Joe Biden isn't Bill Clinton. Not really the Sister Soulja moment some have urged.

More like praising with faint damns, as Wilde put it.

Statement by Vice President Joe Biden on the deadly violence in Portland

He blames Trump for inciting hatred and fear, not MSNBC, CNN, BBC, the NYT, and the Democratic propagandists and commentariat, generally.

He condemns violence "of left and right".

He focuses on killings.

And the rioting in general, the destruction of property, the economic and social damage, and the people hurt but not killed?

More than three months of riots by antifa, anarchists, BLM, racist radicals, and others of the idiot left in numerous cities across the country.

And it's been a long time since Charlottesville.

Biden Emerges From Basement, Sees Violence, and Makes This Unbelievable Statement

Snark? Scorn? This, too, is propaganda.

All the same.

It appears a Trump supporter was murdered by a leftist in Portland last night, but details are still emerging. 

Regardless of what happened, the shooting has finally prompted Joe Biden to denounce the violence in Portland that's been occurring on a nightly basis for three months now. 

"The deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable. Shooting in the streets of a great American city is unacceptable. I condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by any one, whether on the left or the right," Biden said in a statement. 

. . . .

Oh yes, I remember now. It was President Trump who encouraged chaos in the streets when he accused cops of being murderous racists, or when he said America was founded on white supremacy, or when he endorsed the vandalism of historic statues, or when he referred to looters and thugs as "peaceful" protesters as a violent mob raged out of control for months. 

That was all "fanning the flames of hate and division" all, right? But President Trump wasn't the one doing it. 

That was Joe Biden, the media, and the far-left radicals who will be running the government if Trojan horse Biden fools the American people into electing him president. 

Gaslighting: Blaming Left-Wing Violence and Rioting on Trump Is Brazenly Ludicrous

Once the violence spilled over into a small city in a swing state and public opinion started to shift, the Biden campaign finally rolled Biden out to condemn non-peaceful actions, which he's occasionally done with perfunctory statements. 

But his party ignored the issue in their four-night infomercial, elected officials have been bullied by the hard Left into deleting social media posts disavowing violence, and top Biden surrogates have contorted themselves to avoid saying anything too harshly negative about the rioters.

. . . .

As I wrote on Twitter, "there has been violence from the radical right in some cases, which is egregious, appalling and indefensible. Still, bothsidesing the violence & unrest is a form of gaslighting. The mayhem/rioting/looting/assaults has been profoundly asymmetric, and driven by the hard left." 

That's a fact.

Not a lot of social distancing at riots, either. Super-spreaders?

How far will this hurt Joe B in crucial swing states?

Will it even cost him Wisconsin?

538 says the polls there still look good for Joe B.

They think he has a 69% shot at an EC victory, with Trump trailing at 31%.

Maybe the "ride it out" strategy will work.

But nobody knows how to factor in the expected big increase in mail in and absentee voting 

Andrew Sullivan seems to be back to blogging. About how democracies perish.

He just misses telling the horrible truth that the anti-democratic right are the legitimate offspring of their elders and legitimators in spite of themselves, the anti-democratic left.

It happened in Spain.

It happened in Weimar.

The Trap The Democrats Walked Right Into

But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. 

Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. 

This comes first. 

If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. 

In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. 

Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow. 

And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.

I don't live where the rioters are running free, and I doubt AS does.

And my one issue is that I will never vote for a party sworn to kill me, but will instead vote for the party sworn to keep me alive.

I crucially need both Social Security and Medicare to avoid ending my life sleeping in an alley, fighting stray dogs for pizza out of a dumpster.

The GOP is profoundly devoted to destroying both of those, called "entitlements", by the way, because having paid to support both all our working lives we who now depend on them are entitled to count on them.

And so far the Dems are committed to coming through for us.

And as I’ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I’ve begun to feel similarly. 

And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence. 

. . . .

When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. 

When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. 

One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: 

“Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” 

A cheap shot, yes. 

But in the current context, a political bullseye.

. . . .

And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. 

But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless “white supremacy”, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm. 

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. 

These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. 

They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. 

And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks. 

. . . .

It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends — which is how Democratic establishments in Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland responded. 

