If Diogenes the Cynic, lamp in hand, enters the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives today looking for an honest man or woman on the Republican side of the aisle, he will be doomed to failure.
The lower chamber voted Wednesday to authorize something already well underway – an impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden for, well, who the hell knows what. Primarily, it seems the probe is intended to advance the presidential campaign of a truly crooked individual, one Donald John Trump, and, tangentially, improve the GOP’s House and Senate prospects in 2024.
The show vote was strictly along party lines, 221-212, with all five Republicans from the Kentucky delegation going along with this absurdity, led, of course, by our old pal Rep. Jamie Comer (R-WhereverHeHangsHisHatIsHisHome), who, as chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has already been engaged in a snarling, fact-deprived persecution of Biden for 11 months.
While the vote carries little serious consequence – Comer and his gang of horse thieves would have tiptoed down their merry path regardless of the outcome and have already issued more subpoenas than Perry Mason – it is noteworthy that not one Republican was willing to step up and cry “Stop the madness.”
If that doesn’t establish just how corrupt the current GOP is, nothing will.
Comer’s hilarious-if-it-wasn’t-so-serious investigation has produced more baloney that all of the nation’s Oscar Mayer plants combined running 24/7. It’s incoherent and zipless. He has essentially quit conducting public hearings on the subject because he’s played the fool so well during previous engagements that folks have come to believe that’s what he really is.
With good reason.
Say one thing about Jamie and his Pa Kettle impersonation – he’s not afraid to display his ignorance before God and everybody. None of his fellow Kentucky congressmen, perhaps sensing a trap, bothered to explain their vote to the public, likely because they can’t conger up a justification that even a simpleton would accept.
It’s par for the course in the Republican-controlled 118th Congress.
The House this year took forever to elect a speaker, ditched said speaker post haste, took days on end picking a replacement, and finally settled on some dude with no financial history who is better suited for standing in the pulpit of a megachurch than holding the gavel before the House of Representatives. It has not passed a budget, has left Ukraine in the lurch, and has accomplished absolutely nothing worthwhile.
Yet, in the view of the Republican majority, it has plenty of time to involve itself in a bogus impeachment probe.
And, after having giving the impeachment inquiry the go-ahead, having failed to get anything else done, the gang ditched town and headed out for the Christmas break.
Ever wonder why this country is troubled?
The claim against Biden is nonsense. Several Republican lawmakers on the Senate side, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), have publicly stated so. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, told CNN that the facts “haven’t taken me to that point where I can say that the president’s guilty of anything.”
But nothing can stop the Tail-gunner Jamie Express.
The CliffsNotes version goes something like this:
Biden was elected president, regardless of what Trump says, in November 2020. In the preceding years while he was vice president and thereafter, his son Hunter, well-educated with a host of personal problems involving drugs and women, started making hay based on his old man’s name, obtaining lucrative positions on the board of a Ukraine energy outfit, Burisma, and contracts with firms maintaining ties with the government of China.
None of that is illegal. But Comer and his henchmen claim that Biden, as president, has not only instituted policies intended to further enrich his son but that he was actually intimately involved, in fact the leader, in what Comer has characterized as the Biden Crime Family™, although what crime was actually committed, outside of Hunter failing to pay his taxes and lying on forms to obtain a gun permit, is somewhere lost in the ozone.
The FBI received information from a source that Biden, as vice president, received a $5 million bribe to somehow protect Burisma, the Ukraine energy outfit his son was involved with, but that claim quickly fell apart.
Basically, there’s nothing to the whole meshuggeneh. But there is in the weirdness of Jamie World. On the House floor Wednesday, speaking in support of legitimizing the probe, he said this:
“Joe Biden has repeatedly lied to the American people about his family’s corrupt influence peddling schemes. He told the American people he never spoke to his son about his family’s business dealings. He claimed there was an ‘absolute wall’ between his official government duties as vice president and his family. He said his family never made money from China. All of these are blatant lies. Our investigation has revealed how Joe Biden knew of, participated in, and benefited from his family cashing in on the Biden name around the world.”
All of it, with the exception of the China claim, is the bunk. Devon Archer, Hunter’s long-time business partner, told Comer’s committee that father and son spoke frequently on the phone but that business dealings were not a topic of discussion.
“I think you have to understand that there was no business conversation about a cap table or a fee or anything like that,” Archer said. “It was, you know, just general niceties and, you know, conversation in general about the geography, about the weather, whatever it may be.”
Archer further said he had no knowledge of Biden altering policy to benefit his son Hunter.
In his House address, Comer sought to connect the president with his son’s business ventures.
“Joe Biden spoke to his son’s associates by speakerphone over 20 times, dined with foreign oligarchs and a Burisma executive, and had coffee with his son’s Chinese associate – all when he was Vice President. Our investigation has revealed how Joe Biden knew of, participated in, and benefited from his family cashing in on the Biden name around the world.”
Yes, a few phone calls and a couple dinners are what Comer is using as the basis for his claim that Biden benefitted from his son’s businesses, apparently stuffed his pockets with the lucre (although bank records show otherwise) and is the head of the Biden Crime Family™.
Archer said on perhaps 20 occasions when he served as vice president, Biden called his son while Hunter was in the midst of a meeting with executives from Burisma and Hunter would put him on speakerphone.
“There are touch points and contact points that I can’t deny happened,” Archer told Comer’s committee. “But nothing of material was discussed.
And there was Biden’s attendance at a couple of dinners, one celebrating a birthday, that included the then-vice president and several of Hunter’s business associates.
“He came to dinner, and we ate and kind of talked about the world, I guess, and the weather, and then everybody − everybody left,” Archer said.
The second dinner was about the World Food Program USA and included a close Biden friend.
Comer has also mentioned that Biden received sums of money from one of his son’s business accounts with ties to a Chinese firm. Turns out it was a repayment for the president purchasing a truck for his son during a difficult personal and financial period. Comer also tried to make a big deal out of money Biden received from his brother, who was involved in some of Hunter’s business deals. Again, it has been established that the cash was a loan repayment.
Remember: Devon Archer was Hunter Biden’s business partner during much of the time when Biden was vice president. Wouldn’t he know if any hanky-panky was going on?
What we’ve now learned, under the auspices of the Associated Press, is that our boy Jamie might just be involved in his own financial shenanigans. The wire service asserts Comer could be playing games with property transfers, placing “six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife.”
“The AP found that Farm Team Properties functions in a similarly opaque way as the companies used by the Bidens, masking his stake in the land that he co-owns with the donor from being revealed on his financial disclosure forms. Those records describe Farm Team Properties as his wife’s ‘land management and real estate speculation’ company without providing further details.”
Comer rang the bell about Hunter Biden’s use of shell companies to hide, he maintains, financial transactions. Now it appears Jamie has one of his own to play with.
Basically, the public is now aware that Tail-gunner Jamie, the primary cog in all this nonsense, is a liar and a cheap chiseler.
But some good, perhaps has emerged. The public has now seen the evidence that, as a result of this vote, Republican members of the House, every mother’s son and daughter, have the principles of a wharf rat.
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Written by Bill Straub, a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. Cross-posted from the NKY Tribune.
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