It doesn't really matter who is more egregious, but IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
It doesn't really matter who is more egregious, but IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
Well, no, you can clearly be more banana republic than that:
* Using the justice system to corruptly punish the opposition and prevent them from competing in elections,
* Using the security/military/law enforcement establishment to simply kill the opposition,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish, to coerce media into friendly, or at least out of critical, coverage,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish to reward people providing personal material benefit to the leader, or to punish those not doing so,
* Using the pardon power to assure that crimes committed in the course of doing any of the preceding items are unprosecutable
Pardoning family members, by itself (provided that the standards applied are different than those that would be applied to non-family members), is certainly corrupt as a form of nepotism, but hardly the outer limit of banana republic behavior.
> IMO a country's leader pardoning his own family members is about as banana republic as it gets.
That is until you see what's currently happening, the President personally directing the DOJ to arrest his political enemies, of which Biden and his family are considered to be primary antagonists (remember they labelled them the "Biden crime family" and chanted "lock them up"). That is the most banana republic as it gets, so how is preemptively defending against that behavior out of bounds?
> the President personally directing the DOJ to arrest his political enemies
They tried to put true in jail for 4 years, and kept saying he is a Nazi so people would try to shoot him. I don't think it's so different
> They tried to put true in jail for 4 years
I had made an extended repones about that notion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689915
But it suffices to say Biden did not direct any prosecutions at all.
> kept saying he is a Nazi so people would try to shoot him.
These are very different things, you'll need to make a better argument to conflate them. The actions Trump took to direct his DOJ to prosecute is political enemies is a direct action that violates the presumed and intended independence of the DOJ.
You equate those direct actions with something neither Biden nor any Congressional Democrat I know of actually did. Biden never called Trump a Nazi, and never tried to get him killed. In fact Biden increased protection on Trump after there was an attempt on his life.
Do you have any quote I'm unaware of? I do recall that the current Vice President JD Vance has called Trump a Nazi, so apparently that's not really such a concern.
Trump has been accurately labelled a "fascist" by elected Democrats. I don't think that's any different from Trump calling Democrats "communists". He's also called them "fascists" as well.
Because he knew that Trump was a criminal who’d illegally go after his own family purely out of spite.
The prosecution of Hunter for being a user of controlled substances while in possession or acquiring a weapon was pretty clear cut IMO and been used against many more than Hunter as an easy way to put away drug users for a long time. He likely was pardoned in part because Hunter had the resources to actually get that law overturned, signaled intent to do so, and the establishment can't compromise their precious drug laws being found unconstitutional.
It absolutely is, and it's complete ass covering from an administration that utterly failed in its primary duty - putting Trump in prison.
Nice to see the people who fucked it up isolated from the consequences of his second term. (/s)