COMMUNITY NOTEDHunter statement
Hunter Biden statement: "I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.β pic.twitter.com/IIoFykkb0v
β Matt Viser (@mviser) December 2, 2024
https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1h4icoo/president_biden_pardons_his_son_hunter_biden/
Few more - the most active across Reddit right now
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1h4hwnr/megathread_joe_biden_to_pardon_hunter_biden/
https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1h4hvqu/president_biden_set_to_issue_a_pardon_of_his_son/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1h4i08c/nbc_president_biden_to_pardon_son_hunter/
https://old.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1h4i1a4/biden_pardons_his_son_hunter_biden/
https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1h4i3ft/president_biden_set_to_issue_pardon_of_his_son/
https://old.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1h4i2pf/president_biden_set_to_issue_a_pardon_of_his_son/
https://old.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1h4i2pf/president_biden_set_to_issue_a_pardon_of_his_son/
https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1h4hz1z/cue_the_maga_global_meltdown/
https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1h4icg6/fully_support_this/
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Honestly this is literally the only point of the pardon. One has never been used on anyone who deserves it. It exclusively exists for the ability to exact personal bias without question
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I genuinely don't understand why it exists. It's one of those things that feels totally incompatible with the idealized version of the American system. It's super broad as written, untouchable by Congress, and has been upheld by the supreme court, but it's this weird holdover from European monarchical systems that grants absurdly unilateral executive power without a great check against the way it's actually used. I think part of the rationale was that partisan or self-serving pardons could be discouraged by impeachment or removal from office, but basically every president waits until they have one foot out the door and then pardons all their homies with impunity.
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I don't have anything to directly back this up but I'm guessing it's in case of a rebellion. When you're winning you offer them an amnesty if they lay down their arms. Saves you from years of war hunting down and killing them all all. The two really important times it was used was for Confederates after the Civil War and draft dodgers after Vietnam.
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ohh good point, that's was a good reason
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Cringe, should have thrown all those filthy hippies in jail
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I'm ambivalent. It's kind of like illegal immigrants (although I sympathize way way more with the illegals). For several years nobody gets prosecuted. It sends the message that this isn't a real law that you actually have to obey. You can't just throw them in jail after that.
What could have been done is just knock them down a few pegs. The guys who went to Vietnam lost 2 years of the best part of their lives and they didn't get shit for it. They got paid virtually nothing. Then they come back and they have to compete in a labor market where the draft-dodgers are doing the hiring. Eventually there was supposed to be affirmative action for them. Can you guess when they were picking DEI hires how many times they went for a Vietnam vet?
And like with illegal immigration, why in the heck are you going after the draft dodgers? That's like going after the guy on the corner selling a dime bag of weed. You go after the ringleaders: the doctors who do medical deferments, the f-slurs in academia who gave out bogus college deferments, the politicians in the National Guard whose only purpose is to keep rich kids out of the war and let them be kitties and kill black kids and little girls in our streets while the real men are fighting overseas. These people own a huge part of America. They own a heck of a lot of real estate and that's something really easy to seize. If chuds weren't all a bunch of lying f-slurs they'd try to claw that back. Except they can't. Because Daddy dodged the draft just like the rest of the East Coast elitists.
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That's the issue. Where was the social shaming like before? Just like illegal immigration, why would you ever set this precedent?
It's so wild how much stances on Politicians changed. Look at JFK and HW Bush, these guys were some of the most privileged kids in American society, and yet they volunteered as soon as they could to fight in the Pacific. And in the political environments they grew in during the 50's and 60's, being exposed as a draft dodger would have been a career ender. Then the boomers put Clinton in office. That actually made Bush somewhat distraught, not because he had lost but because to his generation, a draft dodger becoming president was unthinkable. But the draft dodgers and 60's leftists won the cultural war, they've won so hard it bled into the right wing and let Trump attack McCain's service record. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." is truly dead, and boomers and every generation after killed it.
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!boomers when !zoomers don't have to literally die in the jungle
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I only have a partial explanation for it. Lots of rich well-connected people from the WW2 generation saw what was happening in Vietnam, decided that in the end the South would lose so it wasn't worth fighting for. So their reaction wasn't "we better end the war" it was "I'll keep my own kid out of it". Of course they never told this to the American and Korean guys fighting over there and especially not to the Vietnamese. So half a million people died for nothing. And the genocide in Cambodia probably wouldn't have happened, that's at least 1M more. And we don't even know if they would have lost, as this became a self-fulfilling prophecy where these "Silent Generation" peepeeheads made sure South Vietnam couldn't win. Kinda reminds me of a certain war going on now that nobody wants to win.
But their kids got to go to college and smoke dope and then decades later have a really easy job as a public school teacher, get rich off PERS, and teach me that my dad was a babykiller and all my friends' parents were puppets and "gusanos" (totally not a racial slur btw). Which they know because it's in this book by Howard Zinn.
