Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: The candidacy of Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States, has started to come into sharper focus as we edge closer to the Republican and Democratic conventions in these next weeks and the start of the full campaign after Labor Day. And it's been ugly for Biden, particularly one indiscreet remark that seemed to reconfirm what Biden said weeks ago: that if you're not voting for him, you're not black.
This time, he dropped a super-gaffe that all but proclaims he has the black vote wrapped up because, unlike other minority groups, they all think the same way. And President Donald Trump provided an apt response.
Joe Biden (to Hispanic audience): What you all know, but most people don't know, is that unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community.
President Trump: If I ever said that, they'd run me out of town, I'd be gone.
Brian Kilmeade, Fox News: He's lost a few steps, I think, Mr. President. He can't figure out his numbers sometimes. He can't even figure out what state he's in.
President Trump: I don't quite get it, but you know, whatever. Six times with the wrong states. You do that, that's game changing, but not for him.
Tim: And as if saying blacks basically all think and act alike and therefore will all vote for him, the former vice president melted down when he was asked by a CBS reporter about the increasingly urgent issue of his cognitive ability and whether he's taken a cognitive test. His response was the opposite of the one he gave earlier this summer.
Joe Biden, August: No, I haven't taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That's like saying you, before you got on this program, you take a test whether you're taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie? Come on, man. I know you're trying to goad me.
Joe Biden, June: I've been tested and I'm constantly tested. Look, all you got to do is watch me and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I'm running against.
Tim: It's fair to say that Trump is likely more anxious than Biden to compare their cognitive capabilities, but how will the American people do it? Well, usually, primarily through presidential debates, but we're getting increasing indications that Biden will try to get out of the three debates already on the schedule for September and October. How? Maybe by saying Trump just lies too much, as one leftist wrote recently, or that he must release his long-sought tax returns first, as a New York Times writer opined. Or even as the once-respected but now completely discredited D.C. inside journalist, Elizabeth Drew, wrote recently, debates just aren't a good way to pick a president. She apparently had an epiphany after decades of covering presidential debates.
And let me tell you, the Biden campaign has been taking its cues from its friends in the elite media, so you can fully expect the talk about debates somehow being unfair to Biden will grow by the day.
But we're now just days away from Biden announcing arguably the most important decision of his campaign: who will be his running mate. The woman -- and it will be a woman, almost certainly a black woman who can check the most identity-politics boxes -- who would serve as vice president.
We're told it's down to a final two: former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice or, the odds-on favorite, California Senator Kamala Harris, who was treated to a softball interview on MSNBC. And here's what she said in positioning herself to be Biden's running mate.
Kamala Harris: If we have a president who is petty, he's petty, but also there's something about Donald Trump that is just the antithesis of what we want as an American leader and as our president, which is we want a president who has a generosity of spirit. There's nothing about Donald Trump that is generous. He's generous to himself, but he has no generosity toward an icon, a hero who has been described as a saint, John Lewis, or the American people quite frankly, when you look at his policies … We have someone who is so self-involved instead of someone who is lifting up the spirit of the American people.
Tim: Kamala Harris was a disaster as a presidential candidate, but Biden has boxed himself in by saying he'll pick a woman and in effect that he must pick a woman of color. But if you listen to the tenor of her remarks there, it's clear that the Biden campaign will try to sell their candidate as a nice guy, civic minded and decent, unlike Trump. There's almost no talk about Biden's policies among his transparent supporters in the elite media, so they're going to try to make this a character election.
But how is Biden planning to win when he can no longer do the very thing that made him a successful politician for almost five decades? Lawrence Jones of Fox News says Biden is clearly not the same guy he once was.
Lawrence Jones: As a guy that was elected to office for 47 years, he was once known as the greatest retail politician. The campaigns would want him out talking with people. His press aides loved him talking to the press. Even though sometimes he would turn some heads, he had a strategic way of connecting with people. That has since changed. They do not want him talking with the press. When he talks with the press, they are lay-ups that they set up for him. They do not want him out talking with people because of the scene or the potential of them asking questions. And so there is a different Joe Biden. I think they have to be honest about that and plan a strategy to combat that.
Tim: The strategy has been to keep Biden out of sight, out of mind, barely in touch and only for friendly interviews in his basement. How long can that last? Will people vote for someone who won't come out of his basement? Well, we've never had to ask that question before.
But Biden will have to carry his whole party on his back, and that includes statements like this one from the once respectable member of Congress and Civil Rights crusader, Representative James Clyburn (D-SC), comparing Trump to Benito Mussolini, the infamous fascist, and saying Trump's in bed with another Hitler and will never ever leave the White House.
James Clyburn: The facts are very clear. He says he was on the phone about seven or eight times with Putin recently. Nobody knows what he's talking about. Is he getting instructions from Putin? What's he talking about on the phone? And if you look at the way he is carrying out this presidency, you kind of see what I mean when I say Putin is Hitler and he's Mussolini ... This guy intends to install himself under the emergency powers or whatever he can use to be president for life.
Tim: That, folks, is the definition of a paranoid conspiracy theory. It's one thing if you heard that from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but that guy Clyburn, who used to be respectable, is now Trump-deranged like everyone else on the left.
Meanwhile, on the other side, conservatives are again panicked about the Supreme Court following a succession of head-shaking or incomprehensible decisions from Chief Justice John Roberts, who has become a swing vote on the Court and has sided with the leftist justices more and more in recent months.
Vice President Mike Pence said on the Christian Broadcasting Network that conservatives thrilled with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the high court are now worried again because of Roberts.
Mike Pence: Chief Justice John Roberts has been a disappointment to conservatives, whether it be the Obamacare decision or whether it be a spate of recent decisions all the way through Calvary Chapel. It's just, it's a reminder. And I think several cases out of the Supreme Court are a reminder of just how important this election is for the future of the Supreme Court. We remember the issue back in 2016, which I believe loomed large in voters' decisions between Hillary Clinton and the man who would become president of the United States. And some people thought that it wouldn't be as big an issue these days, but I think that's all changed.
Tim: Indeed it has, and in a perverse sense, Roberts going soft or even leftward may turn out to be a blessing for Trump because it will once again fire up right-of-center voters who now know they will need at least one more conservative justice to secure the Court for the coming generation.
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