Say no to Joe

His third debate still leaves me wondering how in hell Joe Biden is the front-runner.

[Moderator Linsey] Davis later directed a question at Biden concerning his alarming 1975 comments on school segregation. She read the full quote, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago,” and Biden smirked oddly as she did so. The correspondent followed up by asking, “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” Without missing a beat, the Democratic front-runner delivered a response that was considerably more disqualifying than anything Castro said all night.

Having just had something offensive that he said 44 years ago quoted back to him, Biden took the opportunity to say something that was arguably worse.

After proposing that teacher raises are the first step to undoing the legacy of slavery, Biden said the following. It’s worth reading in full.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need — we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy.

The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have — make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.

It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there. That’s the current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination a) first appearing to treat the mere mention of an old segregationist quote of his as ridiculous, then b) responding to a question about repairing the legacy of slavery by saying that the government needs to have teachers go into the homes of kids in poor schools to teach the parents how to raise those children. And what color are the children, disproportionately, going to those poor schools? Nowhere in that answer is a prescription for making the poor families less so, nor for improving the schools. It’s the kind of paternalistic racism that has so long existed in both liberal and conservative circles, and was on Thursday night spilling out of the mouth of the former vice president on the campus of an HBCU. It was all quite a sight to behold.

[...]

[T]he top contender appears not to have even the vocabulary to engage in an antiracist conversation, let alone combat Trump’s agenda properly. He chose to use that stage to proselytize about record players in the homes of poor families of color who need the teachers to raise their kids for them. Who chooses to do that in a party that needs black voters to win?

  Rolling Stone

Clueless Joe.

Even worse, Biden’s terrible quote was just part of his evening’s racial disaster. He showed that he is not only unprepared to take on Trump, but that he is actually starting to emulate some of his worst traits.

Yes, I've been saying that all along: we don't need a Democratic Trump.

When Ramos inquired what he’d done to stop the record 3 million deportations during the Obama administration, Biden responded with a purely false statement. “We didn’t lock people up in cages. We didn’t separate families. We didn’t do all of those things, number one.” They did do all of those things. Though not to the grotesque extent of the Trump administration, certainly, but Biden is fighting photographic evidence here. Ramos had asked him, openly, “Why should Latinos trust you?” And the first thing Biden did was lie.

Biden’s thinking on incarceration may have evolved his thinking since his Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, known more infamously as the crime bill, was signed into law 25 years ago today by President Bill Clinton. However, it was jarring to see the man behind the legislation that helped explode mass incarceration in this country, especially on the state level — and who said in a 1994 Senate floor speech, “I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up” — stand last night in Texas and claim that “Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime.” Considering who was mostly hurt by the crime bill, I’ll paraphrase Ramos: why should African Americans trust you?

[...]

We must believe that all is not lost, and that this racist society can be transformed. However, I doubt sincerely that I can be convinced that the current Democratic presidential front-runner is equipped to carry out that transformation, if he were even lucky enough to defeat the white-nationalist incumbent lying in wait.

[...]

The former vice president can trumpet his Obama associations all he wishes, but after that debate, it comes across merely as the “I have a black friend” excuse. Biden is not only deficient as an antiracist, if he ever was one, but he is saying things — at a Democratic debate on an HBCU campus, no less — that make it absolutely impossible to trust him to be the party’s best candidate to address systemic racism and to ameliorate the nation the current administration leaves behind.

If defeating Trump in 2020 is as important to Biden as he so often claims, he should end his campaign and remove himself from contention for president.

Amen. Of course, that's not what's important to Joe Biden.

(By the way, that 1975 quote of Joe's got some serious audience rumbling.  He also made a highly inappropriate chuckle at one serious question.  Joe's not right in the head.)

UPDATE:






I repeat:  We do NOT need a Democratic Trump.