James Freeman at The Wall Street Journal is right to point out that it is disgraceful for Biden to compare 2023 Republicans to 1965 Democrats, for all the obvious reasons. But it is particularly loathsome for the president to smear his political opponents as modern-day Bull Connors when he was the one who embraced segregation, without ever admitting to his past behavior.

No one is shackled to a viewpoint. But the man who said he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a “racial jungle” in a debate over busing — you remember Kamala Harris’ “I was that little girl” moment — is also the man who bragged that J. William Fulbright, Herman Talmadge, and, especially, James O. Eastland were not only friends but mentors. It was Biden who praised the racist zealot Sen. John Stennis by comparing him to Stonewall Jackson. And Strom Thurmond was a Biden confidant before he “moved to the good side.”

On his first campaign, only a few years after he now claims his heart was in Selma, Biden told a group that he had been honored as “one of the outstanding young politicians of America” by the notorious Alabama Gov. George Wallace — the man who instructed police “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent” that march in 1965.

[To be fair, some of these mentioned above repented of their previous positions to varying degrees in later life as well. But to Harsanyi’s point, none of them postured as civil-rights activists when they did. — Ed]