Indicating he’ll have no problem injecting racial divisions into any potential presidential campaign, Joe Biden blamed a “white man’s culture” for violence against women.
“I realize I get a little too passionate about this sometimes, but we all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country,” Biden lamented. “Not just the laws, we changed laws — change the culture. The culture.”
The former vice president, speaking at a New York City event honoring young people who have helped combat sexual assault on college campuses, then discussed the origins of the phrase “rule of thumb.”
Biden explained that the phrase derives from English common law in the 1300s.
“No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb,” he relayed. “This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. That’s got to change it’s got to change.”
Is he really under the impression that the culture hasn’t improved when it comes to violence against women since the 1300s?
Regrets Role in Anita Hill Hearing
Biden’s attack against white men, of which he is a group member, stemmed mainly from lingering regrets in his role during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas.
Anita Hill, he argued, should not have been forced to face a panel of “a bunch of white guys” regarding her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas.
“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” he said. “I wish I could have done something.”
Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, oversaw the controversial nomination process for Justice Thomas. Some Democrats are still furious about how he treated Hill.
The New York Times reported on the controversy with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as a backdrop:
His name has been invoked frequently in recent days, mainly by Republicans, for leading the 1991 hearings when an all-male, all-white Judiciary Committee aggressively questioned Anita Hill about claims that Judge Thomas sexually harassed her. The hearings have long been a source of discomfort with Mr. Biden among Democrats who remember the process.
Biden would later apologize to Hill, mainly because he was busy painting Kavanaugh as guilty until proven innocent.
Thomas, meanwhile, had his name was dragged through the mud as political opponents propped up Hill, despite her story having several holes and little basis in fact.
Racial Politics
This isn’t, by any stretch, the first time Biden has used racial divides in America to further his political career.
Last spring, he discussed how Republican efforts to enforce voter identification laws is simply a means to disenfranchise minority voters.
“It’s what these guys are all about, man,” Biden told MSNBC’s Al Sharpton of all people. “Republicans don’t want working class people voting. They don’t want black folks voting.”
This is the most absurd thing I’ve heard all day and it’s still early.
Republicans ARE the working class & WE want the black folks voting. The Democrats claim to be for the people, but only if they can buy them & give them free stuff.
Gropin’ Joe is an idiot. pic.twitter.com/co6MbO3pVY
— ??sɪᴇʀʀᴀ ᴡʜɪsᴋᴇᴇ?? (@SierraWhiskee) April 15, 2018
Then, of course, there was the time Biden told a predominantly black crowd in Virginia that the Republicans and Mitt Romney “wanted to put them all back in chains.”
