Biden Bails Out Hunter and the Soul-Rot of the Ever-Rescued Child

I can think of few things worse than never growing up, from going from sucking on the parental tit to eating it down to the bone and thinking you are entitled to do so

Last weekend, I bought my daughter a car, or rather, I used my credit to help her get a new car. The plan is she will pay me back for the down payment and make the monthly payments herself. I’d momentarily considered, knowing my kid can sometimes be slow to pay, say, a parking ticket she gets on mom’s car, making the monthly payments myself and having her Venmo me (something she’s fast at). But Biden pardoning his son Hunter has made me rethink that plan, and my daughter will instead make the payments directly, and on time, with a little ass-kicking from me as/if needed.

I have a theory as to why Biden did what he did, little of which reflects well on him but which does spread the blame. Leaving aside the $24 million in skanky business deals that traded on father’s name, some facts: Hunter Biden is a 54-year-old man with a history of drug addiction and criminal as well as unseemly behavior, including lying on a gun permit and being filmed going down a waterslide with, as my boys at The Fifth Column recently put it, “his dong hanging out.”

Do you remember doing stupid things as a teenager? I once, trying to keep up with my 100x more athletic brother, scaled the inside of an elevator shaft. Not smart if also not illegal, an endangerment only to myself, and, one supposes, the owner the building, who would have to have cleaned up my guts and wrangle with the insurance company and, possibly, any anger/sorrow that came with finding a dead or severely injured 19-year-old girl at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

You see what I did there? I used introspection to consider action and consequence, something I’ll wager a majority of American teenagers do not have the capacity to do because they have little need to. You do not need to be a nepo baby - something Meghan McCain, in light of the Biden pardon, wrote about on her Substack this morning - to receive special dispensation from society and especially your parents when young. We see our children’s good sides, we want to protect them, and I myself have been bailed out and protected more that I probably should have been by my parents. But there was also a little timer in my head that went off, very loudly, just before I turned 30, when I called my dad and told him I was shredding the Amex card he’d given me for emergencies because the only reason I - then with a two-year-old and working two jobs - needed it was because my daughter’s dad was not working; that my father was, in essence, supporting him and not me. I’ll add here that I have nothing buy love for my late ex, seriously, find someone who looks at you the way he did me, on the sidesteps of our house in Hollywood.

But Tim was an active alcoholic at the time, making our day-to-day lives something of a wreck, a wreck I walked out on when our daughter was not yet three. Two days later, Tim took his last drink and lived sober for the next 32 years. Actions have consequences that lead to other actions, in Tim’s case, to some great ones, including the lives we were able to often live together until his death.

Joe Biden, by contrast, did not push Hunter to grow up. Are there extenuating circumstances that I think any good parent can understand? Yes, absolutely yes.

But a certain rot creeps in to those who do not take responsibility for their actions, rot that the parent needs to keep scraping away, like moldy frosting from a cake, to get to the good of the child; to make the child appear worthy to the world. You better believe the child knows how to keep this going, knows how to alchemize parental desperation into the next infusion of cash, of support; to force the father to construct, as we see in Biden’s blanket pardoning his son, the simulacrum of an honorable and unjustly persecuted man worthy of having the slate wiped clean.

This never works forever. How do I know? Because I’ve seen such a relationship corrode my own family…