President Joe Biden is rightly being raked over the coals by Republicans for his latest egregious display of hypocrisy, which in this case couldn’t be chalked up solely to brain fog.
In his speech on Monday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, the now-shunted-aside Oval Office occupant reiterated a false claim about his predecessor. As it’s one of his key go-to accusations against former (and potentially future) President Donald Trump, Biden runs with the debunked anecdote whenever the opportunity presents itself—and then milks it for all it’s worth.
Rewriting history in order to: a) boast about prioritizing country over personal concerns, and b) to smear Trump, he recounted the events surrounding a deadly riot seven years ago in the state of Virginia.
“I ran for president in 2020 because of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017,” he bellowed to the crowd at the United Center arena. “Extremists coming out of the woods, carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, so emboldened by a president then in the White House that they saw as an ally. … Hate was on the march in America. Old ghosts in new garments, stirring up the oldest divisions, stoking the oldest fears, giving oxygen to the oldest forces that they long sought to tear apart America.”
He went on, “In the process, a young woman was killed. … When the president was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant. That’s when I realized … I could not stay on the sidelines.”
Yeah, right. That’s what caused the politician who fantasized his entire life about holding the highest office in the land to enter the race.
More importantly, Trump wasn’t referring to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists when he made the comment in question.
A recap of the awful episode is in order to illustrate Biden’s repeated disingenuousness in relation to it. Though it’s true that the two-day “Unite the Right” rally was organized by a white supremacist—to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from the park in the Confederate general’s name—the car-ramming that left one person dead and some 35 wounded was universally condemned. Yes, including by Trump. And the perpetrator, 20-year-old Alex Fields Jr., was justifiably sentenced to life in prison.
How Trump actually responded to the act of domestic terrorism that sent shockwaves around the United States was very different from the way that his words have been portrayed by many Democrats, especially Biden, since the incident.
Addressing reporters in its immediate aftermath, the then-president indeed said that there were “very fine people on both sides,” but he wasn’t giving a pass to racists. He was referring, rather, to the peaceful protesters on either side of the statue-removal debate, specifically stressing that neo-Nazis and white nationalists “have no place in America” and should be “condemned totally.”
So much for Biden’s slanderous citations. Still, karma is a bi**h and it came back to bite him at the DNC.
As pro-Hamas anarchists were throwing antisemitic tantrums and burning American flags outside the United Center arena, the lame duck leader said, “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
Hmmm.
What he failed to mention was Israel. Hearing shouts of “Genocide Joe” for not turning completely against the Jewish state after it suffered the worst atrocities since the Holocaust clearly made him uneasy.
Unlike Trump’s, Biden’s “both sides” remark was not taken out of context. This is evident in the sentiments he expressed right before uttering it.
“We’ll keep working to bring hostages home and end the war in Gaza and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” he said, omitting the identity of the captives and the terrorists who kidnapped them on Oct. 7.
Then he made a peculiar assertion.
“As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza,” he said. “A few days ago, I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since Oct. 7.”
Huh? Was this ad libbed or did a speech writer put that in there on purpose?
Either way, it would have been laughable if it weren’t such a grave slip. As if by way of explanation, he added, “We’re working around the clock, my Secretary of State, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”
And that’s when he acknowledged that the mob outside had “a point.” You know, because “a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
This wasn’t merely an example of creating moral equivalence where it doesn’t exist. It gave credence to the idea that the nameless “hostages” and the crimes committed against them and all Israelis by the savages who rule Gaza and their fellow travelers are all victims of some pointless war that has to be stopped.
It was ironic, then, that the “ceasefire now” sloganeers didn’t buy it. They were too busy hurling tired “tentifada” epithets.
The world isn’t likely to hear much more from Biden now that his party and fair-weather friends have put him out to pasture. In case he’s schlepped out for a last hurrah, however, he’d do well to refrain from invoking Charlottesville with Chicago so fresh in everybody’s minds.