The Left can't stand that anyone would think Hunter Biden becoming a convicted felon waters down their talking point that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. They worked hard to inflate some accounting entries for legal expenses into felonies. It's much less serious in their minds that a crack addict lied about being an addict on a gun purchase form so he was able to buy a gun that was later thrown in a trash can near a school.
After Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felonies, Democrats tried to argue that having a "convicted felon" in both presidential families meant the Biden Justice Department wasn't partisan or "weaponized."
Then the weaponizing began. Before the first presidential debate in Atlanta, the Democratic National Committee bought five billboards saying (in all capital letters), "Donald. Welcome to Atlanta for the first time since becoming a convicted felon. Congrats -- or whatever."
The Biden-Harris campaign also came out with a shameless ad slamming Trump with a litany of all the Democrat-prosecutor greatest hits: 34 felonies from Alvin Bragg, civil fraud from Letitia James and department-store "sexual assault" in the nebulous E. Jean Carroll case.
The Biden-Harris announcer proclaimed the race was a contrast "between a convicted criminal who's only out for himself and a president who's fighting for your family." Biden's for lowering health care costs and making corporations "pay their fair share."
This partisan messaging was enhanced on MSNBC's "Inside with Jen Psaki," where the former White House press secretary touted this "very powerful" ad with a "very significant" budget. She pressed deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks to provide a "fiery" spin from Biden and all his spokespeople, all the time.
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The pro-Biden media will find this to be eminently factual and unobjectionable. They won't question the Democrats any more than Psaki would. No one's going to ask how all this "convicted felon" messaging clashes with Hunter Biden, who can be defined as "only out for himself," except for enriching his family with millions from dubious foreign sources in China and Russia and elsewhere.
They also claim Hunter Biden is "not running for office" and never took a White House job like Ivanka Trump, so you can't connect the father and son somehow. On the morning of the CNN debate, CNN's screen graphic implied any attack on Hunter is unduly personal: "Biden prepared for Trump to attack his family." It's painted as rude to bring up Hunter Biden. It was never rude to attack Trump's sons and daughters.
But earlier that morning, CNN host Kasie Hunt asked Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond if Biden would throw the "convicted felon" tag at Trump on stage. He said, hey, "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. He's a convicted felon, and that's just who he is. And, by the way, he's a twice-impeached convicted felon. And so, it wasn't Joe Biden that did that. It was 12 American patriots who served as jurors that found him guilty, unanimously, on 34 counts."
Their shamelessness extends to the forthcoming tax evasion trial for Hunter Biden in California. Unlike the gun case, this trial will deal with Hunter Biden's financial exploitation of his father's name when he was vice president. The gun case didn't connect to Joe Biden. The tax case clearly does.
Democrats don't worry about how their "welcome, convicted felon" billboards might age. They count on a servile media to cry "no evidence" and "without evidence" about the Biden scandals from now until November.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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