Thursday, August 16, 2012
Vice President Joe Biden has made a long career out of
saying crude and stupid things, and now he has outdone himself by affecting a
southern accent and telling a substantially black audience in Virginia (he
seemed to think he was in North Carolina) that if Romney has his way “he gonna
put y’all back in chains.”
The Obama campaign already has established its reputation
as a lowlife operation, trafficking in risibly and plainly untrue statements —
Mitt Romney killed my wife! — but the latest from Biden is so grotesque and
morally illiterate that it deserves a special mention. It bears noting, first,
that Mr. Biden spent his Senate years comfortable in the company of a
Democratic lion who had borne the title “Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan”
and who used the term “white n****r” on national television, and, second, that
Mr. Biden represented a highly segregated state. His party has undermined the
economic and educational interests of African-Americans at every turn, among
other ways by fighting the D.C. scholarship program that benefits the children
served by Washington’s failed public schools.
This is the sort of thing that we’re accustomed to
hearing from Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan. To hear it from the vice president
of the United States is something else altogether. Romney was right to hit back
hard at the Obama campaign in the wake of these outrageous remarks, but, given
the administration’s lack of a policy success story to tell, such outrages are
likely to come thick and deep, and Romney will have to rise above them.
Mitt Romney has an impeccable record on civil-rights
issues, having learned at the knee of his father, a Republican who campaigned
on civil rights in the 1960s. To suggest as Biden did that Romney’s program has
something — anything — in common with slave-trading is vile even by the
standards of Democratic campaign rhetoric. That no Democrat of note has spoken
up against it is a testament to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the
party and the political movement it represents.
Biden’s condescending “y’all” and phony mush-mouthed
g-dropping suggest a great deal about what he really thinks of the southern
blacks he is attempting to buffalo with this embarrassing nonsense. He should
be ashamed of himself, and those who associate with him should be ashamed of
themselves.
An honorable president would dismiss Biden. Barack Obama
probably will buy him a beer.
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