Yeah, Republicans and their right-wing media co-conspirators have tried to desperately rub the limp stories of the business dealings of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, into a full-on scandal erection, but that dick won't fuck this time. And it's frankly shocking considering the record that the GOP has in fluffing flaccid fairy tales into career-killing crisis cum. Just in recent years, you've had the Swift Boat Vets lies about John Kerry. And you had the decades of utter nonsense about Hillary Clinton, Travelgate to Benghazi to But Her Emails.
Encouragingly, no one is falling for it this time. And that's a tribute to a few things.
See, Republicans succeed on this shit only when everything is going fine for most of the voting public (or at least enough of them to give the GOP the presidency and one or both houses of Congress). When, like at the end of the Obama administration or, arguably, the end of the Bill Clinton administration, the economy was swimming along nicely and things were relatively peaceful-ish in the world as far as it affected the United States, there's a sort of a mid-life crisis mindset in Americans, and a fear of complacency comes in, along with a bourgeois desire to upend everything for some fake notion of different being better. So we're more susceptible to the flaming shit bags that conservatives start leaving at our doors and that's part of the reason Republicans get elected president.
The sex scandals didn't kill Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 because the country was tumbling into recession at the end of HW Bush's term. The birther racism didn't lay much of a glove on Barack Obama in 2008 because the country was on the edge of financial ruin and was in two wars that we wanted the fuck out of, among other shit. Now we're teetering on a depression, the federal government is actively making the pandemic worse and flat out murdering Americans, poverty and hunger are rising, domestic political violence is becoming more likely, and shit's just gone mad. Do you really think anyone but Trump's saddest and stupidest voters (and assorted, self-anointed purity lefties) honestly gives a single rat turd about whether or not Hunter Biden got a job because his dad was Vice President?
But, like a blind drunk asshole frantically trying to jack his cock into a semi-chub so he can bang the first one-nighter he's gotten back to his place since the coronavirus hit, it's just pathetic and a waste of everyone's time, but that's not gonna stop Trump from making that his closing argument for his reelection: that Joe Biden is a criminal who profited from Hunter's deals. And since the Ukraine/Burisma stuff didn't stick, they're also going with something something China because they get to make it sound extra-scary. As campaign chair Bill Stepien wrote in a whiny letter to the debate commission, "Biden himself was mentioned as a financial beneficiary of a deal arranged by his son Hunter and a communist Chinese-related energy company."
One glance at the Trump campaign website, which I won't be linking to because fuck them, and you see article after article about Hunter Biden and China, about Hunter Biden's alleged laptop, about Hunter Biden and Ukraine (which, if you'll remember, Trump was impeached for going all mob boss to coerce Ukraine's president to cough up fake dirt on the Bidens), and more. You know what you don't find on the website? A single fucking idea for what Trump would do in a second term.
With the Hunter Biden bullshit (and let's not even get into the bizarro fixation on mocking Biden's son's drug addiction, where it's like the GOP is trying to drive him into a relapse), Republicans have fallen into the Democratic scandal trap. See, if Democrats had impeached Trump for his mistreatment of migrants or his profiting off his presidency, that shit's easy to understand. "Here's a kid being torn from his mother who she'll never see again" is pretty fuckin' easily comprehended. Instead, they went with the complex machinations of Trump's relationship with Ukraine and the way disinformation spreads. Yeah, it was fucked up and Trump should be in jail. But the public didn't fucking care enough. Usually Republicans come up with scandals that are perfect for a bumper sticker and about as deep. This time, there's nuance, and no one's got time for nuance.
(Note: To reiterate, "no one" means "no one who hasn't permanently stapled themselves to Trump's ass.")
No one gives a fuck about China's investments in companies Hunter Biden worked for. And it goes further than that. No one really gives a fuck about the other shit Trump's tried to throw at Biden. Court-packing? Why the fuck should anyone think about that when they're trying not to die or lose their jobs? Higher taxes? Motherfucker, we're out here wondering if we need to hoard toilet paper and canned soup again to get a jump on the inevitable lockdown. We're wondering what the fuck we're gonna do with our kids' schooling when we can't afford wifi anymore. And Trump's out here talking about how mean the press is to him and toilets don't flush right for him. Who gives a fuck? The world's burning and Biden might actually try to put it out instead of pissing gasoline on it. That's all that matters.
And, yes, yes, it has to be said again, yes, another big fucking reason GOP fuckery isn't working now when it worked on Hillary is because 25 years of nonstop defamation, of dragging her for trying to get people health care or support women's rights, of seeking to destroy her for no reason other than to see if you can, of punishing her for daring to be a presidential nominee without a dick, aided and abetted by a media that has been contorted into a repetitive commentary stream because of Fox "news," yeah, all that worked. So we're on the verge of fucked beyond fucked not because of Russian disinformation, but because of homegrown motherfuckers in the media making it so that people believed Russian disinformation because it confirmed suspicious shit they had been told over and over on CNN and in the New York Times.
Biden doesn't have that burden. He doesn't have that burden with the American people. And, more especially, he doesn't have that with the American press. It's sexist as fuck, but it's there. Trump thought he could run the same play as 2016, but the narrative that has finally taken hold is that Biden is worth the effort to unite and, with our votes, say, "Nah, not this time." And also, "It's really pretty fucked that you're making a big deal about a candidate's son. Wanna talk about your kids?"
Look, anything can happen come Election Day. Shit's so unpredictable now and we were burned so badly in 2016 that we're not allowing optimism to lead to complacency. Right now, Trump is like a torpedoed ship lurching to get to port before it sinks. He's gonna dump his munitions to save himself. But I feel pretty confident that all he's got are duds.
Except for voter suppression. That's what might fuck shit up.
