All Trump, no Harris: A look at the Democratic Party’s puzzling new platform
The policy document still includes a host of promises for Joe Biden’s “second term”

Democratic delegates have voted to approve the party’s 2024 platform. The 94-page document still states that President Joe Biden is running for office, mentions Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris, and includes multiple false and misleading claims.

The 91-page document was compiled in July and published on Sunday. In a largely symbolic vote at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, it was approved as the party’s official platform for the next four years.

A woke introduction

The platform opens with a so-called “land acknowledgement,” declaring that the US is made up of “lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial.”

“While we meet in Chicago, we also recognize and honor the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations,” it continues, before listing off other Native American tribes hailing from the Chicago region.

Originating on university campuses, ‘Land acknowledgements’ have been embraced by progressive politicians and nonprofits in recent years. Conservatives have mocked the practice as overly politically correct, while some leftists have argued that land acknowledgements don’t go far enough, and should be backed by cash reparations.

Biden still in the race?

The platform refers to Biden as the Democratic Party’s candidate at least 20 times, despite the 81-year-old suspending his campaign and endorsing Vice President Harris to run in his place last month. 

President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job,” the platform’s second page declares, before listing a host of the president’s priorities for his “second term in office,”which include nominating more “diverse” judges and offering a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Regina Romero, the co-chair of the convention’s platform committee, told delegates that the document was written “prior to the president passing the torch in an act of love and patriotism,” and despite its mistakes remains a “forward-looking vision for our party that echoes the voice of all.”

These references to Biden are “an open admission that Kamala has no policies of her own. She has no plan to fix the litany of crises she’s created,” Trump campaign spokesman Dylan Johnson said in a statement on Monday.

All about Trump

Throughout the platform, Biden’s record is repeatedly contrasted with Trump’s. Lines such as “while President Biden has stood up to the gun lobby, Trump is proud of doing their bidding” and “while President Biden has sought to appoint judges who look like America, three-quarters of Trump’s judicial appointees were men and 84 percent were white” appear on almost every page of the document.

In total, Trump is mentioned 150 times in the platform, while Harris’ name appears only 32 times. Biden is named 287 times.

No Harris policies

All of the platform’s post-election promises are attributed to Biden, with the document omitting Harris’ recent economic proposals, which include financial assistance for first-time home buyers, a $6,000-per-child tax credit, and price controls on groceries.

In the month since Biden ended his campaign, these economic proposals are the only policies Harris has announced. By contrast, Biden, Trump, and Hillary Clinton had all published extensive policy documents by this stage of the 2020 and 2016 election cycles.

Hoaxes and falsehoods

The document contains numerous mistruths and outright falsehoods, particularly about Trump. It claims, as Biden has in his speeches, that Trump called members of the military who died in war “suckers” and “losers,” and that he called neo-Nazi protesters “very fine people.” Neither anecdote is true.

Biden and Harris’ accomplishments are similarly embellished. For example, the document claims that the president and vice president are “finally rebuilding” broadband infrastructure in the US, despite the fact that zero new connections have been built since Harris was appointed to lead the $42 billion initiative in 2021, according to Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr. 

https://www.rt.com/news/602856-democrat-platform-biden-harris/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Norman Solomon
Common Dreams

An observation from George Orwell — “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” — is acutely relevant to how President Joe Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night.

His words fit into a messaging template now in its 11th month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: 

“We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was, in a broader context, the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. 

“I just don’t think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: 

“And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it’s not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. 

It’s central to his legacy. It’s central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring.

Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in June 2023 by The New Press.

This article is from Common Dreams.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/20/bidens-cruel-orwellian-remarks-on-gaza-at-the-dnc/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.