Joe Biden sucks. This isn’t anything new or novel, and the list of reasons why the former vice president and Senate pal of racist good ol’ boys Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms is one of the worst options in the potential 2020 field of Democratic candidates is extremely long and well-founded. That said, the latest entries added to that list are doozies.
On Thursday, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski resurfaced a pair of C-SPAN clips from November 1993 in which Biden bemoaned the hopelessness of rehabilitating Americans convicted of a crime. Warning his Senate colleagues and the public about the “predators on our streets,” Biden said, “We have an obligation to cordon them off from society.” It only goes downhill from there:
Even more so than a great number of Democrats that populated Congress during the 1990s, Biden is infamously forever tied to the rash of heinous crime bills that flowed from the political center during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. At the time of the above speech, Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was making his “predator” argument a day before the vote on the Senate version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
This isn’t cherry-picking, either. Biden was already using similar not-so-coded racist language when he was a freshman senator. Another report published on Thursday, this one from the Washington Post about an interview with a Delaware newspaper, revealed Biden’s beliefs on reparations and integration circa 1975. There’s this gem:
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race,’ ” Biden told a Delaware-based weekly newspaper in 1975. “I don’t buy that.”
And then this lovely follow-up:
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” Biden said. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Earlier today, the New York Times reported, citing a Biden strategist, that the former VP is 95 percent sure he wants to run in 2020. If there’s a just God watching over us, that five percent keeping him out of the race will hold strong, and we can avoid having to spend the next 18 months explaining why anyone with a four-decade career peddling this shit should be kept far, far away from the leadership of a party trying to sell itself as even the slightest bit progressive.