The evening begins with a brief clip of the late Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. He was a great patriot.
Next a clip from the late Rep. Barbara Jordan. But not this clip:
For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful. There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.
Nor this clip:
The [Barbara Jordan] commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force. Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects. We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.
We next see a clip of Ann Richards, a former Texas governor. After she served four years until 1995, the people of Texas had enough of her and Democrats. Texas has elected only Republican governors for the 25 years since experiencing Richards.
Next an Obama clip where he says that we are not a Black America nor an Hispanic America but a United States of America. Interesting. It sounds exactly like President Trump telling us that, “Whether we are Black or Brown or White, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.”
And soon after, the president of the Navajo nation. Elizabeth Warren does not introduce him. A Cherokee-Navajo issue?
More people in Zoom-like squares tell us that unemployment is up fourfold. But we are not reminded that President Trump had reduced unemployment so significantly that Blacks, Latinos, and women never before had enjoyed such remarkably low unemployment rates until the plague of the pandemic descended on the world. It is simple mathematics that a pandemic hitting a low unemployment population will result in a higher geometric multiplier than if it had hit under Obama–Biden. Do you see why? If you have 3 percent unemployment, and it rises to 12 percent during a worldwide pandemic, those numbers have increased fourfold. But if it hits while unemployment is at 8 percent, then a rise to 12 percent does not even double the number. Math matters.
Others in Zoom-like squares tell us that families are facing evictions. We are not reminded that President Trump boldly has signed an Executive Order, in the face of congressional inaction, to stop the eviction of exactly those families.
Next we are told briefly about the life that Joe Biden has lived. We are not told which life. Is it the life story he stole from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, in which Biden even claimed that his father, a used car dealer, had worked in the coal mines — because that was in Kinnock’s speech? Is it the life in which Biden risked his life in Afghanistan to pin a medal on a brave warrior — an event that even Biden’s supporters admit never happened?
Next we are told that Joe Biden will “never forget who he’s fighting for.” This assurance made regarding a man who, in recent weeks, has forgotten what state he is in, what office he is running for, and the Declaration of Independence (“y’know, the thing”).
We are told, in criticism of the Trump administration, “You deserve more than the constant chaos.” And yet these past three years of constant chaos have emerged because certain corrupt FBI officials spied on the Trump campaign and administration and lied to the FISA court. The chaos saw more than two years and $32 million wasted on a Mueller Investigation and Report that resulted in … nothing. As coronavirus was erupting in December 2019 and January 2020, the Democrats subjected America to the constant chaos of an “Impeachment to Nowhere.” The process consisted of weeks of secret House committee meetings marked by almost daily leaks to anti-Trump media sources. When the foregone conclusion reached its predictable result at Christmastime, Nancy Pelosi stirred up a hornet’s nest of chaos as she resisted walking the House resolution to the Senate, where it ultimately died rapidly. She ceremoniously distributed commemorative Impeachment Pens to friends.
Next: “And with Joe Biden in the White House, there’s no limit to what we can do.” And this indeed is true, as Bernie Sanders publicly had stated the day before. Sanders reminded us correctly that, four years ago, agenda items that were deemed excessive and extreme, even for the Left, now are at the “mainstream” of the Democrat Party. With Biden clearly a “transitional” candidate who is so very clearly at the edge of the 25th Amendment, Kamala Harris would stand ready to seize the reins under the Constitution. So, yes, “with Joe Biden in the White House, there’s no limit to what [they] can do.”
Next: “Joe Biden has been fighting for women throughout his career.” Anita Hill did not author those lines. Neither did Tara Reade. Kamala Harris has stated very publicly that she believes women who have accused Joe Biden of personal misconduct. Can you connect those dots?
We next are told of all the things that Biden will do as president. He will build the economy. He will end racial discrimination. He will act on the climate to save the planet. But one unexpressed thought lingers: In 2009–2010 Biden and Obama had the White House, the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof Senate. There was absolutely no constitutional legislation they could not pass at whim. And yet they did not build the economy, instead charting the slowest post-recession recovery in memory and overseeing remarkably high under-employment numbers. Biden and Obama did not resolve immigration concerns; that is why they remain on the table. Again — they had absolutely no legislative obstacle in their way, and yet they generated such economic stagnation and failure on so many initiatives that the American people arose in outrage and “shellacked” the Democrats in 2010.
For the next six years Biden and Obama continued the stagnation. They left behind memories of an Obamacare website that could not function, though built by the United States of America. Memories of Solyndra that cost Americans more than $500 million on a “solar energy” company that flopped. A “Fast and Furious” initiative that sent high-powered American firearms to Mexican drug cartels on a theory that the Obama–Biden Justice Department would monitor the weapons — only they lost track of them. One of those firearms ultimately was found when it was used by the cartel to murder American border patrol agent Brian Terry.
The reminders of Biden’s failures, when he had the power and opportunity to perform, inadvertently are reinforced when the next speaker tells us, “When you’re in the trenches, you want Joe Biden alongside you.” The thing is, when you are in the trenches, you probably had a shovel. Which reminds of all those “shovel-ready jobs” that Obama–Biden promised, but which Obama finally conceded, amid giggles, that those jobs were “not as shovel-ready as we expected.”
