The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden's Problem With Blacks

Were Joe Biden a Republican, his political career would’ve ended years ago. No, the GOP doesn’t discriminate on the basis of dementia. But it does tend to drum out the racists in its midst.

Sadly, the same can’t be said of the Democrats. When one of theirs says something racially insensitive, they tend to circle the wagons — which is precisely what they’ve been doing with Biden all these years.

As political analyst Deroy Murdock writes, “Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate does nothing to erase his years of anti-Black slurs, friendships and policies.”

Murdock, who himself is black and whose parents immigrated from Costa Rica, then rattles off a litany of Biden’s offenses. Many of these, like his recent “You ain’t black!” quote, you’ve likely already heard. But others, like his little-reported second swipe at the black community for what he perceives as its lack of diversity, betray the set-in-stone worldview of a decrepit old white dude who thinks blacks are, in Murdock’s words, “as tough to differentiate from each other as licorice sticks.”

How many Republicans, for example, could get away with saying, “Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids”? Or warning a largely black audience in Virginia in 2012 that if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were to win that year’s presidential election, they were “gonna put y'all back in chains”? Or bragging about being civil and having “got things done” with segregationist Democrats like Herman Talmadge and James Eastland, the latter of whom made no bones about his belief that blacks were “an inferior race”?

The question, of course, is rhetorical. Because the answer is “zero.”

This double standard isn’t anything new, though. Racist behavior and rhetoric have defined the Democrat Party since its inception. Back in 2008, economist and political commentator Bruce Bartlett published an eye-opening book that got precious little attention: Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. In it, Bartlett lays bare President Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the entire federal civil service; FDR’s appointment of a Klansman, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court; JFK’s apathy toward civil rights legislation; and the ascension of West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in history, who himself was a former Klansman.

“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side,” wrote Byrd to fellow racist Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS). “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

And lest you think Byrd’s missive is some sort of anomaly, Bartlett captured dozens of similar utterances from leading Democrats through the ages in this 2007 Wall Street Journal article.

Here’s a sample: “There’s less than 1% of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4% or 5% that is, are minorities. What is it in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

That, too, was Joe Biden, explaining educational disparities.

Here’s another: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

That was then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Democrat who became our nation’s 36th president. (Incidentally, he didn’t always just use the word “Negroes.” Nor did an earlier Democrat president and former Klansman, Harry Truman.)

Mention these inconvenient truths to a liberal, and he’ll likely snap back with something about “The Big Switch” — that magical moment during the ‘60s when the good Democrats became champions of equality and the bad ones became Republicans. Don’t buy it. As Dinesh D'Souza explained in his 2016 book Hillary’s America, Johnson once revealed his cynical vote-buying strategy on Air Force One, as he was encouraging two Democrat governors to support the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I’ll have those ni—ers voting Democratic for 200 years.”

And there you have it, just a sampling of the Democrats’ whitewashed history on race. Tell a friend. Or better yet, tell a black friend.