"Hunter Biden said his obsession with naked selfies was a result of 'body dysmorphia,' according to a rambling screed found in the notes of his hard drive."

The NY Post reports.

“I loved to be reassured that my 9-inch very big penis was actually big. It may sound funny to you but its [sic] body dysmorphia … I know my penis is almost twice the size of an average man’s penis,” the first son wrote on July 12, 2018.

He's right. It does sound funny to me.

This isn't funny:

The hard-drive note is mostly an extended denunciation of Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, with whom Hunter began a tempestuous relationship after his brother’s death from brain cancer in 2015. 

“When the woman you have given up everything for says to a crowd of people ‘il [sic] loved Beau, I’m addicted to Hunter.’ What does anyone who has an addiction want to do more than anything. They want to rid themselves of that awful obsession,” he wrote. 

“Any transgression on her part is forgiven because they all know she was under the influence of Hunter. She never acted this way before. Jesus what the f—k did Hunter do now,” he continued, adding that a “sadistic” Hallie Biden would often insult his manhood as a way to “tear down my already fragile ego.”

Do his rambling notes contain any insight into why his ego was so fragile? Or is the fragile-ego business insincere? I think he's journaling and trying to understand himself, but that does not guarantee the exclusion of insincerity (and outright lying).

To lie in your diary — who does that?

I googled that last sentence and got this 1990 piece by Richard Cohen (not the Richard Cohen who is my ex-husband), "Lying to Your Diary."

[Former national security adviser John] Poindexter asserts that Reagan's diaries might prove that he was following -- not initiating -- the policy that resulted in the Iran-contra scandal....

It's hard to imagine Reagan writing a diary of any literary importance. But it's harder still to imagine him or any high government official confiding to a diary what he actually thinks....

Candor like [that of Samuel Pepys] is now almost totally confined to the novel. It is only in fiction that public people act like real people. The incredible intrusion of the press coupled with the demands of the law ensure that no one of any importance is going to be anything other than a hypocrite. The public figure who lies to the press will likely also lie to his diary, where, after subpoena or posthumous publication, he will be revealed as pretty close to perfect....

[N]either we nor Poindexter should be surprised if Reagan's diary is either mute about Iran-contra or says nothing we don't already know. The incessant search for truth is beginning to reveal a paradox: the more we demand to know, the less we are told.

That was written 32 years ago.

Here's a Newsweek piece from 1994, "Who Says A Diary Can't Lie?"  Some Treasury Department official, Joshua Steiner, had testified before Congress and disagreed with what he'd written in his own diary:

What interests me is the hilarity with which practically everyone greeted this testimony... [He was] "the kid who says he lied to his own diary . . . har, har, har" -- a concept evidently considered preposterous on its face. Who would lie to his diary? the merrymakers wanted to know. 

To which I reply: Where have these people been? Have they ever read a diary? Have they ever kept one? Let's leave poor Steiner out of it and go straight to the big issue. It is, from Pepys to Packwood, the general factual reliability of this kind of writing, by which I mean not just diaries, but also autobiographies, journals, memoirs, tapes and the rest....

Who says people are necessarily honest with themselves, in the first place? And in the second, the diary, crucially, doesn't talk back. It doesn't say "gimmme a break," when inscribed with a whopper. It doesn't even raise an eyebrow. A diary has never heard of cross-examination. A diary has heard only of what its proprietor chooses to tell it. 

Remember that people keep diaries for many different purposes.... And all are at least aware in some degree of how their entries would read to others. Even Samuel Pepys, the most honest diarist of them all, who is funny, dirty, unsparingly candid about his own bribe-taking and other lapses, and wonderfully acute on the subject of government, somewhat self-consciously and coyly dips into pidgin French or Spanish when recording his sexual infidelities, as if in the presence of another. ("And there I had . . . mon plain plaisir of elle.") 

Bob Packwood, paraphrasing one of his famous diary entries in the Senate, made it sound awfully pleasing to himself, awfully bolstering: "She stood up, approached me, put her arms around me, gave me a great big kiss and said, "You're wonderful'." 

I don't know if that's true, but I do know that diaries provide their authors with a chance to recast their own lives more to their liking and this sure has the ring....