Oghier
3255
‘Praise,’ ‘paean.’ That is nonsense. He did not praise anyone.
If we’re going to be the party of facts and reality, we need to be a little more respectful of them.
Banzai
3256
I guess the part that could be considered praise is that as bad as they were, they’d at least work with you to get things done, which is more than the GOP of today. That seems to be Biden’s point, that even the worst racists of yesteryear would work with you because of civility, while the GOP today is a brick wall of obstruction. He could have done that a whole lot better.
I … agree with @Timex. What Biden said wasn’t directly racist. It didn’t make any sense, and it was an idiotic thing to mention, but it wasn’t directly racist. There’s a WaPo article that presents a plausible account of what happened:
“He just misspoke,” said one Biden adviser. “The way Biden usually tells the story, he says Eastland didn’t call him ‘senator,’ he called him ‘son,’ ” the adviser said. “Eastland called him ‘boy’ and ‘son’ also. This was Eastland’s way of diminishing young senators.”
And now we look at the framing of Biden’s comment:
- It reminds people that Biden is really, really, really old. Like he was well established in the Senate before I was even a one-cell organism.
- It gets people to go back and look at all the chummy words and letters that Biden was exchanging with an exceptionally vile racist. In particular, how they both worked together to fight busing students in order to integrate schools.
- It reminds people of the time when the Democratic party was the party of the Confederacy and the Republican party was the party of Lincoln. That whole line that Dinesh D Susan and his ilk are pushing. Which should be laughable, since it was ages since that descriptor was true, but again, Biden is so very, very, very, old. What is ancient history to most of us is still within Biden’s living memory.
- It reminds people of what the other elderly candidates were doing at that same moment in history. E.g. Bernie was marching with MLK.
And all of this was completely unforced and voluntary, just Biden putting his best foot forward and then shooting it off.
(I wish I hadn’t collapsed the layers, I’m not happy with how it turned out. It needs more pep).
Biden as Bison. Never know what I’m gonna find on this forum!
That he was someone you could work with, make a deal with, in contrast to current Senators.
KevinC
3260
That sounds like a statement of fact, not praise. We were able to work together and get shit done in the past, but today’s GOP is strictly about party, not governance.
Well, do you think the problem is that he can only recall the segregationists he worked with back then, or do you think the problem is that he can actually recall non-segregationalists and (stupidly) chose the former as his example?
He’s a gaffe machine, and old, and way out of touch. This shit is going to keep happening.
(Also, too: ‘Those guys were better than these guys’ is praise. It may be faint praise, but it’s praise.)
I think the fact that he chose a segregationist is not a gaffe. It serves to accentuate the point he’s making, which (to me) is, “no matter how distasteful the views of senators in the past have been, I’ve been able to work with them, unlike these chucklefucks we have today.”
In that context, you’d want to use the worst example you could think of to draw a comparison, to bolster your point.
I think he deliberately chose a segregationalist to say “even the worst of them, we could at least work with, because the institution was functioning.”
edit: beaten to it!
As for gaffes, Biden has clearly learned from Trump that you can pile 'em up with no consequence (in the case of Trump, for “gaffes” read “deliberate, horrific statements that call into question his decency and soundness of mind”).
I think Biden is tacking toward people who, in theory, are fed up with the Woke Left, and wants to be like your steel-drivin’ dad who voted Democrat back in the 70s, and therefore he will err on the side of not apologizing for stuff. Will it work? Time will tell.
So far Biden’s gaffe’s have been telling brother to protect their 13-year old sisters from boys, and saying he can work with even the worst Republicans, pre-Trump, I’m confident, among my middle aged Democratic friends none of the seem offended.
Timex
3265
Biden in his speech to South Carolina Democrats basically just yelled, which i guess was supposed to suggest that he had energy, but it totally broke up the flow of what he was saying, and it just sounded weird.
Hey, it worked for Howard Dean, right?
Maybe, but Democrats aren’t Republicans.
I hope you have a lot of friends. On the other hand, there do seem to be a lot of Democrats — maybe people you don’t know — who don’t like these gaffes.
In this case, I believe the segregationists that he was talking about were Southern Democrats, not Republicans? Point still stands, but it’s funny when you reach back that far, the horrible racist people were Democrats back then, I believe.
Timex
3270
Yes, Eastland was a Democrat.
Doesn’t that make choosing him as the example even weirder? His claim is that, as a Democratic Senator, he was able to work with and make deals with…another Democratic Senator?
I feel like if Biden called the current GOP party “a bunch of chucklefucks” as part of an interview he might be able to get my vote away from Warren…
Alstein
3273
It was hard at times back then. Southern and non-SOuthern Dems were two different parties, and in the 50s , the hardcore racists run 3rd party against the Dems in the south like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.
There’s no doubt that we have tried to deal with these conservatives for long enough. They are parasites on our society. They cannot be reasoned with; they only know hatred and benefiting of their own kind. They take food from the mouths of the poor American people because of their sick avarice and filthy pursuit of lucre. They cannot help themselves, and they cannot be helped - it is fundamentally their nature. They must be finally and permanently eradicated, root and branch, for the good of the nation and its people. To try to bargain with them, understand them, is madness. Only destruction will do. They have worked their insidious evils against this state for far too long, and deserve the scourge that will be inflicted upon them.
That, for one, is what I would like Biden to say, and it’s what the American people want him to say. It’s about time.
