Here’s a suggestion: If you are an old white man running for president and opponents and pundits claim that you’re out of touch and “old-fashioned,” you probably shouldn’t recall your work with segregationist senators as a fond memory of the good old days where people with differing opinions could talk to one another.
And when recalling this nostalgic allegory of how “back in your day” things were different, you really shouldn’t point out that the senator that didn’t want to integrate the South didn’t refer to your old white ass as “boy” and how he referred to you as “son.”
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 19, 2019
Unless of course, you are former Vice President Joe Biden. Then keep right on driving that old fogey ass story right off the cliff because this is who you are and it just keeps showing.
During a fundraiser in New York City on Tuesday, Obama’s BFF decided that he’d talk about the differences across party lines now versus when he was a senator in the 1970s and 1980s.
According to Yahoo, Biden—who is not black, black adjacent, mixed, black-ish, black-like or Justin Bieber—decided that it would be wise to share a story of how he worked with racial segregationists “like the Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia,” who Biden said was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.”
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said, and then, because he really wanted to drive his point home, he switched to a Southern accent and noted that the senator “never called me ‘boy,’” a racial epithet demeaning to black men.
“He always called me ‘son,’” said Biden.
Does Joe Biden know that he’s a white man? Seriously, is Joseph R. Biden aware that he’s not black? I feel like former President Obama taught him the handshake and now Biden believes that he can sit at our table. Not sure why Biden would point out that a white man didn’t call him “boy” since it’s a racially demeaning epithet used to degrade black men, but that didn’t stop presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker, (D-N.J.), from gathering Biden’s ass up.
“You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys.’ Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity,” Booker wrote in a statement.
“Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone,” he continued.
From Yahoo:
Eastland, who was often referred to as the “the Godfather of Mississippi Politics,” was a wealthy plantation owner who opposed integration—the “mongrelization” of the races as he called it—and the civil rights movement during his long tenure as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he led when Biden, a young self-proclaimed liberal from Delaware, was sworn in in 1973.From 1956 through to his retirement in 1978, Eastland insisted on the blue-slip process, requiring that judicial nominees receive positive recommendations from both of their state’s senators before the nomination could be considered by the committee. The policy has been criticized as abusive and employed by Eastland to give veto power to himself and his fellow Southern senators to block nominees who were in favor of desegregation and civil rights.Previously, when campaigning for Alabama Democrat Doug Jones in October 2017, Biden, in a call for bipartisanship, invoked his relationship with Eastland, who he said addressed the former lawmaker as “son” instead of “senator.”
“Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists,” Biden said. “You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.
“At least there was some civility,” he said Tuesday, on the eve of Juneteenth, which commemorates when the last slaves were freed 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
“I know the new New Left tells me that I’m—this is old-fashioned,” the Democratic front-runner continued. “Well, guess what: If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president. That’s what it does. You have to be able to reach consensus under our system—our constitutional system of separation of powers.”
Biden is continuously showing America who he is and my hope is that this time, America believes him.
