Joe Biden: The Best Democrats Have to Offer?

Up to this point in the nascent Democratic Party presidential primary race, the 20 or so candidates for the highest office in the land have attempted, at least rhetorically, to claim that their campaigns are based on something more than simply undiluted hatred of President Trump.

But apparently not Joe Biden.

In a stunning announcement video based on the single theme of Trump as a full-on racist, replete with haunting images of scary white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Biden has evidently decided that naked virtue-signaling and stoking fear of the Nazi-like figure in the Oval Office will be enough to hold his position at the top of the field - and deflect attention from his own record from over 40 years as a permanent politician.

And so Sleepy Joe, as he was recently called by President Trump, begins his long-anticipated campaign with a video based on a flagrant distortion. Like everyone else on the left, Biden twisted the words of Trump - “there were very fine people on both sides” in the infamous Charlottesville march. Never mind that Trump specified who he was describing and who he was not. Once more for the record, here is what the president actually said:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America … I think the driver of the car {which was used to mow down a protester} is a disgrace to himself, his family and his country … what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing … you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent … Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee … So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? … But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides … I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Biden, of course, realizes that the black vote will be critical to his third shot at the presidency, so he pulled no punches in his naked attempt to depict himself, vice president under the nation’s first black president, as the savior of a people he once famously said would be put “back in chains” by the Republican Party. Never mind that it is Trump who has produced the lowest black unemployment rate ever recorded. Most people don’t notice that, of course, because the elite media mentions it only in passing as they condemn the president day after day.

Alternately known as Uncle Joe among mainstream Democrats, and Creepy Uncle Joe among many who have witnessed his unwanted advances towards women through the years, Biden had already engaged in a multi-pronged apology tour in advance of his official announcement.

Hardly a paragon of political courage, Biden recently called Vice President Pence a “decent guy,” and then after one angry tweet from an LGBTQ activist, apologized an hour later. He lamented, “I wish I could have done something” about the treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in 1991, even though he was the Chairman of the very Senate Judiciary Committee which conducted the hearing! In his most shameless act of pandering, he recently decried a “white guy culture” that has “got to change,” somehow failing to grasp - or papering over - the fact that he is widely viewed as a poster child for that very corporatist culture. Or perhaps he actually believes his renunciation of a culture that has benefitted him to an extraordinary degree over a life lived entirely within the political realm will result in forgiveness from the woke crowd he seeks to win over in the conga-line Democratic Party primary.

But Biden’s most famous and recent apology came after no less than six women admitted publicly that they were creeped out by his handsy behavior towards them over the years. His statement was remarkable because he said that “social norms have changed,” thus leaving the impression that he believes what he did was fine then, but not now in the #metoo era.

Biden also is hoping people will forget about his two previous disastrous runs for the Oval Office. In 2008, after his famously amusing “clean and articulate” description of Barack Obama, he quit the race after garnering less than 1% of the vote in the first contest in Iowa. Hence, the new nickname attached to him by President Trump: One Percent Joe.

In 1988, Biden was forced to pull out of the Democratic primary after revelations regarding multiple instances of plagiarism. He mimicked entire portions of a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock and acknowledged plagiarizing a law review journal for a paper at Syracuse University law school. He also claimed to be the first one in his family to attend college, a lie, and that he finished in the top half of his law school class, when in fact he finished near the bottom.

Then there is the matter of Biden’s son and his ties to Ukraine. Hunter Biden joined Burisma Holdings, one of the country’s largest oil and natural gas companies, in April 2014. He was paid $166,000 a month, despite zero background or expertise in Ukrainian affairs or energy. The company came under investigation for corruption and money laundering by Viktor Shokin, the nation’s Prosecutor General, who was promptly fired after threats from the Obama administration to pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine.

The leftists in the Democratic party will not forget Biden’s support for the Iraq War. They will not forget his support for the 1994 crime bill which resulted in a marked increase in black incarceration. And then there is Biden’s statement in 1973 that gay people working for the federal government would be “security risks.”

See what happens when you’ve been a part of the ruling class for more than four decades? A long record with much to attack, especially for this famously gaffe-prone politician.

Unable to resist his standing as putative frontrunner in this race, based largely of course on mere name recognition, Biden is evidently convinced that this third shot at the White House will be the charm. What exactly does he think voters who so thoroughly rejected him twice before will find appealing in him this time? In a party given over to identity politics and radical change, he is an old white guy who represents the Obama status quo, which was rejected in 2016 to the point that voters were willing to roll the dice on a bombastic political novice and serial disrupter.

There are so many problems with Joe Biden that he could spend the whole campaign attempting to explain them all away. Is this the best Democrats can do to make Donald Trump a one-term president?

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