Neither the President Nor His Party Will Ever Stop Condescending to You

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

 

Joe Biden usually isn’t allowed to do events (or probably even remain awake) after his bedtime, and if today’s hilariously ill-timed gaffe is any indication, then his bedtime is getting earlier and earlier. He was on camera for a Voto Latino get-out-the-vote Zoom call — under most circumstances, perhaps the least interesting place in the United States to be. But in a zombified half-rant responding to the mess made by Tony Hinchcliffe at Donald Trump’s weekend rally, he bitterly dismissed Trump’s supporters — and therefore half the country — as “garbage.” Here is a link.

 

And here is a transcript of what he actually said:

 

Just the other day, a speaker at his [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something, I don’t—I don’t know, the Puerto Rican that I know, the Puerto Rico where I’m fr—in my home state of Delaware. They’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

 

Those were his words, transcribed with 100 percent fidelity, as you can verify yourself with your eyes and ears based on the countless clips now circulating. I would know because I transcribed them myself, as I do with all quotes from video interviews that I use in my pieces. I consider it proper journalistic practice to always take the time to do one’s own transcriptions, for long ago I found that other people’s can be unreliable — outlets often redact or “clean up” a favored subject’s words, as we are about to see.

 

But, before that, a note on what Joe Biden said. It’s really quite to the point, isn’t it? Biden thinks that Trump’s supporters are garbage. Democrats are trying to clean up the mess of that simple statement by arguing that Biden was really referring only to Tony Hinchcliffe. But, in all honesty, the second half of that statement above indicates to me that, by that point, Biden was back to talking about Donald Trump, not Hinchcliffe — and in any event, his words were clear enough. It’s a spill for the Dems to clean up, and a particularly unfortunate one in the final week of the campaign, when Democrats are trying to turn Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally into their big final messaging note.

 

So why do they have to do it so insultingly? Why must cravenly servile media partisans try to rewrite history? Once the AP’s and CNN’s accounts and transcripts went around, Biden spokesman Andrew Bates tried to shop a hilariously rewritten transcript that “cures” Biden’s language by magically inserting an apostrophe into the line quoted above and (pathetically) making his words read incoherently rather than clearly and precisely (which, for once, they were). Then Politico‘s Jonathan Lemire wrote it up with even more inventive repunctuation, in a transparent attempt to shore him up. This new version instantly became the universally agreed upon talking point on social media, as both mainstream-media commentators and the mad rabble alike desperately clinged to this branch.

 

Which is why it was at least somewhat satisfying when Biden’s own team, as well as other national Democrats, immediately sawed out the limb from under his desperately shilling defenders. They know what they saw on the tape, and they have concluded that there’s no getting away from what was said — it can’t be denied away by an eager media. The video is what it is. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro appeared on CNN tonight to flatly say that the president wasn’t helping by denouncing Trump supporters as “garbage.” Shapiro understands the stakes in his own state, after all.

 

Then Biden himself went to Twitter to “clarify” that he was trying to refer to Tony Hinchcliffe — as predictable a spin as could be imagined and one that nobody is under any requirement to accept with a straight face. I know what Joe Biden said, and I have every reason to believe that it is what he thinks, given that he shares a party and a legacy with Hillary “Basket of Deplorables” Clinton. You, with your partisan beliefs as they are, can choose to accept his “clarification.” Instead, I believe that a nasty, angry old man slipped his leash — as he has countless times in the past few months — and said what he and everyone else around him really believes.