Clarence Thomas | Ted Rall's Rallblog

Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean.

July 10, 2023•

Joe Biden recently told a group of children that he has “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.”

Sounds sweet.

It’s not.

People who read and watch Republican-leaning news outlets have long known that the president has a seventh grandchild, the product of Hunter Biden and his former girlfriend, Lunden Roberts. Hunter, who lives at the White House with his dad, has abandoned his four-year-old daughter Navy Roberts. He has refused to have anything to do with her. Joe, her grandfather, also pretends his granddaughter doesn’t exist, as though he were Grover Cleveland in the 19th century. (Even old Grover didn’t get away with unpersoning his illegitimate baby.)

Last week, the New York Times broke the liberal media’s silence on the story, shocking Democrats. Among the yucky details: Hunter went to court to block the little girl from using her father’s surname, Biden. This is serious stuff: parental abandonment increases the odds that Navy will suffer from health problems, addiction and suicidal ideation as an adult.

Democratic operatives quickly went into damage-control mode, dissembling and making excuses for a politician who has branded himself as our national grandpa—kind, decent, inclusive and loyal to his family to a fault.

It’s a “private family matter,” Democrats say. But there’s nothing private about any First Family—especially not this one. A White House that releases photos of the six grandkids’ Christmas stockings hanging from the fireplace can’t demand privacy when people ask WTF.

What about Donald Trump? He’s no paragon of virtue, liberals deflect. But Trump’s flaws don’t include hypocrisy; he never claimed to be a big family man. Biden does.

Another Democratic talking point: Lunden is a Trumpie. She hobnobs with right-wingers! How can Joe associate with Navy? There’s an easy retort to that one: Hunter ghosted her. You can’t be picky when you’re low on friends.

Because it undermines the president’s political brand, the Navy Biden Roberts issue won’t go away. Voters are finally beginning to ask whether Biden’s carefully crafted Irish-American just-a-boy-from-Scranton charm was malarkey all along.

Of course it was.

Behind Biden’s carefully-cultivated nice-old-man persona is a vicious SOB who screams and curses at his aides. He’s a sadist who enjoys humiliating people in front of their colleagues. He’s a colossally abusive boss; the difference between him and Amy Klobuchar is that the press covers up for him. “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” Biden screams at White House staffers. “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” are other standard Bidenisms.

The fact that Joe is a mean old man shouldn’t come as this much of a shock. After all, this is a man who fist-bumped Mohammed bin Salman shortly after the Saudi dictator lured a Washington Post columnist to his consulate so he could torture him to death, chop his body into pieces, dissolve the chunks and dump the acidic gristle into the Istanbul sewer system. That gesture required a barrel of cynicism and one hell of a cast-iron stomach, not to mention a total lack of ethics. Biden chuckled when a reporter asked him whether MBS might commit another murder like the one of Jamal Khashoggi. “God love you,” Biden laughed. “What a silly question. How can I possibly be sure of any of that?”

Ha ha.

“The president’s cold shoulder—and heart—is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,” Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote. And she doesn’t shock easily.

The truth is, Biden has always been a cruel person. Democrats don’t want to see it and, if they do, they won’t admit it, so they’re no different or better than the Republicans who stand behind Trump no matter what. Team Politics demands that fans of a party pay fealty in the coin of denial, policies and principles be damned.

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee presiding over Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court, Biden repeatedly failed to protect his witness Anita Hill, who credibly accused Thomas of sexual harassment, from his Republican colleagues’ smear campaign. As if throwing Hill—an intensely private, shy person terrified of becoming the center of a political firestorm—under the bus wasn’t bad enough, he brought key corroborating witness Angela Wright to Washington yet never called her, leaving her to watch the hearings at her lawyer’s office. Hill was scarred, Thomas corrupted the court, and Biden moved on.

As chairman, Biden’s duty was to his witnesses, whom he abandoned. As a Democrat, his duty was to try to prevent Thomas from joining the court. Instead Biden sided with Thomas and his fellow senators.

Biden stands accused of staggeringly scurrilous misdeeds, including accepting millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for changing U.S. policy. But no single event showcases his willingness to screw over an innocent person to gain political advantage like his slanderous account of the circumstances of the deaths of his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972.

“A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,” Biden told an audience in 2007.

In 2001 he falsely blamed an “errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive” and “hit my children and my wife and killed them.”

He told this phony story over and over.

