(04-05-2021 06:39 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Quote:CNN’s Brian Stelter is quite the character, and I don’t mean to suggest that he’s actually interesting. Rather, he’s a parodic figure who embodies all the absurdities of left-wing media bias into one, larger-than-normal body.

For the past year or so, I’ve observed an unwritten, self-imposed rule of not really writing about the CNN host (no, he’s not a journalist by any objective definition). But sometimes he does something so ridiculous that it warrants an exception. Today was one of those days.

With Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s corrupt, crack addict son, releasing his memoir, I expected some stupid reactions from networks like CNN. I’m not sure I expected this, though.

Yes, that’s a grown man calling a book ostensibly written by Hunter Biden “breathtaking” as if it’s anything more than yet another Biden family grift. Stelter swoons over Hunter’s “extraordinary” journey from crack-addled corruptocrat to — hang on let me check my notes — crack-addled corruptocrat? Truly, the lack of growth is a testament to the human will.

Stelter then frames the bad press Hunter has received, all of which has been true and deserved, as “tabloid” coverage. And of course, that big bad Fox News is always picking on the president’s son. I mean, it’s not like he’s been in league with Chinese communists, got kicked out of the military for drug use, or tried to abandon a stripper he got pregnant. Oh wait, he actually did do those things.

But the real story here, as told by Stelter, is that Hunter is a victim. He’s a victim of the “right-wing,” never mind that the negative reports about his business dealings and abandoned laptop are completely true and verified. CNN wants you to know that Hunter has changed. Heck, he wrote a book, and if you write a book to make a few million bucks off an advance, then truly, a reformation must have occurred.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Hunter Biden is every bit the low-life he’s always been. No amount of squeeing from the potato section on CNN is going to change that.

Is that the guy that was jacking off during the zoom call?

Sounds like he's doing it again.

Quote:Hunter Biden’s memoir, billed as a recovered drug addict’s acceptance of his mistakes and journey to inner peace, is instead laced with partisan rage, displaying a seething hatred for Republicans who he continues to blame for his problems.

Just days after he had last used crack, the son of the president viewed the prospect of leadership by those with different preferred policy positions as more frightening than a soulless life of depravity, saying Donald Trump’s reelection is what he “feared most,” constituting a “threat to democracy.”

The son of the now-president had been criticized for taking a lucrative position on the board of Ukranian gas company Burisma while his vice-president father was deeply involved in the affairs of that country, where corruption is rampant. Burisma proudly put a picture of Joe Biden on its website.

Hunter admits that his five-figure-a-month board fees were “a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction” that allowed him to “spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively,” including using cocaine on a Burisma board trip.

Yet he justifies his actions with partisan rhetoric, saying that “Burisma was opposed to the direct interests of the most dangerous person in the world—Vladimir Putin,” and still thinks it was unfair for Republicans to question his big-money international deals.

In his world, opposition to Republicans seems to justify everything else.

“If I was going to pick a side—and if I was going to get paid to pick a side—I’d choose the same way again, rather than back the person President Trump has sided with,” he writes, saying a company official told him, “You can get paid by the Russians or the people who are fighting them.”

“Do you think if any of the Trump children ever tried to get a job outside of their father’s business that his name wouldn’t figure into the calculation? My response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments stand on their own,” he writes, even while detailing how he laid on the couch for days with a jerry-rigged bottle of vodka propped to his mouth, or spent his days lounging by the pool while going to the bathroom to smoke crack every fifteen minutes.

An email involving another potential business scheme involving China said that “H,” or Hunter, would get 20% and also hold 10% for “the big guy,” which a participant on the email thread, Tony Bobulinski, has said referred to Joe Biden. Hunter simply says comments by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani questioning the propriety of the arrangement were part of the “up-is-down, self-dealing universe cooked up for political and personal gain by Trump and Giuliani and their circle of bandits,” part of “the ever-swelling club of Trump’s conspiratorial delusions.”

In the end, the elder Biden “beat back a vile man with a vile mission,” Hunter writes, and “I became the beneficiary of the absurdity and transparent criminality of my pursuers. … Every bogus whistleblower, out-of-context email, salacious photograph or video clip (manufactured or real), made me feel nearly invincible to their slings and arrows.”

