That authentic out of touch experience

Joe Biden, former Vice President and candidate for President has been putting his foot in it.

About ten days ago Biden said that when the nasty guy is gone things will change. Folks know better, they know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Joe, don’t you remember what the GOP did to your boss? Didn’t you notice that Merritt Garland is not sitting on the Supreme Court?

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville responded:

Trump is not an anomaly of Republican politics. He was an inevitability.

And I don't know what the fuck Republican Party Joe Biden is talking about, because, for my entire lifetime they have been attacking marginalized people, exploiting bigotry, waging class warfare, taking the nation to war on lies, defunding the social safety net, destroying public education, abetting polluters, subverting democracy, and otherwise generally being despicable pigshits, so even if the GOP returned to stasis post-Trump, they would still be fucking nightmares.

Biden's continued misrepresentation of the GOP in this moment of resurgent fascism is disqualifying. It's just that simple.

Then Biden made a comment about how he was able to work with segregationist senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. Presidential candidate Cory Booker responded:

You don’t joke about calling black men “boys.” Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.

Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone. I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together.

Then Booker asked Biden to apologize. On hearing that Biden wanted Booker to apologize.

Of course, Booker was only one of many to respond. Connie Schultz, who won a Pulitzer Prize (which she said did not impress her dog) and is married to Sen. Sherrod Brown tweeted:

There is no punchline here, no emoji or funny meme to soften the harm of your words. That segregationist never called you “boy” because you are white. If you want to boast about your relationship with a racist, you are not who we need to succeed the racist in the White House.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Joe Biden is not Obama’s amiable sidekick.

Biden is the embodiment of all the negative mischaracterizations of Hillary Clinton, without her integrity or lifelong passion for social justice and the rights of children, women, and black Americans.

John Stanton tweeted a quote from Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Joe is an organic, shade grown old white man who will really give you that authentic out of touch experience.

Ta-Nihisi Coates discussed Biden on the Chris Hayes show:

Coates: The problem here is not that [Biden] had polite relationships with people who had deeply deeply deplorable views, this problem is those very polite relationships were premised on the fact that those people's deeply deplorable views actually disenfranchised an entire sector of the electorate. There is a reason that those polite relationships went away, and part of the reason they went away was because black people are now a voting force in the South, much to the chagrin of some other people.

Hayes: The price of that "cold peace", the price of that civility, is that you didn't cross them on race.

Yeah, one could work with a segregationist as long as one allowed, perhaps even assisted, them to be racist.

I’ve been keeping a list of the Democratic candidates for president. Biden has remained in the “no thanks” category.