Curtis Dunn, who was driving the truck that struck Neilia Biden’s stationwagon, died in 1999. He had not been drinking. The accident was her fault; she blew through a stop sign; Dunn’s truck had none. Dunn stopped immediately and raced to help Biden and her children.

What kind of man would make up a story like that? Who would smear an innocent man just for fun? The same kind of man who would unperson his own granddaughter.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Like Trump, Biden Would Be a Right-Wing President

July 10, 2020•

Ted Rall

Opinion | Why is Strom Thurmond's name still on congressional ...

What would President Joe Biden do? His supporters are making it hard to read the tealeaves.

They say he’d appoint a great cabinet. But he won’t tell us who would be in it.

They say he’d be progressive. Yet his “unity platform” doesn’t include a single major policy position endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

As they warn in those investment company ads, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. But there’s a reason Wall Street analysts pour over historical data—past performance is a strong indicator of what a stock will do next. So if you want to know what kind of President Biden would be, it’s smart to study his record, which has been consistent over 44 years in public office.

With a few exceptions, Biden has always positioned himself either at the center or to the right of the ideological 50-yard line of his party at any given time. When he has written or sponsored legislation with broad implications, it has been so reactionary that it could easily have been authored by a right-wing Republican, like the 1994 crime bill and the USA-Patriot Act. Biden has never been responsible for any major law that could be described as liberal.

It’s impossible to know what was in Joe Biden’s heart as he considered policy decisions throughout his four decades in Washington. All we know is what he actually did. There were few acts of foresight, much less courage. Even when the choice between right and wrong was clear to many others, Biden was on the wrong side of history.

Could this conservative Democrat, at age 78, suddenly reverse course and turn into a progressive? Anything is possible. But it isn’t likely.

I was 12 years old in 1975, but I remember how people felt about court-ordered busing in order to desegregate public schools. Racists were against it; anti-racists were for it.

Biden was against it. He was so against it that he cosponsored an amendment against busing with Senator Jesse Helms, the Republican far-right segregationist. “What it says is, in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son. That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?” Biden said in what ought to have been a career-killing rant.

He has never apologized.

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court, Biden failed to protect Professor Anita Hill from scurrilous attacks by Republican committee members during televised hearings. He seemed to value his working relationship with the GOP more than protecting a Democratic witness. Scandalously, Biden failed to call Sukari Hardnett, who corroborated Hill’s account. Thomas’ confirmation might not have survived her testimony.

Over the past few decades, Americans have liberalized their views about drugs, coming to favor the legalization of marijuana and opposing the “war on drugs” that criminalized substance abuse rather than treating it as a medical condition. Biden is on the opposite side of that trend. He is still against legalizing pot. And he was an aggressive proponent of the war on drugs. In 1983 he joined far-right, racist, Republican senator Strom Thurmond in cosponsoring the legislation that launched the modern asset forfeiture program, which allows police to steal property belonging to people suspected of possessing drugs even if they are not ever charged, much less convicted, of a crime.

Biden has been on the side of the angels a few times. He is fairly strong on LGBTQA rights. He voted against the 1991 Gulf War. Most of the time, however, he sides against oppressed people and in favor of military intervention.

Many people reading this will ask: but what about Trump? Isn’t he so much worse that Biden has to be an improvement?

Trump is terrible. His non-response to the coronavirus pandemic and his relentless racism and dogwhistling to neo-Nazis are execrable and impeachable. As awful and insane as he is, however, there’s no reason to think that he is any worse than Joe Biden would be.

At the end of the next four years, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are more likely to be alive if Donald Trump is president rather than Joe Biden. Trump has resisted new wars and is bringing an end to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan; Biden has repeatedly voted for new wars and backed policies that destroyed countries like Libya and Syria.

Though he hasn’t gone nearly far enough, Trump seems to understand the need to direct stimulus money into the pockets of unemployed and underemployed Americans. Biden, on the other hand, is a devotee of austerity. He was an architect of President Barack Obama’s decision to ignore millions of unemployed and newly homeless workers while handing $7 trillion in federal aid to big banks. One can easily imagine Biden reprising the role of Bill Clinton, another Democrat who became a deficit hawk, at a time when the Treasury should be spending money like water. It took Nixon to go to China; it takes a Democrat to screw the working class.

Vote for Joe Biden if you want to. But please don’t delude yourself. You’ll be voting for a change, not an improvement.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Society Makes Victimhood a No-Win Proposition

November 16, 2017•

Ted Rall

From Clarence Thomas to Jerry Sandusky to Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein, those who doubt their accusers always ask something similar to what Roy Moore said about those who accused him of sexual harassment and assault: “To think grown women would wait 40 years before a general election to bring charges is unbelievable.”

