‘The devil lives in the details if the details that you’re talking about would affect the outcome of something that is about to happen or should happen…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For weeks after other Democratic primary candidates were well into their campaigns, former Vice President Joe Biden kept politicos in suspense, insisting that he needed to be at 100 percent.
In late February, for instance, he told an audience at the University of Delaware, “I am certain about where the family is. But the second piece is that I don’t want this to be a fool’s errand, and I want to make sure that if we do this—and we’re very close to getting to a decision—that I am fully prepared to do it.”
But on Wednesday, the gaffe-prone, flip–flopping, forgetful front-runner in the Democratic primary said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that it was the 2017 clashes between far-right demonstrators and Antifa counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years prior to his candidacy, that brought him to 100 percent.
“When those folks came out of the fields carrying torches with contorted faces and carrying Nazi flags and chanting the anti-Semitic bile that was chanted in the streets of Germany in the ’30s and accompanied by the white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan—and, you know, those spewing hate were met by people who said ‘Not in my town’ and a young woman was killed and when the president was asked about it, they asked what he thought, he said, he said, ‘I thought there were very fine people on both sides,’” Biden told Colbert.
“No president—sitting president—has ever said anything like that, making a moral equivalence between haters and those folks who said ‘no, no, not in my town,’” Biden continued, without evidence.
The revision of his own personal history was just the beginning.
Biden’s appearance, on the heels of recent criticism that he made up crucial details in a war story repeatedly used in his stump speeches, was a veritable smorgasbord of inaccuracies, falsehoods, misleading statements and embellishments—as well as a few staggering campaign promises that one only hopes were lies.
A Blind Eye to Antifa
Notably, Biden repeated the common and demonstrably false left-wing trope that Trump’s response to the deadly Charlottesville protests was “racist.”
On the contrary, Trump unequivocally condemned the violence and hate—the only problem being that, by all accounts except for Biden’s and those of other partisan revisionists on the Left, the violence and hate on display clearly came from both sides.
Antifa thugs used projectiles and improvised flame throwers to attack demonstrators who had obtained legal permits to protest against the illegal removal of two Civil War statues, which courts ultimately ruled were protected war monuments.
Nonetheless, radical leftists in the city government gave their best effort to thwart the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights—and to foment the tension and violence.
At least one Antifa-linked professor from the University of North Carolina openly wielded a rifle in the crowd.
The suspicious circumstances surrounding the Left’s deceptive narrative have fueled legitimate false-flag theories about the episode, with some noting that rally organizer Jason Kessler had been an Obama supporter, and that corrupt city and state leaders purposely gave the orders for law-enforcement to stand down during the unrest.
Ironically, Biden said nothing of the violent and deadly rioting in cities throughout the country—including Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Dallas, Texas—that happened on his watch during the Obama administration.
While fear-mongering and stoking racial tension with his misleading claims about Charlottesville proved a convenient vehicle for Biden to attack the current president, he also criticized Trump for doing exactly that.
“I really do believe that we’re in a place that we haven’t been in a long, long time, and the president’s taken us there,” he said. “… And playing on the fears and the, and, and, and, and the, uh, the uh, the divisions in the country is, uh, is, is—that’s not who we are as a country.”
Forgetting the Record
Biden’s long, speech-like answers continued to attack Trump but rarely tackled the questions Colbert asked.
Asked what lessons his past experiences had taught him, Biden suggested that the American landscape had become unrecognizable in less than three years since the Obama administration.
“America’s changed drastically since we left office, and the problems the next president is going to inherit are fundamentally different than just going back to a pre-Trump era,” he said.
The career politician with more than four decades to his name inside the D.C. swamp sought to stake his claim as someone who would bring the same “hope and change” of the Obama years—but different.
“We’re in trouble around the world, we’ve dissed our allies, we’ve embraced our enemies, we’re in a physician [sic] where we no longer lead by the power of our example at home,” Biden said, again ignoring his own administration’s record for doing precisely those things.
Obama spurned close U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom and Israel, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a “reset” button to Russia and her successor, John Kerry, helped broker a nuclear deal that delivered billions in cash to Iran.
Obama’s administration broke its promises to end wars in the Middle East and gave rise to the even greater threat of ISIS, which swept into power throughout Syria and Iraq after being dismissed as the “JV team.”
At home, the crooked heads of the top intelligence agencies systemically leaked information to cohorts in the liberal media and used false innuendo as the basis to spy on Trump, the candidate of an opposing party’s political campaign.
The ‘Dark Side’ of History
Biden’s selective memory wasn’t limited to the Obama years.
After having drawn much criticism in June for talking about how he had worked closely in cooperation with pro-segregationist Democrats in the U.S. Senate during his early years, he did an about-face Wednesday by waxing poetically about how America had confronted racism head-on during the early 20th century.
However, many racist Democrats continued to serve their party, including Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.—the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a former KKK leader—who did not retire until two years into the Obama administration.
“There’s always been this struggle,” Biden said. “American history’s not been a fairy tale. We’ve been down this road before.”
He discussed a 1925 rally in which 30,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
‘There were 30-some people in the House who were Ku Klux Klan members, a half a dozen in the Senate, etc.,” Biden continued. “And what happened, though, is—in order to deal with that percentage of the population that’s always been on the dark side—is that the rest of the nation stood up.”
Devil in the Details
Biden addressed his gaffe tendencies in a second segment of the show but downplayed their nature, glossing over his major historical revisions.
“I think it’s fair to go after a political figure for anything, OK? I mean, we stand up and that comes with the territory,” he said.
“But here’s the deal: Any gaffe that I have made—and I’ve made gaffes like every politician I know has—have been not about a substantive issue,” he continued. “They’ve been about other—I’m trying to talk about what other people have done.”
Biden acknowledged fudging minor facts but said he didn’t think it was “relevant” as long as the big picture was accurate.
“I don’t get wrong things like, you know, there is, uh, we should lock kids up in cages at the border,” he said. “… The devil lives in the details if the details that you’re talking about would affect the outcome of something that is about to happen or should happen.”
Lightning Round
In terms of whoppers, Biden saved the worst for last, during what Colbert termed the “lightning round.”
He first claimed, after fifteen minutes of chicanery, that his honesty was one of his biggest assets in the presidential contest since it made him more electable.
“The electability relates to whether or not they think I’m straightforward, whether I’m—whether I’m honest with them, whether I’m going in a position where I do what I say I’m gonna do,” Biden said. “I say what I’m gonna do and I do it, and uh, and so that’s all I, I can say.”
Asked what he would do differently from the Obama administration, Biden instead repeated a patently false claim that Obama’s presidency had been scandal-free.
“Everything landed on his desk but locusts,” Biden said, “and he got an awful lot done—and the biggest thing was, not one single, solitary piece of, of illegitimate action took place in the United States presidency with him.”
Biden also answered affirmatively to a question about whether he would appoint Obama to be president (“He’s fully qualified…”) and indicated that he had asked former First Lady Michelle Obama to be his vice president but later said he was joking.
He also countered the idea that his campaign was one of “incrementalism” versus the sweeping proposals of radical progressives like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Biden first said his boldest change would be handling the environment, with a $400 billion investment in climate-change spending.
However, he quickly lost his thread and pivoted to medical research.
“If we took the money that were available to us and we invested in healthcare in a way to find cures—I forgot more about the cancer fight than most people know,” he said.
“We could, in fact, be curing major pieces of cancer, we could be taking out Alzheimer’s,” he said. “We should—there’s so much we can do that is bold —very bold—that I’m the only one proposing.”