Thread by @curaffairs

The Biden takedown is here ❧ New by ⁦@NathanJRobinson⁩. currentaffairs.org/2020/03/democr…

Biden proposed raising the retirement age and eliminating cost of living increases. @ryangrim and @lhfang unearthed material from the 1990s proving that senior advocacy groups had “blasted” Biden for siding with the GOP. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and was a crucial vote. The Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. 4,500 American troops died, with thousands more maimed physically and psychologically. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden not only supported Bush’s war of aggression, he then lied and blamed Bush for his actions. As the @theintercept reported, in 1998, Biden was already saying things like “the only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone.”

Health insurance industry stocks have jumped thanks to Biden’s recent success in the primary. It’s not surprising: Biden has promised to save their profits, while Sanders has said that healthcare financing should not be conducted by a for-profit industry. bit.ly/2ItVLta

As policy analyst @MattBruenig has noted, Biden’s confusing proposal “cause enormous amounts of insurance churn and instability,” but “does not even aim to provide universal insurance coverage,” leaving millions uninsured. bit.ly/2ItVLta

As @ZephyrTeachout notes, while “bankrolled by the credit card industry… [Biden] delivered for it by spearheading a bankruptcy bill that made it harder for Americans to reduce their debts and helped cause the financial crisis.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

The Consumer Federation of America said that Biden “provided a ‘veneer of bipartisanship’” to stripping bankruptcy protections “that eventually helped the credit card companies win over other Democrats.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

“Do politicians like Mr. Biden who support the bankruptcy bill believe they can give credit-card companies the right to elbow out women and children so long as they rally behind an issue like abortion?” – @ewarren, in a 2002 NYT op-ed.

As GQ’s @dukelarby reported: Biden, who often touts his loyalty to Obama, even “went against Mr. Obama to help defeat amendments aimed at strengthening protections for people forced into bankruptcy who have large medical debts or are in the military.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

The New York Times has reported that “during the years [Biden] was helping the credit card industry… his son had a consulting agreement that lasted five years with one of the largest companies pushing for the changes.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

1974: Biden says he “didn’t think a woman had the sole right to say what happened to her body.”
1980s: Votes to let states overturn Roe v. Wade.
2006: Says abortion is “always a tragedy” and “we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

2019: Biden still supports the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion. His spokesman declines to detail his current views on specific policies he once supported, including banning all federal funding for abortion services and research.
bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden collaborated with unrepentant segregationist Strom Thurmond to create the “Biden-Thurmond bill,” which restricted use of the insanity defense (shifting the burden of proof from the prosecutor to the defendant) and abolished parole. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden collaborated with the hard right to expand the death penalty, boasting that “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

In 2010, Biden said of marijuana: “I still believe it’s a gateway drug… I think it would be a mistake to legalize.” He has since flip-flopped during this campaign over whether marijuana may be a gateway drug. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden voted for the infamous PATRIOT Act, which he called “measured and prudent.” In fact, “he would have liked it to go further, regretting that measures handing police more extreme powers had been removed.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has bragged that the PATRIOT Act was based on a bill he himself wrote long before 9/11, but hadn’t been able to get through thanks to the opposition of civil liberties groups. bit.ly/2ItVLta

As @BMarchetich has reported, Biden pushed for increased government wiretap power and reduced accountability for law enforcement, and voted to gut federal habeas corpus protections. bit.ly/2ItVLta