The NYT, CNN and the rest tried to ignore the inexcusable, and find increasingly pathetic ways to dismiss it. 

This week, their staggering bias was exposed as absurd.

. . . .

And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. 

The center has collapsed. 

Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. 

Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. 

The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.

And so on.

He pretty much predicts the worst, even if Biden wins.

A propos de reparations

Has anyone mentioned that blackmailers always come back for more?

The fearless troll in the White House, maybe?

I watched none of either convention. I would not have liked this choice for his major speech.

I opposed busing when Joe did and I oppose it now, by the way.

Biden’s Intended Race on Race

Biden’s speech told America all we needed to know about why Biden chose Harris — despite their acrimonious past — and where Biden intends to take his campaign over the next two months. 

If Joe has his way, this will be a race on race.

His acceptance speech’s first words, after “good evening,” were “Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: Give people light and they will find a way. Give people light, those are words for our time.”

Having connected his campaign message with “light,” he would use “light” repeatedly throughout his 25-minute address. 

Although lacking specifics, his subliminal racial message was clear: I am the anti-racist; if you are not with me, you are a racist or condone racism.

For those on whom such subtlety might be lost, he was explicit too. He called out “communities who have known the injustice of the ‘knee on the neck.’” 

Biden also listed “the most compelling call for racial justice since the ’60s” as one of the “four historic crises” he enumerated. 

When mentioning coronavirus’s economic impact, he singled out minority communities as “bearing the brunt of it.” 

Race was everywhere.

The speech’s fulcrum was the implication that Biden was doing far more than just running for president. 

Biden laid claim to leading a movement to complete the work of the 1960s civil rights movement. 

“History has thrust one more urgent task on us. Will we be the generation that finally wipes the stain of racism from our national character?” 

Biden even cited the Charlottesville protests of three years earlier as the motivation behind his campaign (despite not announcing for another two years): “For me, a call for action. At that moment, I knew I’d have to run.”

Biden has changed. Will the changeless Church change faster?

Will the Catholic Bishops Call Out Joe?

During the South Carolina primary, Fr. Robert Morey of Florence denied Biden communion on the grounds he had excommunicated himself by taking the stand he has taken on the killing of the unborn.

“Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other, and the Church,” said Morey. “Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself out of Church teaching.”

But subversion is rife in the Church as everywhere else.

Had moral truth changed? Did Catholic teaching change? No, Biden changed. 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church still declares “homosexual acts” to be “intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law” and describes “homosexual tendencies” as “objectively disordered.”

Biden once believed this, or said he did for most of his life, for that is the way he campaigned in Delaware and voted in D.C.

What has changed is the Democratic Party Biden now heads. 

The precepts of LGBT now dictate “moral truth” in the party and platform of Joe Biden who now calls transgender rights “the civil rights issue of our time.”

. . . .

On right-to-life, the declared position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is clear: “Taxpayer dollars should never fund abortion.”

This unequivocal moral stance is being publicly repudiated and will be rejected, should he win the presidency on Nov. 3, by the professed believing and practicing Catholic, Joe Biden.

What, if anything, are the U.S. Catholic bishops going to say about this grave moral issue in the fall election? Or will they remain silent?

Where is Biden? Where are the Democrats?

This Is How Biden Loses

Increasing numbers of Americans are seeing Democrats as complicit in or at best tolerant and indulgent toward the mad rioters who are trashing so many cities.

This article and the alarm of so many Democrats are so many confessions.

George Packer at The Atlantic joins Don Lemon and others calling for Biden and Democrats to hammer away at the riots and rioters.

Every day of silence makes credible the Duce's charges Biden is weak, putty in the hands of radicals and a party taken over by revolutionaries and America haters, a Trojan horse for friends of antifa, the worst of the BLM crazies, and the Red Guards and Culture Warriors smashing and burning American cities.

Every day the Republicans turn up the volume on exactly these accusations and attacks.

But it may already be too late for the late conversion at the top Packer is calling for.

And too little.

The whole party is stained.

In the crude terms of a presidential campaign, voters know that the Democrat means it when he denounces police brutality, but less so when he denounces riots. 

To reach the public and convince it otherwise, Biden has to go beyond boilerplate and make it personal, memorable.

