There also is the possibility that it wasn’t a blatant lie, it was rather an obfuscation. If he believed that Kamela would win, the play would be to appeal the inevitable sentencing, keeping Hunter out of the hoosegow for the eternity that is the normal judicial timeline, and then, with the heat off, Kamala could issue the pardon. Viola! Joe doesn’t pardon him, but he’s (in keeping with Dem tradition) “guilty as sin, free as a bird “.

I wouldn’t think that this would preclude the government from filing *civil* charges to recover the tax debt (unless it has somehow already been paid) Anybody have any insights on this?

Well, it’s another country, but G K Chesterton noticed the same thing in England in 1904. IMO, the congenital progressive is with us always.

I think the legacy media will adopt whatever narrative absolves them and furthers whatever Democratic messaging in is play then. If the Dems have cast Biden out, then the legacy media will have been fooled by him And Now It Can Be Told. If the Dems keep Biden in good standing, then the legacy media will either blame Trump or just leave out the events that contradict the narrative that Biden was acting from high principles: they’ll edit out the repeated promises up to a month ago and represent that there was somehow a changed, Trump-caused situation that prompted the pardon. You can see them trying these out right now.

Might that not be like thinking Robert Downey Jr. really believes himself to be Iron Man, because he appears to believe himself to be so while he is in the movie? If you’re seeing them on TV, might they not be performing “real shock and surprise”? The key to acting is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.

(As for written “real shock and surprise” you’d have no way to know there was any genuine emotion at back of it.)

I notice that the description of the New York intellectual scene you quote is now 60 years old. 60 years ago, I grant you that perhaps public intellectuals actually believed what they said and were largely conformists who thought themselves free-thinkers–I wasn’t alive then and wouldn’t know.

But I believe that now, 60 years later, they are performance artists, playing a role.

Suppose Friedman in 1964, explaining what “intellectuals are like today”, gave you examples from 1904. You might wonder, has anything changed since then? 60 years was a long time ago… the NY intellectual aborning 60 years ago has grandchildren by now, and his children are probably the public intellectuals of today, so the thing you are presenting is about three generations removed from the present.

Did anyone at CNN or MSNBC resist the “noble Joe” narrative? Maybe somebody didn’t actively promote the narrative, but did anybody question it or oppose it? Pointing out that Biden wasn’t a noble soul, that this was politics as usual, and that he was likely to go back on his promise would bring down the whole Democrat metanarrative and give the public a window into what Washington DC really is like. In the same way, the “noble Joe” narrative came out when Biden was forced to leave the race. It’s not dead yet, and when the memory of this pardon fades the media will drag it back again.

You raise a good point, and of course I do not know with certainty if the MSM puppets really believe what they broadcast to their willing listeners.

The reason I think they are brainwashed is because several hard core MSM propagandists actually expressed real shock and surprise at joke Bidet’s decision to pardon his dope addict son.

A real propagandist would not express any shock or surprise; they would invent some bullshit to rationalize or justify why Bidet had to / was forced to pardon Hunter. They would have claimed, say, that Donald Trump forced Bidet’s decision.

The other reason I think they are brain washed is because they all socialize / hang out with like-thinking puppets (in Manhattan and DC primarily).
You can bet that none of these puppets would risk being ostracized from their cocktail-party circuit by actually airing (or believing) a viewpoint at variance from that espoused by their echo-chamber pals.

It’s analogous to organizations like the KKK or CPUSA or ANTIFA or NAZI party, etc. Members of those organizations adhere to the tenets of these groups and they just accept without question what their organization tells them to believe.

Members of groups do not have to think or question because it’s easier not to; so they don’t.
They just believe.

If the Grand Dragon of the KKK joined the NAACP, you can bet your house that KKK members would be absolutely shocked and kick him out of the KKK yesterday. They would not attempt to justify or rationalize the Grand Dragon’s decision (other than to claim he lost his marbles.).

Milton Friedman (the U of Chicago economist and Nobelist) had this to say about the NY “intellectual” community:

“In 1964–to the disgust and dismay of most of my academic friends–I served as an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater during his quest for the Presidency. That year also, I was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. The two together gave me a rare entree into the New York intellectual community. I talked to and argued with groups from academia, from the media, from the financial community, from the foundation world, from you name it. I was appalled at what I found. There was an unbelievable degree of intellectual homogeneity, of acceptance of a standard set of views complete with cliche answers to every objection, of smug self-satisfaction at belonging to an in-group. The closest similar experience I have ever had was at Cambridge, England, and even that was a distant second.

The homogeneity and provincialism of the New York intellectual community made them pushovers in discussions about Goldwater’s views. They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: “You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.” ”

Adhering to group-think allows “membership” into an anointed or unique “club;” so it provides social (and probably economic) benefits.
But it also requires that an individual allow himself to be brainwashed and turned into a puppet.

So yea, I think the MSM folks are indeed brainwashed.

I don’t know why you’d assume they believed any of it any more than Karine Jean-Pierre does. They’re playing their role, which is to be the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They believed in the sharpness and integrity of Joe Biden as much as Baghdad Bob believed Saddam Hussein was throwing the Americans back into the sea.

Now that’s it’s publicly proved all lies, they’re playing their role as aggrieved, to try to maintain an illusion that they weren’t the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Later when the furor dies down they will simply rewrite the history of what happened.

Did these talking heads actually believe joke Bidet when he made the promise not to pardon Hunter??
Did they actually think that there was zero chance of a pardon, because of joke Bidet’s promise?

How stupid can one be??
Any normal , clear thinking person could certainly not discount the possibility of a pardon regardless of what joke Bidet promised.

The leftist progressive ideologues are a first rate example of how easy it is to brain wash people into believing, with a religious zeal, anything and everything. One would think that after the Trump is a Russian spy story imploded, the talking heads of the MSM would be more introspective about what they readily, without question, believe.
I guess not; that would be akin to asking them to murder their family members.

The MSM is easily the most dangerous threat to the continued existence of our constitutional republic, the results of the recent election notwithstanding.