Democrats love Rusty Bowers. Can they act like him and call out Biden?

The American left has lavished well-deserved praise on Republicans such as former Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers for standing against the Trump White House and its pressure campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

Bowers was among a number of Arizona and national Republicans who risked, and in Bowers' case realized, the destruction of their own political careers for denying Trump.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation awarded Bowers its prestigious Profiles in Courage Award. The New York Times and Washington Post bathed him in national praise.

An ancient proverb tells us every good turn deserves another, and now the moment has arrived when the American left – the Democrats – can really put their principles where their prose is.

Who will be the Democrats’ Rusty Bowers?

Are there no profiles in courage in the Democratic Party?

So far we’ve not seen profiles in courage from either the Democrats or their mouthpieces in left-wing national media. We’ve seen cognitive dissonance. We’ve seen in the words of that brilliant screenwriter Ernest Lehman, “a deplorable lack of curiosity.”

This has been a year in which the smoke around Joe Biden, his prodigal son and his money-hoarding family has turned from a billowing black plume to a raging fire.

A parade of whistleblowers, confidential FBI sources and former business associates armed with secret memos and text messages have portrayed a Biden family that reeks of corruption.

We now know that Joe Biden has been lying to the American people saying he never talked to Hunter Biden about his business dealings.

Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer put an end to all that with his revelation that Hunter's dad had joined roughly 20 conference calls with his son and foreign business associates and bad actors from Ukraine, Russia and China.

To read that story on the New York Times website, you had to scroll down, down, down until you found it buried below the three headlines on the death of Pee Wee Herman.

We don’t need more evidence to know Joe Biden screwed up

Let’s put all that aside for a moment and just consider this:

We don’t need any more evidence to know that Joe Biden allowed his loose-cannon son to trade on his name.

Hunter was raking in millions for years while strung out on crack and carting in prostitutes. He was a picture of dysfunction. Everyone in that family had to know it.

And yet his father not only stood by him, but abetted his accumulation of millions from people who were not interested in the limited skills Hunter possessed nor in the interests of the United States.

As noted, his clients were a rogue’s gallery.

Hunter had his own rogues' gallery in New York’s SoHo district, peddling his paintings for as much as $500,000 a piece. The New York Times noted in 2021, “The prices — which are high for a novice artist — have raised questions in Washington about whether the works might attract buyers seeking to curry favor with the Biden White House.”

No. Really?

The decent thing here for Joe Biden to have done was to pull his son into the woodshed and apply the lumber:

“You will not trade on my name. You will not diminish this family or the office I hold with your smarmy side deals.

“If you continue, I will make sure everyone of your clients knows you hold no sway with me.”

Instead, the money flowed.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability disclosed in August it had “identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates.”

Where is the left’s Rusty Bowers?

AG tabs a fixer as special counsel, no problem there

With the flames of this scandal licking at the Biden White House, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally appointed a special counsel to investigate the criminal entanglements of Hunter Biden, who had been prepared to plead guilty to tax evasion and a gun violation before his plea deal fell apart.

Commenting on coverage of the story, liberal blogger Josh Marshall noticed that the Washington Post and New York Times had essentially written the same story – that the attorney general had given Republicans exactly what they wanted (a special counsel) and now they’re “insisting it's awful.”

Why were the Republicans furious?

Because the world’s largest law office with its 9,000-plus government attorneys, appointed as special counsel not an independent outsider, as called for in such appointments, but the firm’s fixer – David Weiss.

Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, is the prosecutor who slow-walked the Hunter Biden case for years as it began to bump into statutes of limitation. He oversaw the cushy plea deal that a judge blew up because it, inexplicably, seemed to offer Hunter Biden blanket immunity from future prosecution.

By appointing Weiss special counsel, the attorney general all but assured Weiss will not have to testify before the House on whistleblower allegations that he stonewalled probes into Hunter Biden’s misdeeds.

Where is the left’s Rusty Bowers? Where is journalism’s?

“I think there are some legitimate questions about this whole situation,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Maybe what the whistleblowers were alleging was right.”

Tapper also asked why would the attorney general stick with a prosecutor who produced the “colossal failure” that was the Hunter Biden plea deal?

Of such questions, Rusty Bowers are born.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Joe Biden lets his son trade on his name and the left stays silent