For all the bluster and hyperbole surrounding the 2020 presidential election, there is one consistent promise, from him, of a potential Joe Biden administration: a return to normality.
A return to the simpler days when newsfeeds weren’t filled with doom and gloom.
The days when the country didn’t seem to move from one crisis to the next.
It sounds lovely, honestly. I don’t know a single individual, beyond potentially President Donald Trump, who hasn’t found the last four years to be exhausting.
Trump has his issues, no question there, (though walking out on longtime Washington establishment liberal Lesley Stahl of CBS is definitely not one of them).
But what is this normal that Biden is promising us? Don’t we deserve to know?
Sadly, in making Biden the baseline for normality, the liberal media establishment has glossed over many aspects of Biden’s record that his campaign would prefer never to see the light of day.
If one thing irks many though, it’s that no one, not anyone, wants to talk about Biden’s dreadful treatment of America’s allies during the Vietnam War.
In the Spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese wave was cresting inexorably towards Saigon and then-President Gerald Ford was desperately working to evacuate remaining American personnel to safety.
But, there were hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who had helped American troops who were still stuck in Saigon as well, and for them the only prospect was a bleak future of brainwashing, torture, abuse, enslavement, and murder by the Communists in retribution for assisting the U.S.
Ford wanted to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as he could and bring them to America. He and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed, rightly, that our country had a moral obligation to these brave Vietnamese and that they should be able to start a new life free of Communism.
But there was one senator in 1975 who vehemently opposed the idea.
His name? Joe Biden.
Yes, the same Joe Biden who said we should welcome Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS.
The same Joe Biden who has repeatedly maligned Donald Trump for his calls to keep out illegal immigrants from South and Central America.
And the same Joe Biden who, in a strange twist, is running interference for Communists again today by bending over backward to placate his party’s radical base; a base that wants nothing more than to rip apart our country’s carefully laid out system of checks and balances.
At a meeting with President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on April 14, 1975, Biden, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Kissinger flatly, "I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out."
The Foreign Relations Committee did eventually vote to recommend funding the evacuation efforts for the endangered South Vietnamese.
Roughly 130,000 refugees were successfully evacuated, no thanks to Joe Biden, but countless more were left behind to suffer fates worse than death.
Biden was one of only three committee members to vote against the bill, and later voted against it again in the full Senate.
I wonder if the Communists running the Viet Cong ever realized what an ally they had in the Senate, or if the same progressives who bleat about opening the borders know just how badly their chosen champion to take down Trump cheated our Cold War allies.
It’s rich, beyond rich, to watch Biden prance around acting the hero who will save America from the darkness.
How can a man who wanted our friends to be left to the wolves preach about Trump upsetting the world order?
As Democrats so often like to point out, when criticizing Trump, America doesn’t turn her back on allies. Yet that’s exactly what Joe Biden did in 1975.
Biden’s efforts to torpedo Ford’s act of mercy was more than just a betrayal of the Vietnamese who risked everything to help us fight communism; it was a betrayal of our country’s core values.
At that same meeting in April of 1975, Ford tried to remind Biden of our country’s humanitarian history: "I don't think these people should be treated any differently from any other people — the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union," Ford told Biden.
His words fell on deaf ears.
Out of 100 senators, Biden was one of only a handful who didn’t think those poor Vietnamese who believed in freedom deserved a better life.
As far as many, like folk singer Joan Baez were concerned, that reason and their willingness to stand up to the evils of communism was enough to warrant a second chance on American soil.
But, as with many other blotches on his 40-year, dubious record, Biden gets a pass.
Like Jane Fonda, Biden knew the fleeing thousands were an indictment of the terrors of communism and like Fonda, he wanted them abandoned to the murderous devices of Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam and Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian communists.
Jane Fonda was the notorious stooge for the National Liberation Front, having once betrayed an American POW. Fonda was being used by the NLF for propaganda, touring an American POW camp when one of the prisoners slipped her a note.
Rather than taking it and turning it over to U.S. officials, she promptly handed it to a North Vietnamese goon who was accompanying her.
Stories later reported how that POW was beaten within an inch of his life.
No wonder one former American POW spit in Fonda’s face at a book signing. Will Biden one day have a survivor of the North Vietnamese death camps spit in his face also?
Let’s face it. if the American Left had their way, the "boat people" would have all been murdered as well.
One of America’s greatest strengths has been her ability to build coalitions abroad for the greater good. We wouldn’t have won our independence without foreign help.
It’s how we won against the Nazis in World War II, and it’s how in the late 1980’s we were able to weaken the Soviet Union enough to ensure the Iron Curtain fell in 1991.
Our country remembers her friends, and she doesn’t betray them when they need our help.
Biden is a candidate for the highest office in the land, and he has a record taller than the Empire State Building. Every part of that record, including his betrayal of the South Vietnamese in 1975, should be held up to the sunlight.
Americans should know that, once upon a time before the media made him into the anti-Trump and covered for him, Joe Biden helped communist thugs kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Southeast Asia — simply because the fashionable, procommunist Left in America wanted it that way.
An underreported story of American history is how many in the Democratic Party, more in American liberalism, and most in the anti-American Left were lackeys, stooges, useful idiots, and flunkies; otherwise willing foot soldiers for Soviet and Chinese communism against their own country, and were so for years.
And yes, many are — even today.
In the 1970’s when America and the South Vietnamese needed men of valor and courage, Joe Biden as AWOL.
Your next president might just be a moral and spiritual coward.
Think about that when you vote on Nov. 3.
Craig Shirley is a Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian. His books include, “Reagan’s Revolution, The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started it All,” “Rendezvous with Destiny, Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America,” "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years," and “ Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan." He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, “December, 1941” and his new 2019 book, “Mary Ball Washington,” a definitive biography of George Washington’s mother. Shirley lectures frequently at the Reagan Library and the Reagan Ranch. He has been named the First Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, Ronald Reagan’s alma mater and will teach a class this fall at the University of Virginia on Reagan. He appears regularly on Newsmax TV, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. Read Craig Shirley's Reports — More Here.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.