Not Very Good People

As if this past week's good economic news (2.5 million jobs added last month and an unemployment rate that was projected to be at 20% actually coming in at 13.3%) wasn't bad enough for the Dems, supporters were scrambling this past week to undo Joe Biden's latest gaff in which he channeled Hillary Clinton and said that as many as 15% of Americans are “just not very good people.” Damn ... that's 45 million people—a small "basket of deplorables," I suppose. 

I wonder if Biden is including the many African Americans who now recognize that decades-long Democrat policies have done little to improve their economic situation (but in 3 years, Donald Trump has). Oh wait, I forgot ... according to Biden, if you don't agree with him, "you ain't black."

On the other hand, this has been a bad week for Donald Trump. His handling of the George Floyd protests and the ensuing riots was ham-handed at best. The president has refused to learn that sometimes, it's better to say (or tweet) nothing and let events speak for themselves. However, if the Dems think that mass virtue signaling and broad-based calls for "defunding the police" will resonate with the broader non-progressive public, that's not going to happen. 

In fact, it's possible that Joe Biden is on to something, even though in the muddle that is his current thinking, he doesn't realize it. In every group—politicians, doctors, lawyers, firefighters, bakers, carpenters, bankers, administrators, teachers, masons, and yeah, police—there are some who are “just not very good people.”

Joe Biden and the rest of us who aren't progressives already know that—it's part of the human condition. But what we also know, what we've learned not from leftist agitators but by living our lives, is that we don't paint an entire group of people based on the actions of a few of them. On one level, that's what progressives decry when they condemn racial stereotyping, but at the same time, it's exactly what they do when they claim that all cops are racist and violent because a few cops are "racist and violent." 

Because they're caught up in the emotion of their moral preening, the irony of that escapes progressives. They wail about a "racist, white supremacist" nation, holding up clever (they think) signs that make the accusation but never offer any meaningful solutions. They scream about "systemic racism" among police, suggesting that by defunding the police, black lives will be better. They willfully forget that good and decent residents of African American neighborhoods suffer from crime at a much higher rate than others and desperately need police protection. BTW, those same residents also need the historic number of jobs they acquired during the first three years of Trump's presidency—jobs that allowed them to escape the dependency and victimhood that the Dems offered in preceding years. Looks like those jobs are coming back.

So maybe for just an instant, Joe Biden's thinking wasn't muddled at all. Maybe, he was dead wrong by accusing millions of being "not very good people," but right about the fact that EVERY group, has at least a few people who aren't "very good." It's part of the human condition, and even progressives, despite what they perceive to be their magical moral powers, can't repeal or "reform" the human condition.