When Joe Biden spoke at Arlington National Cemetery during Thursday’s Veterans Day ceremony, he managed to make another classic Joe Biden gaffe that overshadowed everything else by referring to Satchel Paige as a “negro.”
“You know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson, his name was Satchel Paige.”
Biden tells a story about "the great negro at the time" Satchel Paige. pic.twitter.com/VcyfHQkCEm
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 11, 2021
The word negro was deemed offensive enough that it was literally banned by Barack Obama from use in federal laws. I guess Biden didn’t get the memo.
As my PJ Media colleague Robert Spencer noted, Biden “meant that Satchel Paige had been a great pitcher in the Negro Leagues, and that’s absolutely true. But the ‘Imagine if Trump had said this’ scenarios unfold with particular piquancy this time.” He also predicted that Biden’s “vintage-1955 characterization of Satchel Paige will be excused as a slip of the tongue, as another valiant effort by Old Joe to overcome his famous ‘stutter.'”
Well, it’s worse. As conservatives “pounced” on Biden’s faux pas, Mediaite came out to defend Biden by claiming that Biden didn’t actually say what we heard him say.
“Conservative critics falsely claimed that President Joe Biden referred to legendary pitcher Satchel Paige as a ‘negro’ during a Veterans Day speech — barely more than a week after pulling the same bit on Biden and Pope Francis.”
According to Mediaite, “What actually happened is that the president was wishing Amb. Donald Blinken a happy birthday during his Veterans Day speech, and injected one of his favorite stories: a roundabout way of saying that you’re only as old as you feel.”
Mediaite then quoted Biden, verbatim, showing, in fact, that Biden said exactly what everyone said he did… only Mediate supplemented the transcript with what they say is what Biden meant to say.
Related: Biden Meets Pope, Rambles On About…Satchel Paige
“The president obviously began to say ‘Great Negro League pitcher,’ but then paused and shifted to saying ‘at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues,’ which was, in fact, the name of the league that Black players formed when they were shut out of Major League Baseball. That this needs to be explained is beyond absurd.”
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