Hunter Biden’s art con is an insult to ethics — and good taste
If only we all could be Hunter Biden.
When most of us crave a new job, we scour the listings. Advance the education. Spiff up the resume. Pray.
When Hunter Biden wants a new, extravagantly paid gig, the president’s middle-aged son, a former lawyer, lobbyist and alcohol and drug addict whose greatest skill is raking in fortunes for careers he’s unqualified to perform while struggling to keep his pants on, announces that he’s an artist. Then he sits back and waits for streams of cash to gush into his bank account.
The charmed life of Hunter B., which began roughly after his pop became vice president of the United States, is about to take a turn for the fabulous with his dad’s elevation to commander-in-chief. In October, a snazzy art gallery in New York City’s high-rent Soho district is scheduled to put on the market some 15 works created by the president’s son, 51, whose artistic experience, as far as I know, until now has been limited to doodles on strip club cocktail napkins.
Another private viewing for VIP collectors is planned in Los Angeles in September.
It’s the kind of high-profile showing that many a talented artist who lacks Biden’s pedigree and connections could only hallucinate about.
And here is the joke, and it’s on all of us: These multi-media monstrosities, which one critic said resemble renderings of the COVID-19 virus, but to me look like bacteria — on acid — are expected to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000. Each.
The prices could even go higher, some in the art world speculate. But guess what?
The White House is insisting that the identities of buyers remain secret, from Hunter Biden as well as from the public. And while that may have been intended to shield the First Greedmeister from the appearance of selling influence through his art, many find this arrangement particularly troubling for a man who made as much as 83 grand a month as a board member of a Ukrainian oil company, and whose dealings with China sparked a Department of Justice tax probe.
“Because we don’t know who is paying for this art and we don’t know for sure that [Hunter Biden] knows, we have no way of monitoring whether people are buying access to the White House,” Walter Shaub, who led the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told the Washington Post.
“What these people are paying for is Hunter Biden’s last name,” he said.
Could a foreign government seek the ear of the president’s son? We’ll have no way of knowing.
This is the same guy who yukked it up with Jimmy Kimmel in April that he once was so crack-addled, he could not remember if a laptop containing thousands of incriminating pictures and emails between Hunter and his dad, his mistresses and others was really his.
And this is the same guy who insists he was qualified to serve on the board of Burisma Holdings Ltd.
Without Hunter Biden’s name, the canvases would be worth even less than a kindergartner’s scratchings.
That the president’s kid has the chutzpah to enrich himself off his access to his family proves he has no fear of ever facing serious consequences for potential ethical lapses. And, as long as his old man is in office, Hunter Biden will never feel the need to get a normal job.
All of us mere mortals should be so lucky.
