We are more interested, however, in his taped announcement and his interview, because in them he told what in more civilized times were known as lies.
The bulk of his video announcement had to do with the “riot” at Charlottesville, caused by a largely unsupervised clash between white supremacists on one side and on the other, thugs from Antifa and other violent groups from the far left. These two groups hijacked what would otherwise have been a peaceful demonstration by people who objected to the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, and by people who thought the statue should be removed. Sadly, those peaceful people were overwhelmed by others whose opinion on the statue was merely a shoehorn for a violent demonstration. Sadly, one of the peaceful opponents of the statue was killed when struck by an automobile driven by a white supremacist who was fleeing violent left-wing thugs. Sadly, Mr. Biden chose to lie about what President Trump said about that day’s events.
President Trump said the victim was “an incredible young woman.” He said the man who drove the car that killed her was “a disgrace to himself, his family and his country...a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.” He also said this, in reference to the protest: “you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? . . . now in the other group, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and the helmets and the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.” A bit earlier, the President said, “there were very bad people in that group [protesting against the removal of the statue], but you also had people who were very fine people on both sides.”
Anyone who is able to comprehend English can see that the President condemned the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists, and also condemned the violent thugs who opposed them; and also that the President said favorable things about the peaceful demonstrators who either supported the removal of the statue or opposed it. It is not honest to claim that the President said that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists were “good people.” In fact, he said just the opposite – that they should be “condemned totally.”
That event took place in 2017, but Mr. Biden chose to make it the key point of his 2019 announcement, and he did so in order to repeat the outrageous lie that the President “had assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.” Mr. Trump did no such thing, in fact, he condemned the violent people and praised the peaceful protestors on both sides. Why Mr. Biden chose to spread a lie, and to make it the basis of his campaign announcement, is hard to understand, but we can recall that a few weeks ago, when he said that Vice President Pence was “a decent guy,” Mr. Biden was pilloried by the left and soon recanted. Mr. Biden may see himself as some sort of “moderate,” but his announcement shows he is willing to tells lies about the President and is absolutely unwilling to tell the truth to the left. Remember, the Charlottesville demonstration occurred over the threatened removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. As an interesting historical note, guess which one of the twenty or so Democratic candidates voted in 1975 to restore the US citizenship of Robert E. Lee? Yes, that’s right – Joe Biden. How will the Antifa left, defended by Mr. Biden in his announcement, respond to that?
But Mr. Biden also told untruths in his visit to The View. He said “I believed [Anita Hill] from the beginning.” You remember Ms. Hill, who infamously claimed during the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court that Mr. Thomas was a sexual harasser. However, the late Senator Arlen Specter wrote this in his autobiography: “Biden told me ‘It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying’.” This is not the first time that Mr. Biden has told conflicting stories about the Anita Hill episode, but, its relevance here is that it is another lie he tells as his candidacy leaves the starting point. There are plenty of current issues which Mr. Biden could address in announcing, but he chose to use two distorted and untruthful historical accounts, one from two years ago and one from thirty years ago. That itself probably tells us all we need to know about Mr. Biden.