Tag: Joe Biden

national politics & policies political challengers

Biden’s Big Lie

Joe Biden, good people hoax, liar, lies, DNC

“In war,” Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century BC, “truth is the first casualty.”

So, too, these days, in political campaigns.

Last week, in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Joe Biden promised to “draw on the best of us” and “be an ally of the light.” But then the 47-year Washington veteran pivoted, waving the bloody shirt from Charlottesville by claiming that President Donald Trump had declared “neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists” to be “very fine people,” and therefore “we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

Did Trump dub some neo-Nazis “very fine people”?

“And you had some very bad people in that group,” the president explained to a reporter. “But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Noting that “George Washington was a slave-owner,” Mr. Trump asked, “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? …

“It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people,” he continued. “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Unequivocal.

Outraged by the Democratic contender’s false contention, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams called Biden a “Brain-Dead Race Hoaxer” … and worse.

But Biden is hardly alone. The Democrats and most of the media join in ignoring Trump’s explicit statements, pushing their myopically malevolent misinterpretation.

Should this smear defeat Trump in November, an era of political truth-telling will not be ushered in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Months ago, the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org determined that Mr. Biden, in asserting that President Trump had failed to condemn neo-Nazis, had made false claims against the president — ignoring numerous recordings in living color of the president making those exact censures.

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Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Believe Biden?

“Women should be believed.”

That’s what Joe Biden said when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation process. While former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Biden is still for “taking the woman’s claims seriously,” now that he’s been accused, he wants us to “vet it, look into it.”*

Biden wasn’t alone then — “believe all women” became something of a rallying cry — and now his new procedural caution also echoes across the land.

“Allegation against Biden prompts reexamination of ‘Believe women’” The Washington Post headlined its report. “The inconvenient truth is that this story is impacting us differently,” the creator of the MeToo expression, Tarana Burke, told The Post, “because it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”

“Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do,” Linda Hirshman writes in The New York Times, “the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.”

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” Martin Tolchin explained in a letter to the Times, where he once worked as a reporter before becoming editor-in-chief of The Hill. “I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance.”

Thus principle loses to expedience.

As important as fighting sexual predators is, the old principle of trusting accusers only by sex is no better than the new principle of trusting the accused by party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As for vetting? “We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them feel uncomfortable,” The New York Times tweeted, quoting from their story. Citing “imprecise language,” the tweet has been removed and that last phrase scrubbed from the online story without explanation.

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ideological culture media and media people

News, Bias & Winning

To Tell The Truth, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, socialism,

In late February, ABC News suspended a veteran correspondent, David Wright, after Project Veritas released video in which the reporter acknowledged he was a socialist and criticized his network’s political coverage.

“Oh yeah,” Wright responded, when asked if he were a democratic socialist. “More than that I would consider myself a socialist.”

He also critiqued his network: “We don’t hold [Trump] to account. We also don’t give him credit for what things he does do.”

“David Wright has been suspended,” ABC said in a statement, “and to avoid any possible appearance of bias, he will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns.”

But what if ABC’s removal of the reporter were more about hiding bias than combating it?

That story came to mind while considering Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suspension of his presidential campaign. I was amazed at how — just when it seemed the Vermont senator might have an actual shot at capturing the Democratic nomination — a whirlwind of harsh media coverage was unleashed. Simultaneously, other candidates rushed to end their campaigns in a coordinated coronation of former Vice-President Joe Biden.

“Many of Sanders’ allies believe he was inundated with unfair attacks after his Nevada win,” The Boston Globe reported, with “some Democrats and pundits warning he would lose to Trump because he’s too far to the left.”

Meanwhile: “The Biden campaign is expected,” noted The New York Times, “to highlight a series of policy positions that show how he has moved closer to Mr. Sanders on health care and other issues.”

For Democrats and uber-progressive major media outlets, was Bernie’s problem that he’s a socialist? Or his openness and honesty about it?

Seems winning trumps everything. Pun intended.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political challengers

The Mandela Effect

People have been known to plagiarize college term papers. Even a few political speeches have been surreptitiously copied and brazenly re-orated without proper attribution. But you can’t plagiarize getting arrested, can you?

