Yes, all of these answers fit in a general sense, but the specifically correct answer for today is … racist! Even though the Bidens are so pale that Disney would refuse to cast them in a remake of Snow White, even though Joe himself is nearly translucent these days, Democrats have decided to circle the “everything is racist” wagons around them.

At issue, apparently, is the use of the phrase “two-tiered legal system” and its variants to describe how Hunter Biden got a gift-wrapped, no-jail-time plea deal from Daddy’s DoJ. House Republicans spent quite a bit of time making that argument based on the testimony of two new IRS whistleblowers, who corroborated what a previous set of IRS whistleblowers exposed a few weeks ago. They testified that US Attorney David Weiss would not proceed with felony charges against Biden that other taxpayers would face for not properly reporting and paying taxes on an estimated income stream of $17 million. They further testified that the reason for that refusal to properly investigate these crimes was because of the Biden name.

One of the new whistleblowers, lead case agent Joseph Ziegler, spoke with CBS News for an exclusive interview with Catherine Herridge, as I wrote this morning:

More from @CBSNews exclusive interview with IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler, telling @CBS_Herridge that he believes the evidence he gathered supported more serious charges than those Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty to next week. pic.twitter.com/LbCW52jOcg

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) July 20, 2023

Favoritism, obstruction, corruption … it all ended up letting Hunter off the hook with Daddy’s DoJ. To Republicans, the phrase “two-tiered legal system” fits perfectly as a description of such a scheme. House Democrats, however, claimed that Republicans committed cultural appropriation, insisting that the phrase only exists in the context of civil rights:

Democrats used the hearing to focus on the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, but two Democrats went further by saying Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to use the term “two-tier justice system” in reference to the Bidens.

“They’re using you and using your story and using your work to make this argument for themselves,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., told the two whistleblowers.

“Since January 6th, these Republicans and Trump have complained about a two-tier justice system, co-opting the language of the decades-long civil rights movement for Black lives and Black freedom,” he said.

“There is a two-tier justice system, but it’s not about Democrats versus Republican,” Frost continued. “This language, two-tier justice system, has a real history. It has a real history of Emmitt Till. It has a real history with Breonna Taylor. It has a real history with George Floyd, the Central Park Five.”

Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) agreed, arguing that “Trump and his cronies” were the real beneficiaries of the “two-tiered legal system.” In a sense, though, Lee stumbled closer to the point:

“I’d like to address the way my Republican colleagues are attempting to co-opt the phrase ‘two-tier justice system’ to make it sound like Trump and his cronies are somehow the victims here when the reality is that the term two-tier system of justice is meant to refer to the very real system that exists in the United States and which affects Black and brown folks, not powerful former presidents and their political allies,” she said. …

“Republican efforts to use the term two-tier justice is to distract from those who are truly the victims of a disparate treatment in our criminal justice system, and whether we say it out loud or not, we all know who those people are,” she said.

Well, let’s consider that. Let’s say, hypothetically, a “black or brown folk” had hidden income streams from the IRS, wrote off hookers as tax deductions, and failed to pay on millions of dollars that went through his or her hands. Does Lee want to argue that this hypothetical person of color would get the same deal that Hunter got from the DoJ? Or does she think that the DoJ would have thrown the book at this person of color?

Even by Summer Lee’s description, Hunter Biden’s plea deal proves the point. He’s a white scion of a privileged-class family getting let off the hook because of his nexus to power. So why is Lee defending the politically connected white guy getting a sweetheart deal that would never have been offered to anyone else, let alone “black and brown folks”?

Besides, the argument is nonsense, as Jonathan Turley explains and as everyone else knows. Not only has the debate over “two-tiered legal systems” been used in many different contexts, its primary use has been in class and economics — by the same progressives who now claim that its use is somehow racist in cultural appropriation. It even gets used in federal rules of criminal procedure — Rule 6 regarding grand juries.

Turley lists some other examples of recent origin:

The Los Angeles Times objected to the “two-tiered system of justice” favoring Trump loyalists.

The New York Times has explored a “two-tiered system of justice” for celebrities.

John Stewart referred to the system as between privileged and non-privileged folks.

Indeed, polling is often on whether there is a two-tiered system of justice for the powerful or the privileged or the political class.

The problem for Democrats is that the whistleblowers are exposing the real class-based double standard by which they have benefited. That exposure threatens their grip on power. Therefore, they have to distract from the exposure by claiming that the only double standard is racial, not class and/or privilege, in order to distract from the corruption that permeates the Biden administration and their power through it. And their best bet at distraction and intimidation is to accuse Biden’s critics of being racist, even though it’s the critics that are demanding that the white son of privilege get held to the same standard of justice as everyone else.

It’s utterly incoherent. But at least that is consistent with their current leadership, as this classic 2008 clip of Biden discussing the nuances of race in America reminds us.