As Joe Biden begins his third run for president, he is taking a tour to apologize for all the wrong things.
He was right in 1991 not to be taken in by Anita Hill’s story; he was right to not have supported what school busing became; he was right to support the crime bill in the 90’s when it was needed; he was right to support the Iraq War in 2002 and thereafter, as it was the most reasonable course given events at the time.
Perhaps everyone involved should have apologized for what became of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings that stunned and mesmerized the entire country in October 1991. But let us remember that nothing like this had ever happened before. No one knew how to behave.
During the hearings that Biden chaired, nothing was proved. The only corroborating evidence given was from character witnesses, and that all of those questioned spoke up for their friends.
Biden is wrong now to say that he knows Hill was right. The fact is, no one knows anything. He is merely pandering to the feminist caucus that holds the party of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy in the palm of its soft little hands.
On the crime bill and busing, Biden was also on the right side of history, in every sense of the word. The crime bill, signed by that fascist and racist William J. Clinton, was a good faith attempt to cope with a genuine crisis. And school busing was a bizarre perversion that never appeared in any civil rights act whatsoever. The whole movement a great deal of harm.
In Brown v Board of Education, the civil rights case that got the ball rolling toward desegregation, a parent sued for the right to send his young daughter to the whites-only school blocks from her home, instead of to the poorer blacks-only school that she had been assigned to. That’s what school desegregation meant in the great days of the civil rights movement, but by the 1970s it meant something else. Everywhere in the country, even in schools that had never been segregated, children were bused out of their neighborhoods and driven to bad schools in bad neighborhoods until some sort of “balance” had supposedly been reached.
This ill-advised move came closer than anything to destroying the civil rights movement. In a country where people buy houses based on the reputations of nearby schools, this last drove white parents insane. This is what Biden opposed, and he was right to have done so. Call the case on this closed.
Iraq is a whole different matter. As John Kerry once put it, Biden was for the war before he was against it. But in his case, he then became for it again, and then against it again. Biden cast his vote to get the war started in 2002; he demanded withdrawal in 2007 when things had gotten rough. He was for it again in 2010 and 2011, after President George W. Bush’s surge won the war. And then at the end, he gave the credit to himself and President Barack Obama, saying it was one of the best things their administration had done.
Obama, like Bush, lost Iraq (to ISIS) but then won it back. Biden seemed pleased with that at the time. But now, with Republicans in power and left-wing Democratic primary voters holding his future in their hands, he is back to saying that his first vote to start the Iraq War was the worst thing he ever did.
Well, except for the other three things he is now regretting. For now.
