Hunter Biden artwork attracts ethics scrutiny

[DrDeth]

@Jackmannii

While it doesn’t reek of major scandal, it’s not a good start on Biden having “the most ethical Administration in history”.

What is the alternative? Billy can’t sell Billy Beer? Hunter can’t sell his art?

@BigT

So they go to the trouble to avoid the avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and people start going off about how that proves impropriety?

Yep. Since Joe is pretty much teflon, they have to concentrate on Hunter, who- I will again note- holds no public office so what he does is no ones business.

@filmore

One thing that had me scratching my head is that I didn’t even know he was an artist yet his work is selling for $75k-$500k. Some artists don’t make $75k from their art in their lifetime. I looked at some of his art and I don’t really see how they would sell for those prices.

Celebrities often write books, release CDs, sell art- without having any great talent outside their profession. In some case their talent is mediocre, but the stuff sells anyway. In most cases, it is journeyman quality but sells like masters.

@Dewey_Finn

Look, no one who stood by while Donald Trump and his family shredded any sense of ethical behavior has no right to suggest now what should be done. Remember how Trump divested his investments and put his money in a blind trust? No? Well, that’s because he did nothing like that. Instead he directly profited from being in the White House.

Yep, and so did his family, several of whom were given jobs at the public trough. But the GOp thought that was just fine, as trump was sent by God himself.

@HMS_Irruncible

The other big half of this issue, equally bad IMO, is that a serial fuckup keeps luckily stumbling into jobs and incomes that most people can only dream about, and for no reason except his dad is a well-connected politician.

Such as the entire trump family? GWB jr, who became fucking PRESIDENT? JFK and his brother?

@HMS_Irruncible

Remember how Stacey Abrams refused to concede the Georgia election, and Republicans gleefully seized on this as an excuse for them to do the same (but with material consequences)?

No one has to concede. However, she did not claim for a year that the election was stolen. In fact:

Trump Hasn't Conceded Georgia. Neither Did Stacey Abrams. What Changed?

Abrams had stayed quiet for 10 days after the election while her campaign focused on getting more absentee and provisional ballots counted. Then she called a press conference at which she made a careful statement: "I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election

She acknowledged the loss within ten days. It has been EIGHT FUCKING MONTHS since trump lost.

@HMS_Irruncible

You don’t think they could sit down and have a father-son chat where Joe says “look kid, I want to help you, but you’re screwing me (and possibly the future of the country) by trading on my name. Can you maybe stop doing that until I’m not President anymore?”

He could, but since Hunter is doing nothing at all wrong, why should he?

Are you saying Hunter (and any Biden family member) can have no source of income and must live in a sealed cave for 8 years?

@HMS_Irruncible

I want to emphasize… Hunter Biden’s entire adult life has been benefitting from nepotism. He has done nothing under his own steam. He has zero skills that don’t involve trading on his father’s name.

He graduated from Yale law school, he was CEO of a major fund, he founded a investment and advisory firm, co-founded a venture capital firm, etc etc. Yes, his name got him a edge in being selected as a qualified candidate for Burisma. So?

@HMS_Irruncible

I’m not a right-winger, but I feel like it’s a huge liability that the left can’t honestly confront what’s going on here. That’s bad. It’s morally bad and politically bad.

Why is it? He is a qualified Yale lawyer. He is a adult, 51 years old. He needs to be allowed to have a career. Sure, the Biden name will grease wheels, just like the Kennedy name, the Reagan name, the Bush name and of course the trump name. But at least he isn’t being give a high Executive branch position due to his name.

[gdave]

@Joey_P

@gdave

Ok, you’ve convinced me, Hunter Biden is a numpty.

I didn’t say that and I’d prefer you not to suggest I did.

I sincerely apologize. I genuinely thought I was agreeing with you. I had no intention of putting words into your mouth. Maybe “numpty” has meanings I’m unfamiliar with, or maybe I badly misunderstood what you were trying to say. To me, a “numpty” is a bumbling non-entity who succeeds through luck and family connections rather than genuine talent, skill, and effort. I genuinely thought that was your opinion of Hunter Biden. I’ll admit, there’s been so much back and forth going on in this thread between so many different people, I may very well have confused your position with someone else’s. If so, I apologize for that as well.

[DrDeth]

@Deeg

But yeah, anybody who professes that there can’t be anything wrong with Hunter’s sale is obviously a Democrat.

But yeah, anybody who professes that there is anything wrong with Hunter’s sale is obviously a Republican.

@QuickSilver

He could have insisted that Hunter use a pseudonym when working with the art broker.

And then Hunters art does not sell. Billy Beer was crap. Ivankas fashions were meh. Bill Shatner can’t sing.

