The Biden campaign has been understandably reluctant to respond, for fear of giving the story legitimacy. Still, Biden has said his son made a mistake. Family friends say the vice president is reluctant to publicly criticize Hunter Biden further, but they stress that both Bidens have learned the painful lesson that a president’s children should stay away from international business. Would that the Trump family recognized that rule.

He made a mistake while he was in the throes of his crack addiction.

Well, OK.

Why would the “dubious company like Burisma” want anything to do with Hunter Biden?

And by the way, Biden also said his son did nothing wrong, which makes Ignatius’ attempts to shill for the Bidens ring a bit hollow.

How painful was that lesson, by the way? We’ll touch on that one in a minute.

But the main reason David Ignatius comes off like a blithering imbecile for having written that column on Friday at the Amazon Post is that he set himself up as Kevin Bacon shouting “All is well!” at the end of Animal House.

Ignatius hadn’t been read into the apparent fact that Hunter’s laptop contains images and videos of him cavorting in an illicit manner with underage girls, together with rampant and depraved drug use. The underage girls are, apparently, Chinese. There is evidence Joe Biden knew about his son doing inappropriate things with a 14-year-old. There is also evidence, as the Senate alleged in its report on Burisma, that Hunter got himself mixed up in the Eastern European sex-slave trade.

This, you want to humanize?

Note to Ignatius and his ilk: the Hunter Bidens of the world can’t be saved politically. Rather than humanize him, what you want to do is make him the scapegoat in order to save his father you’re trying to elect.

But even that’s not going to work, because:

3. Nobody is going to take that kind of money in stride.

Initially there was a denial that Hunter Biden took $3.5 million from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. Nobody is denying that anymore. Not while they cringe in waiting for the evidence to come out as to what that $3.5 million paid for.

Then there’s all the Chinese money. Some being held for “the big guy.”

There’s the $8 million in Burisma money.

Plus something from Kazakhstan. And Romania.

And there’s the message from Hunter to his daughter Naomi, found on that laptop, griping that “Pop” has taken half his salary.

By the way, Hunter’s former business partner Bevan Cooney, who until Tuesday was in prison in Oregon for his role in some nefarious dealings (another partner, Devon Archer, the grandson of famous Boston mobster “Whitey” Bulger, awaits sentencing for those same dealings), turned over some 26,000 emails to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer in recent days. In those emails are messages referencing Hunter’s “willingness” to take on “risk” with respect to dealings with China and Ukraine. Cooney was just moved out of his prison cell, likely owing to a real threat to his life.

Joe Biden’s net worth in 2016 was just under $400,000. By 2019 it was over $16 million.

A painful lesson in international business dealings? How painful? There are awfully few Americans who would flinch from such pain. What we do flinch from is the obvious fact that, as Margot Cleveland noted at the Federalist, this level of bribery leads to extortion. How does Joe Biden argue that he’s his own man and not a wholly owned subsidiary of China and whatever other foreign potentates and villains who have filled his pockets with filthy lucre over the past few years?

4. The blanket denials and calumnies don’t sound very truthful.

Remember when this first started popping? Joe Biden said he never asked his son about his foreign business dealings. That was absolutely ludicrous on its face at the time.

And then it was revealed, as one of the first disclosures from the laptop, that Biden had met with Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi, who had explicitly asked Hunter to use influence to get Burisma in front of American policymakers. The Biden camp’s denial came in the form of a statement that no meeting with Pozharskyi was on his official calendar; within 48 hours they had backed off that position and grudgingly admitted it was “possible” a meeting had taken place.

Then there was the legacy media narrative that the entire affair was Russian disinformation. That fell apart pretty quickly when the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, debunked it by declaring there was no evidence whatsoever the Russians planted that laptop into the news cycle. His statement became obvious when it came out that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had approached the repair shop seeking to reclaim the computer after it had been remitted to the FBI once the shop owner realized what was on the hard drive. The work ticket with Hunter’s signature on it surfaced. And by Tuesday a Biden campaign operative had to agree that there was nobody saying anymore that the material on the laptop wasn’t authentic.

Russians, indeed. When you’re constructing a Potemkin narrative you should always work the Russians in. But be careful of the public reaction, because when people recognize you’re insulting their intelligence they might take it personally.

5. Remember what happened to ACORN.

This agonizing (or delicious!) drip-drip-drip of damaging revelations from that laptop is straight out of the playbook Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe wrote when the two combined to utterly destroy the urban leftist ACORN machine with a series of hidden videos showing ACORN employees flagrantly breaking the law. ACORN twisted in the wind for weeks as O’Keefe dragged them mercilessly through a pattern of revelation, denial, and further revelation invalidating the denial.

And Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and the conservative news organizations (the New York Post, Fox News, and a number of others) who have imposed this water torture on not just Biden but the legacy and social media giants protecting them have done precisely what O’Keefe did.

You haven’t heard much from ACORN lately, have you?

That seems true of Joe Biden as well, since he called a “lid” on his campaign Monday for more or less the rest of the week, or at least until Thursday night’s debate, at which NBC News journo and Democrat partisan Kristen Welker will do everything she can not to raise the subject of the Biden crime family.

But that isn’t going to work, because Trump is going to bring it up in every answer he gives at that debate. And it’s a given that on Thursday there will be something mind-blowingly salacious coming off that laptop the whole country will be talking about by the time the debate happens. So when Trump tosses it out there, Biden will have to have a good answer, or it’s going to be conspicuous.

The contempt for the American people inherent in refusing to answer anything about Burisma, China, the $3.5 million from Moscow, and now the kiddie porn (Giuliani said Tuesday he turned the document trove over to the Delaware State Police owing to the sex crimes contained therein), coming as it does on the heels of Biden’s refusal to comment on court-packing, is the kind of lousy look that burned up ACORN like a badly managed California forest in late summer.

There’s no saving this dead campaign. They’re all starting to realize it.

On Tuesday the New York Times announced it was suspending all polling operations for the final two weeks of the election cycle.

And the Hill broke a bombshell story that Trump insisted that intelligence officials he met with at his New Jersey golf club try the malted milkshakes.

In 2017.