Partisanship superseding morality and being more important than other aspects of life appears to be a recurring theme in Hunter’s memoir “Beautiful Things,” which was released Tuesday.

Decades ago, former Senator Mike Mansfield taught Joe Biden an important lesson, Hunter writes: “you can question a colleague’s judgment, whether it be a Democrat or a Republican, but you should never question his or her motives. Everybody comes to the Senate for a reason, he went on, but nobody comes for the sole purpose of being mean-spirited or un-American.”

But that no longer applies now, the president’s son writes. “Trump’s motives can and should be questioned because, hell, most of the time he flat-out states them. And take my word, those motives ain’t pretty.”

When Joe Biden joined the Barack Obama ticket in 2008, the family believed he would be the “most influential vice president ever—that is, if you discount Dick Cheney, who had the advantage of manipulating his commander in chief,” Hunter writes — before detailing how Joe Biden repeatedly shouted “Goddammit!” when his attempts to influence the Obama administration were thwarted by other advisers.

Hunter calls Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz “someone once arrested for driving under the influence in his daddy’s BMW, and who later had the charges mysteriously dropped.” However, he sneers that it is “ridiculous” to speculate that his own connections played a role in a dropped investigation against him when Arizona police found paraphernalia in a rental car alongside a Secret Service card and his brother’s attorney general badge.

Hunter’s inability to decide whether to take responsibility for his actions or skirt the details and blame Republicans is a fatal flaw for an addiction memoir, as well as possibly for his sobriety. Letting go of resentments and being honest about one’s mistakes is a key part of twelve-step programs.

Hunter writes that “The greatest value to being in rehab is the opportunity to be honest with yourself and” others, but that in his attempts, “it almost felt like I was playacting—performing a facsimile of my story rather than confessing it.” It’s not clear that anything had changed by the time he wrote the book.

He “had become resistant to traditional twelve-step-based rehabilitation—or too burned out on it, or too proficient at gaming it—for that method alone to seem like much use. It had worked for me for extended periods in the past, and there’s much about it I believe is invaluable—I still employ many of its tenets to stay sober,” he writes.

Some of his attempts an an alternative approach to sobriety simply consisted of taking other drugs. “I was certain that my getting clean depended on more than just being told addiction is a disease and that it requires 100 percent abstinence,” he says, detailing how one rehab in Mexico consisted of taking the hallucinogen ibogaine, which is illegal in the U.S., and another entailed doing DMT, a drug derived from the glands of a toad.

After he drove the rental car to the treatment center in Arizona where the police found paraphernalia, he simply abstained from crack for a week and then left to go to a resort spa, proclaiming himself “physically and mentally purged.”

What is billed as his final cure consists of meeting a South African woman on a blind date, saying he loved her within minutes, and then getting married to her a week later.

In the book’s final pages, Hunter concludes that “I took solace in being attacked by such despicable opposition. When you’re assaulted by people with the capacity to take away an infant suckling from his mother’s breast and place him in a cage—well, I knew I was playing on the right side.”

But a world in which those with different political priorities are perceived as cartoon villains to be crushed is not so far off from the one he inhabited not long before, when his crack-addled roommate Bicycles believed that a serial killer was hiding in the walls.

And in a world like that, lasting serenity could be hard to find.

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Quote:Hunter Biden’s memoir is framed as a howl of mourning for his brother, Beau, who died of cancer at age 46. But a day after Beau’s funeral, his cocaine-addicted sibling believed that his tragic passing might create an opening to run for office himself.

In “Beautiful Things,” his book released Tuesday, he recounts an interaction with his then-wife Kathleen as they returned home from the funeral:

I pulled the car over and told Kathleen that maybe politics was now an option for me. “You know, as horrible as I feel, I have a feeling of real purpose,” I said. It seemed so many people were more willing to forgive my past mistakes—relapses with drinking, administrative discharge from the Navy Reserve—than I was willing to forgive myself.

I suppose her response—Are you serious?—was entirely warranted. We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again.

Hunter idolizes Beau throughout the book, at one point gushing, “He had the longest eyelashes to go with those striking blue eyes. He had great hair.”

In Joe Biden’s own memoir, the now-president once wrote, “I was pretty sure Beau could run for President some day, and, with his brother’s help, he could win.”

But Hunter didn’t just want to help Beau. At times, it seems he wanted to be him.

