Joe Biden Campaigns on divisive lie to bring the country together.
***ARticle first published by 'The Washington Examiner' on April 25, 2019***
If Joe Biden was going to pick anything in the world as his reason to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, you would think he’d get creative. But no, he chose a well-known lie the media have been spreading since 2017.
In his campaign launch video posted Thursday on YouTube, the former vice president said it was President Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville, Va., protests that served as his personal bat signal.
“He said there were, quote, ‘Some very fine people on both sides,’” said Biden. “Very fine people on both sides? With those words the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it and in that moment I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any other I’d seen in my lifetime.”
You can imagine Biden in 2017 sitting in his recliner with an O'Douls when it struck him that the country needed him. He would don his cape one more time.
His primary motivation to run for president was apparently not so much a belief he had the right ideas on healthcare or immigration or the judiciary, but a blatantly out-of-context quote from Trump that the media played out years ago.
After the violent clash in Charlottesville, where protests against the taking down of an historical statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee morphed into an alt-right rally, Trump held a press conference wherein he was repeatedly asked about the incident.
Out of more than 15 minutes of questions and answers, the press glommed onto the three seconds where Trump said “You also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” It was made to look as though Trump had equated white supremacists who hijacked the event and liberals who were there to counterprotest.
This is precisely the opposite of what Trump said.
Trump made clear several times during the conference that he was referring specifically to those who had showed up to demonstrate against the statue’s removal and that he otherwise condemned the white supremacists.
What Trump said, as transcribed by the Los Angeles Times:
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of [the people at the rally] were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee.”
A reporter yelled out, “Both sides, sir?”
Referring to the so-called “antifa,” which was also present at the rally wearing masks, throwing paint and spraying urine, Trump said, “Well, I do think there's blame — yes, I think there's blame on both sides.”
But Trump also said, “You have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
He again specified that he was not referring to white supremacists, saying, “You had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists” [emphasis added].
Later, he said, “If you look, they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I'm sure in that group there were some bad ones.”
What inspired Biden to run is a tired, old media lie.