Former Vice President and Democratic candidate Joe Biden paid a visit to Sunday services at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Columbia, S.C., to pander to black peo— I mean, to speak about his run for the presidency and to urge the largely black congregation to fight back against the environment of hatred and bigotry brought on by President Donald Trump, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“This president and his—the Ku Klux Klans and the rest of them, they think they’ve beaten us again. But they have no idea—we’re just coming back,” Biden said to the 1,300-member congregation.
“I thought you could defeat hate, but hate only hides. It never fully goes away,” he added, referencing white supremacist violence in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va. “And they asked the president what he thought, and he said, “There were very fine people on both sides.’”
He goes on to—in classic racially-tone-deaf fashion—compare things that are not really alike.
Referring to what he called a historic inflection point — when the police aimed fire hoses at civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s, galvanizing more of the country behind their movement — Biden said that the country had reached a similar moment.
Nah, Joe. In this case, the country elected the fire hose into office, and said fire hose will likely continue to receive a strong majority of the white vote. So let’s not go there. Let’s not be a white man invoking the civil rights movement in order to gain steam for your own campaign. You were actually doing okay there for a while.
This isn’t the first time this campaign season that Biden has made the rounds to black churches to say all the right things to court the black vote. Last year, he traveled to Birmingham to visit the 16th Street Baptist Church on the 56th anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan bombing which killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, four black girls all under the age of 15.
There, in a 20-minute speech, Biden talked to black people about recent attacks by white supremacists in the U.S., saying: “The domestic terrorism of white supremacy has been the antagonist of our highest ideals since before the founding of this country. Lynch mobs, arsonists, bomb makers, lone gunman. And as we all now realize, this violence does not live in the past.”
He added, “Those of us who are white try, but we can never fully, fully, understand no matter how hard we try.”
Well, you know what they say about broken clocks: Even when they’re clearly performing a song and dance for black political support, they’re right twice a day. I may have added some things to that.