Thread by @studentactivism

Okay, so now I'm watching Biden's eulogy for Strom Thurmond. And yes, I'm gonna livetweet. (And no, it's not happening now.) c-span.org/video/?c467893…

At Strom Thurmond's funeral Biden said Thurmond was "born into an era of essentially unchallenged and unexamined mores of the South."

(Narrator: Thurmond was born in 1902, a few months before the publication of Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk.)

Biden says that at each stage of his life "Strom represented exactly where he came from."

So much for personal accountability.

Biden tells a joke in his Strom Thurmond eulogy about a guy coming up to Thurmond wanting to fight him because of his racism. (The guy who wants to punch Strom Thurmond is the butt of the joke.)

"I disagreed deeply with Strom Thurmond on the issue of civil rights and many other issues, but I watched him change. We became good friends."

(Thurmond never actually renounced his white supremacist views.)

slate.com/news-and-polit…

"Like all of us, Strom was a product of his time." DRINK!

"This is a man who in 1947 the New York Times ran a lead editorial [on], saying 'Strom Thurmond, Hope of the South,' and talked about how he had set up reading programs [to] get better books for separate but equal schools."

Yes, that's Joe Biden, in 2003, calling the South Carolina public schools of 1947 "separate but equal." For real. It's at 8:45 in the clip. Watch for yourself.

(Also, it wasn't an editorial, it was an op-ed. By a Southern politician. And it didn't call Thurmond "the Hope of the South." In fact, it only mentioned him briefly.) timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1…

Biden mentions his friendship with Senator John Stennis, another white supremacist.

Mentions John Stennis calling him "son," a timely shout-out today.

Biden relates a story of a dying John Stennis repudiating his opposition to the civil rights movement in a private conversation with him. He has no such story to tell of his friend Strom Thurmond.

"When partisanship was a winning option, he chose friendship." The idea that personal friendship transcends not only politics but also ideology and moral disagreement is a recurring theme—in this eulogy, and in Biden's thoughts on the subject generally.

"The powerful and lasting impact he had on his beloved South Carolina and on his nation is Strom's legacy, his gift to all of us."

Wow.

To claim that Thurmond underwent a moral transformation at the end of his life is—to be generous—debatable. To claim that the net impact of his words and actions on the United States was positive is unconscionable.

I don't personally begrudge or condemn Biden's friendship with Thurmond. And I can understand the impulse to eulogize a deeply flawed friend. But this isn't just a eulogy. It's a political rehabilitation.

One thing we know about Joe Biden is that he understands himself as moral, in all situations, at all times. That's why he understands every criticism of him as a scurrilous attack on his character.

When he was criticized for his behavior around women and girls, his was response was to say "I’m not sorry for any of my intentions. I’m not sorry for anything that I’ve ever done."

When asked tonight whether he would apologize for his remarks about segregationists, as Cory Booker had called on him to do, he said "there's not a racist bone in my body," even though Booker hadn't accused him of racism.

And so with his his friendships with white supremacist politicians. He will say he disagreed with them, that he fought with them, but not that they were racists, not that they committed evil acts.

Given the option of either condemning James Eastland or condemning Cory Booker for asking him to condemn James Eastland, Biden is going to take the latter course every time.

This morning I've been thinking more about Biden's eulogy for Thurmond and his various other speeches and comments about his collegiality with white supremacists, and something hit me.

Even when he describes close, decades-long friendship with these men, he never tells a story in which he privately confronts them with his opposition to their support for white supremacy.

The argument is "I can work with them because I get along with them," not "I can change their minds because they respect me and I'm willing to challenge them."

That strikes me as really telling.