TGIF: Pardon Me?

My household now has what I presume is Fauci’s latest concoction, which he smartly soft-launched in the Wuhan Wet Market of America (a Midwestern daycare center). Because over Thanksgiving, we hung out with toddlers, specifically toddlers who live in Pittsburgh that I am related to through marriage, though I won’t name names, and they have defeated us. But the news is best viewed from an isolation chamber anyway. If you feel chills and then sweats violently wrenching through your body, that’s just Elon Musk preparing everyone for Mars.

→ Biden pardons Hunter: Oh, life. America’s president Dr. Jill Biden—standing behind the sitting president, Joe, and moving his arms—has pardoned America’s wayward son, Hunter. Yes, the Bidens have given our sweet, troubled young American prince a sweeping pardon for any crimes committed over a ten-year period. (Sorry, I’m getting information that Hunter is 54 years old, which is categorically false, he’s sixteen.) Anyway, our justice system now does nothing but punish political enemies, some of who might be coming after your painter stepson, so it’s not irrational to do this. I would do it too, Dr. Jill.

The trouble is, Joe Biden said for a long time that he would absolutely not pardon his sweet five- to seven-year-old boy Hunter, such as when Joe said in June: “I am not going to do anything. I will abide by the jury’s decision. And I will not pardon him.” But it turns out that it was 100 percent a lie the entire time, and Biden was always planning on pardoning him. From NBC News: “They said it was decided at the time that he would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on the table.” Of course it did.

Unfortunately, America’s liberal pundits weren’t clued in to the game, and they used Biden’s supposed restraint as an example of his beautiful righteousness. Their gullibility is almost sweet. They really think Biden is so pure of heart.

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski: “Our current president of the United States has so much respect for the law that he has said he would not pardon his son.”

Neal Katyal, also on MSNBC: “You heard the president say he would accept the outcome of the case. I know no other word for that but presidential.” Presidential! As if admitting your son is indeed a crackhead deserves to get you on the Nobel shortlist.

On CNN, Kamala’s former communications director Jamal Simmons said: “Joe Biden has already proven he is willing to stand up for the rule of law in a way that we could all ever imagine Donald Trump to do.” Trumpo would, of course, pardon Hunter, were he his son, or maybe not, depending on whether Hunter ever complimented a runner at Mar-a-Lago. You could burn down City Hall and club a baby seal, but if you say MAGAMAGABABY, Trump would pardon you. Anyone who’s ever watched WWE is pardoned by Trump. All golf caddies, most porn stars. The difference is Trump has never pretended otherwise.

On MSNBC (our favorite), former assistant United States attorney Andrew Weissmann put some poetry into it: “Washington said ‘I am not running again’ ’cause he understood the self-restraint was absolutely essential to this country so you don’t have a king. He did not pardon his son. He did not order the Department of Justice to say ‘Don’t prosecute my son.’ So impressive.”

So impressive. Indulge me a moment while I keep going. It was staggering.

I wonder if these folks feel a little pang of regret. Like me. I live with regret constantly. For example: Last night I couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning thinking of my wrongness on Bitcoin (some may say I have a rumination problem, but I think it’s healthy self-reflection to draw a warm bath, light a candle, and think things like: bad, very bad, you thought Bitcoin was funny, did you, foolish woman, silly wench). Do you think they feel pain like mine when they look at their old takes?

In fact, they do not. Because as soon as the pardon went through, a new consensus arose: It’s good! Biden pardoning Hunter was always good. It’s called familial obligations.

Here’s the publisher of fellow upstart publication The Bulwark, which positions itself as independent, and initially staked out that the publication still thinks it’s bad:

But then a new message was received! Update sent out over the Wi-Fi, through the fluoride, and spritzed via air freshener. And we got:

No sooner was it decided that the pardon was Good then it was decided that pointing out any inconsistency was Bad, natch. We always said the pardon was Good. We always said the pardon was happening. And to bring it up all negatively like this is to pounce, like you’re a strong, mean cat on a tiny, innocent bird, like you’re a cop trying to imprison a tiny little boy named Hunter.