As Natascha Ulmann reported, Biden “voted to uphold an HIV travel ban that authorized the indefinite detention of Haitian refugees,” “called for a crackdown on employers who hire “illegals,” and fought against driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden’s original climate change plans got a D- from @greenpeaceusa (he quickly reversed course and the grade was improved), and the @sunrisemvmt climate plan ratings show his proposals falling well short of Sanders’. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden had to leave his first presidential race in disgrace, because he was caught copying his speeches directly from a British Labour leader (not only mimicking his gestures, but lifting references to the leader’s wife and his coal mining background!) bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has lied about being the 1st in his family to go to college as well as finishing in the top half of his law school class when he finished near the bottom, and plagiarized his academic work in law school. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has lied that he “participated in sit-ins to desegregate movie theaters,” and recently told a black audience an extremely specific story about his anti-segregation activism, which appears entirely made up, as @shaunking documented. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has claimed, without evidence, that the other driver in the car crash that killed his wife and daughter had been drunk, leading the man’s family to call on Biden to apologize for publicly smearing him. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden once said “the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me.” And as @BMarchetich documented, Biden indeed voted for Reagan cuts to “scores of federal programs for health, education, and social services.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

As our friend Asher Smith wrote, Biden once partnered with Jesse Helms—a man who called every Black man he met “Fred”—on a bill that’d have prevented “the Justice Department from bringing desegregation lawsuits that could result in court-mandated busing.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden on the architect of a criminal war of aggression and overseer of the construction of a torture regime: “I actually like Dick Cheney, for real… I get on with him. I think he’s a decent man.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

“This civility was built atop a boneyard. The coalitional politics of the US Senate gave outsize power to unreconstructed racists… what [Biden] sees as a virtuous era of compromise reflects a shameful period in our history.” – @ezraklein bit.ly/2ItVLta

In 2018, Biden accepted $200,000 to give a speech to a Republican audience in which he heaped praise on Republican representative Fred Upton, which helped Upton defeat a Democratic challenger by 4.5 points, and “buoyed the GOP in the Midwest.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has said of Clarence Thomas that “I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all… and that is his character,” when that was exactly what was at issue. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has said he wished he “could have done something” to help Anita Hill, when the entire point is that he was the very person who had control over the proceedings—he was the chairman of the committee! bit.ly/2ItVLta

Years later, Biden gave Anita Hill a pitiful semi-apology that left her “deeply unsatisfied.” Biden also said that he “believed Hill from the beginning,” but his fellow senator Arlen Specter said Biden told him privately that Biden thought she “was lying.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

“I may not be what the party’s looking for. I may be too ‘muscular’ on foreign policy. I may not be ‘pure’ enough about abortion rights. I may not have been ‘energetic’ enough about gay marriage.”
These are, of course, euphemisms ... bit.ly/2ItVLta

By “muscular” Biden means that he helped initiate a disastrous endless war, by “pure” he means that he was actively fighting against women’s rights groups over abortion, and by “energetic” he means that he voted for the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden shares many of Clinton’s exact weaknesses last election. He voted for NAFTA and is a creature of the “swamp” that Trump has vowed to drain, a pal of lobbyists and bankers. And then, of course, there is the corruption. bit.ly/2ItVLta

As @EricLevitz put it, “Hunter collecting $50,000 a month to sit on a board for which he had no qualifications was clearly corrupt influence peddling.” bit.ly/2ItVLta

Biden has told voters to go vote for his opponent. (In Iowa, 85% followed his advice.) He even called one young woman a “lying dog faced pony soldier” after she asked him a tough question. Get ready for Donald Trump to mercilessly mock every Biden misstep. bit.ly/2ItVLta

The gaffes, always a Biden trait, have become near-constant, which has to a strange hide-and-seek game between Biden and the media. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Electability might be the worst argument of all. Biden is a corrupt, inept, dishonest, undisciplined, rambling con man. This makes him exactly the person we don’t want to use to make those very same charges against Trump. bit.ly/2ItVLta

Instead of assuming that received wisdom is necessarily true, you should take a moment to question whether the many talking heads who insist Sanders cannot win might be just as wrong as they were about whether Clinton’s victory was inevitable. bit.ly/2ItVLta

“We do not have to do this. We have a window, albeit a small one, to turn this around. I hope you, and everyone you know, will do whatever you can to help elect Bernie Sanders.” – @NathanJRobinson bit.ly/2ItVLta