Much of the nostalgia for the good old Biden of yesteryear is political hokum.

 Jeffrey St. Clair
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+ In 1988, Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms that he says “changed him into the man he wanted to be.” That “changed man” treated Anita Hill dismissively (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (2023/4).}

+ Much of the nostalgia for the good old Biden of yesteryear is political hokum. He’s always been a scheming politician with very conservative political instincts. Only months before the 1980 elections, Biden publicly attacked Jimmy Carter for being soft on crime. In his four years in office, Carter had managed to reduce the federal prison population by 25 percent. Biden, seeking to advance himself as a conservative Democrat, saw an opening and zeroed in on Carter’s lenient drug policies, saying, “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers. I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”