Whenever President Trump is badgered by the national press about something some random racist did, journalists and TV news anchors accept nothing less than having him state word for word something like, “I disavow this racist and his entire family and dog.”
Anything short of that is suspect, if not a tacit endorsement of white supremacy. But as major cities smolder in ashes amid the violent rioting over George Floyd’s death, that same standard is apparently not something they’re ready to apply to Joe Biden and the conspicuously weak statement he put out on Sunday night.
The Associated Press said Biden “condemned the violence.”
No, he didn’t.
There wasn’t even the mildest specific criticism of the violence — not of the looting, the shooting, the arson, the vandalism. None of it.
The closest Biden got to addressing the rioting was to say that while protesting is “an utterly American response” to injustice, violent wilding in the streets “is not.”
That’s it. That was the stinging rebuke from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as we watched police stations and other government buildings go up in flames.
The mobbing of CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta and the shooting of seven people in Indiana so moved the former vice president that he came out to say that it didn’t fall in line with what we know to be “utterly American.”
Biden did not condemn the violence. Maybe the next journalist who interviews him will ask him if he’d like to.
