By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 05, 2020
Poor Bernie Sanders! The youth vote failed to show up for
him. The youth vote always fails to show up — it will break your heart every
time. Senator Sanders didn’t lose to Joe Biden — he lost to Tinder, weed, and The
Resident. The kids were doing themselves a favor — young people have more
of a future for Senator Sanders and his coterie of socialist dingbat
malefactors to ruin.
Arising from the tumult, triumphant, was the dotty figure
of Joe Biden. Biden and Sanders vying for the Democratic nomination, Michael
Bloomberg perhaps at least dreaming idly of a third-party run — as of today,
the youngest man with a realistic shot of winning the 2020 presidential
election is Donald Trump, 73 years of age.
What can we say for Joe Biden?
For one thing, he is not a socialist.
…
…
…
So, he is not a socialist.
What is he?
He is a vicious self-serving political hack, for one
thing, one whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency.
You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying
drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank
his lunch,” as Biden puts it.
Never happened.
Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car
wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk,
that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk
or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove
into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden,
like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in
terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something
bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did
something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by
Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice
president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which
Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political
ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally
plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.
But that’s Joe Biden. Just a regular guy from Scranton
who takes the train to work (with a 20-man security detail swarming the
platform at every stop and the aisles roped off to separate him from the
riffraff, as I have seen firsthand) whose kids ended up growing vastly wealthy
from unpredictable business opportunities to which they had no especial claim
beyond their proximity to political power.
Biden was protected by the Democratic political machine
and then by Senate seniority; later, he was protected by the Obama
administration and by protectors of the Obama administration. And so he
continues doing the same things he always has done. Some of you may remember
that Biden — who got into trouble for plagiarism back in the 1980s, when I was
in eighth grade (and who already was running for president way back then) — was
pillaging Margaret Thatcher’s speeches (and Neil Kinnock’s, too, not that
anybody remembers him) to flesh out one of his own orations. That was
embarrassing. What is embarrassing is that he is still doing it, as the Washington
Post reports, with his campaign stealing material for advocacy groups and
presenting it as the work of his campaign.
That is a pattern. A man who can lightly misrepresent the
circumstances surrounding the death of his wife and infant daughter is liable
to be just as cavalier when it comes to, say, slavery, telling a largely black
audience that Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — wants to “put y’all back in chains.”
(Oh, that “y’all”!) Cynical doesn’t begin to cover it.
One of the worst features of our political life is the
ugly and dishonest fights we have over Supreme Court nominations — a habit that
can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden, who along with Ted Kennedy, that
pillar of human decency, organized one of the worst smear campaigns in modern
American political history against Robert Bork, whose great crime against
humanity was taking the “extremist” position that the Constitution actually
says what it says rather than what anybody with power wishes it would say at
any given moment, and that the way to amend the Constitution is to amend the
Constitution rather than having nine wizards in black robes pull previously
undiscovered constitutional mandates out of the penumbras upon which they sit
all day. Don’t like the way Merrick Garland was treated? Mitch McConnell didn’t
start that game — he is just better at it than his contemporary Democratic
colleagues are. For lying partisan viciousness in the modern mode, Joe Biden is
your man.
He is a liar, a corruptor of institutions, and a grifter
of the first order.
But he’s not a socialist. I’ll give him that.
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