I can sympathize with Joe Biden feeling the pain of his son’s conviction.
President Joe Biden said he accepts the guilty verdict of Hunter Biden after his son was convicted by a jury of three federal gun charges Tuesday − a historic first for the child of a sitting president.
“I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” Biden said in a statement.
…
“As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.”
That would be my reaction if one of my kids was a screw-up who got caught: we’re going to have to accept that you committed a crime and are being punished for it, but we still love and support you.
Unfortunately, we’d also suffer some anguish — where did we go wrong? What could we have done to prevent them from taking this path? Did my pursuit of a career do them harm? I don’t have to worry about it since my adult kids are all perfect and delightful, but I imagine the Biden family is doing some soul-searching, and if they’re not, they’re not good people.
You know who are not good people? Republicans. Apparently, some of them are very good at cutting human feeling out of their lives. Like, say, Clarence Thomas.
One of the many corruption scandals in his life is that he accepted somewhere around $150,000 to pay private school tuition for his grand-nephew. He and his wife were legal guardians for this kid between the ages of 6 and 19. Clarence said he was raising this boy, Mark Martin, as his son.
Then Mark’s life went awry, he was doing drugs and playing with guns. He has been arrested and is awaiting a mandatory 25 year prison sentence. He’s a great big screw-up. So, the response from Clarence Thomas and his wife is to pretend they don’t know him, to cut their adoptive son out of their lives.
Now 32 years old, Martin told BI in an interview from the Jasper County Detention Center in South Carolina that Clarence and Ginni Thomas washed their hands of him years ago.
“I haven’t really heard much from them in a long time,” Martin said. “I tried to communicate with them a couple of times, but I’ve never gotten any response.”
Yikes. I cannot imagine turning my back on my kids like that, cutting off all communication. I feel pain right now that we live so far apart that we can only see each other sporadically.
But then, ol’ Clarence made his feelings known early when he preferred getting millions of dollars from his billionaire buddies to his son’s company, and sent Mark off to military school.
While his own father was incarcerated, Martin remembers much of his childhood as the Thomases’ ward as relatively privileged. Together, Martin said they traveled to more than 20 countries; he frequently spent summers wakeboarding or waterskiing and babysitting Crow’s son when the elite families vacationed together.
That all stopped when Martin entered high school, he said, when the Thomases decided they “just didn’t have time to deal with” him and sent him away to the boarding schools. From his freshman year of high school on, Martin said he rarely saw his Supreme Court-justice great-uncle or his wife, who Martin said had raised him “like another mother and father” since childhood.
Rich Republicans can’t be like the mother and father I knew, or have tried to be, I guess.
Maybe Mark Martin disappointed his grand-uncle by growing up to be such a small time crook rather than a big-time rotten crook like Clarence Thomas.
So now pz’s obsession with spiders becomes clear!
GOP family life is JUST LIKE a spider egg-sack!
Okay, arachnophobes, destroy them with fire! …no, not the spiders, tho.
At least the Thomases are not eating their young once they have grown big and juicy. So in a very limited way they are better than arthropod parents.
Biden makes a good point here.
Some kids and adults do manage to kick their addictions to drugs and alcohol. I know a few of them.
Some kids and adults never manage to kick their addictions and end up dead, dying early. I know, or rather knew, just as many of them.
One of our friend’s kids started doing drugs in high school. Unfortunately he soon settled on his favorite drugs, opiates. His parents were well off and could pay for the best treatments.
What followed was a decade and a half of one rehab center after another until he died of a heroin overdose in his 30s.
My friend in college had some adverse life experiences that you don’t need to know about. She spent over a decade drinking heavily.
I ran into her 20 years later. She didn’t remember me.
I soon discovered that she didn’t remember much of anything and had real trouble focusing on anything. It was clear that some brain damage had happened, most likely from excessive alcohol consumption.
She died in her 40s.
Abandoned their son
“The party of family”
Was always bullshit.
If I were Joe, I’d pardon Hunter
but not until after the election
He boxed himself in a bit by saying that he wouldn’t, but then I thought — hey, clemency is technically not a pardon.
Even complete pieces of shit like Dick Cheney and Strom Thurmond stuck by their families. In Thurmond’s case, he didn’t publicly acknowledge his Black daughter but supported her financially.
Uncle Thomas, OTOH, couldn’t even do that. It seems like Martin was treated as the help while he lived with them (watched Crow’s children while they vacationed) and was then abandoned at a moment’s convenience. Truly a soulless motherfucker the justice is.
Conservative talk shows are having a grand time with this. Nonstop gloating…pathetic.
See also, Boebert couldn’t be bothered to show up at her son’s hearings, or even help him get a lawyer, but had time to go protest at Trump’s.
@5 Right wing yahoos would fall over themselves if he did that. Besides Hunter committed a crime. There’s no reason to think that he didn’t have a fair trial, and there’s no valid reason he should get a pardon.
Nemo @5
He said he won’t pardon Hunter. And I believe him. He can commute his sentence though. And I hope he does that this November.
And if there was ever a case for jury nullification this was it.
@ 5 Nemo & ^ JimB : last night’s episodoe of Planet America here (half an hour long) made that point re communuting vs pardoning. Hopefully Hunter’s sentence will be non-custodial anyhow. What purpose would a jail sentence serve after all? Rehabilitation? Hunter’s already working on that reasonably successfully apparently. Deterrence? Maybe but national humiliation and raising awareness of cionsequences has already been accomplished I’d reckon and his offense was at the minor end of the scale here. I do think that Hunter wa sonly prosecuted given his luck of birth. OI don’t think Hunter deserves jailand if he does that sentence shoudl be short enough that it is already concluded by the time Biden leaves office. Were I the judge sentencing here the very worst I’d sentence Hunter Biden to would be a token day or two week ‘s prison just to make the deterrence point.
^ That’s a token sentence of at most two weelks but release after a few days with probation. Even that seems overly harsh really. Given thescale of this crime and the fact that he almost certainly was only threateing his own life by what he did and was not in a good state of mental helath at the time. Most probly a warning and maybe community service order seems most approriate her e to me. (Clarity fix.)
Just because: