Fox News found at least two creative ways to exploit Joe Biden’s remarks. One, to pretend he had somehow absolved Donald Trump’s remark about “some very fine” people marching with the Nazis in Charlottesville and the other as an excuse to make racial attacks on Cory Booker and Kamala Harris for objecting.

In case you missed it, here’s the controversy Fox can’t stop gloating over, while feigning only journalistic interest, via New York magazine:

Earlier this week, Joe Biden made remarks stressing the importance of “civility” in politics, and somehow found himself embroiled in another controversy. The issue: while touting his ability to work with his Senate colleagues during a Tuesday night fundraiser in New York, Biden cited his good working relationship with two defenders of segregation in his own party, Senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.

“We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done,” Biden said of his late former colleagues, quipping that Eastland, “Never called me ‘boy’; he always called me ‘son.’”

This sparked the biggest clash between Democratic 2020 candidates in the primary so far, with Senator Cory Booker calling on Biden to apologize, and several other candidates decrying his remarks. The former vice president hit back at his critics on Wednesday night, saying he had nothing to apologize for – and in fact, “Cory should apologize.”

The presence of Fox News contributor and resident African American black attacker David Webb on the panel was an immediate clue that he was about to make racial attacks on Booker. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened, with a bonus attack on candidate Kamala Harris while he was at it.

It’s bad enough that someone would defend Biden by launching race-baiting attacks on Booker and Harris. But cohost Lisa Boothe topped Webb by making a ridiculous comparison between Biden and Trump’s assertion that there were “some very fine people” joining the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville two years ago.

FACT CHECK: As I explained in a previous post, Trump’s remarks were at best unclear about the Nazis. But there is no doubt Trump said there were “some very fine people” marching with them when there was no doubt who and what their “Unite the Right” rally was about. Furthermore, while Tapper acknowledged that Trump was not referring specifically to neo-Nazis and white supremacists as fine people but to those marching with them, Tapper also clearly suggested that it was a distinction without much of a difference.

More importantly, Biden was not praising segregationists as “very fine people.” And while I've never wanted to pal around with any, the segregationists in Congress were not the equivalent of violent neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. That's not to say I saw nothing wrong with Biden's remark that was stupid and insensitive. But equivalent to praising neo-Nazi rallyers? No way.

And isn’t it convenient that suddenly CNN-hating Fox thinks CNN host Tapper is now a voice of credibility?

That was a prompt for Webb to open up another round of the right wing’s Charlottesville Rehab for Trump. “Joe Biden launched his campaign in Charlottesville on a lie, on a badly edited, but cleverly edited lie by the media on what President Trump said,” Webb insisted.

During all this time, the lone liberal on the five-person panel, Leslie Marshall, saw no need to interrupt. But, finally, when Webb said that in “the liberal politics world,” the candidates will “eat each other alive,” she tried to jump in and do a “both sidesism” about Republicans eating their own. But oops! There was no time even for that tame defense. Cohost Harris Faulkner broke in so we could hear Trump, standing at the door of the White House, answering some shouted questions from reporters about Iran.

Watch Fox try to make racial hay out of Biden’s remarks above from the June 20, 2019 Outnumbered.

Published with permission of NewsHounds.us