I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.
A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”
The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.
“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.
Oh. Huh?
This is a visual version of an ad hominem attack. The fact that Hunter Biden is a drug-addicted, desperate, character-deficient creep with the sexual mores of a bonobo is simply not relevant to whether he has engaged in conduct of legitimate interest to the U.S. Congress. Greene set out to embarrass him and the President just to harm them. To anyone with functioning ethics alarms, she primarily succeeded in harming her party and its chances of getting the public to take the Hunter Biden mess seriously while the news media does everything it can to protect him.
Hunter lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has filed an ethics complaint demanding that the Office of Congressional Ethics discipline Greene for violating House Ethics rules and standards of official conduct. Good. He’s right. The fact that only Democrats have been expressing outrage over Greene’s stunt is one more in a series of ethics black marks against Kevin McCarthy’s party.
A few more related points:
- Greene wouldn’t know evidence if it smothered her with kisses. She’s not a lawyer, and is as little qualified to be a member of Congress as anyone in that august body, including the absurd Cori Bush. She’s a conspiracy theory addict; she appears to be a racist and anti-Semite; and if she could beat my dog at Scrabble, it wouldn’t be by many points.
- Is Greene as much of a destructive element in Congress as Rep. Ocassio-Cortez, Rep. Omar, or Rep. Santos, King of Lies? Gee, I don’t know: is a zombie apocalypse worse than the bubonic plague? It doesn’t matter. She’s a blight on the republic; her voters should wear bags over their heads in shame.
- Since I mentioned the unethical news media efforts to shield Hunter and run interference for Biden, a Washington Post “explainer” yesterday still refuses to acknowledge that Hunter’s infamous laptop, the subject of an election-rigging cover-up effort by the Post and others, belonged to the President’s son.
Ethics Alarms 
Then again, she’s not smashing windows and setting fires, just sliding us further into the stinky, brown, puckered pit of being a nation of assholery.
Kakistocracy. Government by the worst people.
Check out Leonard Read’s 1963 essay by that title on the Foundation for Economic Education website. (fee.org) Prophetic
So yesterday we highlighted Rep. Ilhan Omar. Today, we get Rep. Greene. I was going to mention Rep. Santos, but you covered it. There isn’t much more that I can say, except that what Marjorie has done is profoundly stupid and very damaging. There might be a legitimate case against the President’s son, but “prosecutors” like Greene will make sure no one ever sees or hears the facts.
This is that old yellow journalism at its worst. That Congressional Republicans haven’t condemned this publicly is evidence that the rot runs deep on both sides of the aisle.
My Representative will be hearing from me…again. Jack, are you alright with me plagiarizing some of your post…and maybe including a link to the post as well?
Everything here is available to anyone who needs it.
Thank you!
Hello, Jack. I am a long time reader of EA and generally I think you do a pretty good job with the stories. However, I think you missed some of the context on this one.
The focus of that hearing was a particular scheme where Hunter hired a “consultant” from another state and then wrote the whole thing off as a business expense. The evidence against Hunter was a plane ticket receipt (crossing state lines, so the Feds have jurisdiction), the video (showing that the consultant was in fact hired for sex, a prostitute), and the tax records where he wrote it off (tax fraud).
Certainly you can make the case that actually showing the graphic video was unprofessional, but it is the key piece of evidence that this woman was hired as a prostitute rather than a legitimate business consultant.
“make the case”? It was unprofessional and unethical. The place for such evidence, if any, is in a trial, reviewed by a judge, not on C-SPAN. Her presentation was not used to rebut any statement H.Biden made in the hearing. And the photos proved nothing without background and authentication. Nothing she showed proved a violation of the Mann Act, for example.
Hunter Biden took thousands of photos of himself victimizing women. If he did not want pictures of himself victimizing women in the public sphere, he should have refrained from victimizing women, refrained from thoroughly documenting himself victimizing women, refrained from giving a laptop full of images of himself victimizing women to a computer repairmen, and refrained from going without paying his bill to the computer repairman he gave the laptop to. He committed uncountable unethical acts, and bringing those unethical acts to public attention is the unethical piece of the equation? I don’t think so.