What takes so long? Why don’t alleged victims head straight to the police?

There are 17 good reasons in this great article.

Let me add two more that we don’t talk about enough: shame and fear of disbelief.

I’m not referring to the well-documented victims’ fear that they somehow brought the attack on themselves (for example, a woman who worries that she somehow sent mixed signals to a suitor who then raped her), but to something one rarely sees discussed in the media or talked about in typical conversations about victimhood.

Society doesn’t like victims. Victims make us uncomfortable. It’s probably a vestige of our Darwinian instinct for survival: the monkey clan prospers when its members are healthy and lucky, but finds life perilous around those who are sick and unfortunate. We turn away from the unlucky: the homeless man, the woman whose face bears burn scars, the black guy getting choked to death by cops. Not our business, not our problem, these are troubles to be avoided. I do it too.

This instinct goes double for those who refuse to soft-pedal their victimhood. Not even the most active social justice warriors have Rose McGowan’s back in her Twitter crusade against Harvey Weinstein — she’s a bit too angry for comfort. (Her recent drug arrest doesn’t help.)

I am not judging humanity here. I am trying to answer Roy Moore et al’s question. One of the answers is shame — the shame simply of being a victim in a shallow capitalist society that loves winners, hates losers and despises victims. Fake it to make it has a corollary: never let ’em see you sweat.

My friend Cole Smithey the critic told me a bit of film theory, after a character in a movie gets maimed (loses a hand, gets shot and acts shot, getting weaker and visibly bleeding, whatever), the audience stops liking and identifying with him or her. There are exceptions. Typically, however, a screenwriter will have a maimed character die, vanish or completely recover. Because no one likes a victim.

Getting fired and libeled by the LA Times reminded me of that anthropological truism. Immediately following my firing, I hardly heard from my fellow cartoonists. (That’s rare.) Friends resurfaced after I presented exculpatory evidence. A pair of taints (Loser and Liar) had been erased.

Then I sued the Times for defamation, and things tipped back. Some of my friends stayed true but others dumped me because they were scared that if they sided with me the Times and Tronc might deny them work, also because I’d gone Rose McGowan-y crusade-y. It’s true that the LAPD bought Tronc and the Times fired me for the LAPD, but it’s weird and anyway, no one likes a victim. Especially not an angry one.

Fear of not being believed is another underdiscussed yet potent inhibitor to victims considering whether to step forward, whether by filing a police report or going to the press.

I grew up poor with my single mom and we were short of money. To bring in some cash, my mom hooked me up with a job helping the janitor wash the blackboards after school at my junior high school. Looking back now, it was a situation perfect for an abuser: no one but an older male custodian and a 13-year-old boy in the otherwise empty building.

One afternoon the dude snuck behind me while I was working in a classroom and grabbed me, pinning my arms to my side. “Do you trust me?” he whispered in my ear. I remember his exact voice, the smell of his breath (alcohol, bourbon maybe). I felt his penis harden against my back.

I did not trust him.

But I told him I did, several times, and he believed me and let me go and I bounded exactly three steps toward the door, turned the knob and launched myself down the hall and flung myself down the stairs and hurled out the emergency exit, and I ran and ran and ran and it was so damn beautiful outside and I could hear the fire alarm ringing.

When my mom came home, I lied. I told her the job was over, the custodian no longer needed me.

Later a kid I didn’t know approached me at school. He might have been a year older. He asked me if I had worked for the dirty old janitor and whether he’d gone after me because the same thing had happened to him. I didn’t ask if he’d gone to the principal or told his parents and he didn’t ask me. It would have been the stupidest question in the world because no one would have believed us.

No one ever believed kids back then. About anything. The school administration wouldn’t have believed us about the English teacher who kept pot in his desk or the algebra teacher who seduced my friend or the driver’s ed instructor who grabbed my classmate’s breasts right in front of me and my best friend.

We Gen X kids understood the world as it was: survival was up to us. Adults didn’t care; adults wouldn’t help. Decades later, when I told my mom that story, she admitted I was right. “I assumed you were lazy,” she said about my quitting the job.

If you’ve never been a victim of some kind, you may find this strange, but there is something worse than knowing (or suspecting) that you may not be believed, and that is coming forward and letting cops and courts and human resource officers decide for themselves, based on the evidence and their biases, whether they believe you or not.

As long as you keep your victimhood to yourself, you know your experience was real.

(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) next book is “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)