Joe Biden is at it again. The longtime senator from Delaware, former Vice President of the United States, and current Democratic presidential nomination front-runner recently confirmed his reputation as a human gaffe machine by admitting, in public, that he maintained cordial relations with Southern segregationist colleagues in the Senate forty-five years ago. After acknowledging that he’s “old-fashioned” compared to “the new New Left” (tell me about it, Joe), Biden said “[y]ou have to be able to reach consensus under our system – our Constitutional system of separation of powers.” As an example of his bipartisan bona fides, Biden returned to the Paleolithic period to discuss his ability to work with Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland and Georgia’s Senator Herman Talmadge, both of whom had exited the Senate by 1980.
Such an admission in 2019 America, however, is akin to a Class A Felony, as we learned from the viper-like reaction to Biden’s comments from among the twenty-four other Democratic presidential nomination hopefuls, as well as from people who hang out on Twitter and quaintly still refer to themselves as “journalists.” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker took a well-deserved break from hustling for race-based reparations to revive his flagging campaign by indignantly denouncing Biden’s comments, saying that Biden’s senatorial relationships with Eastland and Talmadge were “not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people,” that Biden is “wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples” of civility in politics, and that he, Cory Booker, is “disappointed that [Biden] hasn’t issued an immediate apology.” In the event, Biden politely declined Booker’s invitation to abase himself, replying instead that “Cory should apologize.”
It is tempting, no doubt, to revel in a certain amount of schadenfreude when considering the prospect of Creepy Uncle Joe’s political demise at the hands of utter mediocrities like Cory Booker and others whose warped ideology Biden has enabled over the course of his decades-long political career. On issues ranging from forced school busing to Anita Hill and points in between, for many on today’s Left Biden was first “on the wrong side of history” (to use a common though imbecilic phrase) before getting right with the Left for sake of political expediency. Even President Trump joined the internecine squabble, unsurprisingly seeming to relish the opportunity to take pot-shots at his would-be 2020 rival from behind his Twitter bunker.
Setting aside for the moment, however, the easy humor in seeing the Left eat one of its own, the attempted defenestration of Joe Biden serves as another ominous example that for many on the political Left (and not a few on the political Right), anyone who has ever, at any time, hinted at disagreeing with their chimerical views on race relations is anathema. The recent case of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, in which that Democrat politico was found guilty in the court of Leftist opinion of Doing Bad Things Thirty-Five Years Ago, was a bellwether. Commutation of Governor Northam’s sentence only was secured, it seems, by his shockingly frank commitment, made on a local radio broadcast, of support for legalized infanticide (something which, as an aside, is fast becoming commonplace among Democratic Party elites). In Joe Biden’s case, the Sage of New Castle has been charged with Being Nice To Bad People Forty-Five Years Ago, a crime similar to that of which Governor Northam was convicted. It remains to be seen whether and under what circumstances Biden might secure a similar commutation of his sentence, or whether he shall be cast into the outer darkness. Nevertheless, the trend continues unabated.
The practical effect of this trend, of course, is the continued purge of Southern and American history and heroes. If the principle at work is that anyone in American history who held different views on race relations from those now held in 2019 by Woke Twitter and the mainstream press (but I repeat myself) is beyond the pale – and who can doubt but that is, in fact, the principle at work in these cases – then any American alive prior to 1990 is subject to un-personing by the Left. This includes not only icky Southern segregationist senators and dead Confederate politicians and soldiers, but also every single “respectable,” “mainstream” American personage of note from George Washington forward, including St. Abraham the Great (Emancipator) himself, who held, shall we say, highly unfashionable racial views. The result is a complete scrubbing of American history, a whitewashing the likes of which no advanced nation ever has experienced previously, save perhaps Tsarist Russia in the wake of the October Revolution.
And this is precisely the point. As Czech Soviet dissident author Milan Kundera has written from personal experience, “[t]he first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” This very process has been ongoing, by various means and methods, for decades in the American South. It appears the cancer has metastasized to the point of including the forty-five year old professional relationships with senatorial Badthinkers of a former Vice President and current frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of the two major American political parties. Say it ain’t so, Joe!
