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!?
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.
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.
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...
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.
Maybe in the Republican bubble. Outside of it, no one really cares and sees it as a weird and poorly executed complot
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.
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
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.
The problem with these timed attacks is that they fundamentally encourage lying to affect elections.
I think the NYT with the tax returns and the NY Post with the emails both acted properly, personally. (Though I strongly distrust both of them in general. NY Post much more so, but NYT gets worse and worse by the month, in my eyes.)
It's also unclear if either of them hoarded anything; they both may have published their pieces as quickly as they could, given the circumstances and when they received the information. I might be missing some evidence of hoarding; apologies if so.
> Meanwhile, additional documents obtained by Fox News include FBI paperwork that details the bureau’s interactions with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of “The Mac Shop” who reported the laptop’s contents to authorities, as first reported by the New York Post. > Isaac received a subpoena to testify before U.S. District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019, the documents show. One page shows what appears to be serial numbers for a laptop and hard drive taken into possession.
[0]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-purported-hunter-biden-...
The same was probably true of the person who leaked Trump's tax returns before the election. Of course they were initially treated with caution, but the media worked to confirm their veracity. Here they won't even ask the question.
I don't think the emails contain anything very damaging to Biden, as far as I can tell. I think the cover-up, lack of care about truth, and blind zealotry is way worse than anything in the emails. I do happen to think the emails are > 50% likely real, but the absolute refusal to consider them impartially is the actual problem, not the emails. It just shows neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump give a single shit about truth. They just care about winning. Ideology trumps epistemology.