A favorite moment next comes when Sally Yates — remember her, the Obama holdover whom President Trump inherited before anyone fully grasped the depths of The Swamp in the Justice Department? — tells us that President Trump “is trying to weaponize the Justice Department.” Think of the names: James Comey. Andrew McCabe. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. Bruce Ohr. The FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleading guilty to falsifying documents submitted to the FISA Court. Yes, weaponizing the Justice Department.
Soon we are treated to Chuck Schumer at the Statue of Liberty. He promises that “We will make health care affordable for all.… We will protect the planet.… We will reform our immigration system so that immigrants yearning to be free can at last become Americans.” One hears the echo of 2008, that the Obama–Biden administration was going to “make health care affordable for all.” They were going to reform immigration. There even was something about the tides starting to recede and the Earth healing. They had that filibuster-proof Senate, that House, that White House. What stopped them? Biden did not do it then with Obama, but now he will without him? Hopefully, Independent voters in “battleground states” will ask themselves: “How many times can a Three-Card-Monte victim fall for the same trick again?”
And now it is Jimmy Carter’s turn to enthrall. We remember the Carter White House. The economic collapse. In October 1978, he went on national television to announce “Phase Two” of his “Anti-Inflation campaign.” Inflation thereupon proceeded to hit 11.3 percent in 1979 and 13.5 percent in 1980. Inflation and short-term interest rates even reached 18 percent in February and March 1980. The bond market collapsed. Home mortgages hit 17 percent. Unemployment hit 7.8 percent — without a pandemic. On the foreign affairs front, it was a time of Soviet expansion into Africa and communism creep into South America. In the Middle East, the Ayatollah Khomeini took our 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. The Iran Hostage Crisis ran so long, with so feeble and impotent an American response, that it even gave birth to a nightly ABC television show, Nightline with Ted Koppel.
And what is tonight’s Jimmy Carter’s message? Joe Biden “will restore America’s greatness.” To what — the Carter days? Rather, it took the Reagan conservative agenda to restore “Morning in America.” (On a separate note, we will leave it to Carter and Andrew Cuomo to work out their disagreement over whether America ever was great.)
Now it is Bill Clinton’s turn: “Joe Biden will unite, not divide.” He will differ from President Trump because Biden will not “blame, bully, and belittle.” Yes, the promise of Clinton kindness and decency. Does one remember how Hillary described Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky? The Washington Post:
Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”
She called reports of the Monica Lewinsky situation a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When Hillary finally accepted the reality that the rumors were true, how did she respond? Family friend and Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos wrote,
She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies.
Hillary friend Diane Blair described Ms. Clinton’s reaction to the way Bill handled the matter. As reported in the New York Daily News:
“It was a lapse, but she says, to his credit he tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon,’ but it was beyond control,” [Blair] wrote in notes reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website.
Again: Bill Clinton at the convention tells us about a better time when the White House will not “blame, bully, and belittle.” So it will be more like the non-bullying, non-belittling Obama-Biden years when the visiting Prime Minister of an ally was made to click his heels in the White House while Obama went to have dinner with his family?
“It was awful,” [an anonymous] congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages,” poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea.”
Now we come to nominations. A former labor union leader places Bernie Sanders’s name into nomination. The nomination is seconded by a pre-taped message from Ocasio-Cortez. Her recording is limited to 60 seconds. Not only is she denied the right that was granted to other endorsers to speak live, but she also is restricted to a “New York minute.”
Bernie’s moment passes, and it next is time for nominating and seconding speeches for Joe Biden. We hear about how Joe Biden “restored integrity to national government.” Really? Let us review:
Yes, restore integrity to national government. Like the Obama-Biden IRS with Lois Lerner? Like the Obama-Biden Justice Department?
As Sen. Ron Johnson’s committee investigates, more to come.
John Kerry speaks next. He attacks President Trump for “writ[ing] love letters to dictators.” Wasn’t that Obama who cozied to Hugo Chavez and the Castros of Cuba?
We further are told by Kerry that President Trump “has not stood up to China.” Yet the night before at the convention a farmer complained that the president had levied brutal tariffs against China. They need to coordinate their talking points.
But we end on a note that is lovely — the relationship between Jill and Joe. Yes, there is a startling story just breaking in the Daily Mail that Dr. Jill’s former husband, Bill Stevenson, is alleging that Biden broke up his marriage and stole his wife. In 1972, Bill and Jill Stevenson were active volunteers in Joe Biden’s first campaign for U.S. Senate. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Stevenson told the Daily Mail, “but facts are facts and what happened, happened.” This is the tough part of politics that so many of us particularly hate. But, at least for tonight, I found myself moved by the story of Jill coming into a dispirited Biden family after the unspeakably tragic accidental deaths of Joe’s first wife and baby. It hit close to home for me. I looked at the two of them, clearly deeply in love. We owe it to the Bidens to spare Joe the stresses of a presidential job he clearly is not now suited to handle. Let him enjoy more time at home with his wife. They will enjoy it, and we will, too.
