Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

A Little Night Narratology

 

Got fixated on a peculiar detail of the government case against Alexander Smirnov, the main witness in the Republican complaint according to which Hunter Biden and Joe Biden took $5 million each in bribes from Hunter's Ukrainian employer, Mykola Zlochevsky, and nobody else seems to be paying attention to it. 

Smirnov, a double agent working for Russian intelligence services and the FBI, gave the latter the story of the bribery, with advice as to how they could go about gathering evidence to back it up, and the Bureau gave it to Rep. James Comer and Senator Charles Grassley, who hoped to use it as a gigantic and appalling climax to their attempt to impeach the president, except, as we now know, when the special prosecutor found a moment to check the story out (34 months after receiving it), it turned out to be completely bogus, Smirnov's invention or that of his Russian handlers, and the Republicans' impeachment case, such as it was, is smashed to pieces, Smirnov is now under indictment for his deceit, and the prosecutor is trying to have him detained before trial, as a flight risk.  

It's in that document, special counsel David Weiss's request to deny bail to Smirnov, that the story of his collaboration with Russians emerged publicly for the first time, in the context of Weiss's long-delayed investigation of Smirnov's allegation—a story of Russian intelligence services promulgating disinformation to help elect Donald Trump to the presidency, which is, as you know, one of my favorite kinds of stories to tell, and the first big one of the 2024 campaign—so of course I was looking at it, and noticed this narrativium-packed paragraph (where Public Official 1 is the president and Businessperson 1 is his son):