[gdave]

@filmore

He can say that adult children and relatives of politicians have the right to make a living. He can say that he doesn’t feel there’s anything wrong with Hunter earning a living by selling art. But he can add that these types of transactions should always be examined and that he supports the press ensuring that no buyer is doing so with the intent to curry favor. He can say that he won’t be swayed by anyone who buys Hunter’s art, but that no one should blindly take his word on that, or any politician’s word for that matter. So acknowledge that there could be a conflict of interest in situations like this. He should not discount concerns as right-wing nonsense and that everyone should trust him that everything is above board.

This is, so far, the only reasonable criticism and suggested course of action I’ve seen in this thread. I’m still don’t think it’s really fair to criticize President Biden for not doing this, but it sure does seem like it would be a good approach for him to do so.

[Hari_Seldon]

@Si_Amigo

And still no one has linked to his work.

Here is a link that shows one piece of his work. I would not buy it, but so what.

ElectoralVote

This seems like a tempest in a teapot. It may not be perfect, but the best that can be done.

[BobLibDem]

Thanks for the link with the art. I don’t know art, so I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or indifferent. I doubt he makes a lot of money out of it as a new artist. Maybe he becomes famous for his art, maybe not. Has squat to do with his dad. It seems to me that the only people this is going to be a big deal for are the same ones who gave “duhhhhh… something something emails” as the reason for voting against Hillary.

[Thing.Fish]

It’s a nothingburger. The blind trust isn’t a foolproof guard against corruption, but it’s a reasonable effort.

Why are people so contemptuous of Hunter Biden? He has a pretty impressive resume, and though you can’t PROVE that he would have gotten all those jobs without his family name, you can’t prove that he wouldn’t have, either.

But people are throwing around phrases like “chronic fuckup” and implying that he wouldn’t be able to support himself at all if he didn’t have a famous father, as though this is all well-established public knowledge. I know he’s had some drug problems, but that doesn’t make a person stupid or incompetent; is this just prejudice against people in recovery? Or are there things in his past that I’m not aware of?

I mean, it’s a very reasonable assumption that he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he has in life without his family connections. But I don’t see why people seem so confident in assuming that he’d be sleeping under a bridge without said connections.

[DavidNRockies]

Tragically, it may well be that those folk represent the majority of the votes that are actually in play in any given election.

[DrDeth]

@Thing.Fish

Why are people so contemptuous of Hunter Biden? He has a pretty impressive resume, and though you can’t PROVE that he would have gotten all those jobs without his family name, you can’t prove that he wouldn’t have, either.

He got jobs that he was fully qualified for, but the Biden name undoubtedly greased the skids. There are many family names that do the same.

[Thing.Fish]

Wrong. Numerous people here are implying that “the Bidens” are some kind of hive mind that operates in unison. The facts are these:

Hunter Biden is an adult who can make his own business decisions, and does not hold any government office. Joe Biden cannot stop him from doing this.

It is possible that Joe might have tried and failed to dissuade Hunter from doing this; if he did, there is no reason to expect that we would know about it.

In order to make Joe look bad here, you have to ignore at least one of those two facts. Mushing them together as “the Bidens” makes that much easier to do, which is exactly why Fox et al are doing it. It’s not just nitpicking grammar, it’s stopping people from moving the goalposts.

[filmore]

@BobLibDem

It seems to me that the only people this is going to be a big deal for are the same ones who gave “duhhhhh… something something emails” as the reason for voting against Hillary.

True, but Hillary’s handling of the emails by being dismissive and pre-scrubbing the disk of all the “yoga appointment” emails likely ended up getting Trump elected. So even if this really is a nothingburger, the fallout can have huge consequences depending on who can use it for political gain.

[Cheesesteak]

@filmore

So even if this really is a nothingburger, the fallout can have huge consequences depending on who can use it for political gain.

You can’t prevent a nothingburger, for the exact reason that it is based on nothing. There is always an unlimited supply of nothing to base these claims on. We’re talking about a group of people who believed Hillary Clinton lead a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza shop that… didn’t even HAVE a basement.

[k9bfriender]

@DavidNRockies

Remember the Obama years ? Remember all the real/manufactured ethics scandals that plagued that administration ?

Me either.

You mean to say that you will forget about this in the next 5-15 years?

There were quite a number of scandals perpetuated by the right during the Obama years, from long form birth certificates to Benghazi.

[DavidNRockies]

I don’t know to what extent the two groups (those who believed Pizzagate, and those who were apoplectic about the email server) overlap, but …

The political operatives do.

And they can target broadly, and they can microtarget. And they are propagandists of the highest order. And they are evil, but they are not stupid.

And they know who needs to hear about QAnon, and they know who needs to hear about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

And their efforts can win or lose elections.