It's not just that. MAGA includes a lot of '60s extreme left ideology. The most obvious being the "deep state" bullshit about the FBI and CIA. Do you ever think about how much stuff you "know" about the evil atrocities the FBI and CIA did because... it's just common knowledge... everyone knows that... why are you being weird questioning the mainstream consensus? Somehow in the MAGA world, the one thing your purple-haired enby professor told you that must be 100% believed is everything that Russia wants you to. They're even scare-mongering about nuclear war (which would somehow be our fault) like European vapid r-slurs in 1983. (Except that instead of a banger like "99 Luftballons" it would be some horrible Nu Country song.)
!anticommunists Frick eurotrash I'm still not over the Euromissile Crisis and I don't think I ever will be.
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What's the euromissle crisis
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In the early 1980s the Soviets were going crazy invading everywhere on the planet. (You personally I'm sure know about Angola.) They also brought out the new SS-20 IRBM, a missile designed for nuking Europe even better than before. NATO decided that they should have American equivalents deployed there to match that. Pershing II, a ballistic missile with extremely good accuracy for the time and nuclear Tomahawks on trucks.
The Soviets controlled the whole "anti-nuclear" movement in western Europe, so they whipped up a frenzy of young r-slurred college kids. It's hard to describe what their claims were because they were really incoherent. Basically that American missiles pointed at Russia put them in danger but Russian missiles pointed that them by people wanting to kill them would magically disappear if the Americans left. There were massive protests all over the continent.
Fortunately the adults prevailed. European governments approved it. The American missiles were deployed. Very soon Reagan and Gorbachev made a deal where both sides agreed to remove their missiles of this category. This was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tankie kids who wanted to be nuked by the Soviets screamed and cried out that they wanted war but world peace won in the end.
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WWII was the 'Canonical War' for our current status quo. Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq don't even come close to comparing. It's apples and oranges.
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Oh so now YOURE VIETNAMESE?
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For a second I didn't get you were joking. I think that says a lot about my enemies here.
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His own son was a draft dodger though unless you're saying he never expected Dubya to get anywhere.
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The daddy Bush-Dubya relationship is odd, he kinda was the frickup son
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Mommy is soooo proud of you, sweaty. Let's put this sperg out up on the fridge with all your other failures.
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You think I haven't talked to my mother about this before? That's a great idea Longie. Thank you for all your helpful suggestions over the years.
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they can have a little autocracy as a treat
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It's an extended form of prosecutorial discretion. The U.S. Attorneys, the Bureau of Prisons, and so on all work in the name of the President as chief executive. If he can sign the instructions to execute the sentence, it makes sense that he can withhold the punishment, too. Without, you have different parts of the same branch working against each other.
The case is a little more obvious in the case of a monarch since all the sovereign power is united in his person, but if you have to assign it to somebody in a system with separation of powers, the executive is the most natural choice.
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This is cancer eating out the butt of America. Prosecutors don't go after rich people because they would have their own lawyer so that would be a lot of work and they don't go after poor people because you can't make them show up to court, pay their fines, pay their "fees" for court (yes it's like the fricking 800s still), etc. So "prosecutorial discretion" means finding some middle class people to frick so that you can justify your job between big murder cases.
In the 1400s one of the demands of the Hussites was just that people openly committing crimes be punished. I didn't get it when I was a kid. I get it now.
Terry Bean, one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party in Oregon, gangbanged a 15-year old boy. This is all out there in the open in court. The other guy who assraped the kid got convicted. But "prosecutorial discretion" means he's faced no criminal charges. That's what the term means to me.
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Surprised such isn't covered by something like impoundment.
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I always assumed it was there in case of regime changes as a safeguard against the corruption of a previous administration.
So If the last guy started imprisoning political rivals or something the new guy could just undo it without having to spend months going through the bureaucratic process
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It's supposed to be a check when someone is guilty but the interest of justice is that they either don't get convicted or don't serve time. Plenty of these cases make it to prison without malfeasance. Think people who kill cops during no knock raids and the cops are at the wrong address. They don't get used for that but that's why they exist.
I partially agree with Joe's statement. The weapons charges make sense and that is routinely prosecuted. The tax charges largely were inconsistent with how the IRS does enforcement, I can't think of or find any other cases where people have been charged with filing false returns after filing a corrected return. They generally want people to fess up willingly.
I'm really looking forward to 4 years time to see if Trump pardons everyone in his administration now. Elon & Vivek have already backed up a decent rap sheet. The private transition team is going to be an awesome assortment of felonies too.
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Hunter doesn't deserve this. He's spent his entire adult life as a complete and total frick up peddling influence and access to his daddy. I'm jealous so he should face some punishment.
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He's been helping DDD while in office due to his not-dementia.
So that's how he seemingly "earned" it imo
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/hunter-biden-joining-white-house-meetings-amidst-us-presidents-health-concerns-staff-struck-by-conflict-of-interest-101719982819586.html
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None of the charges are related to that though they're just random bullshit
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Tax evasion is random bullshit? It's also a blanket pardon for any and everything he may have done since 2014.
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