I Tuned in to Biden's DNC Speech Last Night

I was just in time to hear him resurrect the Charlottesville Lie

[Note to Readers: This is a corrected and revised version of what went out late last night via e-mail to subscribers. Should you wish to share this (or any of my Substack essays), kindly use the version on the website.]

I tend to eat dinner fairly late, sometimes too late. And I usually eat while seated at my dining room table and watching TV. Last night I ate some fruit and a sandwich while watching a re-run of “Kojak.” And then I flipped through a few channels and landed on Joe Biden giving his speech at the Democrat National Convention. I hadn’t intended to watch it , but I did. And I wished I’d had a barf bag.

I tuned in just in time to hear Biden repeat the Charlottesville Lie, and then invoke his dead son, two themes he loves to return to at every opportunity. He once again claimed that it was the events in Charlottesville, VA in August of 2017 that made him resolve to run for president, and that his resolve was also to honor his dead son, Beau. Later in the speech he managed to mention his dead son a second time.

The Charlottesville Lie was the lie that Donald Trump had referred to Neo-Nazis and white supremacists as "very fine people". Trump certainly did say that "there were very fine people on both sides." The two sides to which Trump was clearly referring were those who came to demonstrate in favor of removing Confederate statues and those who came to demonstrate in favor of preserving them.

The Neo-Nazis and white supremacists represented a barely-significant fraction of the crowd, and in Trump’s remarks preceding the “very fine people” phrase (remarks conveniently omitted by Biden as well as in most accounts of the event), Trump very clearly and unequivocally excluded and condemned those Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. But that's not how Joe Biden chose to hear it and repeat it, even adding “That’s what he said!”, as if it were the truth, which it was not.

As he repeated the Charlottesville Lie the needle on my Bravo Sierra meter looked like this:

It also looked like that when he repeated the lie about Trump refusing to visit the graves of American soldiers in Germany, and the lie that Trump had called those soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”

But, actually, that’s what the meter’s needle looked like throughout the speech! It looked that way when Biden condemned Trump as a liar; it looked that way pretty much any time Biden was speaking, and especially when he included those phrases that Biden-watchers have come to recognize as ”tells,” indicating that the stories they accompany are often inventions of Biden’s mind, as when he said, “I’m not joking,” “That’s not hyperbole,” “I mean it,” or “I’m not exaggerating!” All those classic Biden-isms were glibly repeated during last night’s speech.

The time I really reached for the barf bag was when, lamenting “the war in Gaza,” he said that “Those people demonstrating outside have a point,” and, oblivious to the irony of a remark that echoed “fine people on both sides,” he declared that “too many innocent people on both sides are dying.”

(If there are any so-called Palestinians who are indeed innocent, who do not celebrate, encourage and enable their so-called countrymen slaughtering, raping and terrorizing Jews, then they have my sympathy if they are collateral casualties of their so-called countrymen collecting the payback they so richly deserve for what they started. Especially when the IDF tries harder than any army in history to limit those collateral casualties.)

In addition to my Bravo Sierra meter, there was a movie clip playing in my head in response to any number of statements Biden made in the course of his speech. It was this one.

One of the few times the BS needle receded back into the Normal range was when Biden spoke of how very proud he was to have appointed a Supreme Court justice based solely on her sex and race, and having employed the same selection process in choosing his Vice President and now (for the time being, apparently) his anointed successor. His pride in those (patently sexist and racist) “accomplishments” was genuine.

Biden’s speech was beyond entertaining, beyond amusing. His ludicrous and predictable claims caused me nary a chuckle, as they were far too depressing, as was the notion that far too many people not only swallowed his claims but cheered for them. All that cheering for Joe Biden made me think it was a convention, not of the Democrat Party, but of propaganda writers and admirers, or mental patients. But perhaps I’m repeating myself.

But there was one instance in which, despite the dismal, disheartening prospect of Kamala Harris in the Oval Office, I had to chuckle. When Biden said he would never bow down to a foreign leader the way Donald Trump had bowed down before Vladimir Putin, and that, once she was elected President, neither would Kamala Harris, a little voice in my head added, “…the way she bowed down before Willie Brown”!

ST