Maureen Callahan: Bidens Are as Dysfunctional as the Kennedys — And Protected by the Press
Joe Biden, as his former daughter-in-law recounts in her new memoir, comes on strong.
That’s no surprise to anyone who has read the allegations of sexual inappropriateness against President Biden, or has seen the multiple videos and photos of creepy Uncle Joe with women and young girls: sniffing their hair, massaging their shoulders, pressing his forehead against theirs, grabbing them by the arm or kissing them on the lips, pulling them in close for a full-contact hug.
Betsy DeVos, in her new memoir, is the latest to claim unwanted forehead-to-forehead contact. She was in a wheelchair at the time, recovering from a bike accident, with nowhere to run. “It was gross, and it was also a feeble attempt to intimidate me,” she writes.
But no left-leaning outlet, otherwise hyper-attuned to such violations, seems to care.
Nor has much attention been paid to that first meeting between Hunter Biden’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle and Joe. As she writes in her newly-published book, “If We Break,” Joe, then a stranger to her, “put his hands on my cheeks and looked me in the eyes, his nose almost touching my own. ‘Honey,’ he said, ‘my boy tells me he loves you, so that means I love you, too. Understand? I love you.’ ”
Joe’s instant intimacy was, Buhle says, a lot. “I honestly didn’t know what to do with it,” she writes.
Who would?
That encounter was a preview for life with the Bidens, a family whose public image — that of a close-knit, well-adjusted family brought even closer by tragedy — is at stark odds with reality.
Not since the Kennedys has the mainstream media ignored such familial dysfunction, lack of sexual boundaries, hardcore substance abuse issues, the hiring of sex workers, the leveraging of presidential access for money and trails of corruption, greed and thirst for power that supersede all.
To get this out of the way: Donald Trump, of course, has said pretty disturbing stuff — “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her” is but one example — and has been accused of sexual harassment and rape. The difference is that the mainstream media has treated every single one of these utterances and accusations with utmost seriousness.
President Biden’s adult children share a strange habit of leaving their most intimate communications, thoughts and confessions where anybody can find them. Hunter hasn’t denied the laptop is his; Ashley hasn’t denied the diary is hers.
So why isn’t the media treating their contents as newsworthy?
Hunter and Ashley take issue not just with their father but with the media’s fantasy step-mommy, the saintly Dr. Jill Biden. Each writes of feeling like political pawns or liabilities, of letting their father down, of anger towards their parents’ ambition. Neglect is a common thread, substance abuse a problem Ashley and Hunter share.
How much anger might each adult child harbor over their upbringing?
It says something when, in the midst of your hotly fought presidential run against a super-controversial opponent — a campaign in which you run as steady, experienced, moderate, sane, and above all else, compassionate — your crack-addled son decides to give a lengthy profile to The New Yorker. Hunter’s openness extended to his lobbying days while dad was in office, of this privileged political scion’s time living with a homeless woman named Bicycles (“mainly . . . we just planted ourselves on the couch and smoked a ton of crack”), and of his affair with his dead brother’s wife.
“All we got was s–t from everybody, all the time,” Hunter told the New Yorker. “It was really hard.”
Spoken like a true addict with an ax to grind and maybe, just maybe, a vendetta against his father. Why else open up to one of the left’s most unimpeachable outlets? Why else open the door to a former Obama aide telling the publication what a liability Hunter was?
“On the loose,” the Obama aide said, “undermining his father’s message.”
Really: It’s enough to make you think that Hunter and Ashley Biden are trying to tell us something.
If only liberal news outlets got the hint. No wonder 63% of Americans, per Gallup, don’t trust the media.
Even Bill Maher took umbrage earlier this year, excoriating left-leaning outlets for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story as the 2020 election neared. (By the way, Hunter has lost or abandoned three computers, including one reportedly recovered from celebrity therapist Keith Ablow’s office.)
“It looks like the left-wing media has buried the story because it wasn’t part of their narrative,” Maher said on his weekly HBO show. “Hunter Biden . . . you’ve made a living being a ne’er-do-well who was taking money just because you were the vice president’s son, and you had influence. He has $8 million dollars from Chinese energy companies to” — air quotes here — “’sit on the board’ and consult. Yeah, that was his passion in life — energy exploration. Hooker exploration was his passion.”
