Give Joe Biden this much credit -- he stayed up past his bedtime. And mine, and pretty much everyone's east of the Colorado River. For some reason, the organizers of the Democrats'  national convention let the schedule slide more than an hour by the time their 81-year-old retiring incumbent had planned on taking the stage. 

The DNC later blamed this on the amount of applause each speaker got. Sure, pals.

For those of us who went to bed rather than watch Red-Eye Joe, and "us" includes me, we could have skipped it and just replayed Biden's State of the Union speech from March. Or really, any of his campaign speeches he gave before flaming out in the June 27th debate. With only a few tweaks to note that he was no longer the candidate, Biden gave a vigorous reading of his usual demagoguery and fabulism for just under an hour in Chicago.

How do I know this? I read the transcript. He started off with a lie so hoary that even Snopes has debunked it:

I ran for President in 2020 because of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017. Extremists coming out of the woods, carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan, so emboldened by a President then in the White House that they saw as an ally. They didn’t even bother to wear their hoods. 

Hate was on the march in America. Old ghosts in new garments, stirring up the oldest divisions, stoking the oldest fears, giving oxygen to the oldest forces that they long sought to tear apart America. In the process, a young woman was killed. When I contacted her mother, I asked about what happened. She told me. When the President was asked what he thought had happened, Donald Trump said, and I quote, “There are very fine people on both sides.” My God, that’s what he said. That is what he said and what he meant. 

It took Snopes years to get around to debunking this, but they did so two months ago. Not that anyone reading Hot Air needs this explained, but here you go anyway:

In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn't talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally."

Trump wasn't even talking about the rally, but the dispute over Confederate monuments, which prompted the extremist rally. However, Trump was characterizing the larger groups of people "on both sides" debating whether to keep or remove the monuments, not those showing up to the rally. This was known literally from the first day that Trump made those remarks, seven years almost to the day from when Biden took the stage last night.

In a way, though, this is a perfect valediction for a man who spent his political life as a vicious demagogue and intellectual lightweight in Washington DC. Joe Biden's farewell speech was a perfect encapsulation of his career; it was twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag.

Consider this claim, for instance:

Well, during the pandemic, Kamala and I helped states and cities get back their schools back open. 

Say what? Biden and Harris caved to Randi Weingarten and the teachers' unions to keep schools closed for as long as possible. They allowed Weingarten to help craft CDC 'guidelines' that allowed teachers to keep schools shuttered and forced distance learning for months longer than necessary. Red-state governors like Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis, and Greg Abbott (among others) fought the Biden-Harris administration, the CDC, and the unions to get kids back in schools. 

He's closer to the truth on this claim, albeit accidentally:

We fundamentally transformed how our economy grows, from the middle-out and the bottom-up instead of the top-down. 

Biden and Harris fundamentally transformed the economy by creating three years of scorching inflation that resulted in a net loss of buying power during their administration. They did that by "fundamentally" applying short-term stimulus in a supply-chain crisis against the advice of people who understand economics, most notably former Obama and Clinton adviser Larry Summers. Middle- and working-class households still have not recovered their financial footing; inflation may have decelerated, but it is still above the 2% threshold and wages are only recently keeping abreast or above it. 

Biden indulged his fabulism on the border, too:

Trump continues to lie about the border. Here’s what he won’t tell you. Trump killed the strongest bipartisan border deal in the history of the United States that we negotiated with the Senate Republican took four weeks. Once it passed, and then we acknowledged those expansive border change in American history, he called senators to say, “Don’t support the bipartisan bill” because he said it would help me politically and hurt him politically. My God. No, I’m serious. Think about it. Not a joke. Ask even the press who doesn’t like me, they’ll tell you that’s true. Typically Trump, once again, putting himself first and America last. 

Then I had to take executive action. The result of the executive action I took: border encounters have dropped over 50%.

Most of this is a non-sequitur. Trump used the existing laws on immigration to keep the flow of illegal immigration to manageable levels. Biden and Harris deliberately chose not to enforce those laws and set up incentives that resulted in massive migration across the border. Biden didn't need a "bipartisan border deal" to enforce the existing laws, which is what he ended up doing this spring when it became clear that the Biden border crisis was killing his chances of re-election. "Executive action" in this case was just Biden deciding to actually follow the existing law. 

And so on, and so on, and so on. Biden also signaled his sympathies for Hamas last night in another shocking part of the speech, but Duane will have more on that later today. 

In the end, Joe Biden went out as the authentic Joe Biden -- an angry, lying demagogue. The full speech is below, if you want to watch it.