Harris, a Black former prosecutor and now an advocate for police reform, seems uniquely positioned to speak to the crisis. 

But she has said little all week, which suggests that there might be things she doesn’t want to say. 

On Thursday, Harris directly addressed the events in Kenosha, affirming that Americans “must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protesters. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence.” 

She quickly moved on. 

Democratic leaders, from the nearly invisible mayor of Kenosha up to those on the presidential ticket, are reluctant to tarnish a just cause, amplify Republican attacks, or draw the wrath of their own progressive base (Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut deleted a tweet saying that both the Blake shooting and the riots were wrong after commenters accused him of equating the two). 

So Democrats continue to mute their response to the violence and hope it will subside, even though it has persisted straight through the summer.

. . . .

On Tuesday night, the CNN host Don Lemon warned his colleague Chris Cuomo that riots were hurting Biden and the Democrats: “Chris, as you know and I know, it’s showing up in the polls, it’s showing up in focus groups. It’s the only thing right now that’s sticking.” 

Lemon urged Biden to speak out about both police reform and violence. 

With Kenosha and the political conventions, the coverage seems to be changing. On Thursday, the Times ran a piece headlined “How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin.” 

Half a dozen Kenosha residents, reckoning with damaged buildings and businesses, expressed displeasure with the uncertain response of Democratic officials. 

Ellen Ferwerda, an antique store owner, “said that she was desperate for Trump to lose in November but that she had ‘huge concern’ the unrest in her town could help him win. She added that local Democratic leaders seemed hesitant to condemn the mayhem.”

Pelosi to Joe B.: Don't debate Trump

Speaker Pelosi says Biden shouldn't debate President Trump because he will 'belittle' the purpose

"I myself -- just don't tell anybody who told you this, especially don't tell Joe Biden: I don't think that there should be any debates," Pelosi, D-Calif., volunteered during a news conference with reporters at the Capitol Thursday morning. 

"I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody should [and] has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts."

Biden insists he will debate Trump after Pelosi remarks

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Thursday said that he would debate President Trump shortly after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested that Biden shouldn’t “legitimize” the incumbent president by participating in debates.

“No. As long as the commission continues down the straight now as they have, I’m going to debate him,” Biden told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell when asked whether he would consider not debating Trump following Pelosi’s comments.

“I am going to be the fact checker on the stage while I’m debating him,” Biden continued.

Pence, GOP overshoot the mark, shoot selves in foot.

NPR plays a clip of Pence last night telling America the riots everywhere must stop, Americans must stop hurting and killing Americans, Biden is complicit with the rioters and will not make Americans safe, but he and Trump will not tolerate rioting and violence and destruction, Trump will put an end to it and make Americans safe!

Vote for Trump and he'll put a stop to it!

NPR interviewer to GOP spokesperson:

Really? Why wait? 

Trump is in the White House now and has been for nearly four years, over all the time the rioting has been happening. 

It's all happening on his watch. Why wait?

GOP talking points urge Joe B was silent on rioting from the outset until just the other night, demanding why he didn't once condemn it all that time.

They are very boldly hanging the riots on the Democrats and Biden in particular.

Angry Hillary and her advice for Joe B.

Hillary Clinton urges Biden not to concede in close election

"Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out and, eventually, I do believe he will win if we don't give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side," Clinton said in an interview with Showtime's "The Circus."

Clinton, who won almost three million more votes than Trump overall in 2016 but lost to him in the state-by-state electoral college count, suggested that the Republicans are hoping to get the result they want through in-person voting on the day -- and not necessarily wait for any delayed mail-in ballots to be counted.

Her comments follow warnings from both sides that the result of the election may not be known on the evening of November 3.

Republicans "have a couple of scenarios that they are looking toward. One is messing up absentee balloting," she said.

"They believe that helps them so that they then get maybe a narrow advantage in the electoral college on election day," Clinton said.

She called for Democrats to mount a "massive legal operation."

"We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places," she said.

Republicans have reacted by saying the Dems are undermining an eventual Trump win in advance and will reject a Trump win as crooked.

They say the same about Dem complaints about the Post Office and Trump's refusal to give it money.

