Joe Biden launched his campaign by declaring the 2020 election would be “a battle for the soul of our nation.” As bad slogans go, I gave it at a NINE on a scale of, “One to I’m With Her.”
It was a straw man argument meant to characterize his opponent as a comic book villain hell-bent on destroying the nation. Hardly the stuff that woos voters who prefer substance over an imaginary job as a Marvel Avenger.
But if Biden had a bad slogan then, it’s a worse slogan now when the country is literally on fire and much of the destruction has been caused by far-left groups like Antifa.
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Does anyone really think the “Soul of Our Nation” belongs anywhere near a group who claims to be fighting racism by burning down minority-owned businesses?
The same organized protesters who’ve looted stores, beaten owners, torched a police station, and countless police cars to go with it?
St. John’s Church was founded in 1816 and played host to every president since James Madison before it was set on fire Sunday night.
If you think the soul of our nation should reside with that mindset, I don’t want a hit of your smoking because chances are it’s way too strong for me.
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To be clear, I’m not accusing Democratic leadership of endorsing violence, nor am I saying that every Republican voter is a choir boy. But when members of the Biden campaign are bailing out protesters arrested in the Minneapolis riots, it’s hardly a show of support for the fireman who invested his life savings to open a bar only to watch it get burnt to the ground by those same “protesters.”
Nor is it an economic pick me up for dozens of local businesses who were already reeling from the distress brought on by the coronavirus lockdowns.
The thing that makes this moment so frustrating is that the whole country agreed on the need to bring justice for George Floyd’s death. There was no additional video context needed and zero room for debate.
We were all on board with peaceful protests although I should point out that if you’re peacefully holding up a sign that says “Defund the Police,” you’re also doing so idiotically.
Yes, we’re all heartbroken by what happened to George Floyd, no, we’re not all dumb enough to think we can have a society without police. Nor are we okay with seeing them attacked and killed the way we have.
President Trump vowed to restore order during Monday’s address in the Rose Garden and floated the idea of invoking the 200-year-old Insurrection Act, which would allow him to mobilize the military to combat the violence.
You can argue with the idea of using troops but you cannot argue with the need to maintain the rule of law after a week in which the images beamed into our living rooms have often looked less like a protest and more like a full-on societal collapse.
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For his part, Joe Biden trashed the move during Tuesday’s speech in Philadelphia and urged Congress to get to work right away on excising systemic racism. Which begs the question: if America has been plagued by decades of systemic bias, what was he doing during his 40 years in government, eight of which were spent as Vice President under our nation’s first black president?
Talk about finding Jesus a little late in the service.
We live in the greatest country in the world. Yet Democrats love to depict it as a giant racist hellhole, which completely ignores the enormous amount of racial progress we’ve made in the past 50 years.
We’re clearly not perfect, far from It. But we’re never going to get there if we can’t even acknowledge the people who sacrificed so much to get us here.
I won’t ask the Democratic Party why they continue to put the need to score political points ahead of the need to have an honest conversation.
Nor will I ask why all of this chaos seems to be happening exclusively in Democratically-run cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and Minneapolis, which has been plagued by poor relations between police and black citizens for 50 years, the vast majority of which occurred under Democratic rule.
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What I will ask you, my fellow voter, is this:
If the 2020 election is truly a referendum on whether or not the Democrats get to “own our soul,” shouldn’t we at least solicit a bid from the devil?
Surely he’s offering a better deal than this.
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