Biden on gaffes: I may get some details wrong but not details like locking migrant children up in cages

Via Becket Adams, I regret to inform poor Joe that he has this very important detail wrong too.

—“Speechless. This is not who we are as a nation.” — Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor now running for governor, referring in a tweet Sunday to photos showing young-looking immigrants in steel cages

THE FACTS: The photos, taken by The Associated Press, were from 2014, during the Obama administration, but were presented by liberal activists as if they showed the effects of Trump’s immigration policy now. Villaraigosa, Favreau and some others deleted their tweets when the mistake was pointed out.

They had linked to a June 2014 online story by The Arizona Republic titled “First peek: Immigrant children flood detention center.” The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.

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Remember last year when lefties spent a few angry hours one afternoon posting photos of young immigrant kids lying face-down behind a chain-link fence, looking to all the world as if they’d been housed in a large kennel? That effort quickly petered out after outlets like the AP reminded them that the photos were taken in 2014. How Biden’s team could have missed that episode and sent him out onto Colbert’s show to insist that the Obama administration never put kids in cages, knowing that Republicans are already paying close attention to Democratic hypocrisy on this issue, is mind-boggling. It makes you wonder if he botched what he was supposed to say: He would have been on firm ground if he’d said “at least our administration didn’t separate immigrant families.” It was unaccompanied minors who ended up kenneled by the Obama team, not kids who arrived here with an adult.

He walked right into another gaffe, this one much more substantive than the usual “Biden forgets the name of the guy whom he ran with in 2008” stuff. Why?

Next thing you know, he’ll be telling people that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.

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He absolutely did not oppose the war from the beginning and it’s freakishly stupid for him to insist that he did. Democrats proved three years ago that they’re willing to forgive a would-be nominee who voted for war in Iraq. The issue has less salience in this year’s race than it did in 2016 or, of course, 2008. All Biden had to do was follow Hillary’s lead — “I was misled by Bush about Saddam’s WMD, I’m deeply sorry, I’d do it differently if I could do it again.” The one sure way to put Iraq back on Democratic voters’ radar is to try to whitewash history on it. Which is exactly what he did a few days ago in an interview with NPR.

Again, why? Does he honestly not remember the positions that he and, later, the Obama administration took on certain major policies? That’s more alarming than the idea of Biden simply lying to try to cover his tracks.

In lieu of an exit question, enjoy Adams’s long list of media outlets that failed to fact-check Biden on locking up migrant children in their write-ups of his Colbert interview. I’m giving you the whole clip here because it’s fun watching Colbert grapple with the awkward role he’s in with Biden as a guest. He doesn’t want to hit him hard lest he damage the party’s most likely nominee (for now, at least) but he also has to come after him to placate the progressives in his audience who want Biden cleared aside for Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. Usually a big-name Democrat on Colbert’s show is a pure ally. Not quite here, and it shows.

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David Strom 3:30 PM | December 04, 2024
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