“Do I look like a radical socialist?” That’s what Democratic nominee Joe Biden rhetorically asked a crowd in Pittsburgh yesterday on the first leg of his return to the campaign trail. He said it with the same intonation one might use in asking whether he looks like a circus freak or a homicidal maniac, which has me wondering: How are Biden’s most hardcore-left supporters handling his repudiation of their beloved socialism? Bernie Sanders in particular, who drafted much of Biden’s radical platform and boasted in July of his handiwork that “Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR,” must be seeing more red than usual.
Biden, suddenly forced by circumstances to decry violence in the streets, isn’t just rejecting socialism in name. He announced yesterday that he is recanting his position on a promised fracking ban, telling a crowd in Pittsburgh:
I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again: I am not banning fracking no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.
Unluckily for him, video exists that shows that if anyone is lying, it is Biden:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Did you hear this, Pennsylvania? FACT CHECK✔️
Joe Biden claimed today, that “Donald Trump is lying. I do not plan to end fracking”?
Joe Biden thinks OUR memory, is as short as his✔️pic.twitter.com/KQ1tpcJTSU— Marla Hohner (@marlahohner) August 31, 2020
Biden has managed in the past 24 hours to paint himself into another corner by declaring categorically:
Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those who do it should be prosecuted.
That pronouncement is not likely to sit well with the black bloc agitators whose acts of criminal destruction Biden has been lauding for the past three months as a beneficent fight against racial injustice.
