Does any of this stuff really matter? I would say that on a swamp monster scale of Revenge of the Creature From the Black Lagoon to Kermit’s Swamp Years Biden’s situation barely rises to the level of Frog and Toad Are Friends. Because that is exactly what this kind of low-key nepotism is about — friendship, family, shrugging and winking and sometimes loudly denying it as the people he loves are allowed to profit from his power and connections. Biden spent virtually his entire career in Washington as one of the least wealthy people in the Senate. This isn’t about money for him, even if he doesn’t exactly mind that his cokehead failson got a job out of it.

The people who get worked up about this are (or should be logically anyway) the same people who want to investigate every single one of Trump’s real estate deals and make a fuss about the fact that Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation and wife Mitch McConnell, is related to the owners of a shipping company that incidentally benefits from administration policies Trump would be implementing no matter what (just as Biden and Obama wanted to end corrupt prosecutions in Ukraine regardless). Sometimes, gasp, she even brings them along for official government meetings, just like the former veep did, which no doubt accidentally resulted in Hunter’s company being awarded a gazillion-dollar contract and his receiving a 2.8 carat diamond gifted to him from a Chinese energy tycoon. I doubt that either Biden or McConnell and Chao mind that their relations are prospering, but this is not exactly Tammany Hall material.

What I don’t understand is why Biden wants to expose himself and his family to all of this now. Here is a man who could have lived out a quiet honorable retirement, remembered fondly even by conservatives for whom he was largely the caricature who figured in classic Onion articles.