Tucker: How would 'President Biden' handle the coronavirus pandemic?
Ask yourself: Is Joe Biden ready to lead this country?
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Well, there's been so much going on, obviously, it's been easy to forget it, but there is still a presidential campaign going on this year.
Until a few hours ago, in fact, the Democratic primaries were still in progress. But now it's done, at least officially. This morning, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., former 2020 presidential candidate: We are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible.
And so today, I'm announcing the suspension of my campaign.
So that's it for Sanders. He is 78 years old. He will never be the president, but he did leave his mark.
For two cycles in a row, Bernie Sanders evoked panic at the highest levels of the DNC. Twice in a row, the Democratic Party leaders managed to crush him in the end, and they did that, despite the fact that Sanders had a large and passionate following, as well as a genuinely populist message. The DNC., meanwhile, is ossified and corrupt and cares not at all about the actual lives of its voters.
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So how did they manage to beat him twice? Well, they could not have done it without Sanders' help. Sanders never wanted to win. Like so many ideologues he wanted to lose; it makes him feel virtuous.
In 2016, Sanders wouldn't attack Hillary Clinton for putting classified email at risk on an unsecured server. He didn't go after the grotesque scam that was the Clinton Foundation until it was far too late to matter.
This year, he disavowed one of his own supporters for criticizing Joe Biden, and then floridly praised Biden's character. Then Sanders sat by like an embarrassed child as Elizabeth Warren and CNN attacked him as a sexist.
After a while, voters began to wonder the obvious: If the Democratic Party isn't bad enough for Sanders to attack, then why do we need a revolution? Sanders never answered that question, and now he never will. Because underneath it all, he was a party man to the core, always. Sad.
All of which means Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Nobody really chose Biden for this job. He wound up in it by a series of defaults, and it shows.
Sanders never wanted to win. Like so many ideologues he wanted to lose; it makes him feel virtuous.
Ask yourself, is Joe Biden ready to lead this country? Could he find his car in a three-tiered parking garage? Could he navigate a salad bar? And by the way, what exactly is his position on the coronavirus pandemic? Those are the mysteries Democrats now face.
Biden has been virtually invisible for the last month. That's not an accident. Joe Biden on camera means more moments like this:
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic nominee for president: We cannot let this -- we've never allowed any crisis from a Civil War straight through to the pandemic of '17 -- all the way around -- '16.
We have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle a way that we can both have a democracy and elections and at the same time, correct the public health.
You follow that? "Correct the public health."
It is hard to imagine a man like that making it through a presidential debate or even staying awake through the inaugural proceedings.
Ask yourself, is Joe Biden ready to lead this country? Could he find his car in a three-tiered parking garage? Could he navigate a salad bar? And by the way, what exactly is his position on the coronavirus pandemic? Those are the mysteries Democrats now face.
It seems likely that at some point, Democratic leaders will try to find a way to replace Biden before the November election. Andrew Cuomo is the obvious replacement, but there are many others. Whatever happens, it's worth taking Joe Biden seriously for this moment, now that he is officially, in a sense, the nominee.
Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972. That was the year Richard Nixon opened China to the West. As the threat from China grew larger and more threatening and much more obvious over the decades, Biden seemed to grow more accommodating to the Chinese government.
In 2000, for example, the U.S.-China Trade Relations Act gave China normal trade status. What does that mean? Well, in her book, "China RX," Rosemary Gibson, who we've had on the show, details how that piece of legislation opened the floodgates for Chinese drug imports.
Within three years of the bill passing, America lost its last aspirin factory, its last vitamin C facility, its last penicillin plant. Our ability to make critically vital antibiotics in this country vanished, and that was a serious blow to our national security.
And yet Joe Biden voted for that bill. He went on to oppose amendments to it that would have put pressure on China to release political prisoners and stop forced abortions. Eleven years later in 2011, Biden still didn't see the threat. In fact, he appeared to welcome it.
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That year, he said, "A rising China is a positive development not only for China, but for America." The day that Biden gave that speech, millions of Americans already lost their jobs. They've been shipped overseas to China.
Chinese students were already flooding America's schools and research labs, crowding out Americans, stealing the data and information. And in the end that would boost the Chinese economy to where it stands today -- larger than ours.
It is hard to believe Biden said that, but it wasn't the only time he did. Here's Biden last May on the campaign trail.
Biden: China is going to eat our lunch. Come on, man. They're not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They're not a competition for us.
Just two months ago when it was already clear to everyone who was watching that China had lied to the world in ways that hurt the world with a deadly outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus, Biden was still flacking for the Chinese government.
Biden: Now, we have right now a crisis with the coronavirus emanating from China. In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do.
This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria, xenophobia -- hysterical xenophobia to -- and fear-mongering -- to lead the way instead of science.
"Xenophobia." It seems almost antique. Why? Because in a moment like this, in a moment of national crisis, irrelevant issues tend to recede.
You've probably heard a lot less recently about how America is racist, how we need reparations for slavery and non-binary signs at every public men's room stall. It all seems insultingly frivolous now.
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What matters in moments like this are the big things, and at the top of that list is who should lead this world going forward? Should it be the United States or should it be the government of China? Anyone who has trouble answering that question probably won't be the president.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on April 8, 2020.