Joe Biden’s Craven Exercise In Blame Shifting

I&I Editorial

After a thug shot and killed a Trump supporter Saturday night in Portland, Democratic nominee Joe Biden suddenly got religion when it comes to leftist riots in our nation’s streets. The former vice president “challenged” President Donald Trump to “condemn violence,” then blamed Trump for “encouraging” it. Say what?

It goes beyond hypocrisy when Biden for months sat in his basement in near-total silence as his far-left supporters rioted, looted and burned U.S. cities, and his own party egged them on.

This same man chose as his vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who warned us all with a smile on her face during a television appearance that the protesting and rioting is “not gonna stop,” not even after the election.

Funny what a bit of bad polling will do.

For months, the 77-year-old Biden said and did nothing as Democrat-supported Antifa and Black Lives Matter followers violently protested across the country.

Said nothing, that is, until polls showed him losing major ground among voters after the hugely successful Republican National Convention, which focused on patriotic themes and roundly condemned the national violence.

As Democratic pollster John Zogby put it, Trump is “clearly back in the game.”

Perhaps more surprising was a HarrisX-Hill poll showing Trump’s approval rating surging 60% among black voters during the GOP convention — a terrifying prospect for Democrats, who have long taken African-American votes for granted.

So it’s not so surprising after all that Biden suddenly shows concern for something he couldn’t be troubled even to comment on for weeks.

“I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same,” Biden said in a canned statement. “We must not become a country at war with ourselves.”

Biden wondered what Trump thinks “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” before accusing him of “recklessly encouraging violence.”

But as CNSNews.com’s Craig Bannister points out, “As far back as August of 2019, the BBC ran the following headline: ‘US mass shootings: Trump condemns racism and white supremacy.‘ “

Sound like he’s “encouraging violence”? And that wasn’t the only time Trump tried to calm people down.

In an Aug. 30 post, the last of the day, Instapundit‘s Glenn Reynolds revealed headlines from, of all places, anti-Trump CNN, showing the number of times Trump criticized violence on both sides from 2017 to late May of 2020, just after the George Floyd’s death.

“President Trump condemns violence in nationwide protests …” CNN.com, May 30, 2020

“Trump calls KKK, white supremacists ‘repugnant,’ ” CNN.com, Aug.14, 2017

“President Trump condemns ‘racist hate,’ ” CNN.com, Aug. 5, 2019

Then the coup de grace, from Sunday:

“Trump’s law-and-order message strikes a chord (opinion)”

And then:

“Biden condemns violence in Portland and calls on Trump to do the same,” CNN, Aug. 30, 2020

That’s hypocrisy at work.

As for the rest of the Democrats, all this time we’ve heard … nada.

Actually, they (and their allies in the media) denied repeatedly that “protests” had turned violent. It’s of course a tragic joke, as cities around the country, most recently Portland and Kenosha, Wisconsin, have been torn apart and looted by angry left-wing mobs and suffered politically motivated deaths.

Lefty Democratic Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler blamed the Saturday night death of Aaron Danielson, a member of the conservative Patriot Prayer group, on Trump, even as authorities investigate a man who said he is “100% Antifa” in the shooting.

“It’s you who have created the hate and the division,” Wheeler said to the president from the comfort of a news conference held at city hall.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to downplay the damage, both to lives and property, of the riots. The toll is reaching staggering proportions, much of the losses borne by African-American and other minority businesses. It was all so preventable.

“Rioting that erupted in cities across the United States after the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis may rival the 1992 Los Angeles riots to become the most costly civil disorder in United States history,” according to a June 2 article in the authoritative Claims Journal, which put damage from those earlier riots at roughly $1.42 billion in today’s money.

That was nearly three months ago, when Democrats such as Biden were still embracing the mayhem or refusing to outright condemn it.

The hypocrisy of Biden saying nothing for so long about the riots, then blaming everything on Trump is a classic example of gaslighting. It makes him complicit in the damage, violence, criminality and death. It’s also a gross abdication of his leadership of a formerly great political party. If the fast-shifting polls are any indication, voters are catching on.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board