Not really. What you can do is lie about being arrested — just make it up out of whole cloth.

That may be what former Vice-President and once-upon-a-time Democratic Party presidential front-runner Joe Biden has been doing in recent days “as he confronts challenging political headwinds,” following fourth and fifth place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively — though he came in (a distant) second in Nevada over the weekend.

“I had the great honor of meeting [Nelson Mandela],” Biden told a South Carolina crowd last week. “I 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.”

“No, I was never arrested,” U.N. Ambassador at that time, Andrew Young, now 87, told The New York Times, “and I don’t think he was, either.”

Back in 1977, Mr. Biden was Senator Biden from Delaware. Methinks the arrest of a U.S. Senator by a foreign government might spark at least a single news story. Be informed: “A check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest.”

The Times also notes that Biden “did not mention it in his 2007 memoir when writing about a 1970s trip to South Africa.”

Plagiarism sunk Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign. This time out, the politician’s gaffes, bouts of bizarre truculence, and age-related physical failings have hampered his quest. Add to all that, now, the apparent fact that Joe can’t even get arrested.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The upshot of the Biden candidacy may amount to nothing more than an increased interest in “the Mandela Effect.”

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education and schooling national politics & policies

A Flip-Flop, Not an Echo

Joe Biden, school choice, meme, flip-flop,

“If I’m President, Betsy DeVos’s whole notion [of school choice], from charter schools to this, are gone.”

That’s what Joe Biden, presidential candidate, had to say this December at an education forum.

Charter schools are K‑12 schools that are publicly funded but managed semi-independently— not by the standard educational bureaucracy. Biden’s repudiation represents a break with the Obama administration, which had voiced support for charter schools.

One reason for Obama’s support may have been that so many Democratic voters, like other voters, want an alternative to standard public schools.

According to a survey conducted by Beck Research, 56 percent of Democrats “favor the concept of school choice,” with “school choice” understood to mean giving parents “the right to use tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs.”

Once upon a time, Biden supported greater educational opportunity — explicitly, not just tacitly as a member of the Obama administration. But now he slams charter schools for taking money from public schools. (But in a different way from how public schools take money from taxpayers.) More and more, this man’s “moderation” seems indistinguishable from opposition to any even halting expansion of our freedom.

Andrew Cuff of the Commonwealth Foundation suggests that a Democratic presidential candidate who advocates school choice will gain an edge over his competitors — given the popularity of school choice among Democratic voters.

How about it, Joe? Flip-flop again.

But this time in favor of freedom.

And better education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Worse Than Hypocrisy

Joe Biden, Obama, medal, money, campaign finance,

“You shouldn’t accept any money from a Super PAC,” former Vice-President Joe Biden claims he advised his presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders, “because [if you do] people can’t possibly trust you.”

Now it must be impossible to trust Mr. Biden.

“Joe Biden is apparently dropping his long-held opposition to the creation of an outside group,” the media tepidly informed last week, “that would supply an infusion of money to benefit his campaign.”

That is: the dreaded Super PAC.

In his 2017 book, Biden claimed he would not have accepted such “outside” support had he entered the 2016 contest — even though he “knew there was big money out there for me.”

Why not? “[I]n a system awash with money,” the former VEEP wrote, “the middle class didn’t have a fighting chance.”

What changed? Now this drowsy Democrat actually needs campaign cash!

“Biden has struggled to raise money, and last week, his campaign reported having $9 million on hand,” reports The Washington Post, “roughly a third as much as some of his top Democratic rivals.”

Necessity is the catalyst of hypocrisy?

“As president, Joe Biden will push to remove private money from our federal elections,” his campaign explained. “He will advocate for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and end the era of unbridled spending by Super PACs.”

Your private money and mine has as much right to engage in federal elections as Mr. Biden does. And I’ve wa r ned many times about the free-speech repealing amendment the doddering Democrat frontrunner is pushing.

There may be worse things than hypocrisy, but there are few things worse than opposing First Amendment rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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