That Bar Won't Lower Itself

Hi Ben, you know how you were able to learn this? Because the interested parties publicly acknowledged it at the time.

It's Thomas's concealment of his and Mrs. Thomas's financial interests that breaks the law. https://t.co/xCIlueOUB6

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 14, 2023

Of course you know what Shapiro's doing here: not trying to demonstrate that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans, but rather that Republican bad things aren't really bad, because Democrats do them too. Look at that Biden! Sweetheart deal! Though it struck me as less than convincingly corrupt, if the value of the Biden house rose by a factor of six in a 20-year period, and a vacant lot not at all in a 5-year period. Why shouldn't that happen? should it have risen by 150% (i.e., one fourth of 600%) because house prices and land prices always change at a perfectly even and commensurable pace? Do they? How about if, while the lot remained undeveloped over the 5 years, they did some work on the house over the 20? What if they did a lot of work? 20 years is a while!

In fact, hard as it may be to believe, Eric got it wrong; it was a real mansion, 10,000 square feet and originally built by the Delaware Du Ponts, but a fixer-upper: in serious disrepair and slated for demolition when Biden picked it up in 1975 (when his salary was $44,600, not $174,000), and he renovated it extensively over the 20 years he lived there. And since, although Ben Shapiro and Eric Trump are evidently unaware of this, inflation exists, you should note that when comparing the prices: in constant 2020 dollars, he paid $895,014.87 for the house in 1975 and sold it in 1996 for $1,990,669.22, so far from sextupling in value, it had not quite doubled.

And even that's not the thing I was wanting to say, which is that even if this deal smelled as bad as Justice Thomas's deals with the billionaire sugar daddy who paid for him and Mrs. Thomas to go on an all-stops-out luxury vacation every year (both side they were vacationing together, but the description of the Indonesian holiday suggests Crow didn't go on that one), set up Mrs. Thomas in her own rightwing think tank where she paid herself a six-figure salary out of the funds he supplied, and bought the house Thomas was raised in by his grandparents so his mother could go on living there without paying any property taxes, along with a some properties on the block including the one next door where his mother felt the tenants were too noisy—even if it smelled that bad, it wouldn't have been illegal, and nor would the money Thomas took.

Because that's not the crime in Thomas's behavior (as far as we know, because nobody's proved it was all bribed): the crime is failure to report it.

And Biden reported it all, as he was required by law to do, and Thomas just didn't. And it doesn't matter in the least how deep and personal and satisfying his friendship with Mr. Crow was; he should have reported the transportation, the direct money and real estate gifts, and the wingnut welfare funding, regardless. 

There's a lot of this going on, trying to persuade the rubes that their boy was charged with a crime they weren't charged with—the most thorough effort has been the one saying Donald Trump was busted for bonking a porn star, which is idiotic and of course a bald lie: he was busted for falsifying business records of the payments his company made to silence the porn star (and maybe the Playboy Centerfold model as well, in a superseding indictment, because it was David Pecker who paid for that and they did interview him), in order to hide them from the public, because he didn't want voters to know in such detail about his bonking habits so soon after the appearance of the pussy-grabber tape; because the money the three of them (Pecker, Cohen, and Trump) spent on it consisted of illegal campaign contributions and illegally unreported loans, illegally structured and laundered in hope they wouldn't get caught.

Nobody's going to arrest you for consensual bonking! We're following the money!

And finally, there's Representative Empty Greene:

 No, Margie. His name is Jack, for starters. But not that there's anything especially wrong with white, male, Christian, or even antiwar (though this old hippie doesn't believe Empty Greene is really antiwar). That's shit that can happen to anybody. Texeira was arrested and charged for stealing sensitive military information and sharing it with people who didn't have the security qualifications to look at it.That's espionage. That's spying. And when Trump was doing it it was spying too. Don't tell me he was just doing it for entertainment, because that doesn't matter.