Biden Compares Trump to WWII, Cuban Missile Crisis for Supporting Confederate General Biden Also Supported

The overheated rhetoric behind Joe Biden’s campaign announcement video is what’s coming back to bite him a few days later, particularly as it relates to the Charlottesville attacks.

If you haven’t seen Biden’s video yet, here’s the TL;DR version: Biden begins by quoting the Declaration of Independence, authored by one famous resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson. He’s appealing to our best instincts and highest ideals, but most of us can sense what happens next.

“We haven’t always lived up to these ideals; Jefferson himself didn’t. But we have never before walked away from them,” Biden says.

Then there was the ominous footage of the other Charlottesville, Virginia, that we all know: Racists with tiki torches, marching on the city back in the summer of 2017 in a far-right event that ended in the death of a counter-protester at the hands of a twisted racist.

 YouTube ‎@YouTube

Joe Biden

✔@JoeBiden

The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI …

3:30 PM - Apr 25, 2019

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“And that’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.’ 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,” Biden said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

We’ll get to “those words” in a second. But first, Charles Payne of Fox Business had a good tweet putting this in perspective:

Charles V Payne

✔@cvpayne

Joe Biden citing President Trump comments on Charlottesville why he's entering presidential race: "I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime."
Other "threats" in Biden's lifetime
WWII
Korean War
Vietnam War
Iraq War
Flu Pandemic 1968
Aids Pandemic

4:35 PM - Apr 25, 2019

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Yes, World War II, which raged for almost three years after Biden’s birth in November 1942, would have been less serious of a threat than Trump. So would the other three wars Payne mentioned.

AIDS, the flu pandemic of 1968 — not really a threat, by Biden’s lights, apparently.

Payne also left out a few. The Cuban missile crisis, 9/11 — I’m sure we could think of some more here.

In other words, the “threat” from some words spoken by Donald Trump is, according to Biden, greater the horrors of the Nazis. Greater than the upheaval of Vietnam. Greater than the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11. Greater, even, than staring at the brink of nuclear war.

And what were these words?

Well, as the media has begun to point out, they weren’t exactly Trump co-signing far-right figures marching on Charlottesville.

Rather, here were the “very fine people” he was talking about: “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

That’s it.

Not a policy pronouncement, not a legal position by the federal government, just an opinion that has been grossly distorted by skewed media coverage.

It’s interesting that Biden considers this a threat to a United States that, with Trump in the White House, is doing pretty well by just about any metric.

The economy is growing at a healthy rate — 3.2 percent GDP growth in the first quarter of this year, low unemployment in general and historically low unemployment for minorities, etc.

It’s even more interesting in light of the fact that Biden himself has also lent a hand to the long-deceased Confederate general in the past.

“While many have [begun] criticizing the dead former Confederate leader, in 1975 the Senate, which included freshman Democratic Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, unanimously approved the reinstatement of General Robert E. Lee’s citizenship to the U.S.,” The Daily Caller noted on Saturday.

“Following his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Va., on April 9, 1865, Lee wrote to then-President Andrew Johnson and asked for a pardon so his citizenship could be restored, according to a New York Times article from 1975. One part of the process was to swear his allegiance to the president, but when Lee did submit it to the president, it never got to Johnson.”

This may not have been as controversial as Trump’s words, but if the mere defense of Lee is a threat to the nation, I look forward to hearing Biden defending how he himself is not a threat.

Good work, Uncle Joe. You’ve officially proven just how much your party has lost touch with reality — a dangerous trait among a group of politicians who want to use government to control everything.