Biden, Kissinger and the banality of evil.

The inability to call out evil when it stares us in the face is not a defect of this age but its hallmark.

I grew up in a politically savvy household. My first words were “De Gaulle.” Behind my high chair, back in 1960, my Republican mother placed a large and looming poster of Richard Nixon, a former Vice President and California Governor running for President against Democrat John Kennedy, a rare Irish Catholic child of Brahmin-level privilege whose father was a rumored bootlegger. My mother was active in Nebraska politics, and spent free time campaigning, Betty-Draper-style, while raising kids, running nonprofits, and being a dutiful glamorous doctor’s wife in a sleepy city where doctors were treated like celebrities. She cried when she learned Kennedy was shot as we drove to Baum’s Drugs in Omaha’s Dundee, though she never voted Democrat.

In my teens, I joked that I would knee-jerk splatter my Gerbers all over the Nixon poster. I had no verification of this claim. I said it merely to ingratiate myself with the bevy of Nixon haters that populated late-70s America. On Halloween and other occasions that required dramaturgy, my favorite get-up was to don my mother’s plastic Nixon mask, and mug, hunched-over, Tricky-Dick-style, with two fingers on each hand extended into a victory salute, bellowing, “I am not a crook!”

In time, I came to admire Nixon for his moderate Republican embrace of clean water and air, his nuclear detente with the Soviet Union, and for his uncanny foresight to open up the free world to Communist China. I still feel that opening was smart, even as America now struggles to manage the Asian tiger it helped unleash.

It’s worth remembering these signature accomplishments, as we reflect upon Nixon’s recently deceased Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who was at the center of Nixon’s foreign policy successes and failures.

Throughout his later years, Kissinger was routinely lambasted as “a war criminal.” This was due in part to the litany of alleged crimes proffered, Nurenberg-style, by the late Christopher Hitchens in his 2001 book and documentary The Trial of Henry Kissinger. A leftist turned late-blooming NeoCon, Hitchens alleged, sometimes on thin ground, that the Real Politik chess master was cynically connected to war crimes in Indochina, East Pakistan, and East Timor, as well as the assassinations of Chilean President Salvador Allende and Cyprus President Archbishop Makarios. With no prosecution of Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and Rumsfeld for their bold-faced lies and disinformation that led to the catastrophic Iraq misadventure––and the birth of ISIS and ensuing Yazidi genocide––one could hardly single out Kissinger with such a rogue’s gallery of scoundrels in power throughout the early oughts. Still, those were days when American media brought illumination to dark abuses of government power by either party.

Today, mainstream media has largely become the propaganda arm of one party. Its 4th estate function is no longer to check executive branch abuse writ large but to dismiss one party’s criminal misdeeds in exchange for a deranged obsession with the “wrong-speech” and microaggressions of the other, especially if the standard-bearer of that other party dares to question the NeoCon interventionist assumptions still afflicting our foreign policy. If there was a subsequent Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Donald J. Trump, the “evidence” would not be remotely on the level of hundreds of thousands of dead or wounded from the deceitfully sold Iraq War (Chris Hitchens’ “good war”), let alone the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge after Nixon and Kissinger carpet-bombed putatively neutral Cambodia into oblivion. Rather, it would consist of a crazyquilt collection of mean tweets, wild conspiracies, insufficiently harsh rebukes, real estate propaganda, personal vendettas, braggadocio, and misplaced showmanship.

There is a maudlin but effective scene towards the end of Oliver Stone’s beguiling Nixon in which the Quaker President––his empire in ruins, reputation eviscerated, historic achievements forgotten––asks the Jewish Kissinger to kneel and pray. Kissinger complies. It’s something many of us, regardless of religion, might think of doing these days faced with the astounding state of our current politics. I am not talking about the arcane internecine dramas over speakers, budgets, and omnibuses—the mother’s milk of palace intrigue that is our distracted media’s daily obsession—but about bold-faced calumny.

President Biden’s son Hunter openly sold access to his father while Joe Biden was Vice President, affecting U.S. policy towards Ukraine, China, Mexico, and other nations. Remarkably unhindered by any moral imperative outside of “Thou can” and “Thou wilt,” Hunter regularly invited his VP dad onto phone calls with his (“their”?) high-paying foreign clients to confirm that, for all his crack-smoking and whore-humping, he, Hunter “Fredo” Biden, could indeed corral his pops on a moment’s notice. Vice President Joe Biden was “the brand,” as Hunter's business partner Devon Archer testified before Congress. Biden Inc. exploited the brand towards outrageous profits for all family members, including “The Big Guy,” hiding those gains in a sprawling Byzantine network of foreign companies and bank accounts.

Two IRS whistleblowers who were part of the Hunter Biden investigation team have regularly and courageously testified under oath that they were told by the Biden Justice Department to steer away from any investigation that might remotely implicate the President or his family in criminal wrongdoing. The Biden DOJ went further in protecting Biden, Inc. by delaying investigations, leaking key intel to Hunter Biden’s attorneys (including the location of a Northern Virginia storage unit where Hunter stored incriminating evidence), tipping off prospective witnesses, and postponing charges until after the 2020 election when the statute of limitations had run out.

But law enforcement and election interference are just the tip of the Biden family iceberg—analogous to the Watergate break-in—that includes a far more sordid and treasonous use of the Vice-President’s office in sundry pay-to-pay schemes with foreign actors that netted Biden, Inc. over $20 million in a few short years. Whether Joe Biden and our national security are now compromised by these entanglements is the subject of a House probe, which is centered on these cases:

CHINA: pay-offs totaling over $8 million from China’s State Energy HK Limited that appeared in various Biden, Inc. bank accounts within a few months of VP Joe Biden leaving office, along with an $80,000 diamond for Hunter.

ROMANIA: pay-offs of over $3 million to Biden, Inc. associates shortly after Biden met with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

RUSSIA: $3.5 million to Biden, Inc. from Russia’s richest woman, oligarch Yelena Baturina.

UKRAINE: payoffs of $6.5 million to Biden, Inc. to get Joe Biden to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into bribery charges against Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of Ukraine energy concern Burisma. Joe Biden later bragged about delivering just that result.

In 2019, Hunter Biden texted his daughter: “Unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

In 2020, prima facie evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in a $5 million extortion scheme with Burisma was released. An incurious media looked the other way. It seems that if you are the standard-bearer of today’s Democratic Party, and the party’s best hope of defeating the Orange Monster, you can, to quote Chinatown’s Noah Cross, get away with “anything.”

In 1972, Richard Nixon and Kissinger opened the People’s Republic of China to the world. In 1973, Nixon, through Kissinger, negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam. By 1974, Nixon’s longstanding denials of knowledge of the criminal actions of his associates were fully repudiated. In August, he resigned from office in disgrace.

Today, Hunter Biden was finally indicted for tax cheating related to many of the exploits of Biden, Inc. His father continues to deny knowledge of, involvement in, or profits from those exploits. It’s 1974 all over again. And the President is facing a Hobson’s choice: either pardon his son and then decline to run in 2024, or sacrifice his son for his own reelection.

In the interest of integrity in the Oval Office, one hopes that Joe Biden finally chooses the right and patriotic third option and resigns. In this hyper-partisan era that can’t separate real from imagined evil, don’t hold your breath.