Now that's a really big tent

This is not Joe Biden running to his left.

Nuh un.

Democratic campaign launches 'Republicans for Biden' as Flake, former GOP lawmakers endorse him

On the first day of the GOP convention Monday, Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris picked up support from 27 former GOP members of Congress, including former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump before and after retiring in 2018 -- in the latest act of defiance from Republicans against the sitting president who represents their party.

. . . .

Along with the endorsements, the Biden campaign is launching "Republicans for Biden," which they say will be a "national effort to engage Republicans who are supporting Biden this fall," and will "encourage Republicans to organize their communities for Biden using the Vote Joe app and other relational organizing tools."

It comes a few days after more than 70 former Republican national security officials, including some former members of the Trump administration, came out in support of Biden's bid for president last week, releasing an open letter that offered a scathing rebuke of Trump's first term.

. . . .

Republicans endorsing Biden include:

Senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.
Senator Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H.
Senator John Warner, R-Va.
Congressman Steve Bartlett, R-Texas
Congressman Bill Clinger, R-Pa.
Congressman Tom Coleman, R-Mo.
Congressman Charlie Dent, R-Pa.
Congressman Charles Djou, R-Hawaii
Congressman Mickey Edwards, R-Okla.
Congressman Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.
Congressman Jim Greenwood, R-Penn.
Congressman Bob Inglis, R-S.C.
Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz.
Congressman Steve Kuykendall, R-Calif.
Congressman Ray LaHood, R-Illinois
Congressman Jim Leach, R-Iowa
Congresswoman Susan Molinari, R-N.Y.
Congresswoman Connie Morella, R-Md.
Congressman Mike Parker, R-Miss.
Congressman Jack Quinn, R-N.Y.
Congresswoman Claudine Schneider, R-R.I.
Congressman Christopher Shays, R-Conn.
Congressman Peter Smith, R-Vt.
Congressman Alan Steelman, R-Texas
Congressman Jim Walsh, R-N.Y.
Congressman Bill Whitehurst, R-Va.
Congressman Dick Zimmer, R-N.J.

Fareed lauds Biden for big tent approach

He reminds us the New Deal and the Great Society were made possible by the biggest of tents in the history of the party.

Fox reported this in an OMG tone. Biden would shut the country down to control the virus, if the experts said he should.

[My paraphrase]

ABC Interviewer David Muir: What if you face a virus still spreading and a bad flu season?

Biden: We can't get the economy running again until we get the virus under control.

Muir: So, if the scientists say to get the virus under control we have to shut the country down?

Biden: If the scientists said we have to shut the country down to get the virus under control I would shut the country down. Yes.

[/Close paraphrase]

Biden to ABC's David Muir: 'I would shut [country] down' to prevent spread of COVID-19 if scientists recommended

Watch the video.

It's a while getting to it but Joe B is clear as a bell, sharp as a tack, articulate as you could wish.

KH rather woodenly says Joe B "had the audacity to choose a black woman." And she asks "How amazing is that?"

Not at all.

It would have been amazing if he hadn't.

His handlers made him promise that way back during the Democratic debates.

When elites want something the newsies tell you it's the only decent and just thing in about a hundred different ways.

Reparations.

CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and almost all Democratic media.

Wait for some anti-Trump Republicans to get on board.

Joe B is on board.

The only way it doesn't happen in the next president's first term is the Great Fat Orange Klansman wins another term.

Actually, she seemed awkward and unprepared. She did not know her lines or read them well

During the campaign she was very good in front of audiences.

Maybe not enough time reading over her prepared remarks and also not yet comfortable talking to an empty room as if it were full.

Rather like baseball players complaining it's weird playing in empty stadia.

Trump is not the only campaigner who misses the crowds.

Even Biden's energy level in an empty room isn't what it is when speaking to a real, enthusiastic, and responsive audience.

Kamala Harris just showed why Biden chose her as his running mate

Eh. Not so much, really.

But would that make it Trump v. Harris?

If Joe, for whatever reason, dropped out.

Bernie and his supporters would sure as heck question that, I think, if Joe was out before the convention anointed anyone.

Anybody might question that, given the GOP might well run better against a woman of color not so well known they can't paint her as a crazy radical, which they are already doing without too much trouble.

