Joe Biden hypocritically slams Trump for using the word 'lynching' when he himself called Clinton probe 'partisan lynching' in 1998
Every Democratic leader and supporter is angry with President Donald Trump but Joe Biden is perhaps the most disgusted one among them all.
The former vice president, who is running for the White House in next year's elections, found Trump targetting him and his son Hunter over his past dealings with Ukraine and became one of the president's fiercest critics.
Biden has strongly supported the impeachment process that has been launched against Trump by the Democrats and when Trump likened the procedure to a "lynching", Biden trashed his comments as "abhorrent" and "despicable".
Reacting to Trump's attacking tweet on impeachment, the 76-year-old Biden said in his tweet on Tuesday, October 22: "Impeachment is not 'lynching', it is part of our Constitution.
"Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It's despicable," he shared.
Biden had called impeachment "partisan lynching" in the past
But Biden's higher moral ground was soon exposed when a video of a two-decade-old interview of his began doing the rounds. It showed the former Delaware senator uttering the same word in reference to impeachment.
In the interview given to CNN, Biden said the upcoming impeachment proceedings against the then president Bill Clinton could be seen as "partisan lynching".
It was the Democrats who were at the receiving end of the impeachment procedure then. Clinton remains the last US president to be impeached although he survived it.
"Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard, the very high bar, that was set by the founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense," Biden, 21 years younger then, said in the interview.
Clinton's impeachment kicked off soon after Biden's interview and the House of Representatives formally impeached him for lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Biden personally voted to acquit the president during the trial phase in February 1999.
Meanwhile, a report in The Washington Post on Tuesday, October 22, said that at least five Democratic House members had invoked the word lynching during the Clinton impeachment trial.
Jerrold Nadler, a representative from New York, called the 1998-99 impeachment process as a "lynch mob". He is now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that will consider articles of impeachment against the current president.
Biden tenders apology but attacks Trump
With Biden's campaign declined to comment on the matter, the Democratic candidate apologized for his words in a tweet later on Tuesday. He said it was not the right word to use and that he was sorry about it.
However, Biden didn't give up his fight against Trump as he said in the apologizing tweet: "Trump on the other hand chose his words deliberately today in his use of the word lynching and continues to stoke racial divides in this country daily."
The term "lynching" is associated with the extrajudicial killings of African Americans, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a method of terrorizing black Americans and maintain white supremacy in the political field.
SC Justice Clarence Thomas also played the "lynching" card
The US has seen the term "lynching" used to play a victim card during a trial even before that.
Michael Frazer, a lecturer in political and social theory at the University of East Anglia, said: "African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas described the investigation of sexual harassment allegations during his 1991 confirmation hearings the same way."
"For Thomas, however, the racial history of the term was obvious and explicit. In American history, literal lynchings were a brutal, illegal, and disturbingly frequent way of eliminating what Thomas called 'uppity blacks' who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas."
"For Thomas to describe legitimate concerns about his treatment of female colleagues as a lynching was highly controversial. For a white president who is hardly known for his racial sensitivity to use the same metaphor is downright shocking," Frazer added.