Senate Democrats apparently don’t care that America is on fire. With their most recent filibuster, they just ensured that police reform – rather than being an issue on which bipartisan compromise could be reached, which would, hopefully, tamp down the almost revolutionary atmosphere permeating many of our nation’s urban areas – will, instead, be an issue in the fall campaign. That puts their presumptive presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, on the hot spot, caught between the extremist elements of his party (who want no compromise at all, but, apparently, destruction instead) and the more moderate elements (who want actual reform, but are unwilling to stand up to the extremists to support a legislative compromise).
Meanwhile, earlier this week the Biden campaign announced that he would be willing to debate President Trump in the fall campaign no more than three times.
So, with America on fire, congressional Democrats unwilling to engage in bipartisan negotiations over police reform, and Biden getting ready eventually to emerge from his basement, perhaps it would be a wise use of his time for the former vice president to ready himself to answer the following questions – and for potential debate questioners to bone up, as well:
“During your 36-year term of service as a Democrat in the United States Senate, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) served twice as Senate Majority Leader. Byrd previously served as an Exalted Cyclops in his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, personally filibustered (for 14 hours!) against passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was the only senator to vote against the confirmation to the Supreme Court of the only two black justices ever confirmed. Will you lead the fight to secure the removal of Byrd’s portrait from the Senate Leadership Portrait Collection?”
“As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, you were largely responsible for the passage of that year’s crime bill – a law that many civil rights activists now believe is responsible for stupendously high rates of incarceration of black men. Do you think that was the right bill to pass?”
“Experience tells us that, relatively speaking, as the size of a police force rises, crime goes down. Yet now, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, leftwing activists – many of whom call themselves members of your political party – insist on ‘defunding the police.’ Do you support efforts to remove funds from police budgets, thereby forcing them to make do with fewer resources, and reallocate them to social services and the like?”
“Do you agree with the Black Lives Matter proposition that ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable’?”
“Last year, The New York Times published its so-called ‘1619 Project,’ a distorted rewriting of American history that suggests the desire to maintain slavery had far more to do with the origins of the American Revolution than had previously been understood. Do you agree with the supposition of The 1619 Project that the founders of our nation declared independence from Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue’?”
“In late May, you said during an interview with a popular black radio host, ‘I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.’ Do you really believe that it would be impossible for a black person to vote for President Trump?”
“The social unrest occurring in the wake of the death of George Floyd has now gone beyond rioting, looting, and arson, and has moved to the tearing down of statues by mobs. At first, the targets were statues of Confederate soldiers, officers, and political leaders; of late, the targets have broadened, and include Catholic saints and former U.S. presidents. If you were sitting in the Oval Office as president right now, how many statues would you allow to be torn down by lawless mobs before issuing commands to restore order, and which would they be?”
“As you look around our country and see the strains of civil discord, do you believe there is anything good and redeemable about America?”
Joe Biden has been a leading national politician since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. Yet, paradoxically for a man who’s been close to the center of the national debate for as long as he has, he is a question mark on the issues that currently roil our body politic.
We’ve got just a few months to find out who he really is. It’s time for the media to get to work.