’s anguish.
But there should be no schadenfreude here. We none of us are ennobled when someone is diminished. Justice was served in the Hunter Biden case, but there is no joy in it. The legal system is fair. But that doesn’t mean that fairness isn’t often cruel.