Democrats have insisted upon placing porn in the kindergarten sections of elementary schools. They are ethically estopped from complaining about porn being shown to adults.
I don’t like Representative Greene. She is a hypocrite and a con artist. She does not care about the ideals she pretends to defend. But let us not pretend that a culture soaked in kinky sex, genital mutilation ideology, and human trafficking is somehow going to be scandalized by a man having sex with prostitutes. This is the prevailing culture of the United States. It is not yellow journalism to show the everyday activities of our political elites to the public. Pretending that a country which provides 5 year olds with prolific amounts of child pornography is scandalized by the pornographic activity of an adult is the yellow journalism. Men exchanging money for sex is normal, whether people like it or not. Porn is normal, whether people like it or not. Attempting to protect your children from such pornography is the abnormal, extremist behavior in this current cultural point. I don’t like it, but it is where we are as a culture. Sex and drugs are normal in the White House, just as they are everywhere else in the country. Shielding sensibilities is not the way of the left.
“Shielding sensibilities is not the way of the left.”
You might want to amend that, NP. Shielding SOME sensibilities is not the way of the left. The left wants to shield black people from seeing Confederate statues, Native Americans from seeing Columbus or anyone associated with the early conquest of the Americas, and themselves from seeing the Founding Fathers, who they regard as evil. They would love nothing better than to wipe Donald Trump from collective memory. They’d also like to shield kids from traditional parents who might actually tell them they are who they are and “take that off, you look stupid.” Tell me, how many lefties have you seen post garbage about how they love to raise conservative blood pressure or who own mugs that say “conservative tears” on them? Probably a few.
The fact is that lefties only shield their own sensibilities. They want to stomp all over the sensitivities of those they don’t agree with. How many comments have you seen that say “the feelings of bigots are irrelevant” or words to that effect? In other words, if you aren’t a lefty or an ally, you don’t count, and neither does anything about you.
It’s true, if there’s stuff about you that you don’t want getting out there, you make the appropriate effort to prevent it from getting out there. Password protection is relatively easy, and so is keeping documents on outside drives rather than on a computer that service people will see. If there are acts you have committed that you don’t want others to know about, maybe you should take extra efforts to NOT document them, not TO document them. Kids who go around filming themselves shooting others with paintballs have only themselves to blame if they end up in jail. Making homemade pornography is generally not a good idea. Making homemade pornography and putting it on a laptop is just foolish. Doing that AND leaving it in the hands of someone you don’t know too well is idiotic. The guy did everything but directly hand these images to the GOP. In a different time, they would have thrown them in the trash and said, “no, we’re not doing this.” Of course, in a different time the president would have distanced himself from a screwup son like Hunter, or put him somewhere to get clean and sober and stay clean and sober. He wouldn’t be using him as a conduit to peddle influence for cash, nor pulling strings for him to get a military commission he didn’t deserve and which he would lose within a month for testing dirty for drugs, nor backing an exhibit of his “art” if it can be called that. Unfortunately, we are where we are as a nation, and, just like the GOP is increasingly realizing it has to do things like ballot harvesting to be competitive, it’s realizing that it has to play as dirty as the other side. The choice isn’t between winning unethically and losing ethically. It’s between winning and losing, period. There’s a lot to gain if you win and a lot to lose if you fail. There is no value in trying to keep your hands clean over the sensitivities of those who would hate you anyway.
I’ve never seen the “conservative tears” mug, only the “liberal tears” one marketed by Ben Shapiro. Both are stupid, but given Shapiro’s popularity on the right that is clearly not a problem confined to the left.
There are no photos that definitively show Hunter Biden “victimizing” women of which I’m aware. The photos Greene showed all seemed to show consensual sexual activity. Can you provide evidence of your claim of victimization?