The news hit like a sucker punch from a drunken mule: Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter. A move so loaded with contradiction and raw humanity, it could only have come from a political system so warped that it allows this lunacy in the first place. Pardons—absurd relics of royal prerogative, as grotesque and medieval as a leper’s bell—shouldn’t even exist. Yet here we are, perched on the edge of the abyss, watching the President of the United States bail his son out of legal hot water while pretending this is all very normal.
In a rambling, self-justifying statement, Biden claimed this was about justice, about mercy, about fairness. He painted Hunter as a man persecuted not for his sins—of which there are many—but because of his last name. "Raw politics," Joe Biden thundered, "infected the process!" A stirring defense, perhaps, but one that lands a little differently when it comes from the guy wielding the power of unilateral absolution like a medieval Pope handing out indulgences.
But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t just a Biden problem. It’s an American problem, a bipartisan sickness. Pardons are the nuclear option in the theater of presidential powers: opaque, unaccountable, and ripe for abuse. Every president abuses them, and every president claims to do so for the noblest of reasons. The truth? They all smell like rotten fish.
A monarchy of dunces
The pardon—a weaponized relic of imperial privilege—has been the festering ulcer of American democracy since the ink dried on the Constitution. Presidents wield it like a drunk swinging a fire axe, hacking at the pillars of justice while pretending it's all for the greater good. And the people, bless their gullible souls, keep letting them get away with it.
Let’s rewind to 1974. Gerald Ford, the accidental president, kicked off his doomed tenure by pardoning Richard Nixon, a man so steeped in corruption that he made Tammany Hall look like a church bake sale. Ford called it a salve for the nation's wounds, but everyone knew it stank of backroom deals and political cowardice. The country didn’t heal—it just got angrier. And Ford? He got laughed out of office two years later, a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Nixon’s sins.
Then came Bill Clinton, a man who turned sleaze into an art form. On his last day in office in 2001, Bubba unleashed a torrent of pardons so brazen they could’ve been auctioned off at Sotheby’s. There was Marc Rich, the fugitive billionaire tax cheat whose ex-wife conveniently bankrolled Clinton’s library. And let’s not forget Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress turned bank robber. Clinton painted her as a victim of circumstance, but to most Americans, it looked like a crook letting another crook off the hook. And then there was his half-brother Roger—a convicted coke dealer—freed in a move so nakedly nepotistic it would’ve made the Kennedys blush.
Donald Trump, of course, took this madness and supercharged it with his trademark brand of gaudy nihilism. In 2017, he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a sadistic sheriff who ran his department like a dystopian gulag. It was less about justice and more about sending a MAGA bat signal to the base. And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Trump waved his golden scepter over the Blackwater mercenaries who mowed down 14 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad bloodbath. The message was clear: loyalty to the throne trumps all, even human decency.
Now Joe Biden enters the fray, pardoning his son Hunter in a move that would make a medieval king proud. This isn’t justice—it’s dynastic politics in its purest form, a father shielding his heir from the harsh glare of the law. Biden dressed it up in lofty rhetoric about “raw politics” and “selective prosecution,” but the truth is as raw as a butcher’s block. This was about power, pure and simple.
And therein lies the problem. In a country supposedly founded on liberty and equality, the president holds the power to grant absolution like a Pope on steroids. No oversight, no accountability, just one man with a pen and a god complex. We fought a revolution to escape the tyranny of kings, only to crown one every four years.
The American people should be furious. Instead, they’re distracted by the circus—red hats screaming about Biden’s hypocrisy, blue hats pointing fingers at Trump, and everyone else munching popcorn while democracy crumbles around them.
Presidential pardons aren’t about mercy or justice. They’re about who you know, what you can give, and how much the guy in the big chair is willing to gamble with his legacy. And as long as we let them play king, the only losers will be us.
The irony here is that both Biden and Trump have given us the perfect encapsulation of America’s broken legal-political complex. A system where the powerful protect their own, where justice is a marketing slogan, and where the rest of us are left to shovel through the wreckage.
Joe says he did this for his son, out of love and paternal duty. That's the problem Joe! Either way, the result is the same: Hunter Biden walks free, and the rest of us get another reminder that the rules don’t apply equally. Justice, in this twisted carnival of a republic, is just another pawn in the game.
But hey, at least the spectacle is entertaining.