And that should never be forgotten.

I don’t know what the Monday Morning Quarterbacks are really saying about all the dynamics that tilted the 2020 election to Biden, but – much like the enthusiasm – particularly for younger and first-time voters – for Obama – it isn’t to be counted on. It should never be taken for granted.

There’s generally an element of ‘lightning in a bottle’ in modern-day elections. It’s a game of inches. All the election ratfuckery, the gerrymandering, the outright voter suppression efforts … are one piece.

But the other place that the pile of data and demographic analysis goes is to the propagandists.

I like @filmore 's suggestion about how Biden/his admin could handle this one. But – ISTM – the key really is to handle it, quickly and forcefully.

And … yeah … it was a bit of hubris on the part of HRC and her operatives that probably led her to handle the email server thing as she did.

Unforced error.

You can’t spend your entire administration’s public-facing time addressing every single CT that the RW gish gallop machine cranks out, but you’re well served to figure out which ones to address, and how to address them.

Just because you’re in power, inside the Beltway, doesn’t mean you’ve changed politics. You’re still a player, and it’s still the same shitty-assed game.

Now play to win.

[asahi]

I love how we go from a White House that literally tried to bring back patronage to…no one in the president’s family is allowed to have an income.

[DavidNRockies]

I get that. I basically addressed it in post #59.

[Dewey_Finn]

@filmore

He can say that adult children and relatives of politicians have the right to make a living. He can say that he doesn’t feel there’s anything wrong with Hunter earning a living by selling art. But he can add that these types of transactions should always be examined and that he supports the press ensuring that no buyer is doing so with the intent to curry favor. He can say that he won’t be swayed by anyone who buys Hunter’s art, but that no one should blindly take his word on that, or any politician’s word for that matter. So acknowledge that there could be a conflict of interest in situations like this. He should not discount concerns as right-wing nonsense and that everyone should trust him that everything is above board.

Saying anything like that is drawing attention to this. I think it’s better not to say anything about it.

[DavidNRockies]

I’d like to believe that those aren’t our only two choices.

I’d also like to believe that the second part of your statement dramatically overstates the case.

[DavidNRockies]

And – if it hasn’t already been said – the theory behind blinding the art buyers to the WH and to Hunter Biden is good, but in another sense, it really is the antithesis of transparency.

In another sense, wouldn’t it be better to tag that money with radioactive isotopes and trace it forever ?

In any administration, I’d like to understand how often pay-to-play folks, or their agents, get an audience with high-level administration folks.

It feels to me like this was the right motivation (the blinded thing), but it may not solve the potential issue.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Benghazi. IRS targeting conservative nonprofits. Operation Fast and Furious. But Her Emails. Solyndra. Kenya citizenship. Failure to Salute. Tan suit.

You forgot about Dijon Mustard, surely the greatest scandal to ever come out of the Oval Office since the removal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. There is no hypothetical ‘scandal’ that Sean Hannity and Fox News cannot promote into being the “Worst Thing Evah!” regardless of precedent or lack of factual basis. In fact, manufacturing fake scandal it is their métier. I’m surprised they haven’t looped Biden into that, too, given that he was standing right next to Obama when he asked for “spicy mustard…dijon mustard, something like that?”

@HMS_Irruncible

The Trumps were bad. Hunter Biden is bad. Both things can be true. In fact, can we be done with the Bushes and Clintons as well? Dynastic connections and corrupt influence just needs to fuck off into space. The Republicans certainly aren’t going to do anything about it, so the Democrats should.

The fact that any rationale person can even conceive the “bothsiderism” notion is evidence of how badly the news media has done their jobs of reporting on actual scandal over spectacle. Setting aside the open perfidy of the Trump Clan, just looking at the Cabinet of that administration shows so many gross conflicts of interest from [Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao making deals clearly favorable to her family’s transoceanic shipping business](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/us/politics/elaine-chao-inspector-general-report.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/us/politics/elaine-chao-inspector-general-report.html) to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos pimping for charter schools, something the DeVos family is heavily invested in.

The idea that Hunter Biden—who is not a member of the Biden Administration and has never been shown to have any influence over the policy or legislative decisions of his father—is doing anything more than playing off of the Biden name to inflate the valuation of his paintings in an industry that all about inflating value is some legitimate example of “both sides” is absurd, and a result of media that spent so much time focused on Trump’s incessant and inane tweets and not on the continuum of actual scandals that plagued the Trump Administration from inauguration to move-out day. If Joe Biden were to somehow use executive action to force a private citizen to not conduct legitimate business transactions in plain view, that would be an actual scandal instead of something made up just to get clicks and give the commentators something to babble on about on CNN.

Stranger