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Why Hunter Biden's Personal Life Matters, Whether We Like It or Not

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | June 27, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | June 27, 2019 |


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We have walked gently around the Hunter Biden issue so far; I think our coverage has been limited to a link in Pajiba Love to another site’s Hunter Biden piece. After all, his private life is not our business. Hunter Biden is the son of a Presidential candidate, and not the candidate, and therefore he should be off limits, right? YES! Absolutely. 100 percent.

But is Hunter Biden going to be off limits? Come on. In what year do you think we live? And how many Hunter Biden stories have you shamefully read without telling anyone (yeah, me too). Still, his personal life shouldn’t matter, but it will matter. It’ll matter a lot if Joe Biden wins the nomination for one very simple reason: He’d be running against Donald Trump.

Vanity Fair has an article up today where they’re doing sort of what I’m doing here, which is to talk about Hunter Biden while saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Hunter Biden. However, in the case of VF, they hung their reasoning on a belief that Hunter Biden is actually good for Joe’s presidential run because over in the right-wing media, where Hunter Biden is a frequently discussed topic, Hunter’s personal life is distracting the rest of America from Joe’s gaffes and all the controversies otherwise surrounding his campaign.

Is it, Vanity Fair? Or is VF making an assumption that so many political pundits often make: That we can’t accept two different but related stories into our brains at the same time. Is Hunter Biden’s personal life distracting us from Joe Biden’s problems with women, or is it highlighting Joe Biden’s problems with women? No one really wants to go there — to draw a line between Joe’s uncomfortable interactions with women and Hunter’s series of failed relationships and affairs with women — but I’m telling you this right now: Donald Trump will go there.

How do we know, other than the fact that he’s Donald Trump? Because he did this:

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Donald Trump brought Bill Clinton’s accusers to the second Presidential debate in an attempt to rattle Hillary Clinton. Trump also repeatedly brought up Bill Clinton’s troubling history with women whenever the issue of Trump’s own sexual assaults were mentioned. Now, you could make the argument that Bill Clinton was the President, and therefore a public figure, and this is different.

But Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn. Donald Trump, just as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are doing (despite the network’s horrendous history of sexual assault, and Limbaugh’s checkered past with drug abuse), will exploit this and they will insinuate it goes to Joe Biden’s character. Hell, Hunter Biden is already a near-daily presence on Page 6.

And what happens when Joe goes after Trump’s character? After all, for Joe, at least, the contrast between himself and Trump is the biggest and maybe the only issue he’s really running on. Well, if Joe does, Trump will bring up Hunter. If Joe mentions Ivanka or Jared or Eric or Don, Jr., Trump will go full glass house on him. Trump will throw his own character under the bus if it means he can drag Joe down with him because Trump knows he cannot otherwise win unless he drags his opponent down with him. Trump can’t beat another candidate on approvals, but he can drive down their disapprovals, which is exactly what he did to Hillary. When the Russians get involved and supercharge it on social media, we’re looking at 2016 all over again: Two immensely unpopular candidates running against each other, trying to turn out their respective bases not for them, but against their opponent. Trump’s got the best pretty hate machine in the history of politics, and I would not put it past him to drag Hunter Biden through every mud puddle and pothole there is until next November. God knows, there’s plenty of material there with which to work.

It sucks, and it’s not fair, but yeah: Hunter Biden matters.



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