Because he has no good answers for why his ne’er-do-well son Hunter was paid a sweet $50,000 a month — a month! — by a Ukrainian energy company, former-tough guy Joe Biden is going the full-crybaby to kill the story.

So, uhm, what happened to the badass who took on Corn Pop? What happened to the tough guy who was going to beat President Trump like a drum? What happened to the sunglasses and swagger?

I’ll tell you what happened…

Joe Biden got old. And I don’t mean number-wise. While Clint Eastwood is still knocking them out of the park at age 89, Joe Biden’s eye is exploding, his dentures are falling out, and now he’s ranting and raving at the refs because he’s losing the game.

On Thursday, the far-left New York Times published an op-ed written by Breitbart’s own Peter Schweizer, author of the recent bestseller Secret Empires. In the piece, Schweizer uses Biden and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as an example of why Congress must pass reforms closing the “glaring loophole [that] provide political families with an opportunity to effectively ‘offshore’ corruption and cronyism.”

About Biden, Schweizer lays out the devastating facts:

As vice president, Joe Biden served as point person on American policy toward China and Ukraine. In both instances, his son Hunter, a businessman, landed deals he was apparently unqualified to score save for one thing: his father. In December 2013, Joe and Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China; less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he founded with two other businessmen in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners, whose largest shareholder is the government-run Bank of China, even though he had scant background in private equity. (Representatives of the fund claim that the timing of the deal and the Bidens’ trip to China was coincidental.) Thus far, the firm has invested about $2.1 billion, according to its website. … With the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Joe Biden became point person in Ukraine as well. That same year, Hunter Biden landed a board position with the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings. Despite having no background in energy or Ukraine, the vice president’s son was paid as much as $50,000 a month, according to financial records. (He left the board in early 2019.) Why would someone with so little experience be able to command such enormous payments? Joe Biden recently claimed, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” But Hunter Biden admitted to The New Yorker that on one occasion, they had in fact discussed his work for Burisma[.]

Biden’s response…? He ran out on his front lawn, shook his fist at the sky, and started yelling at the Times.

In a letter addressed to Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Biden’s deputy campaign manager and comms director Kate Bedingfield freaked out. Here’s a taste:

What was especially troubling about the Times’s active participation in this smear campaign is that prior to its reporting on the subject by Ken Vogel, this conspiracy had been relegated to the likes of Breitbart, Russian propaganda, and another conspiracy theorist, regular Hannity guest John Solomon. … Despite voluminous work done by the independent press and fact-checkers — including some by The Times — to refute the heinous conspiracy theory that Donald Trump attempted to bully Ukraine into propping-up for him, the paper ran an op-ed by none other than Peter Schweizer, making more malicious claims about the Biden family. This leaves us with a critical question: are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?

How sad is that?

Biden tried to do the same with Facebook and Twitter after the Trump campaign started running ads about Biden and Ukraine. Twitter has so far said nothing. Facebook told Biden to go pound sand, as did the Times, which released a statement defending the Schweizer op-ed.

But is this the behavior of a tough guy?

Is this the behavior of a man or a mouse — a mouse with something to hide?

If Biden was an actual tough guy, if he still had The Stuff to be president, he wouldn’t be crybabying to the refs to stop the fight and declare him the winner. If Biden were the swaggering badass he claims to be, he would be out there fighting, he’d be sticking it right back to Trump.

Most importantly, he would come out of hiding to address this scandal head on — you know, like a man.

Nothing proves this Ukraine scandal is the real deal more than Biden’s cowardice when it comes to addressing it.

Even if a reporter is able to ask him a question about the ridiculous amount of money his son was paid by a Ukrainian energy company, Biden just freaks out. Instead of answering the question, he acts like the reporter just skipped in front of him in line at the Blue Plate Special — he starts screaming and crybabying about how the question isn’t fair.

Listen, if there were a legitimate reason Hunter Biden was paid $50,000 a month —a month! — by this company, Biden would have already sat down for an extensive interview to lay it all out, or he would have called a press conference to answer all questions. Instead, he is hiding his son in some undisclosed location, when he should have Hunter doing the interview rounds in defense of his own business practices and honor.

But Biden can’t do that because there are no good answers, so the old man has been reduced to a big whiner, and like a spoiled child caught red-handed, he only has one option: temper tantrums where he screams, “No, you shut up!”

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.