By: Becket Adams – nationalreview.com – December 8, 2024

An additional stage exists for anyone dumb enough to have taken Biden at his word.

For a healthy, normal person, there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

For the people stupid enough to have trusted a midwit career bureaucrat as unscrupulous as President Joe Biden, there’s a sixth stage just before acceptance: delusion.

And few things have brought out this sixth and rare stage quite like Biden’s characteristically cynical pardoning of his debauched, ne’er-do-well son, Hunter. Indeed, for those who’ve spent the past several years extolling the president for his fidelity to “norms,” “decency,” and the restoration of the “soul of the nation,” the pardon has created an overwhelming cognitive dissonance.

After all, what sort of man would insist that he would not pardon his son’s multiple felony firearm convictions, only to turn around later and do precisely this? What sort of man would look the voter directly in the eye, say there will be no pardon, and insist that “no one is above the law,” all while discussing in private the timing of his son’s forthcoming pardon?

What sort of man issues a pardon covering a weirdly specific eleven years, covering crimes the pardoned has committed “or may have committed or taken part in” during this, again, weirdly specific period?

And what sort of man rewrites the history of the felony convictions he’s pardoning?

It can’t be that Biden is a corrupt, self-serving, and venal fraud. No! This would mean the people who believe and say he is a good man are either too thickheaded or dishonest to be trusted to tie their shoes, let alone be trusted with the business of news, politics, and commentary.

It must be something else, say Biden’s fans.

Enter the delusion.

CBS’s View co-host and supposed political insider and commentator Ana Navarro attempted to defend the pardon last week by arguing that many presidents, including America’s 28th commander in chief, have issued such edicts.

“Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts,” she remarked on social media. “But tell me again how Joe Biden ‘is setting precedent’?”

If you have never heard of this incident, it’s because it never happened. There is no Hunter deButts. Wilson never pardoned his brother-in-law. It’s pure fabrication.

In a fevered scramble to exonerate Biden for his objectively sleazy dealings, Navarro had asked the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT for exculpatory historical examples of similar presidential pardons. The AI tool then hallucinated a nonexistent event, which it is wont to do, and Navarro uncritically shared the results on social media, wanting so badly for Biden to be, at the very least, in line with historical precedent.

“Hey Twitter sleuths,” Navarro tweeted later, “thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with ChatGPT.”

The funny thing isn’t that a robot hallucinated a presidential pardon for a man with a name like “Hunter deButts,” but that none of this sounded out of place to a woman who is paid handsomely to explain the news and U.S. politics to television audiences. One can’t help but wonder whether even the names “Hugh Jass” or “Amanda Huginkiss” would have set off alarms in Navarro’s head.

The only saving grace for the supposed former GOP strategist is that she’s not alone in indulging in delusions to defend the Biden pardon.

Esquire political columnist Charles Pierce, the absolute dimmest burnout in the commentary business, did something arguably more embarrassing when he wrote an entire article promoting a similar pardon fantasy. The article has since been retracted.

The 1,000-plus-word story, originally titled “A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” claimed that former President George H. W. Bush pardoned his son over a savings-and-loan scandal.

The article subhead read, “Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.”

H. W. Bush never pardoned his son Neil. No more context is required.

Immediately after healthy, well-adjusted readers pointed out the historical falsehood, the Esquire article went through significant changes and revisions, including to the headline, which was changed to “Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”

Eventually, Esquire retracted the piece altogether because there was no longer any point to the article, even with the edits and revisions.

Where once Pierce’s historical revisionism stood, an editor’s note now stands, reading, “This column has been removed due to an error. The original article incorrectly stated that President George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the mistake.”

The truth will set you free!

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Source: Six Stages of Grief for Biden Boosters | National Review