Miranda Devine: The ghosts of Joe Biden’s past are back to haunt him
As the Democrat’s presidential pick faces sexual assault allegations, the hypocrisy of the Left is revealed in a new documentary about a time when the tables were turned, writes Miranda Devine.
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When it comes to weaponising sexual harassment allegations to destroy a political opponent, nothing beats Joe Biden’s performance in the brutal 1991 Senate confirmation hearing of America’s only black Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas.
Now, 29 years later, karma has caught up to Biden, as sexual assault allegations from former staffer Tara Reade threaten to torpedo his presidential campaign.
A brilliant new documentary about Thomas, Created Equal, aims a timely dagger at the left’s hypocrisy on race and sex issues, with Biden front and centre.
It also pays due homage to one of the greatest living Americans, the impoverished son of a single mother in the segregated South, who was raised by his formidable grandfather from the age of nine, briefly became a Marxist radical at Yale before rising to the highest court in the land.
The program is mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to understand Biden’s character deficits, which were apparent long before he started hiding in his basement.
As the top Senate Democrat in 1991, Biden presided over the “hi-tech lynching for uppity blacks”, as Thomas dubbed the Kafkaesque hearing in which baseless sexual harassment allegations by former staffer Anita Hill were used to try to block his ascension to the Supreme Court.
Hill accused Thomas of pestering her for dates and making ribald jokes when they worked together. Thomas denied the accusations and the FBI concluded they were not credible.
As the documentary premieres on American TV this week, it’s a delicious irony that Thomas’ prime tormentor should be caught in the same trap, or worse.
A grinning Biden, then aged 48, is a repulsive presence in the program, sitting next to his fellow traveller in moral rectitude, Senator Ted Kennedy.
Whether he’s smashing his gavel on the table, patronising the dignified black man sitting silently in front of the row of white senators, or blathering gobbledygook about “natural law”, Biden comes across as smug, feckless, and totally outclassed.
When Hill gives her evidence, it is a prurient Biden who extracts such details as an alleged joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can or the name of a porn star, “Long Dong Silver”.
Feminists loathed Thomas because he was a Catholic conservative who they believed would wind back abortion law.
Hill’s testimony, heavily massaged by Democratic operatives, was just the last-ditch attempt to force him to withdraw.
“I mean, come on, we know what this is all about,” Thomas says. “This is the wrong black guy. He has to be destroyed, just say it …
“I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan. As an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along.
“My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued, not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.”
The attacks began the minute he was announced as George H W Bush Snr’s pick for the Supreme Court.
He was parodied in shockingly racist cartoons and comedy skits, portraying him as an “Uncle Tom”.
“You’re not really black because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do,” says Thomas.
Asked about the attacks that continue to this day, Thomas says they’re just “a tactic”.
“And when people see it being successful, they don’t realise they’re going to be the next ones in the Tower of London. It’s just a matter of time. You allow this to be a precedent in your society and people might say ‘it’s wonderful this particular guy is getting tarred and feathered’. Well, there’s a lot of tarring and a lot of feathering and eventually you will be [next].”
And so it is for Joe Biden. Now he’s the one being “tarred and feathered” on the basis of one woman’s word.
Now he’s running for president he expects everyone to believe him not “all women”. But he never afforded Thomas the same courtesy, nor Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was targeted in 2018 with the same tried and true Democrat tactic.
It just shows that when it comes to racism and sexism, the people who are quickest to accuse others of impure thoughts are always the most shameful hypocrites.
“I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic towards me,” Thomas says in his rich baritone.
“We were told that it’s going to be the bigot in the pick-up truck, it’s going to be the Klansman, it’s going to be the rural sheriff. And I’m not saying there weren’t some of those who were bad. But it turned out, through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern day liberal.”
If anyone is a shining example of the American dream, it is Thomas.
He came of age in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and at college rejected the values of his grandfather and the beloved Irish nuns who taught him.
“For the first time in my life, racism and race explained everything. It became the substitute religion. I shoved aside Catholicism. It became all about race.”
But after one violent anti-war protest he felt ashamed. “I had let myself be swept up in an angry mob for no good reason other than I was angry.”
He went to a church to pray: “God, if you take anger out of my heart I’ll never hate again.”
It was a turning point.
His intellectual evolution was based on seeing the world for what it is, through the grounding of a childhood doing hard physical work on the family farm. From his illiterate grandfather he learned the wisdom of a man “uncorrupted by modern thinking. When you can’t read and write you take [the world] as it is”.
When he witnessed bussing in Boston, where white students were forcibly bussed across town to black schools and black students to white schools, he marvelled at the idiocy, since both sets of schools were equally bad.
“I thought that blacks would be better off if they were left alone instead of being used as guinea pigs”.
In the end he found the answers to his questions in the words of the American constitution, as it was originally written, not through the prism of a left-wing race agenda: “Thomas Jefferson said ‘All men are created equal’…”
“How could a country founded on this allow slavery to exist? The answer was it couldn’t”.
He overcame more adversity to rise higher than just about anyone, and he did it by blazing his own intellectual path.
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With Biden in the basement, Obama is turning up the pandemic pandering
Barack Obama’s administration turned spying on American citizens into an art form, even turning the tax department into a weapon against conservative groups.
Now evidence is emerging that the former president was in on the plot to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency, in a scandal Trump calls “Obamagate”.
Despite Trump’s urging, Attorney-General Bill Barr, whose department is investigating the origins of that sabotage, the so-called Russia collusion hoax, this week sensibly stomped on suggestions that Obama or former vice-president Joe Biden would face prosecution.
But with a sleepy guy in a basement the only thing standing between Trump and a second term in November, Obama has begun to inject himself into the campaign.
During two university commencement speeches on the weekend, he fashioned the attack lines the Democrats will use over the next six months.
“This pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
The pandemic works electorally for the Democrats in three ways: it has crippled the roaring economy, Trump’s greatest asset; it offers the opportunity for the socialist transformation that often follows war; and it allows them to keep hiding Biden in the basement.
They plan to hang every coronavirus death around the president’s neck, keep people locked down as long as possible and then blame him for the ailing economy.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph