We’ve played a lot of games of political “what if?” and “whataboutism” in the three years that we’ve been through the looking glass in America. On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host explored a hypothetical, wondering how the media would be reacting if Donald Trump Jr. were engaged in the kind of cronyism that Hunter Biden was in Ukraine.
“The more I read about this … no, I don’t think he was doing something terrible in Ukraine,” Maher said of the younger Biden during a panel discussion on “Real Time” on Friday night.
“But why can’t politicians tell their f—ing kids, ‘Get a job, get a goddamn job!'” he continued. “This kid was paid $600,000 because his name is Biden by a gas company in Ukraine, this super-corrupt country that just had a revolution to get rid of corruption.”
The liberal comedian and host added that it “just looks bad.”
Personally, this kind of stuff doesn’t bother me much. I’m old fashioned, I think the real corruption happens while politicians are in office, not after they leave and get rich from all of that “public service.” Heck, I’d love it if my kid could walk out of college next year and into a pile of money using nothing more than her last name. Unfortunately, that’s more likely to bring up law enforcement red flags than job offers.
Still, the media does have very selective outrage about such dealings. It’s the epitome of greed, graft, and post-political corruption when a Republican does it, and business as usual when it’s a Democrat.
Maher touched on that as well:
“It does sound like something Don[ald] Trump Jr. would do,” Maher later added on his show Friday. “And if Don Jr. did it, it would be all Rachel Maddow was talking about.”
The all-around sleazy optics of the Bidens’ end of this has largely been glossed over in the mainstream media this past week. Conservative blogs write about it, of course, but that’s it.
Thankfully, POTUS has been all over it as well.
In the end, there will more than likely be more questions about the Bidens than Trump’s phone call. None of which will ever be asked by our intrepid political journalists.
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