Thread by @usacsmret

Biden Was More Than 'Civil' With Segregationists. He Was An Ally thefederalist.com/2019/06/21/bid…

Biden was far more than merely “civil” with segregationists, he was obsequious. Biden hadn’t negotiated with political rivals to push bipartisan policy. He had worked with members of his own party—run by men who placed him in positions of power—on issues they agreed on.

Judging from the Senate transcripts and interviews of the time, it’s clear that Biden was an all-star opportunist. After watching the former Delaware senator shed 50 years of positions in the past few years, this should come as no surprise.

In 1973, Democratic Party leadership was teeming with unsavory Southern senators. If a freshman like Biden, who in a 1974 profile admitted “to being compulsively ambitious”—wanted a plum committee position, he would be compelled to approach someone like J. William Fulbright,

J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a segregationist and anti-Semite who would later become a mentor to the Clintons. Bill awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993 and Hillary still had her name on a shared fellowship in 2016.

And if Biden wanted to be on the judiciary committee, he would have to get along with Eastland, “Voice of the White South,” who was chair and president pro tempore of the Senate. The stories about their chummy relationship aren’t new; Biden has been repeating them for decades.

Eastland was particularly anxious to mentor young members,” J. Lee Annis notes in “Big Jim Eastland: The Godfather of Mississippi.” “One favorite over the last term was Joseph Biden, who then was best known for having lost his wife and young daughter in an automobile accident.”

Eastland took an interest in Biden because the young senator shared his position on busing, one of the most contentious racial policy fights of the early 70s. It was during this time that busing had turned working-class, union-heavy white areas like South Boston into “war zones.”

At the time there was “intense public disapproval of busing,” according to The New York Times. A 1974 Gallup poll, for example, only 15 percent of whites favored the policy, and 75 percent were against.

Biden showed Eastland “considerable deference” towards the Mississippi senator not because he was the key to freshman’s political ambitions but also an ally in the busing fight. Biden admits as much years later in his own 2008 book, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.”

Eastland wasn’t just a powerful senator, Biden points out, but ran the committee “that handled all crime legislation, a committee on which I badly wanted to serve.” Until very recently, of course, Biden took great pride in being a tough-on-crime Democrat.

“I started by asking him questions. He was proud of his standing as the longest-serving senator and of his reputation as a keeper of the institutional flame,” Biden goes on to write, “I think he was flattered by the deference I showed him..."

All that deference would pay off. Eastland and Fulbright assigned Biden seats on both the judicial committee and, although he had absolutely no related experience, on the foreign relations committee.

This afforded Biden a head start in his Senate career; a position that many other senators, perhaps less inclined to suck up to segregationists, were not given.

Eastland and Biden had hit it off so well, in fact, the elder senator offered to come to Delaware to help the freshman senator get reelected. “I’ll campaign for ya or against ya, Joe. Whichever way you think helps you the most.”

But, by any standard, Biden was not on the liberal side of the issue. In fact the senator was still fighting against busing four years after Eastman had already left the Senate. And he was still pretending to be a civil rights hero.

“Joe Biden was a lawyer who did work for the black community, represented the Black Panthers at the time they were burning down my city, was a criminal defense lawyer, and the proponent of public housing in the county that election. And, guess what? I won.

“I went out to those same counties, those same neighborhoods, and I said: ‘I want to put a public housing project in your neighborhood.’ It is a matter of record. I am not exaggerating.”

Well, Joe was exaggerating.

“When I marched in the civil rights movement” is, in fact, something Biden often told crowds before the lie caught up to him during his disastrous 1987 run for the presidency.

“It really is a hard, hard thing,” Biden joked another time. “In law school I was considered a raging liberal. As a lawyer, I’m considered, gee, I must be wacky — who’d represent a member of the Black Panthers?”

There’s no record of Biden ever having marched with civil rights leaders nor of having defended Black Panthers as they were “burning down” Wilmington in 1968 (the event he seems to be referencing),

Nor do we know that Biden was a particularly zealous advocate of “public housing,” although it was a plank of the Democratic Party’s platform in Delaware at the time.

Joe’s self-aggrandizement, and exaggerations were often deployed in the third person, as if his adulation was aimed at some mysterious hero. The Senate transcripts of Biden during the 1970s and 1980s are a reminder that the upper chamber has always been something of a circus.

It’s also useful in once again confirming that Biden is perpetually and shamelessly revising his own biography—which is allegedly the central case for this presidency.

For example, Biden didn’t just eulogize Strom Thurmond, the one-time Dixiecrat candidate and later Republican. “Biden had developed a genuine fondness for Thurmond,” recalls Nadine Cohodas in “Strom Thurmond & the Politics of Southern Change.”

“The young Democrat appreciated Thurmond’s political skill—he realized he was sitting next to a living piece of history– and he respected the straight way he could deal with one another.

When Biden became Judiciary’s senior Democrat, he had promised Thurmond he would never do anything to undercut him. Thurmond had always reciprocated.”

In 2012, it was Biden who would tell a crowd of African Americans that the presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney—who, as far as we know, had shown not any deference to segregationists—was going to “put you all back in chains.” It was an ugly smear.

We can assume that Biden understood the power of this kind of slur, since he had once been compared to the segregationist George Wallace during a Senate hearing.

“We will have to judge five years from now whether or not Joe Biden was, as one of the witnesses said, a George Wallace or similar to George Wallace or Joe Biden is a racist,” Joe Biden said of Joe Biden in 1981. “I have stand on that. I will be judged later.”

Journalists had little interest in this chapter of Biden’s past when he was running for the Senate against Republicans, or when he was the vice presidential nominee against the media-approved presidential candidate.

Now, though, when facing favored progressive candidates, maybe that judgement he was talking about in 1981 will finally be rendered.

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