NBC’s chief Biden tool and apple polisher Mike Memoli hit send Sunday on a puketastic item with colleagues Carol Lee and Monica Alba that painted President Biden with nothing but sympathy from the get-go in “Biden allies worry son Hunter’s indictment could strain the president’s 2024 focus”.
The trio did its best in the first paragraph to make one’s eyes roll 180 degrees to the back of their head: “During the period between his vice presidency and presidency, Joe Biden was often asked about the campaign he didn’t run. In explaining why he passed on a White House bid in 2016, Biden would describe how the death of his eldest son, Beau, weighed heavily on him and his family.”
Like concerned family members, Memoli and co. fretted that while Biden wanted another term, “people close to the president are increasingly worried about how the legal troubles of his remaining son, Hunter, could divide his attention at a time when he needs to be fully focused on what’s expected to be a razor-close election.”
“A distracted president, perhaps more prone to mistakes or missteps, is the political toll people close to Biden worry could hurt him in 2024 as his son faces at least one indictment and potentially trials...stemming from...the height of his drug addiction,” they added.
“But at the very least, developments this week are crowding the president’s message in public and his focus in private,” they whined.
Well, considering Hunter Biden was suing the IRS and the two whistleblowers from the agency (and thus showing whistleblowers weren’t as sacred as they used to be in the Trump administration), Hunter was anything but a wounded animal.
Going to the first of many slobbery quotes, Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) engaged in more eye-rolling nonsense by demanding sympathy for Biden in light of Hunter’s problems being the latest tragic tale involving his offspring, which started with him “los[ing] a child too early in life.”
On Hunter’s plea deal collapsing, Alba, Lee, and Memoli painted a pathetic picture as if to paint them as ordinary Americans putting on a face of happiness in public when, on the inside, they were struggling (emphasis added):
Days later, the president set off to Rehoboth Beach for a weeklong getaway that was meant to help recharge him for the looming campaign. Instead, despite cheery public appearances — a date night out with the first lady, bike rides and time on the beach — both the president, and particularly Jill Biden, were consumed with worry, not just over the legal challenges facing their son, but with the unwelcome public spotlight shone on his personal life, and whether they should publicly acknowledge a daughter he fathered with an Arkansas woman during the peak of his struggles with drug addiction.
Hunter, his wife and their young son, Beau, joined the president and first lady during a separate getaway last month in Lake Tahoe as Hunter’s legal team sparred with Delaware prosecutors[.]
But wait, there was more sympathy-peddling as they bemoaned Hunter’s legal peril “continues to” incur an “emotional toll...on the president and first lady, who approach the most sensitive family matters as a father and mother above all else” with the President “lament[ing] aloud that he might be dead before his son’s case would be resolved”.
Cue the laugh tracks for this zaniness from former Biden aide Michael LaRosa, who surmised that the President likely “wakes up and thinks about his deceased son and probably cries every day” about Beau and Hunter’s life of ruin.
They also made Biden seem like, yes, a child: “The president relies most heavily on his wife at these moments, and they were apart for about a week with her Covid diagnosis and his trip to India and Vietnam, which came hours after the news that Hunter would be indicted by the end of the month.”
The piece wrapped with even more anonymous sources (click “expand”):
“In 2020, Donald Trump’s calling card was standing on a rally stage screaming, ‘Where’s Hunter?’ like a drunk fraternity girl. It was a huge piece of the debates, and it was something [Biden] addressed,” a close Biden ally said. “It backfired on Trump, and the American people empathized with the president and his family who had gone through challenges that families all over the country go through every single day.”
(....)
“He is laser focused on doing the job as president, winning re-election, and at the same time [he] can be a patriarch, a loving father and grandfather that he has been throughout his career,” the Biden ally said.
(....)
“Whenever I apologized to him for bringing so much heat onto his campaign, he responded by saying how sorry he was for putting me on the spot, for bringing so much heat onto me, especially at a time when I was so determined to get well. That’s the biggest political debate my dad and I had for months: Who should apologize to whom?” he wrote.
A source close to the Bidens say that Hunter, 53, is now similarly “steeling his spine” for both the legal and political sparring to come.
“The president would be in anguish if Hunter was really struggling from this. But Hunter is ready to fight,” the source said. “He’s taken accountability for his actions, his addiction, and the horrors that come along with it.”
