Biden doesn't even have enough brains to hide his segregationist history. A few days ago he fondly reminisced about his loving friendships with the worst Southern racists in the U.S. Senate. He was free-associating to a crowd of rich swells in a swanky Manhattan hotel, hitting them up for bucks for his presidential campaign. We bragged that working with the likes of Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, "We got things done!" (Awful things, of course.)
Other contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination for president jumped on the news, including Kamala Harris, Bill de Blasio, and Cory Booker, calling it unacceptable. Booker demanded an apology, which made Biden wax indignant:
"Cory 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.”
Other contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination for president jumped on the news, including Kamala Harris, Bill de Blasio, and Cory Booker, calling it unacceptable. Booker demanded an apology, which made Biden wax indignant:
"Cory 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.”
If by "involved in civil rights," you mean opposing them, then sure!
Biden has a long history as a segregationist and as one of the worst enemies of African-Americans in the U.S.
Biden has been a staunch opponent of what he calls "busing." Of course he doesn't mean that no school child should have to take a bus to school. No, the "busing" he has always opposed is busing to racially integrate schools. He even recently reaffirmed this position.
Biden adamantly opposed affirmative action, doing ANYTHING to try and undo the results of centuries of extreme oppression and economic exploitation, and racist discrimination right into modern times:
Notice how "hold the white man back" is in perfect sync with the notoriously racist reelection ad run by Jesse Helms showing a white hand crumpling up a slip of paper while a voice-over says "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?" Not racist, Joe?
So what IS the difference between "desegregate" and "integrate"? Not clear from this. What IS clear is that he opposes Affirmative Action. "Quotas" is the slur used by racist opponents of attempts to bring more African-Americans into places long closed to them, namely universities and white collar jobs. As far as "ensuring mediocrity," since only a select few blacks will be chosen, the best and most qualified ones will be picked. So that sentence ONLY makes sense if you believe all blacks are innately inferior to all whites!
Ohh, INTEGRATION is the "most racist" concept, NOT, say, Jim Crow laws,or lynching, or redlining, or government rules barring blacks from government benefit programs like subsidized mortgages and the G.I. Bill, or "theories" of innate black "inferiority," integration is the most racist thing!
This one has to go down in the Annals of Disingenuousness. The point of school integration wasn't that some darkie had to "rub shoulders with my white child" (notice how he personalizes it about his child!) in order to learn, but that segregated schools for the descendants of slaves were deliberately made grossly inferior to those for the "white" population, starved of funds and resources. The 1954 Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education decision finally dropped the myth of "separate but equal" schools, a "legal doctrine" used to justify segregation, because reality overwhelmed it. An avalanche of facts, and the social pressure of the civil rights movement, forced the change in legal "reasoning."
Note: The Supreme Court, which was extremely tardy in recognizing and doing a thing to redress the gross repression and persecution of blacks in America, came out with the Brown decision in 1954. Here's Biden in 1975, twenty-one years later, resisting it and hewing to the segregationist line.
But guess what? You can always hire some amoral liar to lie for you:
Talk about turning reality upside down! Other than adamantly opposing school integration, and Affirmative Action, spearheading "crime" bills that increased the repression of black communities, and forming close alliances with the worst arch-segregationists in the Senate (the closest relationships with any of his Senate colleagues, the ones he rhapsodizes about to this day), what exactly has Biden done FOR civil rights? Huh Bill?
Biden did play a major role in imprisoning millions of blacks over the years by taking the lead in pushing extremely repressive "crime" bills through Congress. He even instructed his staff that he wanted to be known for this. (These days, he's presenting himself as a criminal "justice" "reformer."
He was a key figure in the draconian punishments for possessing minuscule amounts of crack cocaine.
Stoking racial panics in the name of "fighting crime" has been a hallmark of Biden's Senate career.
Yet Joe Biden insists he doesn't have "a racist bone" in his body. But his ligaments, tendons, arteries, and veins sure seem racist.
Joe Biden may really believe he isn't a racist. He's the type of racist whose racism is so ingrained and unconscious that he isn't even aware how racist he is. But then, this is a man who never imagined that pawing, sniffing, hugging, and kissing strange women, children, boys, wouldn't be considered perfectly natural. After all, everyone ELSE does it, right? (Wrong.) How clueless IS Joseph Biden?
Pretty clueless. [1]
Lucky Boy! The Vice President of the United States wants to give you a kiss on the lips!
Biden is a throwback in time. Electing him president would be revanchist. And in policy terms, he would be no better than Trump (like Trump, he's for a reactionary Supreme Court, being the man who is more responsible than anyone for putting arch-reactionary Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
Biden and Trump are much alike. Both are devoted first and foremost to promoting the interests of the richest people. Biden publicly defends billionaires- as if billionaires don't have enough protection. Both Biden and Trump are U.S. imperialists, of course. (They wouldn't have establishment support if they weren't.) Both are compulsive liars. And both are racists.
THAT is the choice the power structure wishes to offer the citizens of America in 2020. An unchanging and seemingly unchangeable status quo of imperialism, corporate oligarchy, bourgeois class dictatorship.
Unfortunately the flock of sheep that is the bulk of the American electorate refuse to even vote for the available alternatives that have managed through great effort to claw their way onto most state ballots (the Green and Libertarian Parties) that would at least try to change the system of power. So ultimately some responsibility for this anti-human system must be placed on them.
One more thing Biden and Trump have in common: Grossly inappropriate behavior. Trump on television expressed a desire to date (read: sleep with) his daughter Ivanka, just for starters. And of course grabbing women's vaginas through their clothes, forcibly kissing them, walking in on naked "beauty pageant" contestants- all things he's publicly boasted about doing or was captured on video boasting about. (His numerous affairs and payoffs to silence women he's used for sex he's not so eager to brag about.)
The bourgeois blatherariat insist Biden is the best Democratic candidate, a man hardly preferable to Trump. American Democracy, an Inspiration to the World!