The New York Times posts ads on the Internet boasting of their journalistic courage, like this one: “Holding the powerful to account takes fearlessness. Tenacity. And you.”
But they don’t run ads with messages like “Sometimes we fearlessly hold hands with the powerful, and rehabilitate their image with tenacity.”
On Saturday, the front of the Arts section of the Times carried this sugar puff:
There’s a New Artist in Town. The Name Is Biden.
Hunter Biden, his name forever linked to President Trump’s impeachment, says painting “is literally keeping me sane” after years of addiction and poor choices.
The Times paid a freelancer named Adam Popescu to promote this “undiscovered artist” and bury the “addiction and poor choices” at the article’s bottom. It began with a typical splash of color:
LOS ANGELES — Dressed in Oxford boots, jeans and a long sleeve T-shirt, Hunter Biden ushered a reporter down a stone walkway, into a pool house-turned-art studio in the Hollywood Hills.
It was filled with colorful works of decorative abstraction — psychedelic florals and ethereal patterns that look like nature viewed through a microscope, leaning toward the surreal.
This artist toying with a “bamboo wok brush” lives very well for a guy without a job:
As an undiscovered artist, he is better situated than most: living in a rented, 2,000-square-foot house in the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive, with a Porsche Panamera in the driveway, plenty of natural light and a pool house he has transformed into an art studio.
From the edge of the sloping property — it was leased for $12,000 a month starting last June 15, according to the homeowner — he has a view onto the San Fernando Valley below: Burbank and Universal Studios to the east, the 405 freeway to the west.
If you read through 25 paragraphs of puffery, you arrive at the last section, subtitled “Painting as Therapy.” There, you find an acknowledgment of Hunter’s dissolute life, apparently caused by "personal loss," losing his mother at two and his brother Beau at 45:
For years, vodka and cocaine were constant companions....
“I was addicted to crack for four years,” he said. “I went through a really long period of addiction and I was at a point where I didn’t read, write, think. I don’t do things halfway. That can be a problem.”
Mr. Biden moved to Los Angeles in early 2018 after his divorce from Kathleen Buhle, with whom he has three children, was finalized. He had also ended a relationship with his brother Beau’s widow, Hallie.
This past November, a paternity suit revealed he was the father of a toddler; he had met the child’s mother in Washington.
This illustrates the article's soft focus. He met the child's mother where? At the Mpire strip club, where the child's mother was a stripper.
In the same way, the Times repeated their usual Democrat disclaimer: "There has been no proof of any wrongdoing by Mr. Biden related to his business dealings in Ukraine. He declined to answer questions about them....Even if no laws were broken by him, Mr. Biden has made questionable choices."
Fearlessness! Tenacity! Back to the paintings!
