After weeks of confusion, Joe Biden’s campaign have finally admitted that he was not arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela. Biden has made some false claims in the past but this was particularly bizarre. No one had any record of such a historic arrest in South Africa. While Biden did not take responsibility personally for the exaggeration, his deputy campaign manager admitted today that Biden was not arrested but merely “separated from his party at the airport.” That is a bit of a nose bleed of a step down from an arrest with Mandela to an airport separation. Hard to imagine how you confuse the two since one ordinarily involves custody, cuffs, and confinement.
The claim of the arrest was viewed as a pitch to help Biden’s campaign in South Carolina but was widely ridiculed. The problem is that Biden identified his own witness in his account by noting that “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robben Island.”
However, Andrew Young, who was the U.N. Ambassador at the time, stated “No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either.”
The campaign then tried to explain but only made the claim more offensive that Biden would suggest that he was arrested in South Africa during apartheid: “It was a separation. They, he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”
So Biden remembers separation in going through an airport door as an arrest in the cause of freeing Mandela in South Africa?
Biden has been challenged about past statements like his claiming that he Biden had traveled to Konar province in Afghanistan to give a Silver Star on a Navy captain who refused the medal, because his friend didn’t survive. The Washington Post reported that it “never happened” and said “as he campaigns for president, Joe Biden tells a moving but false war story.”
Biden was also recently challenged for saying that Biden he worked on the Paris Climate Accord with former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who died 19 years before the agreement was signed.
This story however is even more insulting to those who honor the memory of Mandela. It is akin to claiming to have marched with Dr. King because you walked through an airport with him on one occasion. There is a big difference between being separated at an airport and being arrested in South Africa in the same cause as Nelson Mandela.
Yet, it is notable that CNN spent exclusive coverage on “how important is the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn” to Biden in South Carolina rather than this astonishing claim and belated admission about Nelson Mandela.
Mandella was a communist and a murderer. No one with a shred of decency should want to admit any association with that piece of garbage.
Three decades after Biden stole his speech, Neil Kinnock endorses his 2020 bid
by David Mark
April 30, 2019 04:40 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/three-decades-after-joe-biden-stole-his-speech-neil-kinnock-endorses-his-2020-bid
Excerpt 1:
A member of the House of Lords, where his title is Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty, since 2005, Kinnock told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that Biden would be an ideal Democratic nominee to defeat President Trump in fall 2020.
“From this distance, but as a citizen of the world with grandchildren and deep concerns about our planet and many of those ruling it, I’ll support anyone who can beat Trump,” Kinnock said of Biden, a Delaware senator for 36 years before spending eight more as President Barack Obama’s vice president.
“If the Democratic Party chooses Joe they’ll have someone who is certainly in with a decent chance,” Kinnock added. “That will be because of his proven ability, experience, sense of mature judgment on the major issues, his qualities as a communicator and his normality. Not perfect, but with only mundane imperfections, which, I think, will have real appeal to the electorate.”
Excerpt 2:
At the Iowa State Fair in August 1987, he said: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”
Biden had related the thought before and attributed it to Kinnock, who had asked in a speech earlier in 1987: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys [his wife] the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?”
But when he dropped the attribution, the media pounced. The plagiarism controversy led to further questions about Biden’s accuracy and integrity, including a citation in a law school paper he attributed incorrectly. It also emerged that he had also used passages from the speeches of Democratic greats Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The scandals snowballed and Biden dropped out of the race within weeks.
Excerpt 3:
Kinnock said Biden’s penchant for long-winded speeches and other self-inflicted wounds could even be an asset. “He was an excellent VP, not solely because of loyalty but because of capability too. Mr. Obama picked him because Biden would be ‘a safe pair of hands’ if he’d been unable to continue as president for some reason. Happily, no such reason arose, but Joe proved to be more than up to the task, despite his habit of occasionally off-color spontaneous remarks.”
