Joe Biden Is A Lying, Dog-Faced, Pony Soldier.
From the archives: Joe Biden has been and always will be, a lying, dog-faced, pony soldier.
Among the general electorate, Joe Biden is not an unlikeable character in American politics; in fact, he remains quite favorable to those who came to know him during his time as Barack Obama’s ice cream-cone eating Vice President. His affable presence and folksy demeanor are authentic, and by that virtue, appeal to working-class Americans in a way politicians of the D.C. establishment simply can’t muster. Biden’s greatest strength as a politician–his ability to paper over his record with an affable personable nature, and it’s a big part of the reason that he was finally able to overtake all the other moderate candidates nipping at his heels over the past year in this primary election.
But unfortunately for Joe, the attributes which fueled his success in electoral politics and may get him through this primary will not be nearly enough to save him when his true record is fully examined and excoriated by the Right. In Joe Biden, the Democrats find themselves uniquely vulnerable to Trump: Any charges lobbed at Trump-related to sexual malfeasance or shameless bigotry will ring hollow when he redirects the attention to Biden’s long history of inappropriate behavior with women. Nor can the Democrats take the high road on policy, as Biden has been central to the passing of the most calamitous legislation in modern American history. Nominating Joe Biden for president exposes the utter hypocrisy at the heart of the pearl-clutching Democratic establishment, and if there’s anything Trump understands how to weaponize masterfully, it’s hypocrisy.
First elected into the Senate at the ripe age of 30, Joe Biden has been a lifelong creature of the establishment, with a record to boot. To call his past checkered, would be all too polite. Since taking office, Joe Biden has been consistently on the “wrong side of history.” In fact, it’s often forgotten that the reason Barack Obama even selected Biden as his running mate in 2008 was to court Democratic voters who were uncomfortable with a black president. Biden’s own comments describing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary are caked in racism, saying “you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy… I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Selecting Joe Biden as Vice President was a conscious decision to ease the skepticism of those racist white voters. Take his position on desegregation bussing back in the ’70s, when he called it an “asinine policy” and argued that “the one way to ensure that you set the civil rights movement further back is to continue to push busing.” Just recently on the campaign trail, he declared that “poor kids are just as smart as white kids.”
In 1988, when Joe made his first run at the Oval Office, his campaign was an absolute disaster. Biden was forced to bow out embarrassed and ashamed after blatantly plagiarizing a speech delivered by British Labour Party Leader and former challenger to Margarette Thatcher Neil Kinnock, going so far as to mimic the mannerisms of Kinnock in the campaign video he lifted it from. This was not the first nor last time Biden was caught pilfering his material, he was also dogged in the ’88 race by leaks showing he was caught hijacking an article from Fordham Law Review and submitting it as an essay in law school. In addition to the multiple instances of appropriating others’ work on the campaign trail, Biden also sprinkled in a good deal of outright lies; most notably those regarding his civil rights record.
In January, activist and Bernie Sanders surrogate Sean King penned a devastating compilation of Joe Biden’s long history of rewriting his past and misleading voters about his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a list that continues to grow, as just a few short weeks ago Joe Biden was caught with his pants down claiming he “had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robbens Island (where Mandela was imprisoned).” There is of course no evidence of this occurring, it wasn’t documented in any newspapers in the United States or South Africa at the time, and Biden eventually fessed up.
As frequent as the lies and stolen valor from the true heroes of the civil rights movement were the instances in which he turned his back on the communities whose vote he’d lied for, quickly selling them down the river in DC. Joe Biden cut his teeth in the Senate working closely with the arch segregationists Strom Thurmond (who Biden referred to as his “closest friend”) and James O Eastland, and together the three lobbied their demands for mandatory minimum sentencing during Biden’s freshman term. These are truly unfathomable friendships for a man who claimed to have been molded by his time in black churches during the Civil Rights movement.
The true “piece de resistance” of Biden’s tenure as a Senator of Delaware was The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or as Biden himself refers to it, the “Biden Crime Bill.” This mammoth piece of legislation was a culmination of Biden’s decades of clamoring for Democrats to get tough on crime and played a critical role in expanding the prison industrial complex by increasing funding for prison construction nationwide. It was responsible for riddling communities with police forces who did not care about or represent them and codifying the three strikes law that sent thousands of nonviolent drug offenders to prison for life with no chance of parole. The bill did just about “everything but hang people for jaywalking” he boasted. Joe Biden not only wrote this legislation but was among the most outspoken Democratic cheerleaders of the crime and punishment political era that dominated American politics for the tail end of the 20th century.
It is not the case that Biden is solely responsible for the problem of over-policing and mass incarceration–as he’s quick to point out, state laws are indeed more responsible by the numbers. However, his bill included state-level funding for states who adopted TIS or Truth in Sentencing legislation mandating inmates serve at least 85% of their sentence. This prompted 9 states to adopt TIS legislation in the 5 years after the bill was signed into law along with 21 states who modified their existing legislation to qualify for the $12.5 billion in funding. Legislation like this is just one of the many examples of the fearmongering perpetrated by politicians like Joe Biden, fear-mongering that molded popular opinion and corralled voters behind policies of over-policing that decimated low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods nationwide, exacerbating the issues he supposedly set out to solve.
Only slightly less bountiful than the lies regarding his involvement in the Civil Rights movement are those regarding his involvement in the Iraq War. His vote to give George Bush sweeping authorization to use military force in Iraq, a country that had never attacked us, was not one cast in ignorance. as the New York Times reported, Biden, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “had been scrambling to draft a bipartisan resolution that would grant Mr. Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq.” He then spent the next decade alternating between defenses for the matter either arguing he was too trusting of George Bush, or just flat out lying and saying he opposed the war “from the moment it started.”
Not only has Joe Biden consistently mislead the public about his relationship with notable Civil Rights leaders in order to make himself seem closer to the fight for social justice, but he has also lied about his time spent with troops overseas. Just last fall The Washington Post reported on a touching speech delivered by Biden about how he navigated the “godforsaken country” of Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a soldier who had valiantly retrieved the body of a fallen comrade. He resisted, Biden recalls. “He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing! ‘Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!” a truly moving tale, or it would be had it happened, it didn’t. It was just another of the litany of examples of Joe Biden blatantly misrepresenting himself in a positive light to gain the favor of his audience.
These are not isolated instances that can be considered slips of the tongue or mind — Joe Biden has demonstrated a consistent behavior of rewriting his personal narrative to make himself easier to market to whichever voting bloc he is courting. How then can Joe Biden take the position of moral high ground against Donald Trump when he himself is guilty of so many of the same faults? He can’t.