He proceeded to shack up with Beau’s widow, Hallie. “By the time we returned to Delaware at the end of the week, we were no longer just two people bound by shared grief. We were a couple,” he writes.

Then he married another woman only a week after meeting her, instantly professing his love to her on a blind date, based seemingly on her physical similarity to his brother:

We both smiled as I sat down. I spoke up first.

“You have the exact same eyes as my brother.”

Then, not long after that, having no idea what I was going to say until it jumped out of my mouth: “I know this probably isn’t a good way to start a first date, but I’m in love with you.”

Beau’s cancer diagnosis also helps Hunter justify his five-figures-a-month paycheck from a Ukranian gas company:

I want to be clear: Beau’s health problems didn’t prompt me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. The money was helpful, but I could’ve figured out another way to make it. I wasn’t desperate. Yet it did provide me the ability not to work as hard at continuing to develop clients, the most time-consuming part of my work—drilling twenty dry wells to finally hit pay dirt. That gave me more time to tend to Beau.

Instead, the money was “a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction” that allowed him to “spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively,” including using cocaine on a Burisma board trip, he says.

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Quote:Hunter Biden’s memoir is notable for what it doesn’t discuss, gliding past deals with shady Chinese businessmen, not mentioning the name of the child he had with a stripper, noting his infamous “purported” laptop only once, and avoiding a Justice Department tax investigation and a missing gun incident altogether.

Biden claimed in his book, titled Beautiful Things, that “I became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be reelected. He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China.”

Concerns about Biden gained broader attention in late 2020 after multiple outlets reported that he is being federally investigated in connection with his taxes and potentially related to his overseas business with China. Although he devoted a chapter to defending his work for Burisma, he largely dodged the controversy surrounding his attempted Chinese deal-making.

Biden wrote that in 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden asked his son's teenage daughter to join him on Air Force Two to Japan and then to Beijing, where he was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Hunter Biden said he tagged along to China to spend time with his father and daughter. At the time, Hunter Biden was working with Devon Archer at Rosemont Seneca, and “our deal with the biggest potential was a partnership with a Chinese private equity fund seeking to invest Chinese capital in companies outside the country.” Hunter Biden wrote, “While we were in Beijing, Dad met one of Devon’s Chinese partners, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel, just long enough to say hello and shake hands.” He lamented, “Trump declared I walked out of China with $1.5 billion. … The actual amount raised before that trip to China: $4.2 million. I had no equity in the company at the time and only bought a 10 percent stake after my father left office.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked in early February about reports that Hunter Biden still owned a 10% stake in the Chinese investment firm formed with state-owned entities, and she said he “has been working to unwind his investment.” Two Chinese business websites run by Baidu and Qixin seem to show a limited liability corporation, Skaneateles, as still having Hunter Biden as a “sponsor/shareholder” with 3 million yuan invested in the company, purportedly comprising the 10% stake in the venture.

Hunter Biden’s dealings in China do not stop there.

When Patrick Ho, one of Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming’s lieutenants, was charged by the Justice Department in 2017, the first call he reportedly made after his arrest was to Joe Biden’s brother James, who has said he thought the call was meant for Hunter Biden. Ho was indicted and convicted for his role in a global money laundering and bribery scheme. Ho, likely under FISA surveillance at one point, had tried reaching out to Joe Biden's son for help because he agreed to represent Ho as part of his efforts to work out a liquefied natural gas deal worth tens of millions of dollars with CEFC China Energy leader Ye, who has since disappeared in China. Ye reportedly had links to the Chinese military, and CEFC has links to the Chinese government.

A Senate GOP report from September concluded that Hunter Biden also “opened a bank account with" CEFC deputy Gongwen Dong to fund a $100,000 global spending spree with James Biden and James's wife, Sara.

In 2017, former business partner Tony Bobulinski worked with James Biden, Hunter Biden, and others to create a business dubbed Sinohawk, formed to establish a joint venture with CEFC. Bobulinski repeatedly expressed in 2017 messages that he expected the venture to get off the ground with $10 million in startup money from CEFC. The Senate GOP report concluded that millions of dollars were sent by CEFC to accounts linked to James and Hunter Biden instead.

None of this was hinted at in Hunter Biden’s memoir.

