Joe Biden's handsiness is not the main issue; it's his track record as a scumbag

You'll notice LITD hasn't weighed in on the matter of Joe Biden getting fresh with the ladies. From what we know so far, it just looks to be of a piece with his overall avuncular goofiness, along with his well-documented gaffes over his career. It could be more than that. I could get surprised by further revelations. Some of the figures exposed in the big #MeToo wave a while back, such as Garrison Keillor and Charlie Rose, surprised me.

But it's the success he's had at hiding his utter lack of integrity that makes him a non-starter in LITD's estimation.

The most recent example is his perpetuation of an egregious lie in order to suck up to the identity-politics crowd:

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Biden Courage Awards ceremony in preparation for his presidential campaign launch. There, in an attempt to forestall claims that as a white man, he simply isn't intersectional enough to compete in the Democratic primaries, he critiqued a central pillar of Western civilization as inherently racist. "Back in the late 1300s, so many women were dying at the hands of their husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle, or the sheep, that the court of common law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths," Biden fibbed. "So you know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man's culture. It's got to change. It's got to change."

Biden's take was, as always, historically illiterate. The "rule of thumb" story has been circulating for years -- and it has been repeatedly debunked. There was no "rule of thumb," as feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers points out. "On the contrary," she writes, "British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating." In actuality, the phrase originated in craftsmen so expert that they could perform tasks without precise measuring tools.

More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights under law; English jurisprudential culture is responsible for preserving the natural rights we hold dear, rights which were imperfectly but increasingly extended over time to more and more human beings, particularly minorities. No less a leftist figure than Barack Obama explained just that in 2009, saying he sought a system at Guantanamo Bay that "adheres to the rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system."

Protection of individual rights -- and in particular, minority rights -- lies at the heart of English jurisprudence. Yet Biden boiled down those rights to racial privilege. And the attempt to reduce the fundamental principles of our civilization to a mask for racial hierarchical power is both false and frightening. It suggests that those principles ought to be undermined for purposes of disestablishing that supposed hierarchy. Get rid of English jurisprudential law, presumably, in order to fight racism. 

Then there's Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's recollection of what a snake in the grass Biden was during Thomas's confirmation hearing:

In contrast to the portrait of Biden as a warm-hearted and genuine straight-shooter, in his book My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas offered a blistering account of the then Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who acted friendly in private, only to stab him in the back when the cameras were on. He wrote, “Senator Biden’s smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk.”

Before the contentious hearings, Thomas described an ominous interaction he had with Biden in early 1990, during the confirmation process for his appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Biden, Thomas wrote, “informed me that I would be confirmed for the Court of Appeals, but that I could expect things to be very different if I were to be nominated to the Supreme Court.” At the time, Thomas said Biden’s remark “jolted” him, because it was the first time he had ever thought of the prospect of a Supreme Court appointment.

Biden’s warning would prove accurate when, in the summer of 1991, Thomas was nominated to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall, and hearings were scheduled for the fall, allowing opponents more time to mount their attacks.

“A few days before I faced the Judiciary Committee, Joseph Biden invited [wife] Virginia and me to tour the Caucus Room in the Russell Senate Office Building, where the hearings would take place,” Thomas wrote. “Senator Biden was reassuring, stressing that the hearings weren’t meant to be an ordeal. He said that since I’d be nervous at first, he would start the questioning with a few ‘softballs’ that would help me relax and do my best, assuring me that he had no tricks up his sleeve.”

As chairman, Biden was able to get the first questions once the hearings kicked off. Thomas wrote that, “Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said.” 

Biden quoted a portion of the speech in which Thomas said, “I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would ... strike down laws restricting property rights.” Thomas recounted being caught off guard, because he didn’t recall the context of his remarks, which Biden suggested showed Thomas was arguing in favor of judicial activism. It wasn’t until Thomas got a chance to reread the speech during the break that he noticed Biden had neglected to quote the following sentence in his remarks, which made clear that Thomas’s point was the opposite of what Biden had claimed. Thomas had said in the speech, “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self-government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.”

Thomas recalled, “Throughout my life I’ve often found truth embedded in the lyrics of my favorite records. At Yale, for example, I’d listened often to ‘Smiling Faces Sometimes,’ a song by the Undisputed Truth that warns of the dangers of trusting the hypocrites who ‘pretend to be your friend’ while secretly planning to do you wrong. Now I knew I’d met one of them: Senator Biden’s smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk.” 

In this country, we have a tendency to overlook glaring flaws in our elder statesmen. Biden is currently able to market himself as the seasoned, calm alternative to the rest of the ever-burgeoning field of Democrat presidential candidates. Republicans who would cast him in that light in discussions of how the field is shaping up would do well to consider these two incidents, along with his assertion to a mostly-black rally crowd a few years ago that Republicans would put them all back in chains.

He's part of the 99 percent of Democrats who are the enemy, plain and simple.