At a March 3, 2002 Presidential Gala at Ford’s Theater, in Washington, President George W. Bush was seated in the front row. When emcee Kelsey Grammer introduced blind musician Stevie Wonder, the president smiled and raised his right hand in a perfunctory wave. It was clear to those seated nearby that his gesture was intended for Grammer, one of Hollywood’s few unabashed Republicans. Nevertheless, the Washington Post published a story the following day implying that Bush had waved at Stevie Wonder, saying, “The Prez is such a dolt, he waves at blind folks,” and Democrats all across the country repeated the fiction.
Months later, on December 5, 2002, while participating in the 100th birthday celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) made what liberals and Democrats charged was a “racially insensitive” remark. Clearly, Lott was attempting only to patronize the longest-serving member of the senate, but liberals and Democrats claimed racial bias and used his remark to drive him from his senate leadership position.
But while Democrats and the mainstream media are always anxious to make up such stories if they can make a Republican look foolish, we rarely have to make up such stories about liberal Democrats. For example, at a campaign appearance in Columbia, Missouri on Tuesday, September 9, Senator Joe Biden began his speech by recognizing a number of local politicians. He said, “Uh, uh, Chuck Graham, state senator, is here. Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see you.”
Chuck Graham is a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair for the past twenty-seven years from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Realizing his gaffe, Biden said, “Oh, God love you. What am I talking about? I tell you what… you're making everybody else stand up, though, pal. I tell you what, stand up for Chuck.” Walking to where Graham was seated, Biden said, “Can you tell I'm new at this?”
Like baseball players who’ve never learned that when they’re playing in a televised game there are certain parts of the anatomy that should not be scratched, Joe Biden is a politician who has never learned to think before he speaks. Had Barack Obama been present he could have saved Biden a lot of embarrassment. If the mere sight of Obama can cause chills to run up the leg of a liberal NBC commentator, who knows what miracles he might be able to perform?
He may even be able to outdo Senator John Kerry in the performance of miracles. In an October 10, 2004 campaign appearance in Iowa, Senator John Edwards was regaling his audience with outlandish promises of the importance of stem cell research, and the wonderful things that would happen if only the people were wise enough to elect John Kerry as President of the United States. Referring to the deceased actor, Christopher Reeve, he said, “Well, if we can do the work that we can do in this country – the work we will do when John Kerry is president – people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk. Get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
On Wednesday, September 24, Representative Alcee Hastings (D-FL) had a dire warning for Jewish Democrats about Governor Sarah Palin. He said that they should be very wary of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks… If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention.”
This, of course, comes from a Democrat, a former federal judge, who was impeached, convicted, and removed from the bench in 1989 after being charged with taking $150,000 from a defendant in exchange for a lenient sentence. Four years later, Democrats elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives, the same legislative body that had impeached him, and in 2006, after Democrats took control of the House, Hastings was in line to be chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. After weeks of pressure from across the country, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi was forced to withhold the appointment.
Hastings’ remark was greeted with polite laughter, but had his Jewish audience given the matter a bit of thought, it might have occurred to them that it is no less obscene for a black man to be a member of the Democratic Party than it is for a Jew to be a member of the Nazi Party. For more than 200 years, Democrats oppressed and murdered African Americans as cruelly and as indiscriminately as the Nazis murdered Jews during the 1930s and ‘40s. It makes one wonder why they were even in the same room with Hastings?
On Monday, September 22, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden sat down for a friendly chat with Katie Kouric of CBS News. In a typical burst of Biden verbal excess, he suggested that today’s leaders could take a lesson from Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a financial crisis.
Biden explained to Kouric, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ” Biden had apparently forgotten that Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929. He had also apparently forgotten that there was no television at the time. Television was not introduced to the public until the 1939 World's Fair, and most American families did not have television sets in their living rooms until 1946 or 1947.
Unfortunately for the Obama-Biden ticket, Katie Kouric wasn’t quite as quick on her feet as George Stephanopoulos, who pulled Barack Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire recently when Barack used the phrase, “my Muslim religion.” Stephanopoulos quickly corrected him, saying, “You mean Christian religion, don’t you?”
During World War II, every American was warned repeatedly to be very careful about what they said in public. Posters and billboards across the country carried the warning, “Loose lips… sink ships!” It looks as if today’s Democrats may yet sink their own ship with loose lips.