Members of the Secret Service attempted to retrieve gun paperwork from a Wilmington, Delaware, gun store in October 2018 after a firearm owned by Hunter Biden went missing, according to a Politico article in March — another incident not mentioned in Hunter’s memoir. According to a police document, Hallie Biden took the .38-caliber revolver and placed it in a public trash can near Janssen’s Market in Wilmington. Hunter Biden instructed her to go retrieve it, but it was no longer in the trash. Local police were notified, and the gun was soon recovered.

Secret Service agents allegedly asked the owner of the gun store to hand over the paperwork related to the sale. Politico reported that Ron Palmieri, the owner of StarQuest Shooters and Survival Supply, refused. The Secret Service said it had no involvement in this.

“No idea,” Hunter Biden said during an interview on CBS This Morning when asked if he knew anything about the Secret Service involvement. “I don’t know whether the Secret Service were or why they would be — I don’t think that that’s true, to my knowledge.”

That contradicts reported texts by the president’s son from January 2019, which the New York Post said it obtained, in which he mentions Secret Service involvement.

In addition to the police report, Politico obtained copies of the Firearms Transaction Record dated Oct. 12, 2018. Hunter Biden responded "no" to a question asking if he was an illegal drug user, with his response coming five years after he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. His memoir discusses his drug addiction at great length, and lying on the form is a felony.

The book mentioned his missing laptop only once, in a passage written as a letter to his brother, Beau, saying, “Your strength and love was embodied in the strength and love that surrounded me. That was never truer than when Giuliani, Bannon, and their collaborators purported to have a laptop that chronicled the lurid details of my descent into addiction the last three years.”

The president’s son gave evasive answers about the laptop during an interview on CBS This Morning when asked if the laptop was his.

“You don’t need a laptop. You’ve got a book. The book — it’s all in the book. And I don’t know,” Hunter Biden said. He was then pressed on whether he ever left a laptop with a Delaware repairman, and he said, “But whether or not somebody has my laptop, whether or not I was hacked, whether or not there exists a laptop at all, I truly don’t know.”

When asked if he was missing a laptop, he said that "you’ll realize that I wasn’t keeping tabs on possessions well for about a four-year period of time.”

John Paul MacIsaac, the owner of the Delaware computer repair shop, told the New York Post that he made a copy of the hard drive and provided it to a lawyer for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was a lawyer for former President Donald Trump at the time. MacIsaac also provided a copy to the FBI after the younger Biden never picked up the hardware after dropping it off in April 2019.

Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, along with many in the media, dismissed the laptop story as being part of a Russian disinformation operation, without evidence. When asked if the laptop could be his during a previous CBS interview, Hunter Biden replied, “Of course, certainly. There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence.”

Trump's director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said on Oct. 19, 2020, “There is no intelligence that supports that, and we have shared no intelligence … that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

Also largely unmentioned in the book was a son whom Hunter Biden had with a woman who reportedly worked at a strip club in Washington, D.C.

“I’m a fifty-one-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters, two in college and one who graduated last year from law school, and now a year-old son.” Hunter Biden was married to Kathleen Biden from 1993 until their divorce in 2017, and their three daughters, Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy, are mentioned by name and discussed at length in the memoir. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and Hunter Biden carried on a relationship with his widow, Hallie, starting at least in 2016 through 2019. He then married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen shortly after meeting her in May 2019, and their son, named after his brother, was born in March 2020.

The child he had with Lunden Alexis Roberts, though, gets only one passing mention near the end of the book, right in the middle of a section where Hunter Biden described meeting Cohen for the first time at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles in 2019.

“It was my first actual date in twenty-six years. My relationship with Hallie belonged to a whole other category, and the other women I’d been with during rampages since my divorce were hardly the dating type,” Hunter Biden wrote. “We would satisfy our immediate needs and little else. I’m not proud of it. It’s why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine — I had no recollection of our encounter.”

Despite the glaring omissions in the book and hazy recall in interviews, Hunter Biden’s memory seemed impeccable much of the time in his memoir, describing his first drink at age eight, getting busted for cocaine just after high school graduation, searching for crack cocaine while in law school, his alcoholism and drug use, his crumbling personal relationships, his addiction to crack cocaine, allowing a homeless woman who was his crack conduit to live with him in his Washington apartment for five months, learning how to cook his own crack, his drug-and-alcohol benders in various cities, and much more, including a “crack-fueled, cross country odyssey.”

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