Truer words.
The Ashley Biden diary is the most recent example of a blanket media blackout, a July 2019 excerpt going viral two weeks ago. Read this and defend it as non-newsworthy:
“Was I molested,” the author writes. “I think so — I can’t remember specifics but I do remember trauma. Hyper-sexualized @ a young age . . . I remember being somewhat sexualized with Caroline; I remember having sex with friends @ a young age; showers w/my dad (probably not appropriate).”
She also wrote that she was in treatment “for sexual trauma.”
Imagine this entry written by Ivanka Trump. Imagine the media hailstorm, the feminist outrage, the minute-by-minute calls for a federal investigation on 24-hour cable news — calls quickly ratcheting up to impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment — the late night talk shows, the obvious headline: Is the sitting president of the United States a child abuser?
Note that a woman who identified herself in the diary as Ashley Blazer Biden wrote this as an adult, as part of her therapy sessions, to work out her sex addiction.
In trying to identify its root causes, the author continues:
“ — my mother not emotionally available —
“ — my father was — message — I could get love from men
“ — ‘I’m not your mother’”
“ — Blanket being taken away
“ — Not letting myself go to the bathroom
“ — Being wiped until too late in the game — ”
“I’ve had one of my hardest days,” the author wrote. “My sex drive is out of f–ing control. Like literally, I am in heat. I know it’s not the healthiest way to deal with things but @ least it’s better than drugs.”
If these aren’t Ashley Biden’s entries, why not publicly say so?
One day after these entries circulated online, 41-year-old Ashley — who normally keeps an extremely low profile — was photographed taking a windswept, Kennedy-esque walk on the beach with her mother Jill.
Two days after that, Ashley was back on the beach, in front of the press, this time with her father.
When Joe began chatting with reporters, Ashley interrupted. “Nope,” she said. “No more questions.”
But the diary does nothing but raise questions. The Joe Biden who branded himself — with a complicit media — as America’s grandpa, our counselor-in-grief and empathizer extraordinaire, is revealed by Ashley and Hunter as, at times, absent, manipulative, and more concerned with his political career than his children.
As Joe faced yet another presidential debate in July 2019, the diary’s author wrote of an upsetting conversation with her father.
“My dad cried on the phone saying he has the debate in a week and, ‘Now has to worry about me.’ . . . Maybe he knows what he is doing and it’s worked but my feelings of guilt are often overwhelming.”
Hunter Biden expressed a similar sentiment after Joe announced he would not run for president in the 2016 election.
“Well having made clear to the world that the only reason for not [running] is your family problems im [sic] glad to be the f—ing bullseye you painted on my back,” he wrote.
There was very good reason for Joe not to run: He had just lost his adored son Beau — clearly his favorite child — to brain cancer.
Also: Hunter, a married father of three, had begun an affair with Beau’s widow Hallie.
When Page Six broke the story, Joe Biden issued a strange statement.
“We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other” — as if they collided randomly, like atoms — “as they were putting their lives together after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s complete support and we are happy for them.”
No mention was made of Hunter’s three traumatized daughters, or Hunter’s long-suffering, blindsided wife, or of Hallie and Beau’s children, their uncle now playing stepfather — that is, when he wasn’t out blowing money he didn’t have on drugs, booze, strippers and sex workers.
“YOU NEED TO GET TESTED FOR HIV HALLIE.”
Hunter wrote this email to his brother’s widow in July 2018. He was simultaneously involved with Hallie’s married sister Elizabeth — not that you’ve read much about that scandal either.
Hunter to Elizabeth, via text: “We should shower together by [FaceTime] every morning or night. I’ll teach you how to masturbate.”
Hunter, Hallie and Elizabeth lived together at Beau’s old house. “They were obviously up 24/7 just partying,” one source told the Daily Mail. “They would sit out on the patio like crackheads almost.”
Again: Imagine if this was a Republican president’s family. Imagine the cries of hypocrisy, of poor personal character and amorality, of illegal activity run amok — family values, think of the children! It’s all we’d hear, morning to night.
A text from Hunter to Hallie, Nov. 2017: “By the way I’m going to have 5 strippers naked and admiring my d—k back to my hotel tonight and I’m going to smoke crack and drink enough to kill and [sic] elephant and put your kids” — Beau’s kids — “robbed over the phone and wake them up and assure them that your [sic] not as bad a person as you seem.”
