CORRECTED: Serious? He named his son Robert HUNTER Biden?

** Please see comments (thank you, Steven Michaelson!) for the ACTUAL likely reason for Robert’s middle name.  I was totally unaware of that, hence my sarcasm was, in retrospect, entirely inappropriate.  I will white-out the brunt of the sarcastic comments where I can, so that they are still there for those that wish to study my error (highlight the whole post), but won’t be there as a blind and ignorant insult to the origins of the name.  I stand by the rest of the post as is.

I have a friend who is always pressuring me to name my next dog ‘Hunter’, just because he thinks it’d be such a badass name.

“Aides to the Obama campaign said Sunday that Senator Biden’s goal was always to strike a workable compromise between the competing interests on the bankruptcy bill, and that he was not influenced by his son’s work for MBNA or the campaign donations.”

-New York Times

See? Joe Biden’s son’s work for MBNA while the backruptcy bill (that would help keep consumers from escaping credit card debts through bankruptcy) was being debated didn’t effect Joe Biden’s decision to vote for the bill, against most Democrats, on four separate occasions, from 1998 (two years after his son graduated from Yale Law, and the same year that The Hunter was promoted to Senior Vice President at MBNA) to 2005 (when the bill passed, as The Hunter was entering his fifth year of employment as a consultant to MBNA).  Why would he when he could be influenced more directly by the aforementioned campaign contributions, and the fact that the Delaware is known as “the mega center for U.S. credit card operations”?

btw, also from the NYT article: “They said he [Big Biden] had sought several changes in the bill to protect consumers that upset MBNA executives, then the largest employer in Delaware, while acknowledging that he also voted against other amendments proposed by other Democrats.” Translation:  Yes, Joe Biden slept with MBNA on the first date, but no, he did not fellate MBNA until he was sure that MBNA was “a really good guy”.

What’s mystifying to me is that Biden voted for the bankruptcy bill in 2000 among his four one-night-stands, a year where The Hunter was NOT employed directly by one of the bill’s largest beneficiaries, as far as I can tell from the NYT article.  Buy 3 get 1 free?  I hope other credit card companies got the same deal.

What is actually most interesting to me about this subject is the perilous occupational dilemmas faced by families of notable (especially notably corrupt) public figures.  For instance, I always wanted to be a street juggler, alas it would bring to much shame to my father’s name to pursue such a noble pursuit.  I hope the less-fulfilling life of a journalist will be my silver medal.

For The Hunter, who could very well be an extremely capable person, he has a similar dilemma.  After all, my undergraduate application to Yale University was politely rejected (as opposed to my Harvard application which was rejected in a more memorable fashion).  The Hunter graduated from Yale Law, so he must be more capable than I, and potentially even as superlative as other notable Yale grads such as George W. Bush (it’s hard not to be sarcastic whenever Yale comes up in conversation since 2000).

Should he have checked his career ambitions to save his father (and his father’s Black Friend) the embarassment of having to defend against accusations of improper motivations?  Should a young man, straight out of University at which he likely learned nothing (I’m not bitter…), be able to discern between a job offered to him by merit and a job offered to him because the products of his daddy’s corruption falls on his employer’s heads like manna from heaven?

I suppose the argument is all moot anyways, since The Hunter is now officially employed as a Corruption Conveyancer (colloquially, lobbyist).  But if this comes up again in a less obvious fashion, I would love to re-examine it.

… and the cow goes moo