…
Kinnock in 1995 retired from the House of Commons to became a member of the European Commission. He served in Brussels as the commission’s vice president from 1999 to 2004 and was named a life peer in 2005.
Biden’s message to minorities – you poor, downtrodden victims. You need a powerful white savior to solve all of your problems. Your country hates you. The Klan is out to get you. It is impossible for you to succeed because your country is racist. Where will you be without me? You can’t make it on your own. To prove that I am your warrior, I got arrested in the fight to free Nelson Mandela.
Reality – he was not arrested, at all, but rather walked through a racially segregated door. He could have refused, kicking and screaming, and demanded to walk through the black only door. But he didn’t.
Reality – studies show the US is one of the least racist countries on planet Earth.
Reality – slavery is still common in the African continent. Slavery was universal. It was America and Great Britain who were avant guarde in stopping slavery. Half of the member nations of the UN don’t even have laws making slavery a crime.
Reality – recent African immigrants do better, on average, than African American citizens. This is because one of the root causes of African American poverty, crime, and dropout rates are the astronomical rates of single motherhood. Democrat welfare policies incentivized single parent households.
Reality – black people don’t worry about what the KKK is going to do to them that day. They worry about jobs, crime, and anything else that directly impacts their health and safety, just like white people.
Reality – black people don’t need a white savior. Democrats need to stop fantasizing about being Kahleesi, surrounded by adoring black slaves she freed. It is racist to suggest that black people cannot be successful, and require the government to take care of them from cradle to grave, while Asians and Hispanics do just fine. It is racist for universities to discriminate against Asians to allow more African Americans entry. Only a meritocracy is fair. From my observation, there are different cultural approaches to success, and they all work. Arabs have something called wasta. It loosely means connections. A Middle Easterner emigrates here, they have a network of connections. Their brother’s wife’s sister’s son will help them get a job. If they need a car, their cousin’s father-in-law owns a dealership. They network and they help each other. And in some Arab cultures, there is tremendous pressure to be successful. A son had better be driving a Porsche or a Mercedes soon to make his mother proud. Armenian immigrants from various countries went through the diaspora after the genocide. So they have often have a close knit culture with connections that help each other. An Asian might be poor in her home country, but when she immigrates here, she will work her fingers to the bone so her child can go to the top schools. The pressure to become a brilliant doctor, research scientist, or musician is intense enough to turn coal into a diamond. There are definitely favored fields. They MUST succeed to not only financially support their parents who sacrificed everything so they could have a better future, but their life reflects upon the family honor. They MUST make their parents proud. Culturally, there is little tolerance for scofflaws. Hispanics, too, have their own approach. When they immigrate here, they seize opportunities. They have their own network of connections for housing and jobs. They work their fingers to the bone. Start businesses. There is a very high rate of Latino-owned small businesses here in CA. The one criticism I have of their approach is that there is not as high a rate of value for academics, on average, compared to other cohorts. But, on average, they work really hard.
African Americans would be just as successful if they did just a few things – value education, graduate from high school with good grades, and wait to have children until they get married. That’s the recipe to stay out of poverty for most, not all, people.
So Democrats, cut the white savior baloney and the bigotry of low expectations. Don’t insult the intelligence of black voters by claiming to have gotten arrested in a civil rights fight when he didn’t. African Americans can GOOGLE, too.
All I can do is shake my head, but I will say this:
It’s “Google.” One doesn’t need to scream it.
Tragic. All that plastic surgery for nothing…
Bob L.,
Biden can still recover, so it isn’t necessarily tragic.
Maybe he’s just waiting for the most opportune moment pull out the big guns; to show voters how many push-ups he can do, his IQ scores, and how he also graduated in the top half of his law school class when he was about #75 out of a class of about 82.
Is there anything about Biden that isn’t Gore-ist? What’s next he invented Mandela?
‘
In other news, Biden names Brian Williams as his chief speech writer and revises his campaign slogan. Instead of “No malarkey”, it will now be “Xerox Joe, everything old is new again!”