Does Joe Biden Understand He Did Anything Wrong?

"I can't believe those SOBs at Politico turned against me," I can imagine Presidentish Joe Biden seething this week. "I didn't do anything wrong!"

Politico has run a couple of tough pieces on Biden in recent days and, in general, the Infotainment Industry has been taking belated notice of the Biden Crime Family's various shell corporations, seven-figure paydays, and mysterious no-interest family loans. "Fresh revelations contradict Joe Biden’s sweeping denials on Hunter" is the screaming headline over a Politico report this week that contains nothing new — stuff Republicans have been talking about for years.

That was Sunday. Wednesday it was "Biden adviser-turned-ambassador opens up on ‘scary’ 2024 polling." And all week long, everybody has been talking about David Axelrod's blatant call for Biden to drop out of the race and let a stronger candidate carry the Democrat banner.

Biden knows what he's done. Everybody in Washington knows what Biden has done. And, until now, hardly anybody of any importance has had anything to say about it. That's in large part because almost everybody in proximity to the Beltway is also hoping to cash in.

So how can I say that Biden might not understand that he did anything wrong?

Maybe you think that since I'm traveling this week for the GOP debate in Miami on Wednesday, I might have imbibed in a brunchtime bloody mary or two. And maybe you'd be right. The little restaurant on the third floor of the hotel makes a decent one with just the right amount of horseradish: slightly too much. 

Even so, I haven't enjoyed nearly enough brunch bloodys to think Biden believes he hasn't broken any laws. What I mean is, maybe he doesn't believe he's done anything wrong, as opposed to illegal. 

Let's go back to the early 1990s, when Middle-Class Joe benefited from a couple of sweetheart real estate deals. A 2008 Delaware Online investigation (republished here in 2020) detailed how MBNA credit card bank and one of its top executives, John R. Cochran III, helped put Biden on the road to real estate riches — and how Biden then pushed the bankruptcy legislation that MBNA wanted through the Senate.

MBNA later hired a young Hunter Biden right out of Yale Law School. 

Nobody batted an eye at the time. Hardly anyone batted an eye when Delaware Online published or republished its investigation. 

In Joe Biden's experience, one hand washes the other while the palms are getting greased. If the press gets wind of any indiscretions, they'll publish a lame exposé piece, easily dismissed (including by the press) when someone like Biden makes all the expected pronouncements. 

Biden takes no notice of his own corruption for the same reason a fish takes no notice of water — except when it's absent.

One of the greatest acts of corruption in American political history took place while Biden was vice president, it was committed in broad daylight, and virtually nobody cared. But this time it wasn't Biden — it was his boss and political benefactor, Barack Obama.

Obama spent serious political capital during his second term pushing for Net Neutrality. I'm an old-school internet idealist — or at least I used to be before Google and Facebook beat it out of me — but Net Neutrality was a huge scam. I don't know the current figures but back then, the 25% of Americans who subscribed to Netflix used more than 40% of the nation's bandwidth during primetime viewing hours.

Netflix loved Net Neutrality because under its "bits are bits" regulations, ISPs couldn't charge more for the Netflix video bits that were clogging the nation's internet arteries. Netflix loved Obama so much that, once he'd been out of office for a discreet-looking period, it gave him and Michelle a $50 million payday to produce not much of anything.

Certainly not $50 million worth of anything, but the Washington-Infotainment Complex acted as though Obama was above even the appearance of impropriety. 

While the Obamas cosplayed as Netflix producers from their $15 million Hampton home, Biden himself got rich in the private sector, despite providing no product or service in the private sector. Is a Biden speech really worth $200,000? Is a Biden book really worth eight figures? No, but his public sector influence was priceless to people in places like Beijing, Kyiv, and Moscow.

"Nobody cared then," Biden might be saying to himself. "Why do they suddenly care now? I don't get it!" Then he goes back to his pudding and forgets what got him so upset.

Despite any confusion Biden might have about his current predicament, his question is an easy one to answer. The Washington-Infotainment Complex is finally taking notice of Biden's ethical troubles, and Biden is starting to look like a loser. And while lefties can tolerate almost anything from petty corruption to the massacre of innocents in Israel, they will not tolerate a loser.

I can imagine asking Biden, "You get that, Jack?"