By John Kass

After somberly promising to unify the nation just a year ago, President Joe Biden, with his poll numbers plummeting, with his mind going, decided to reach out to the Democratic Party’s inner demon.

He branded all Americans who oppose his unconstitutional plan to federalize the elections this way: As unredeemable racists, as domestic enemies.

“I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies—foreign and yes, domestic,” Biden said in his incendiary and un-presidential speech in Atlanta last week.

Notice that he stressed “domestic” enemies.

“At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the same side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden said, ignoring the fact that he once boasted about receiving praise from Wallace, the Democrat segregationist of Alabama.

“Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?” the president asked the people. “Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide to defend our elections, to defend our democracy!”

It is odd that Biden would pose himself as a defender of democracy in a speech of lies. It was ugly. And it was beneath the office of the presidency. I’ve never bought into the partisan line that he’s not my president. I detest that sort of thinking, no matter who holds the White House. I see it as dangerous and corrosive for the republic.

I’m an American and Joe Biden is my president. Yet after his shameful speech smearing Americans as racists simply for supporting election integrity at the polls, I feel only shame for this shameless man and for the office he holds.

Joe, Kamala, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the days of honoring yourselves will soon be at an end.

Is this the “racist” nation that twice elected a black man from Chicago as its president without the elections having been federalized?

Was this America that voted to elect and re-elect President Barack Obama also racist when he was sworn into office?

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as hateful racists. Yet Biden, Schumer and the wild-eyed Jacobins who rule the Democratic Party—and many of their mainstream media high priests—obviously think so.

So what comes next?

What do you do with these tens of millions of domestic enemies and subhuman racists and fascists who voted for Obama, though now that they think Voter ID is important, they’ve been categorized as agents of evil by the president of the United States?

Your sense of moral outrage compels you to hunt them down, does it not? You want to burn them as witches, don’t you? And screaming over the roaring flames, you shout to your friendly media chorus that you really had no choice, that you had to do it, you just had to burn them, because well, you’re oh so holy and they’re such sinful domestic enemies.

Isn’t that how it goes? So much for that unity speech at your Inauguration a year ago, Mr. Biden.

By the president’s own words spoken in Georgia, Americans who disagree with him and support state control of elections as the Constitution provides–and Voter ID laws–while opposing wholesale mail-in ballots so the nation will have some confidence in the elections results are nothing but racists and domestic enemies.

A former friend of mine, let’s call him Maximilien, once seemed to me to be reasonable man who prided himself on his apolitical intellectual honesty. At least when I knew him. Now Max is consumed by this same self-righteous zeal. He loathed former President Donald Trump, but I didn’t hold his political beliefs against him.

Yet now in Max’s eyes, all Republicans are fascists. And all conservatives are domestic enemies who must be shamed and marginalized. I expect to see him someday at the head of a tribunal.

Max is not alone. I’m sure those of you who’ve lost friends over politics know men and women just like him.  But now Max and his friends have President Biden lifting them up, embracing their loathing of those who disagree with them, the president officially legitimizing their view of things.

Other Americans, from political independents to rational Democrats and Republicans, were sickened by Biden’s speech. And even some Biden apologists were appalled, including liberal columnist David Ignatius of The Washington Post. Other pundits of the left will find something else to focus on, or  defend Biden and prattle his talking points, lest they risk the mob turning on them.

A weak president who is out of control, one who wildly denounces those who disagree with him as sinners against the state,  blaming them for the failures of his extreme legislative agenda that can not generate enough votes in the Senate is not a hopeful business. It is a frightening thing. It is something out of bad paranoid fiction, or post-war Eastern Europe. But it is not fiction or history. It seeps from the babbling old man in the White House.

Most Americans aren’t worried about looking for racists on every block. They don’t think America is consumed by racial hate. They think America is a nice country. They like living here. They’re worried about other matters. They wonder why Biden and the Democrats won’t address their concerns.

The people are worried about inflation, not racist witches. After those wild spending and money-printing sprees from Washington, inflation is now higher than it has been in 40 years. It is eating a hole in their bank accounts, college funds and retirement savings. The people see the rising price of gas and wonder how long they’ll be able to afford meat.

They’re worried about confusion over vaccine mandates and vax passes and their kids being locked out of school in the lockdown blue states, of babies ordered to wear masks

What they’re not worried about are the screams of the witch hunters, or whether to play some old-timey Democratic political game like “race cards.” They have lives.

But Biden and Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer don’t live in that world. They live in the abstract political world, where the left talks to itself, and reads what the left has written in The New York Times and The Washington Post and regurgitate it all, just like the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC..

 They’re all there in their Washington silo and can’t see how the rest of America views them or how Americans are living. They’re stuck in their bubble with their loathing of the American people.

Biden and Schumer and the rest know they don’t have the votes in the Senate to kill the senate filibuster and federalize the elections. Schumer once warned that democracy would die if the filibuster were killed and the Senate decided important matters by simple majority.

“The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called ‘the cooling saucer of democracy’ into the rubber stamp of dictatorship,” Schumer cried out in 2005. “We will not let them. They want, because they can’t get their way on every judge, to change the rules in mid-stream, to wash away 200 years of history. They want to make this country into a banana republic, where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules. Are we going to let them? It’ll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.”

