Not a Joke

"Stare into the sun and begin to glimpse the size of what you're up against." — Mike Benz

The Hunter Biden super-sized blanket pardon went over so well around the country that “Joe Biden” — or the shadowy league of not-quite-geniuses who run the twilight White House operation — floated the idea of issuing preemptive pardons for a few of the most spectacularly dishonest characters in US political life: Dr. Fauci, Senator-elect Adam Schiff, and Liz Cheney. Does “JB” plan on legally adopting them so he can claim he was moved to act out of a father’s love?

Like every official act ever associated with the name “Joe Biden,” the preemptive pardon idea has that reality-optional feel. None of the three has been convicted of a crime to be pardoned for, or even been hauled-in for questioning by federal law enforcement agents on a probable cause writ. But a pardon would necessarily paint them as criminals, ipso facto. Would they accept a pardon, with what it implies, or run shrieking from it as from an apple polished with novichok?

The proffer of a pardon itself must amount to a declaration of probable cause, igniting the very legal process it seeks to dispose of. An inquiry would have to be launched to discover what laws these three desperadoes might have broken, followed perhaps by a grand jury to evaluate the evidence, and so on. “Joe Biden” himself might have to answer some basic questions, such as: at what time prior to issuing the pardon did he begin to suspect some laws had been broken? And, since the president’s chief duty is to enforce the law, was “JB” negligent and culpable himself for misprision of felonies?

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You know, of course, that the Supreme Court decided last summer in Trump v. United States (Docket No: 23-939) that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. But the misprision of felonies is neither a presidential duty nor anything describable as an official act. Rather it would be grounds for impeachment, being a “high crime.” Now, luckily for “Joe Biden,” his term-in-office is so close to its conclusion that impeachment must be considered off-the-table as a practical matter. He might be subject to prosecution, though, after the clock strikes noon on one-twenty-twenty-five.

I doubt he will be present at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, so the US marshals will have to root him out of Delaware (or wherever) and haul him into the federal lockup in DC at exactly the moment Mr. Trump pardons the J-6 prisoners. Will they get to see “Joe Biden” coming into the joint on their way out? There would be a certain poetic symmetry in that, and hard to not admire the workings of Providence after all its foot-dragging. You might well ask: how many days, or months, will “Joe Biden” have to endure in solitary detention before the paperwork is in order for a proper arraignment? Considering how the process was applied to those J-6 culprits, a year would seem sufficient.

Pardon me for saying: I fear that “Joe Biden” might have started something that isn’t going to end well for “Joe Biden” and many others. The little goldfish bowl of the White House is surrounded by the vast, pulsating DC blob and its million-footed ranks of officials deserving of pardons. You know the floated names Fauci, Schiff, and Cheney were only representative samples, denoting a certain managerial class of blobists that runs to the thousands of federal employees at least. What about Garland, Monaco, and Gupta at DOJ, and their paladin prosecutor Jack Smith, and his many deputies? Or Comey, Wray, Abbate, Sallet, McCabe, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page, Pientka, Priestap, McCord, Horowitz out of the FBI? Or Mueller, Weissmann, Dreeben, Van Grack, Rhee, and Quarles from that spin-off Special Counsel venture? Or Boasberg, Chutkan, and Sullivan in the DC judiciary? Or, Collins, Walensky, Cohen and their many deputies in Covid-land? Surely, they all deserve pardons now, and their crimes can be sorted out later.

There would appear to be no precedent for a chief executive pardoning the entire federal government, or we would have heard of it by now. At the conclusion of the Civil War, Abe Lincoln issued a conditional pardon to Southerners — they had to take an oath of allegiance to the Union — but it did not include military officers and high-ranking Confederate officials. The blob of our time is a different breed of porpoise.

Actually, it’s more like a systemic fungal infection of the body politic, requiring deep fumigation and exposure to sunlight. The proposed D.O.G.E. advisory under Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy might answer as a “good enough” therapeutic approach, wholesale dismissal of entire agencies and departments, actually flushing away the malign parasites en masse, pardons not required.

What I await in the sunsetting “Joe Biden” presidency is whether he will go ahead and pardon the other members of the Biden family beyond just “first son” Hunter: brothers Jim and Frank and the wives and various offspring who received cash “gifts” from officials in foreign lands laundered into their personal bank accounts amounting to millions of dollars. None of them enjoy the much talked-about presidential immunity out of mere familial proximity to their illustrious relation, number “46” in the lengthening line of commanders-in-chief.

Perhaps that’s what is spurring the league of not-quite-geniuses behind the Big Guy to try to start World War Three this Christmas Season — to distract the public from the inevitable Biden family blanket pardon. At this point, I don’t care if they are ever prosecuted for all that grift. Let the Big Guy and his adjacent family fishes slip through the net. Let that certain someone who authored The Art of the Deal work his magic on the situation so that we don’t become an ashtray from sea to shining sea before the Christmas trees are swagged and lighted.

The migration of archival content from my previous website to this Substack account is about halfway complete. On the desktop version you will find a navigation bar at the top that will bring you to various sections of content, or simply scroll down on the home page which is now Kunstler.com. (My custom domain, Kunstler.com, is now functional for all pages on Substack.)

It’s that time of year! In this novella, a boy runs away from home in Manhattan all the way to Vermont the night before Christmas. Tribulations ensue. “A masterpiece of comedy and pathos.” Autographed copies from Battenkill Books, Cambridge, New York.

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Also for Christmas: JHK’s novel set on a hippie commune, 1967-68. “What a beautiful tale of the 1960's! It brought back so many memories of the events and emotions of that long ago time in the context of a light and wonderful story!” Autographed copies from Battenkill Books, Cambridge, New York.