I’ve said it many times that Joe Biden needs to win in November, and I will phone bank as much as I possibly can to do my part to make sure that a Biden victory happens.
But it’s a depressing reality that he only looks good in comparison to his opponent, who is quite possibly the most vile creature to ever slither his way into the White House, and that’s saying a lot given that Andrew Jackson was once alive! Just take some of Biden’s remarks on Monday during, of all things, an event with black clergy and community leaders in Wilmington, Delaware, during which he helpfully suggested that cops, rather than shooting people in the heart, should instead be trained to shoot them in the leg.
Maybe police officers should be trained to not shoot people at all? Better yet, maybe cops shouldn’t be armed to the teeth, and the bloated budgets of police departments around the country should be redirected towards programs that would actually improve people’s lives? Just a thought!
To be fair to Biden, that’s not all that he said. Biden also promised that he would “earn” people’s votes and that he’s “going to make sure that the economic recovery deals with… institutional racism but also economic structures that need to be fixed.” He added, perhaps thinking of himself, “Ordinary folks who don’t think of themselves as having a prejudiced bone in their body, don’t think of themselves as racist, have kind of had the mask pulled off.”
Update (11:39 a.m., 6/2/20): The tweet embedded in this post has been updated.
Luckily for Biden’s electoral hopes, Donald Trump continues to be Donald Trump, an authoritarian racist bully who glorifies violence and is obsessed with projecting an extreme macho bravado at all costs. At almost the exact same time Biden was speaking in Wilmington, Trump was on a phone call with the country’s governors, and it went about as well as one would expect, which is to say, it got pretty fascist pretty fast.
According to news reports, Trump berated the governors, describing them as “weak” and encouraging them to use the military in response. “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” he reportedly said. “They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate.” An analysis by ABC News found that Trump, and Attorney General William Barr, who was also on the call, used the word “dominate” almost a dozen times. “Law enforcement response is not gonna work unless we dominate the streets, as the president said, we have to control the streets,” Barr said, adding, “We have to control the crowds and not to react to what’s happening on the street and that requires a strong presence.”
Describing the protests as a state of “war,” Trump told the governors on the call, “You’re allowed to fight back.” He also told them to arrest people: “You have to track people, you have to put them in jail for ten years and you’ll never see the stuff again.”
- The mother of Breonna Taylor is calling for the officers who killed her daughter to be fired. “I don’t think that I’m asking for too much, just justice for her,” she said during a press conference with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. [Courier-Journal]
- Also in Kentucky, David McAtee, the owner of a barbecue restaurant, was killed on early Monday morning by either Louisville police officers or the state’s National Guard, who fired shots into a crowd as they attempted to disperse a group of people. “My son was a good son. All he did on that barbecue corner is try to make a dollar for himself and his family,” McAtee’s mom said. “And they come along and they killed my son.” According to Louisville police chief Steve Conrad, someone in the crowd shot first, which is a statement that should certainly be taken with a very large grain of salt. Later on Monday, Mayor Greg Fischer announced that police officers hadn’t turned on their body cameras, which is not suspicious at all, and that he had fired Conrad. [NBC News/Courier-Journal/Courier-Journal]
- And in Atlanta, two police officers who were caught on tape over the weekend breaking the car windows of two black protesters and then tasing one of them have been fired. [CNN]
- But hey, some cops took a knee before pepper-spraying and tear-gassing protesters so the epidemic of police violence is now over.
- Republican Senator Tom Cotton continues to be a virulent racist. And he naturally got an approving retweet from the white supremacist in the White House.
- Ivanka says, “Gay rights!”