That was Schumer then, warning that killing the filibuster would be “doomsday” for the republic. And now, as the left washes away centuries of American history, what does Schumer do? He kneels on the neck and calls out for other Washington Democrats to join him and finish the job.

But Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona won’t join him and stand firm for now. If they hold, theirs will be a true profile in courage, understanding that Schumer was right in 2005. Yet the witch hunters on the Democratic left want to burn Manchin and Sinema too.

So Biden doesn’t have the votes. But to serve their personal political ambitions and desperate about what they believe waits for them in the November 2022 mid-term elections, Biden and Schumer are willing to drive America off the racial cliff.

Can you smell the unity Biden once promised that is burning?

Opinion poll after opinion poll tells us that Americans are concerned about the integrity of elections, given that for several cycles now, Democrats and Republicans have attacked the legitimacy of their victorious opponents. Trump has done this. And Hillary Clinton has done this, going so far as to collude with real Russians with help from media.

Poll after poll tells us that most Americans support common sense voter integrity provisions like Voter Identification and an end to wholesale mail-in balloting and vote harvesting by partisan activists. That kind of stuff like vote harvesting isn’t really all that removed from the bad old days along the Chicago Way.

And the nation wonders: If Americans from all demographic groups must wait in long lines to be coughed upon by strangers in order to get tested for Coronavirus or obtain a precious vax pass, how can any rational being oppose Voter ID to give the people more confidence in their elections?

“His speech in Georgia was unbelievably divisive, way over the top in terms of rhetoric, comparing the Jan. 6 riots to the bombing of the church in Birmingham,” said Tom Bevan, co-founder of Real Clear Politics and guest on this week’s edition of The Chicago Way podcast.

“Democrats are having a hard time convincing people that voting in 2022 is worse than voting in 1965,” he said. “The average person recognizes this as a blatant untruth.”

Since Biden does not have the votes to kill the Senate filibuster and ram through a federal takeover of elections—which in case the president has forgotten, the Constitution gives the administration of elections to the states—what is the strategy here?

Bevan had an idea. If you look at the image at the top of this column, you’d find it.

“I tweeted this the other day, that he and Schumer are like Thelma and Louise, pedal to the metal, going over the cliff,” Bevan said. “And they don’t care.”

“Thelma and Louise.”

Bingo, Mr. Bevan. Thanks for the headline.

But I see Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the car with them, sitting in the back seat, shrieking like kids on a roller coaster, the sun on their faces as they crack open some beer for the ride down.

I suppose I could pick Biden’s speech apart, and remind you of his past, of all the racist things he’s said about school busing, his friendships with Southern segregationists, how he lied about so many things, including that whopper about getting arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela. I should remind you that  Kamala Harris called him a racist, then ate her words to climb the ladder of power, when Biden offered her the vice presidency.

And Biden had this to say in 2012, when he was Obama’s vice president and Republican corporate milquetoast Mitt Romney was the GOP presidential nominee.

Biden called  Romney a racist, using a Foghorn Leghorn voice to tell a mostly black audience that Romney would “put y’all back in chains!!”

Y’all.

Must I remind you? Monday is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Before Biden again cynically uses the late Rev. King’s memory as a weapon, must I remind you what Biden said of black Americans who hadn’t decided whether to vote for him?

“Well, I tell you what,” Biden said during the last presidential campaign, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Black people “ain’t” black if they don’t support you? Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. President.

When Republicans are in political trouble they often shout about patriotism, rattling their sabers, pushing for unnecessary foreign wars that neither they nor their children will ever fight. Some demand boots on the ground, as long as their family’s feet aren’t in those boots. They talk of honor and sacrifice, even as they hold out their hands for political donations from defense contractors.

And when Democrats are in trouble, as they are now, what do they do?

They fan the angry flames of race like blacksmiths in a hurry to make swords from ploughshares. In Chicago, where I was born, fanning racial flames is an art form, like counting votes or giving out hams and turkeys from the political office. The politicians cut up the city political maps by race. They hand out government contracts on the basis of race. They call this “equity” and declare themselves moral.

 Biden and his fellows in Washington are masters of racial flame fanning too, able to continue their corrosive sorcery just as long as they’re protected, as they have been for decades, by the corporate legacy media. But Americans see through the fog, and realize that the Democrats have lost their way. They’ve gone woke and they can’t find their way back to the center. Even John F. Kennedy wouldn’t be able to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Now, Democrats pit Americans against each other by using immutable characteristics, like skin color and gender. And it all gets angrier and louder by the day as independents and others—including Latinos–turn their backs on them.

Without racial division and racial anger, where are the Democrats? I don’t mean Democrats I grew up with. I mean the elite leaders of the Democratic Party. Where are they?

They’re lost in the desert. But their tricks still work. They have their allies in corporate media to carry their water. Emboldened by media, Biden, Schumer and the Democratic left keep pushing policies that Americans don’t support, and become enraged when Americans won’t follow.

Frightened and angry, they drive stubbornly off that cliff just like Thelma and Louise in the movie.

But Joe, Chuck and Nancy are not in a gorgeous 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible, gleaming in that turquoise death-arc as the ground comes up to meet them.

 For the time being, they’re in control of the most powerful government of the greatest nation on earth.

At least, until November.

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(Copyright 2022 John Kass)