Where's El Rushbo When We Need Him?

What made Rush Linbaugh indispensable. even though he was well past his prime by the time he died, was his ability to reason past individual data items and see a bigger picture, which more often than not was funny. Nobody now on the scene combines a sharp intellect with a sense of humor, which always softened the blow of what he was actually saying.

Let's take a slowly emerging cluster of data points that hasn't been well examined in the public forum, those being that prior to the 2016 presidential election, Joe Biden made a deliberate decision not to run. Instead, soon after he left office as vice president in January 2017, he began an intense fundraising campaign, not for political office, but for personal aggrandizement. The Penn Biden Center has so far emerged as the most visible manifestation of that campaign.

For reasons that so far haven't been fully examined, Joe had relied for some years on his dissolute son Hunter as his chief confidant, having notably credited him with the advice to run for vice president in 2008,

Listing those he sought out for counsel, he mentioned his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, his mother, Catherine “Jean” Biden, his late son Beau Biden, “and I had my son Hunter, who’s the smartest guy I know.”

What intrigues me, and what nobody so far has pointed out, is that Biden's decision to undertake a major personal fundraising campaign in 2017 coincides almost exactly with Hunter's spiral into the worst phase of his addiction. Even as of mid 2016, Hunter had been severely addicted to cocaine, and that autumn he'd been on a notorious trip to LA and then rehab in Arizona, where he and his brother Beau's widow had decided to become an item.

He filed for divorce from his then-wife in December 2016, which became final in April 2017. A month later, Burisma cut his director's fee. At about that time, he began negotiating with Chinese energy officials, the arrangements for which involved, according to a May 2017 e-mail, 10% to be held by Hunter “for the big guy.”

So far, even without the Treasury Department providing the access Chairman Comer has demanded to suspicious activity reports on Biden family transactions, details have nevertheless been dribbling out:

Comer also dropped a big tidbit about what they had been able to discover to date in their investigations. They had subpoenaed bank records from three Hunter Biden associates, including Rob Walker. They’re now reviewing 14 years of SARs from Bank of America.

. . . According to Comer, Walker was wired millions by CCP-connected individuals two months after Joe Biden stopped being vice president. The money was then distributed to three Biden family members, including a Biden family member whose name has never been included previously as a recipient of any monies. Comer said that he couldn’t identify any related business and that it appeared to go into their personal accounts. He said that he believes it’s influence peddling, and that raises questions about people then being foreign agents.

. . . Interestingly, Comer wasn’t giving up that third name and then he repeated there was a “problem” with figuring out what they were doing to get such sums of money from the CCP-connected people.

Now, what's likely to come out from all this is simply what's going to come out, and so far, it looks like more of the same -- multimillion-dollar wire transfers to Biden intermediaries that don't even have the beard of respectability they might have as campaign donations. They're just payments from a grateful world to Bidens for being Bidens. And there may be subsidiary questions about whether those payments were declared for tax purposes, or whether the Bidens were properly registered as foreign agents -- and I assume they'll work themselves out in whatever way.

But here's the set of inferences El Rushbo is no longer around to make: Joe, by the accounts we've had, made a deliberate decision not to run for president in 2016. Instead, by the same accounts, he and Hunter, with outside advice, decided to set up an operation consciously patterned after the Clinton Foundation to take donations from whomever on the basis that Hillary, in that particular case, would run for and be elected president either in 2008 or 2016, just get in early and you'll get what you want at a discount.

(Let's leave aside that the Clinton Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, but the Biden family is just a bunch of people with their hands out -- the principle is the same. Joe and Hunter seem to have decided they didn't need to waste the time even to look like they were observing the proprieties.)

But even looking toward a presidential run in 2016, Joe was 74 that year, but he decided not to run. At the time he made his decision in 2015, Jeb Bush was the likely Republican nominee, while Hillary was the favorite for both the nomination and the general election. If Hillary had won especially, the conventional wisdom would have had her in office until 2024, when Joe will be 82.

Yet Joe and Hunter decided to defer a run for the presidency until 2020 or 2024, when Joe by any conventional standard would have been too old. They nevertheless decided to undertake a massive personal fundraising operation to secure payments, mostly from foreign donors, in anticipation that Joe would win a general presidential election campaign, quite possibly as early as 2020.

What led them to make this decision? That's the kind of question El Rushbo would be asking. I have a feeling his answer would be funny, and beyond that, he'd be right.