{"id":393077,"date":"2019-01-16T18:17:51","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T17:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/joe-biden-crime-fighter-from-hell\/"},"modified":"2019-01-16T18:17:51","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T17:17:51","slug":"joe-biden-crime-fighter-from-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/joe-biden-crime-fighter-from-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden, Crime Fighter from Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I just listened to Joe Biden\u2019s seventeen-and-a-half minute\u00a02003 eulogy\u00a0<\/a>for his political friend Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat segregationist from South Carolina who became a Republican in 1964. It\u2019s clear Biden liked the man, who he worked closely with to pass crime bills in the early 1980s.\u00a0 As Thurmond\u2019s replacement as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden went on to push the now-controversial bill he proudly touts as \u201cthe 1994 Biden Crime Bill.\u201d This is the bill about which, in 2015, former President Bill Clinton told an NAACP convention concerned about the mass incarceration of African Americans: \u201cI signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.\u201d According to a\u00a02015 NY Times story<\/a>, \u201cToday, about 2.2 million Americans are locked up in federal and state prisons and local jails, twice as many as when Mr. Clinton took office.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s long eulogy is full of warmth and wit and, for a liberal like Biden, driven by a spirit of forgiveness and, more important, a pragmatic sense of political synthesis between the dead man\u2019s racist past and what Biden claims as his political mission, the pursuit of civil rights. He had been asked by Thurmond himself to give it. The problem is, when we forgive past shortcomings or evils in order to get over hurdles to make change possible so we can move on to better things, there needs to be true atonement, or it can\u2019t work. And even if one argues…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair I just listened to Joe Biden\u2019s seventeen-and-a-half minute\u00a02003 eulogy\u00a0for his political friend Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat segregationist from South Carolina who became a Republican in 1964. It\u2019s clear Biden liked the man, who he worked closely with to pass crime bills in the early 1980s.\u00a0 As Thurmond\u2019s replacement as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-393077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}