The Turley Worm Catches the Bird

I don’t know what happened to Jonathan Turley, but he may have hit a new low.  He posted a long thread on Twitter, but the first, slimy, cringe-filled tweet  in the thread said all you need to know.  It read -- “The Hill is out with my column in [sic] a recent discovery of the criminal history of the great-great-grandfather of Joe Biden. It turns out that the evasion of accountability may be something of a family trait acquired through generations of natural selection.”
 
Yes, really.
 
Mary Trump, though, had the best response.  She replied back to Turley, “Now do my family.”
 
Brilliant.

Other responses online were, as you might imagine, less polite.  Giving him the...well, pointed piece of their mind.  Blunt and scathing about how totally responsible he was.
 
I went to Turley’s Twitter page and saw a long posting from him there where he went into great detail slamming people who he said totally missed that his reference to “natural selection”  was a quip. (In fairness, you might need a microscope to find the joke he intended.)
 
I replied to that tweet by writing back to him -- “Ohhhh, it was just a humor column!!  I get it.  Like something for ‘The Onion.’  Cool.”
 
However, I then decided to check out his article on the chance that everyone had it wrong, and that maybe Turley did, in fact, write a sarcastic article that ridiculed Republicans going on and on about the supposed “Biden crime family.” 
 
But nope, no such luck, his article was dead-on totally serious.  The only “quip” in sight was that knee-slapper about “natural selection.”  To be fair, I only skimmed the article, since I couldn’t stomach it, but it seemed to be almost entirely about -- literally -- Joe Biden’s great-great grandfather, Moses Robinette, and a serious legal issue he had, stabbing a man in a bar fight.  In 1864!!!  He was charged with attempted murder, sentenced and sent to prison, but pardoned by Abraham Lincoln.  And at the very end of the article, Turley suggested that this from 160 years ago was just core to the Biden family history. 
 
At that point, I also replied to his initial tweet that promoted the article.  What I wrote was --
 
“The great-great grandfather, eh? Cool. (I don't have a clue who mine are. So, how nice to find his!)
 
“After you follow up on Mary Trump's request to do her family, maybe you can do the great-great-great grandfathers of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Astors.”

But after a friend sent me an article on the historical story of the event that he’d read in The Smithsonian magazine, I decided not to leave it there.  So, I also tracked down the original article in the Washington Post that The Smithsonian references.  And I then gave in, took a deep sigh, and read Jonathan Turley’s article so I could compare them all.
 
It turns out that Turley’s article is actually much worse than I first thought.  As a result, I wrote a 5-part tweet explaining just a handful of the slight changes he made so that the story would seem worse. 
 
Here’s that Twitter response thread, which I’ve put all together and smoothed out to make it read better than tweets do (with their character limitations).  It was sent to Jonathan Turley as a reply to his initial tweet.  

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I just finished reading the original articles of this 1864 tale that initially appeared in the Washington Post, and then followed up by The Smithsonian.  As it happens, I trust them more on history than Mr. Turley's retelling, most especially with his slight changes to make the story worse.
 
He writes that Moses Robinette (Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather) pulled "a knife," which sounds big and dangerous. The historians, however, say "pen knife" and "pocketknife which, while dangerous, is certainly less so. He says Moses stabbed John Alexander "repeatedly," which sounds like in a crazed, angry fury and out of control.  Neither of the historians say "repeatedly," just stabbed.  (One of the historical articles does say there were several cuts, but even though that certainly means it wasn’t just a single stab, of course, something that is “several cuts” doesn’t seem as being wild, but perhaps more defense.)

Also, though Mr. Turley repeatedly refers to the charge of attempted murder, for which Moses Robinette was charge, he leaves it there.  What he doesn’t ever say, as the historians do in their articles, is that John Alexander survived.  Maybe that goes without saying from the word “attempted,” but saying it actually drives the outcome home clearly.
 
Turley says that Moses was overheard by Alexander "bad-mouthing" him.  What the historians say, however, is that all that’s known is Moses was talking about Alexander, but it’s not clear at all what was said. 
 
Mr. Turley says dismissively that mere "friends" took it upon themselves to ask the army to intercede with "powerful political figures," suggesting something unseemly.  The friends were actually three officers in the Army! They all served with Moses Robinette and apparently went to their superior officers, as protocol would require.
 
He says Alexander didn't have a weapon, which everyone agrees on, but omits defense testimony that the man was "much superior in the strength and size" and drunk, stating that he was clearly a threat to Robinette, even without a knife or gun.
 
He says that Moses Robinette "didn’t have any formal medical training." The historians call him a "veterinary surgeon."
 
Turley uses damning words like "pressured" and "leaned on" in the pardon petition that got to Abraham Lincoln.  The historians only say that Lincoln got the petition, went through all the documentation and pardoned him.
 
He also goes out of his way to demean the pardon by saying, pretty unnecessarily it seems that Lincoln was known for giving out many pardons.  That may be true, but it doesn’t even remotely mean the pardons weren’t justified.  Abd, most especially, it doesn’t mean that the pardon of Moses Robinette specifically was without full merit.
 
And he derides Moses as being a "political ally" for those asking for and granting the pardon. This clearly sounds like there were some underhanded shenanigans going on.  What the historians say, though, is that if he was in Turley's words a “political ally,” that’s because -- he was on the side of the Union, and was loyal and helpful to the Union cause.

As far as political allies go, that's a pretty good one.  At least as far as U.S. history and democracy goes.
 
But worst by far is the end.  That’s when Mr. Turley inexplicably and reprehensibly tries to tie this 1864 bar fight, that ends with a pardon, to Hunter Biden -- and even to Joe Biden (including the President despite zero evidence of even a crime).  And throws in a total dismissal of the importance of Republican star impeachment witness Alexander Smirnov being discredited for being a Russian asset and admitting to lying.  All from this from a Civil War bar fight story that ends with a pardon.  But to Turley, he calls it a "familiar pattern" of "what the Bidens do best."
 
Having read the two articles by article historians, I’m still trying to figure out what Mr. Turley means “it” is.
 
It was an utterly awful article that Jonathan Hurley wrote, and which The Hill published.  When the Washington Post and The Smithsonian wrote their articles, they were historical pieces showing an interesting, off-beat tale of the distant ancestor of the U.S. President.  What Jonathan Turley did was turn a quaint piece of bar-fight history from 160 years ago, overlapping with Abraham Lincoln, into attempted evidence of modern-day political crime.
 
As I said, I don’t know what in the world happened to Jonathan Turley.  The best I can figure is that he seems to gotten infected by close contact to Alan Dershowitz…
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