→ What about the little crimes: Hunter Biden, of course, did big crimes. But in the course of the past few years he’s also done tons of little ones. Like, he rented a cool house in Venice, California, in 2019 and 2020 and decided just not to pay rent. The landlord happened to be Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia VC. And when Shaun said, sir, you owe me $300,000, Hunter offered to pay his rent in artwork made of his own feces. Like, I can’t give you rent but I can give you this (a painting made with my own shit). As someone who makes beautiful art (this column) and tries to use it to get out of things I don’t want to do (change the baby? I’m creating), I feel for Hunter. But the sweeping pardon probably means you should give up, Shaun.

I love that the Hunter issue was talked about like it was so far in the past, so distant—the guy was trying to use poopy art to pay rent in 2020, when Joe was sworn in as president and Hunter was regularly in the White House (remember the mysterious bag of coke?). You know he pitched Dr. Jill on putting some choice pieces up on the walls in the Treaty Room.

→ An assassination in New York: The chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was murdered at 6:46 a.m. outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Video captures a masked assassin calmly shooting the executive before escaping via bicycle. Thinking of a Free Press angle on this afterward, as I do, I concluded that there is none. People will certainly react to this straightforwardly bad thing in a normal fashion, and it’ll be interesting to find out what happened. Well, how wrong I was.

As news of the assassination broke, former star New York Times reporter and then Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz posted about how bad health insurance companies are, adding:

She posted about how all her group chats were celebrating, texting cartoon stars with the words CEO DOWN. Taylor was gleeful. She posted an idea for the next hit:

Taylor Lorenz was a major business reporter at the NYT. I was her colleague there, and to put it mildly, she wasn’t a fan of mine. I never quite knew what to do about Tay-Tay and her crew of nutjobs (sorry, reporters), and eventually I began to see her as a kind of high camp character. Many times I have thought: I would pay money to watch a reality show about her life. I wish I cared half as much about anything as she does about keeping that N95 strapped high and tight. (This week she described breathing without a mask as “raw dogging the air.” Which is objectively hilarious.)

Anyway, now I know she would quite literally celebrate my death. I don’t deny people’s coverage, but you bet I had that mask off as soon as the vaccine hit my bloodstream. And if you’re reading this, then she’d probably celebrate your death too, sorry. And yet, I’d still pay money to watch a reality show about her. Tay-Tay eventually killing someone (me?! Aetna VP?) would make it all the better.

Just so you don’t think celebrating assassinations is exclusively a left-wing disorder, here’s Charles Haywood, a far-right pundit.

I do not celebrate the death of random executives. I do not hope they live in fear of unexpected punishment. That’s how we at The Free Press differentiate ourselves. That’s called being a radical moderate. My Nikki Haley voters, my Haley Hive, stingers up! We think everyone in the C-suite should keep their lives. The only time I’ve seen art in the last decade is in a corporate lobby, and I’m content with that.

But we also aren’t afraid to say the hard truths. And as with the Houthis and the Cop City antifa, this terrorist is unfortunately very hot. Just like the best bakeries are run by communists, the best terrorists are hotties (I’m looking at you, Young Stalin).​​

Why was his mask pulled down? He was doing everything so carefully until then. Well, per CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, law enforcement spoke to a female employee at the hostel where he was staying and she admitted that “at one point, she asked the then-masked man to lower his mask while flirting with him, which is when this photo released by NYPD today was taken.” Man, felled by his own sex drive. 

Back at the scene of the assassination, it turns out, the bullets had the words deny, defend, depose written on them. Which is how people describe insurance company tactics. This man is going to be getting so many marriage proposals from Brooklyn girls sick of Tinder. He looks like he just ghosted Suzy. This is the left’s Daniel Penny, but way more a real murderer.