The “touchy feely” misogynist racist pervert

benfell

Joe Biden

Joe Biden is being Joe Biden again:

Gotta tell you, my mind is blown too. And I’m not even Black. There is no better way to persuade me you are a racist than to deny that you are a racist:

“They know better,” [Joe Biden] told reporters as he went to a fundraiser. “Apologize for what? Cory [Booker] should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body; I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period. Period. Period.”[1]

But also, Joe Biden’s appeal to ‘civility’[2] echoes the right-wing whenever anybody calls them out for bigotry; even worse, it grossly misrepresents the history of the Senate:[3]

The Southern bloc of segregationist senators used every means of procedural warfare at its disposal in the Senate to mount a full-blown, scorched-earth campaign of resistance to any and all racial progress — one that lasted for decades.

As Robert Mann recounts in “When Freedom Would Triumph,” that Southern bloc adhered to this “massive resistance” as a “philosophy,” one committed to fighting to maintain white supremacy in the South “to the last ditch.”

These senators literally depicted the civil rights movement as “the enemy,” for years. As Mann recounts, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Arkansas while angry white mobs protested, [Herman] Talmadge likened it to “Russian tanks and troops in the streets of Budapest.”

For his part, [James O.] Eastland depicted one early civil rights measure as “the very worst form of Stalinist tyranny,” and claimed another bill “takes us back to Stalin, Khrushchev, Nasser, Hitler.”

None of this was overcome by “civility” or “getting things done” together. It was overcome by years of mass protests and struggle, much of it undertaken while braving fear of violence and death, in the face of terror.[4]

It doesn’t get any better as Greg Sargent, whom I quoted at length above, points out that Biden opposed busing to desegregate the schools.[5] I doubt that Biden was working for civil rights when he treated Anita hill the way he did.[6] And I’m remembering a previous failure to apologize,[7] which I addressed at the time.[8]

Simply put, it’s folks like Biden, much more than Donald Trump or any of the racists Biden worked with, who help to explain why the Left often hates white men in general. The blatant bigots don’t represent all white men. But you throw in folks like Biden, and you account for a lot more. It’s still not all of us—I still take exception to being lumped in with wealthy and powerful white men as “privileged” when I can’t even find a job, and it’s still unfair, but it’s a lot more understandable.

Stephen Collinson, “Joe Biden gets in his own way on race,” CNN, June 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/politics/joe-biden-race-2020-election/index.html

Scott Detrow, “Democrats Blast Biden For Recalling ‘Civil’ Relationship With Segregationists,” CNN, June 19, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734103488/democrats-blast-biden-for-recalling-civil-relationship-with-segregationists

Matt Viser and Sean Sullivan, “Biden faces backlash over comments about the ‘civility’ of his past work with racist senators,” Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-faces-backlash-over-comments-about-the-civility-of-his-past-work-with-racist-senators/2019/06/19/c0375d2a-92a8-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html

Greg Sargent, “Joe Biden is badly undermining his ability to challenge Trump,” Washington Post, June 20, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/20/joe-biden-is-badly-undermining-his-case-against-trump/

Elizabeth Warren

Natasha Korecki and Charlie Mahtesian, “Warren emerges as potential compromise nominee,” Politico, June 19, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/democratic-establishment-elizabeth-warren-1369874

Reparations

I’ve been noticing lately that those Memorial Day banners commemorating each town’s war dead I still see in so many places around the Pittsburgh area are nearly, if not entirely, all of white people. Even in areas that seem predominantly Black.

There are a couple of issues here. First, to the extent that these areas were largely white at the time these (almost all) men went to war, this would seem to lend further weight to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ claim that demographic shifts (“white flight”) occurred as devalued (“redlined”) areas (especially around the Monongahela River) were reserved for Blacks as whites were encouraged to leave.[9] I haven’t actually tried to find statistics here but what I see looks way too much like what Coates describes for me to have much doubt.

But second, and to me even more disturbing, what must Blacks think when they see these banners of “heroes” only of whites? Am I to infer that only whites will be recognized as “heroes?” Who makes that decision? Is there even in predominantly Black communities a lingering racist white power structure?

A few images have sepia tone or those weird artificially pink cheeks that I guess people thought were a good idea in the early days of photography—these I guess to date to World War I or before. Some of the images seem to date to World War II or Korea. But some are clearly more recent. I’d be awfully, awfully surprised if no Blacks died in any of these wars. Where are their banners?

