Superficial To The Core

As I continue to follow the revelations about the Biden family business ventures, I keep getting the impression that we're learning less about payoffs or influence peddling and more about Joe's character. For instance, as of Friday, he went so far as to say about the current revelations of Hunter's 2017 payments to James, Hallie, and another generic Biden, "That's not true".

On Thursday, GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee revealed that they had obtained bank documents showing that Hunter Biden, the president's brother Jim, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his son Beau, received payments from Hunter's business associate Rob Walker and their joint venture with Chinese energy firm CEFC. A spokesperson for Hunter Biden's legal team confirmed the payments Thursday but emphasized that the recipients' accounts "belonged to Hunter, his uncle and Hallie – nobody else."

However, Biden denied that the payments were made when confronted by a reporter on the White House lawn Friday.

"That's not true," the president said, when asked about the GOP lawmakers' findings.

I basically put this in the same category as the legends he tells of himself, along with things like the Amtrak chestnut:

And so, I’m getting on the train on that Friday, and these guys who all became my family — all — the conductor. And a guy named Angelo Negri came up, and he goes, “Joey, baby!” Grabs my cheek like that. (Laughter.) And I thought they were going to shoot him. I really did. (Laughter.)

I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He’s a friend.” He was like, “What the hell.” And he said, “Big deal, Joey. A million…” — whatever it was — “…three-hundred thousand miles. You know how many miles you’ve traveled on Amtrak, Joey?” And I said, “No, Ang. I don’t.” And he said, “At that retirement dinner, we calculated it. We estimated 127 days a year, 250 miles back and forth, 3 — 36 years, then as Vice President. Joey, you traveled more on Amtrak.” (Laughter.)

CNN fact checked the story:

Biden’s account simply does not add up. Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments. But Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in May 2014, according to an obituary published online and in the Asbury Park Press, a New Jersey newspaper.

He does this because he can get away with it, and in fact, he's been getting away with it all his life. I think one reason observers think he has cognitive issues is that he wasn't a nationally familiar figure before he became vice president, but when he was vice president, he was, after all, vice president. But as Rich Lowry put it last year,

If the country thought that it was getting a buttoned-up, by-the-books communicator after four wildly undisciplined years of Donald Trump, it knew nothing about Joseph R. Biden’s long career as Washington’s standout long-winded, seat-of-the-pants, poorly informed and misleading talker.

What we're seeing is nothing new:

When his first presidential campaign was falling apart in 1987 because of plagiarism scandals and obviously false boasts about his resume, Biden apologized, saying, “I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”

Nevertheless, The New Yorker reported that at the time he was “getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden’s picture and accomplishments, including ‘inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater’ and ‘Member, Rockettes (1968).’”

. . . And Jon Favreau, speechwriter for then-President Barack Obama, said, “Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch—it was that he was a blowhard.”

My developing view is that Hunter business deals will continue to come out -- Chairman Comer has teased 11 more over the weekend -- but they're going to continue to be small potatoes, five-figure payoffs to one or another of six or seven likely suspects in the Biden family, mostly with plausible deniability to the big guy, who'll continue to bloviate that they have nothing to do with him.

And in fact, net-net, as I've been saying, Hunter has been, and will continue to be, a loss to the family finances, but Joe will simply continue to pay his debts, alimony, legal, tax, or whatever else. Except that Joe won't have the money to back his promises up -- I have no doubt that Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen has been led to believe Joe will backstop her $37,000 a month alimony payments, just as I have no doubt half a dozen lawyers have been led to believe Joe is good for $2000 an hour billings. Good luck.

Joe's a blowhard, and he's always been one. He says what he thinks he needs to say at any given moment, and he gives it no subsequent thought. So far, he's gotten away with it. The upside for him is tht Hunter's rinky-dink con games will never amount to impeachable high crimes, even if Joe got $10,000 here or $50,000 there. Whether he'll ever have a downside in this life remains to be seen, but he's a man utterly without insight and without reflection, superficial to the core. There are people like that, and they prosper. It's a mystery.