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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think the emails contain anything very damaging to Biden, as far as I can tell.

This is the weirdest part about Republican attacks on Biden's ethics or integrity. All that I have seen have been accusing Biden or his family of things that Trump and his family do much more often than the Biden's are alleged to have done them.

In a rational world, that kind of attack would totally backfire.

But it's pretty clear people aren't rational. I've had people tell me that Trump must be trustworthy because he's a billionaire, and had the same people tell me that Gates, Soros, Buffett, and Bezos cannot be trusted because they are billionaires. Huh!?

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> All that I have seen have been accusing Biden or his family of things that Trump and his family do much more often than the Biden's are alleged to have done them.

Attack your enemy (especially falsely!) for the things you are guilty of so the people who are outside of the bubble that uncritically listens to propaganda (yours or your opponents) have been primed to dismiss that line of attack as just the kind of thing that propagandists invent about their enemies isn't a novel technique.

Trump went into politics a rich man. Biden become rich while being in Politics.

The difference in the accusations is something like this: "Biden monetized the vice presidency, for personal gain. He set up a money laundering operation, that funnelled money from foreign entities back to his family, through deals his crack head son was making."

His son was making 50k/month from a power energy company in Ukraine, that he had no prior experience in.

This is a lot different than hiring your own kids to work for you in your own administration, as Trump did.

Lots of people here are still holding on to "emails" being fake. Maybe you have heard the term, "A lie is 3 questions deep". The problem with the emails are fake theory, is that that emails have these snippets of personal information, that have been collaborated, along with very incriminating selfie photos of Hunter doing crack and prostitutes in hotel rooms. Both would be incredibly difficult to fake because they are so mundane, and intimate, as no one would have the imagination to fake them.

> Trump went into politics a rich man. Biden become rich while being in Politics.

Biden wasn't very wealthy for most of his political career, which was as a Senator from 1973 to 2009, nor when he was VP. His net worth was under half a million when his VP term ended.

His current wealth of around $10-20 million or so came after he was no longer in office, mostly from a multi-book deal with Flatiron Books for both he and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee $100k, but sometimes as low as $8k and as high as $190k), and $540k from his professorship with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

There's a chart of Biden and his wife's total earnings from 1998-2019 in this Forbes article [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/22/how-t...

I fully agree with you. That's why I think the cover-up is way, way worse than the actual original thing. It was a nothingburger, and now the media's unintentionally turned it into one of the biggest controversies of the year, by refusing to treat it in a reasonable and balanced way. It's the epitome of the Streisand effect.

This is why I keep posting about this. It's all just unwittingly helping Trump, all because they somehow think being journalists is the thing that'd actually help him or will cause accusations of helping him if he wins.

There's a middleground here. Of course the media having a front page headline about the emails every day would be irresponsible. But refusing to talk about it or look at it inquisitively, at all, ever, is just as irresponsible. As is Twitter censoring links to it.

> the media's unintentionally turned it into one if the biggest controversies of the year

Maybe in the Republican bubble. Outside of it, no one really cares and sees it as a weird and poorly executed complot

I think you're very wrong. I'm the opposite of a Republican, and I think this scandal (the media's and Twitter's behavior, not the emails) is big. Matt Taibbi, a very definitely not-Republican journalist, agrees: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/with-the-hunter-biden-expose-s...

I think the main reason it's not a big controversy elsewhere is due to exactly what you mention - both bubbles absolutely reject anything negative about their side and absolutely accept anything negative about the opposing side. So of course one bubble won't care, or even be aware of what's going on.

Taibbi like Greenwald has gone gaga against the establishment/evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia.

I don't think many people care what he has to say

More relevant is https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/28/trump-conspiracy-th...

Basically a bunch of Republican operatives admitting that virtually no one is buying the BS and that's it's not a useful line of attack

There wasn't any evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, though, as explained in Mueller's report. Greenwald has in the past gone so far as to even doubt interference, but he seems to have changed his stance and on JRE the other day he did say they interfered. Also, as you can tell from my post history, I strongly dislike Trump and everything he stands for, to be absolutely clear. I just want to accuse him of the thousands of things he's actually guilty of and not the things he's not guilty of.

If you read Taibbi's article, he's not at all claiming that the emails are damaging to Biden. The headline is "With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story".

Like in my posts, he's talking about the media's and Twitter's behavior in censoring the story - not the emails themselves. Everything he says is perfectly consistent with what's said in the Politico article you linked.

Taibbi is one of the most reputable, high-integrity, rational, and truth-seeking journalists working today, in my opinion. Reality often sits between a gray area of poles.

Russiagate has been investigated with insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign. You can easily verify this for yourself. Please stop promoting conspiracy theories.

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