I Think We Can Go a Bit Harder Than "Unsubstantiated Claims" Here, No?
The big noise in Blogistan on Friday morning was this Washington Post story regarding Hunter Biden and the "concerns" harbored in 2015 by one George Kent, who was the latest canary invited to sing by the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry. The story is attributed to "three people familiar with the testimony" and it later goes on to caution:
The testimony by Kent offers a reminder that as Democrats probe President Trump’s alleged actions in pressuring Ukraine to dig up compromising information on Biden, the impeachment inquiry also threatens to keep alive questions about the former vice president’s handling of his son’s foreign work at a precarious moment for his 2020 presidential campaign.
In other words, thank the Lord, we can Both Sides this sucker at last.
Bear in mind—if the folks at Camp Runamuck had not bungled their way into admitting to several felonies and impeachable offenses, brother Kent would still be out there happily carrying out the idiotic non-policies cooked up by El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago that have sold out the national interest and lit a good part of the world on fire. Moreover, I think it's safe to assume that the People Familiar With The Testimony are either Republican congresscritters or Republican staffers. If that is the case, then the Post has a responsibility to let its readers know that fact since this is clearly going to be the White House defense strategy going forward.
No names, of course. But "Republican sources familiar with the testimony" would be perfectly inbounds. (Come to think of it, if the sources are Democrats, that's a helluva story, too.) Anonymity is one thing. Strategic camouflage is another, and no journalist is bound to provide the latter. That's how everybody got in trouble with Whitewater. And it's not like it's an impossible thing to do. In fact, later in the story, an anonymous source is identified as, "a former senior Biden national security adviser," which lends credibility to offset a reader's skepticism as regards anonymous sources.
And this section here is just complete manure.
Although many of Trump’s charges regarding Hunter Biden have been unfounded, the elder Biden has faced questions about why he didn’t anticipate concerns about potential conflicts of interest as he took a leading role in carrying out U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Polls show Biden with an advantage over Trump in a potential general election matchup, and Biden has sought in recent days to focus attention on the actions of a president many Democrats see as corrupt and unfit for office.
Here, in the context of a political campaign, in which, I guess, empirical facts are not altogether necessary, we are comparing something that the president* actually did, and something that his chief-of-staff copped to on Thursday, to "unfounded" charges and "questions" about why the elder Biden "didn't anticipate concerns." Can the shadows and the clouds be far behind? And then there's this:
Trump and his allies have made the unsubstantiated claim that Biden pressed for the prosecutor’s firing to protect his son. In fact, according to former U.S. officials and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, the investigation of Burisma was dormant at the time. And Biden, adding to the calls from others in the U.S. government and Western institutions, was urging Ukraine to tap a new prosecutor who would be more aggressive in combating corruption.
A demonstrably truthless president* and his allies have made "unsubstantiated" claims? I think we could go a little harder there, no? I think we all can agree that unbridled nepotism is not necessarily a good thing in government; Lord knows, we have had enough proof of that over the past couple of years. But if we're in the middle of creating a media environment in which Donald Trump, Jr. feels comfortable waxing all moral about what the children of politicians should and should not do, then nobody has learned anything.
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