Not quite the storybook romance Biden Inc. was selling.
After Hallie and Hunter broke up, Hunter wrote an email expressing confusion. Even though all kinds of familial and sexual boundaries had been crossed, he asked, why couldn’t they stay friends?
“I thought we agreed that we would never part ways,” he wrote Hallie, “and certainly that we would never forbid access to my family . . . Please do not continue to make [redacted] believe that I am somehow a danger to her if she is alone with me no matter what state I am in.”
Amidst juggling the sisters, Hunter impregnated a stripper named Lunden Alexis Roberts, a woman he initially denied ever having sex with — even though she was on Hunter’s company’s payroll while pregnant.
None of the Bidens have ever acknowledged the daughter Hunter fathered with Roberts. She’s only three.
Then again, the Bidens have a pattern of overlooking Hunter’s bad behavior. This is a guy who had his father pull strings so he could join the Navy — despite being too old and having a history of drug use — only to test positive for cocaine before he could even report for duty. But hey, no big deal.
It’s not like the media picked up on it.
Besides, as Hunter told his then-wife Kathleen, he had absolutely no idea how cocaine got in his system. None!
Kathleen wanted to believe him, she writes. Just as she wanted to believe all the dubious jobs Hunter had weren’t due to who his father was, or that she and Hunter were able to secure six-figure mortgages with zero in savings due to who his father was, or that she was actually a Biden, even when asked to step out of a family portrait meant for “Biden blood only.”
Or when The New Yorker reported that, in the wake of the Hunter-Hallie affair, Kathleen “felt ostracized by the Biden family.”
Biden lore, via People magazine and other sympathetic outlets, usually casts Joe as the most family-oriented politician of modern times.
Again: In what universe? After his small boys survived a car crash that killed their mother and infant sister, Joe insisted on going to Capitol Hill, holding a public swearing-in ceremony in his children’s hospital room — 3-year-old Beau in traction with multiple broken bones, 2-year-old Hunter recovering from a severe head injury.
No wonder Hunter might feel like a political prop.
To be the sole surviving parent of two very small, very injured, traumatized, motherless toddlers and sally forth to life as a career politician — to not put that goal aside for a few years at least — well, if that isn’t craven, what is?
Instead we got “Amtrak Joe,” the media’s appellation for just another single dad, commuting daily from D.C. to Delaware, so devoted to his boys that he wouldn’t rent an apartment near the Hill as so many of his colleagues did and do.
But au contraire, says Joe’s troublesome son. As Hunter wrote in his memoir, Joe’s sister Val and his brother Jim moved into the Biden home and raised the boys. Not that they ever get the credit.
Anyway, soon enough Joe met Jill on a blind date. Or so they say.
Ready for more alternative facts? Here’s Jill’s first husband, Bill Stevenson, on that little origin story.
“I considered Joe a friend,” Stephenson told the Daily Mail. He and Jill worked on Biden’s first Senate run, Stephenson said, and within two years, Jill and Joe were having an affair.
“Jill and I sat in the Biden’s kitchen,” he said. “I gave $10,900 to his first campaign — in cash.”
The most genuine and heartbreaking detail in Hunter’s memoir: “our mommy” was what he and Beau called their birth mother into adulthood. He claimed that even so, he and Beau considered Jill their second mom. The press loves this story, Jill swooping in seamlessly, healing all their trauma and abandonment with effortless maternal love.
“You’re avoiding being the chosen one,” Hunter’s therapist wrote to him of his turbulent love life, “because you were not the chosen one, by your step-mother.”
Perhaps Joe and Jill Biden share more in common with the Reagans than the Kennedys. After all, Ron and Nancy were famously devoted only to each other, their own children outspoken about feeling left out and neglected as their parents powered through the political ranks.
Here’s another question the media conspicuously avoids: If anyone was privy to Joe’s obviously deteriorating mental faculties, it had to be Jill. How could she encourage her husband to run, let alone urge Americans to elect him?
Just how badly did these two need to be in the White House?
To look at the collateral damage in their wake — namely, Ashley and Hunter — is to approach an answer.
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