Hunter Biden is simply part of the rat’s nest of corruption, logrolling, and favor-trading that winds through the globe-spanning plutocratic elite. And you can see why it might not even have occurred to the Bidens that this kind of thing is morally suspect. Barack Obama himself has scarcely been better, with his post-presidential buckraking career of speeches before Wall Street banks at $400,000 a pop — after stubbornly refusing to prosecute a veritable container ship-load of financial crimes by big banks as president.

Only chumps like Jimmy Carter forswear the hustle and live modestly — that is, just scraping by on a piddling $210,700 presidential pension, plus occasional floods of book revenues. What is an ex-president supposed to do, serve as some kind of moral example of republican virtue? How are you supposed to go windsurfing with Richard Branson if you act like Cincinnatus?

Liberals often get furious when you criticize their favorite leaders for being money-grubbing scoundrels who let their kids trade on their name. But nominating Biden would be a political grenade that explodes right in the middle of Democratic messaging about why Trump should be impeached and defeated in 2020. Instead of a clean, simple message the Democrats are clean and Republicans are corrupt, they would be forced into complicated arguments that Biden’s history isn’t as bad, or tendentious, unconvincing arguments that it isn’t bad at all. (Sound familiar?)