In a ceremony commemorating the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Joe Biden depicted Republicans as modern segregationists while claiming to be of part of the civil rights movement. “I was a student up north in the civil rights movement,” the president said. “I remember feeling how guilty I was; I wasn’t here. How could we all be up there, and you going through what you went through.”
This never happened. Just as Biden never participated in any marches or sit-ins or boycotts and just as he was never arrested trying to march with Mandela and just as he never represented any Black Panthers in the 1960s. No president, none, has lied about his personal history as aggressively and blatantly as Joe Biden. This is stolen valor, not the muttering of a doddering man with an aging mind. It has always been his modus operandi.
James Freeman at The Wall Street Journal is right to point out that it is disgraceful for Biden to compare 2023 Republicans to 1965 Democrats, for all the obvious reasons. But it is particularly loathsome for the president to smear his political opponents as modern-day Bull Connors when he was the one who embraced segregation, without ever admitting to his past behavior.
No one is shackled to a viewpoint. But the man who said he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a “racial jungle” in a debate over busing — you remember Kamala Harris’ “I was that little girl” moment
