One dega comma. Same flow. No prostate problem here, as they piss down your leg and call it rain. Plus, same story about a jerk.
The star chapter, Burisma, is literally the book's middle chapter -- Chapter Six in an Eleven Chapter account of the memories of a confessed drunken lout. We're supposed to love him for his "searing" honesty; he's a gin and tonic for our times, like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. "C'mere," he says to the bartender, he's got a long tale of woe to tell, with wisdom on a leash at heel behind. Give me a double. Well, I don't know about Ray or Hunter, but I've been on a few benders in my time -- most journalists have -- and there's no way you'd want to rely on my blackspotted personal memories. Probably it happened that way, you think. But unless Hunter took notes, like a journalist, he may have just said "whatever" to Drew and rolled back over in the comforting snow blanket of his snooze. That's if he spoke with Drew at all. Mighta been just another bone they threw him.
Most likely, Beautiful Things (notice he doesn't say, Beautiful People) is, like Donald J. Trump's The Art of the Deal, totally a contrivance of the ghostwriter. In Anatomy of a Monstrosity, Nathan J. Robinson noted:
Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, says Trump had no hand whatsoever in the writing process, and limited himself to spending "a couple of hours" reading a draft of the book once Schwartz had completed it.
Probably our new good bud, Hunter, was out back getting his boogers bounced by the poetry-hating bartender Frank Stallone, who didn't like "C'mere" very much as an expression, as it reminded him of the old lush at the end of the bar always summoning him with her finger, and always wearing too much make-up, a customer he referred to as C'mere Rouge, shot glasses before he like the killing fields. Frank was that kind of guy; you didn't like him mad. Biden's "memoir" is, like, his Daddy's speeches, the product of someone else's mind. Hunter gets the credit if the tale is seen as swell and marvy, but if cracks appear, then Drew's been paid to be blamed.
Drew won't tell us how much Hunter actually made. It's been widely disseminated that Hunter pulled down a head-scratching $50,000 per month as a board director (he admits, in the chapter, that at previous jobs, they'd just thrown him expenses -- "take that, and get out of here, if you weren't Joe's boy, why I'd..."), but in the memoir we're told, "[T]o be honest, the pay was good. There's no question that the board fee, five figures a month, appealed to me." Five figures a month is vague. Trump was claiming that Hunter earned more than $90,000 per month; also five figures. You'd think Hunter would be exact, just to rebuff Trump's silliness. We can assume that Hunter paid taxes on that reported $50,000 per month, but if it turned out to be closer to the Insurrectionist president's claim, then oh-oh, Donald wouldn't be the only one with a tax problem. Ouch.
Anyway, the Burisma chapter is the only one worth ruminating on, and then only briefly. (Rent Barfly, watch it with an unaffected but grabby date, and then read the Burisma chapter -- badabing -- you get the gist). Although, like the other chapters of this non-political thriller about one man's descent into the madness of p*ssy galore and bar-hopping among the Stephen King set (Jack Torrance picks up Carrie, all work no play, bartender give me a firestarter, make it a double, on the double), the 12-page Burisma chapter is couched, like a potato, and rather dissembling; it's not telling all it knows, and it doesn't know very much.
The reader will recall that this sorry saga about Burisma comes from the fact that as Obama's VP Joe Biden had Ukraine's doings in his portfolio. He was the go-to guy. (Go-to, along with Eric Ciaramella, a CIA National Security Council analyst who specialized in Ukrainian affairs, and, presumably, at the very least, shared notes with Joe Biden and Obama.) So, did Joe influence the Burisma decision to appoint Hunter as a board director? And the follow-on question, relevant to Trump's later first impeachment, did Joe arrange for the firing of Viktor Shokhin, the Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Burisma's alleged corruption?
In answer to the first question, Drew tells us that Hunter's Dad had nothing to do with getting him appointed. However, Hunter does have Drew say for him,
There's no question my last name was a coveted credential. That has always been the case-do you think if any of the Trump children ever tried to get a job outside of their father's business that his name wouldn't figure into the calculation?
So, nah-nah, Trump does the same thing.
As for the second question, Joe Biden went out of his way to tell the MSM back home that he got Shokhin shitcanned, threatening to have $1 billion in aid withheld if he wasn't fired, and the wonderment was about whether he'd arranged for the dismissal because Shokhin was doing a poor job investigating corruption, including at Burisma, or, as Trump and others have alleged, because he was closing in on dirt at Burisma. When Biden was mildly confronted by the MSM with the notion that he'd taken the heat off Burisma by the firing, Joe said the opposite was true; a more aggressive prosecutor would be appointed. Ukraine must clean up its act.
Ouch. Boy did that turn out to be untrue, Uncle Joe. The new prosecutorial appointee, Yuriy Lutsenko is an ex-con, having served three years in a federated pen for embezzlement and abuse of office. In other words, he did time for corruption. And we know what happens in those Russian prisons (see Solzhenitsyn, The Glug-glug Acapella Choir-o). No, without pressing it, Joe, he got even less done than Viktor. The net effect is the heat was taken off Burisma when Shokhin was fired and replaced with a convicted criminal, who probably learned new tricks while he was away at the School of Hard Knocks. So, Joe crowing about it to the Center on Foreign Relations has the smell of smokescreen to it. Another smell too.
A further question is raised, but, of course, not answered, by Hunter's appointment to Burisma. In the chapter, Drew-in-Hunter-clothing states that because Putin's power is based on Russia's oil and gas production that Burisma was the natural target of the regime. In answer to that, we're told,
To put it more bluntly: having a Biden on Burisma's board was a loud and unmistakable f*ck-you to Putin.
Aside from the fact that Biden spent his time on the board drinking like a Russian, Hunter's work on Burisma's board, according to the chapter, focussed largely on Ukraine's corruption, which just happened to coincide with the interests of Dad's portfolio. Which suggests, in a way, that Hunter was an "asset" in IC-speak. Stagger Lee, the asset.
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