Interesting question which way AOC and the Squad would jump.

Of course, Bernie actually is a crazy radical, but he's an old and well known white guy as well as a crazy radical, and that's probably a better combination for white voters Trump needs in battleground states than a relatively little known woman of color.

Though if Bernie bumped her off the ticket that might cost him nearly all the black support he would absolutely have to have to win.

Fox News host baselessly claims that 'something's going to happen' to Joe Biden

She just went a little over the line, maybe, in course of playing her part in Fox's propaganda onslaught that Old Dodderin' and Sleepy Joe is just a Trojan horse for flaming, insane radical black woman nutjob Kamala Harris.

All of Fox's talking heads are fairly shouting it's really Trump vs Harris and Joe is at best a signature monkey for the craziest, darkest (heh, heh) elements of the "Democrat Party".

More of that by now infamous Republican projection, I'd say.

Claiming Joe will not even make it to election night is just making the prospect all the more terrifying, eh?

The Fox News opinion host Jeanine Pirro baselessly suggested on Wednesday evening that "something's going to happen" to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and that it would cause the former vice president to be removed from the ballot during the presidential election in November.

"For some reason, I just have this feeling that Joe Biden isn't going to be on the ticket," Pirro said during a Fox News segment.

"I have a sense that something's going to happen before the election and he's not even going to be on the ticket, so don't even ask me if he's going to make the four years," she added.

So far as I can tell, she actually is further to the left than Joe B, and she was that at the beginning of the campaign, at the end of the campaign, and in response to the Floyd killing, protests, and riots.

And as she so painfully and forcefully pointed out during the debates, she was and all but incontestably still is to his left of racial matters.

I am truly not sure where that puts her relative to registered Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents.

But she is definitely to the left of this guy, my very own Democratic Congressman, and apparently also to the left of my Democratic Senator.

It's Harris

Qualified?

Well, Bozo lowered the bar, anyway, didn't he?

If you're worried, I mean.

And I'm not.

I do wonder whether we're going to see the country put through a bussing wringer, again.

She beat Biden up about that during the debates, pretty hard.

Hostiles will throw that in their faces again and again during the campaign.

Are they ready for that?

Both of them?

Fox black woman talker says she's not descended from slaves, she's descended from slave owners.

She's not "black like me".

And complains it's all just shameful race pandering.

Tax and spend, 90 trillion for the green new deal, job crushing radical, blah, blah.

Up? Down? Sideways?

Two stories on Bing news, both marked two days old, both from Newsweek.

Biden Lead Over Trump Increases With Just 90 Days Until Election: Reuters/Ipsos Poll

Biden's Lead Over Trump Drops by 3 Points in RCP National Polling Average

So, down, I think.

The Great Fat Orange Klansman and Mob Boss in the White House could still maybe win an EC victory?

Maybe not.

Trump Has Just a 2% Chance of Winning Most Votes, 10% Chance of Winning Electoral College: 'The Economist' Forecast

An election forecast updated Friday by The Economist said President Donald Trump has a 10 percent chance of winning more electoral votes than presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Not even an insult, though clumsily put, GOP pretends it should be a deal-breaker

Are any black or Latino leaders biting?

Other than Republican Trumpists, I mean?

Trump claims Biden 'no longer worthy of the Black Vote' in wake of diversity comment

President Trump on Friday said his presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden “is no longer worthy of the Black Vote,” after the former vice president made comments contrasting African American and Latino diversity.

"After yesterday’s statement, Sleepy Joe Biden is no longer worthy of the Black Vote!" Trump tweeted Friday morning.

. . . .

In both [his] tweets, the president was referring to Biden’s remarks during an interview that aired at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

During the interview, Biden was pressed over whether he would “re-engage” with Cuba as president—something the interviewer noted would have an impact on Cuban-American voters in Florida.

“Yes, yes," Biden responded. 

"And by the way, what you all know, but most people don’t know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

He elaborated, "You go to Florida, you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you're in Arizona, so it's a very diverse community.”

Republicans are pairing Biden's remark up with his earlier remark that anyone who'd vote for Trump "ain't black", and mixing both with their current line that old Joe's a bit light between the ears.