OPINION:
In the throes of a heated national election, cities burn and innocent citizens are beat up and murdered in the street. Who is to blame?
Joe Biden offers two answers to this question.
First, he says, it is all President Trump’s fault. Then he attacks Mr. Trump for politicizing the violence by blaming Mr. Biden’s Democratic cohorts who lead those cities.
Only somebody who has spent 48 years in the bowels of the federal government could arrive at that kind of demented logic. And only somebody who has spent a life in partisan politics could be so shameless.
It is true, Mr. Trump is the incumbent in this race. But his four years battling even his own “allies” in Washington is no match for the half-century that Joe Biden has been stinking up the joint.
For a week during the Democratic convention, Mr. Biden and his party were silent about the flames and violence ravaging neighborhoods across the country. They mocked anyone who reported on the fiery mayhem out of Portland or Kenosha or D.C.
They thought the bloodshed was so funny they found corners of these cities where rioting and looting were NOT happening and posted pictures as some kind of twisted evidence that the violence was not happening in other parts of the city.
Talk about “White privilege.”
That’s like laughing that the Titanic has sunk with 1,500 dead by posting a picture of a child’s floating shoe and saying: “Look! All is calm here!”
When polls began showing that American voters were not amused by Mr. Biden’s delusions, he sprang into action, blaming everything on the guy who just got here four years ago.
He also blamed Mr. Trump’s supporters. The only people he did not blame were the marauding criminals actually committing the violence, looting and burning.
“As a country, we must condemn the incitement of hate and resentment that led to this deadly clash,” he said earlier this week. Again, notice that Mr. Biden condemns not the people who committed violence, but the people who said things that made those people angry.
“It is not a peaceful protest when you go out spoiling for a fight,” he said, again refusing to condemn the actual bad actors.
Then, of course, Mr. Biden went on to use the situation to score political points.
“What does President Trump think will happen when he continues to insist on fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters?”
Perhaps the most tragic part of this slanderous and cynical claim is what it reveals about Mr. Biden himself.
Here is a guy who has been a politician his entire adult life. Here is a guy who has been part of the problem in Washington for nearly five decades.
And yet he fails to understand that free speech is one of the most cherished protections in our republic, while responding with violence is among the most abhorred violations of our constitutional rights.
The problem isn’t just that Joe Biden now seeks the presidency. The larger problem is that someone so stupid and so profoundly ignorant of our founding principles has thrived as long as he has in our nation’s capital.
Yes, something is rotten in Denmark. And, truly, the fish rots from the head.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt on Twitter.
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