Papa Joe Biden is a blatant liar and the embodiment of a perverse lie that sustains America’s phantom democracy.
Only the familiar stable of wind-up partisans who appear on US cable news networks and silly naifs who cling to the fantastical idea that America is a shining-city-on-a-hill model of liberty, equality, and fraternity would deny the essential truth of that blunt opening sentence.
That is why the overwrought brouhaha over Papa Biden’s predictable volte-face to pardon his wayward son after insisting that he would not exercise his prerogative to wave a presidential wand and erase Hunter’s criminal convictions, strikes me as missing a larger and obvious point.
All presidents lie. It is the American way. It always has been. It always will be.
Indeed, there are two defining qualities that every American president must possess in order to fulfill their duties and responsibilities. They must be able to lie with an almost pathological ease and they must be content to order others to kill without pause or a scintilla of remorse.
Presidents lie about war. They lie about peace. They lie about negotiating “truces”. They lie about “intelligence” produced by spy services whose business is deceit. They lie about bridging the schism between rich and poor. They lie about protecting “innocents” at home and abroad. They lie about preventing the planet from burning into extinction.
They lie about pardons. They lie when they place their hand on a bible and swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. The biggest lie of all is when they reassure “the American people” – again and again – that they will, without fail, tell the truth.
Which raises a necessary question: Why do they lie?
They lie to convince the gullible that presidents are “peacemakers” who oppose war rather than fuel conflict with money and arms.
They lie to obscure the fact that, as president, their principal obligation is to serve the parochial interests of the few at the debilitating expense of the many.
They lie to promote a myth that America is a symbol of hope and freedom in order to deny the historical record that US president after president has been the unrepentant architect of loss and suffering on an almost incomprehensible scale across this ever-turbulent world.
Biden’s eager complicity in the genocide being perpetrated with such ferocious and lethal efficiency in the desolate remnants of Gaza and the occupied West Bank is more convincing evidence of America’s defining and anti-human past, present and, no doubt, future.
America’s 46th president has passed the litmus test that every president must pass. Biden has proven throughout his septic tenure as president that he has, all along, had the right stuff all right to be commander-in-chief.
And, like many other presidents who preceded him and are, of course, destined to follow him, Biden will have a shrine – euphemistically known as a presidential library – built in his honour to celebrate his facility to lie and kill.
So, the duelling camps on what constitutes the “right” and “left” in America who, on one hyperbolic side, are excoriating Biden for his hypocritical assault on the “rule of law” and, on the other sentimental wing, are defending the president’s understandable act of love, are both guilty not only of naivete, but a glaring double standard which confirms their profoundly unserious natures.
Biden’s detractors wail like colicky babies that he has reneged on a solemn pledge not to grant his second, troubled son clemency because they were convinced of this president’s once-uncompromising fidelity to the “norms” that gird the American democratic “experiment”.
This may come, I suspect, as a revelation to these starry-eyed chumps, but the pampered and powerful elites in Washington, DC and beyond – who dictate the terms and conditions of the American “experiment” – have never had to abide by any of your fictive “norms”.
There are an exculpatory set of rules for the governors and a decidedly different set of incriminating rules for the governed.
Exhibit A: Not one of the grinning nest of Wall Street plutocrats who engineered the sub-prime mortgage racket that triggered the near collapse of the rigged US economy and caused such grief and hardship among “Main Street” America were held to even a perfunctory measure of account.
Instead, they were handed golden, life-time-do-not-go-to-Rikers tickets and bailed out by the legion of “blue-collar” American taxpayers whom they damaged, often beyond repair.
Not surprisingly, they were abetted on this rule-of-law defacing score by a succession of compliant presidents.
In happy league with their grateful Wall Street patrons and donors, not one sitting president has ever been charged, let alone convicted and jailed, like millions of their much less fortunate “fellow citizens”.
God-fearing, law-abiding, Boy Scouts all.
I suggest 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 Post columnist and his like-minded brethren on CNN and MSNBC who chafed at Papa Biden’s U-turn but gave him credit for saving his kid from an unpleasant fate 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 ought to be responsible for his illicit actions and his pop is the president of the United States.
The scales of justice aren’t blind when your dad can lift the blindfold and take a good, long peek at the accused in the dock to find out whether they are related to you or not.
Papa Biden should spare an ounce of his mercy for the deserving victims of the “miscarriages of justice” that are rife in America’s unsparing “judicial system”, which routinely imprisons the poor, minorities, non-violent offenders, and the innocent, who, in many outrageous cases, face the death penalty.
Towards that – dare I say it – just end, Biden better carve out some time during his dwindling days in office to call the Innocence Project – a group of honourable volunteers who work hard to free the condemned – and seek its advice on who he should pardon next.
That might temper the shameful stain on the “truth” and “justice” he has left behind.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