Marc Parry, “Congress Is Taking On Reparations. At the First Hearing, Academic Historians Were Absent,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Congress-Is-Taking-on/246527

Israel

My inclination would be to agree with Shabtai Shavit. But:

“They called us chah’chahim, amulet-kissers and bots, and now we’re ‘ignorant people,’ [Binyamin Netanyahu] said in a brief statement. “There’s no end to the left’s condescension toward Likud voters. Our response will come in the ballot booth.”[10]

The trouble here should be apparent and this helps to explain the affinity that Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu have for each other. Both point to the Left as bigoted against the right. It’s the authoritarian populist playbook of victimhood and the Left too often plays right into it.

Times of Israel, “Ex-Mossad head: Netanyahu voters are ‘ignorant,’ have no moral standards,” June 20, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-mossad-head-netanyahu-voters-are-ignorant-have-no-moral-standards/

Bureaucracy

The Supreme Court only just upheld the transfer of power from the Legislative Branch to the Executive Branch with Samuel Alito concurring only because at the time the Court heard the case, it was short a Justice. The conservatives all want to reaffirm the nondelegation clause; Elena Kagan, on the other hand, wrote that if this delegation is unconstitutional, “most of Government is unconstitutional — dependent as Congress is on the need to give discretion to executive officials to implement its programs.” Even with its own deregulatory fervor, the Trump administration sought to defend the law.[11]

Elena Kagan, quoted in Ariane de Vogue and Veronica Stracqualursi, “Supreme Court upholds the scope of federal sex offender registration law in case testing ‘nondelegation doctrine,’” CNN, June 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/politics/supreme-court-sex-offender-registration-law-gundy/index.html

  1. [1]Matt Viser and Sean Sullivan, “Biden faces backlash over comments about the ‘civility’ of his past work with racist senators,” Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-faces-backlash-over-comments-about-the-civility-of-his-past-work-with-racist-senators/2019/06/19/c0375d2a-92a8-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html↩
  2. [2]Stephen Collinson, “Joe Biden gets in his own way on race,” CNN, June 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/politics/joe-biden-race-2020-election/index.html; Scott Detrow, “Democrats Blast Biden For Recalling ‘Civil’ Relationship With Segregationists,” CNN, June 19, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734103488/democrats-blast-biden-for-recalling-civil-relationship-with-segregationists; Matt Viser and Sean Sullivan, “Biden faces backlash over comments about the ‘civility’ of his past work with racist senators,” Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-faces-backlash-over-comments-about-the-civility-of-his-past-work-with-racist-senators/2019/06/19/c0375d2a-92a8-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html↩
  3. [3]Greg Sargent, “Joe Biden is badly undermining his ability to challenge Trump,” Washington Post, June 20, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/20/joe-biden-is-badly-undermining-his-case-against-trump/↩
  4. [4]Greg Sargent, “Joe Biden is badly undermining his ability to challenge Trump,” Washington Post, June 20, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/20/joe-biden-is-badly-undermining-his-case-against-trump/↩
  5. [5]Greg Sargent, “Joe Biden is badly undermining his ability to challenge Trump,” Washington Post, June 20, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/20/joe-biden-is-badly-undermining-his-case-against-trump/↩
  6. [6]Elise Viebeck, “Joe Biden was in charge of the Anita Hill hearing. Even he says it wasn’t fair,” Washington Post, April 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-biden-was-in-charge-of-the-anita-hill-hearing-even-he-says-it-wasnt-fair/2019/04/26/a9a6f384-6500-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html↩
  7. [7]Brett Samuels, “Biden: ‘I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,’” Hill, April 5, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437582-biden-im-not-sorry-for-anything-that-i-have-ever-done↩
  8. [8]David Benfell, “Joe Biden blows his #MeToo moment, Not Housebroken, April 5, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/04/05/joe-biden-blows-his-metoo-moment/↩
  9. [9]Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/↩
  10. [10]Times of Israel, “Ex-Mossad head: Netanyahu voters are ‘ignorant,’ have no moral standards,” June 20, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-mossad-head-netanyahu-voters-are-ignorant-have-no-moral-standards/↩
  11. [11]Elena Kagan, quoted in Ariane de Vogue and Veronica Stracqualursi, “Supreme Court upholds the scope of federal sex offender registration law in case testing ‘nondelegation doctrine,’” CNN, June 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/politics/supreme-court-sex-offender-registration-law-gundy/index.html↩

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