After the news that President Joe Biden would offer his son, Hunter Biden an expansive pardon broke, Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow for Media Matters for America, made a succinct observation on social media.

“If you make your whole schtick ‘the other guys put themselves above the country, undermine the rule of law, and lie constantly,’ then you need to have much higher standard for yourself than pardoning your son after saying you wouldn’t,” he wrote.

We believe Gertz makes a valid and important point. We further believe it is not an aberration or exception to the course that, specifically in this case, the Democratic Party and its liberal and progressive supporters, have found themselves on.

As we noted in our July 29 editorial, the Democratic Party, in abandoning President Biden’s nomination, disregarded every ballot cast in every 2024 Democratic primary and caucus, “after eight years of hyperbolic claims that former President Donald Trump is a unique threat to the fabric of democracy.”

That decision followed the revelations, soon after an investigation into President-elect Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents became public, that as vice president, Joe Biden also had a similar cache of classified documents — one that did not warrant a similar reaction by Trump’s critics.

We believe the Hunter Biden pardon is, frankly, an abuse of power. We expect elected officials, from our township supervisors on up, to abstain when the responsibilities of their offices collide with the perception of personal or familial benefit.

We know many Democrats understand this: They understood it well enough during Donald Trump’s first term, when they criticized his pardons for his son-in-law’s father and other close friends of his family and other actions that clearly benefitted his family or his business interests

Which is why our greater concern is how prevalent hyocrisy and double-standards — especially, these last few years, for the Democratic Party and for many on the left — seem to be in our modern political landscape.