Joe Biden's heartfelt answer to Trump's PTSD comments

This is why I love uncle Joe. Guy’s got a heart as big as this town.

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I love Amtrak Joe, always have, always will. A decent man, not the brightest, not the most suave or slick or polished, but he is the real deal. A public servant first and foremost, a partisan a distant second. Also love the Onion’s parody of the man (bet he gets a good laugh out of those bits).

Note also how he very decently does not ascribe malice ‘he wasn’t trying to be mean’. Can you even imagine Trump behaving in such a basically decent way? Nope.

“…the anger of a gentle man” I’ll remember that one, thx

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I agree, Trump probably isn’t even trying to be a sexist racist pig. It just comes naturally.

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I think Lloyd Bentsen covered that pretty well already.

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I’m planning to watch it, if only to see how much…I’m sorry…Kaine is raised.

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I think you should definitely watch it if you’re Abel.

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I’ll mark it in my calendar.

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FTFY.

We all need more of “cool uncle Joe”

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Fucking war rhetoric. All those “heros and brave young men and women”. Whether you insult them or honor them, let´s not pretend they are anything but underprivileged young people bullied into flying around the world to do the blood work in economically motivated invasions because they have no other chance to get somewhere in life in the system you built.

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Donald Trump is a complete shitshow, but if you watch the clip instead of reading the text, on this point he’s entirely empathetic to the problem. I hate the guy and if folks want to pile on this point because they can as punishment for his many other sins, fine, and that phrase – as written – is awful. But it’s not at all tracking how he was addressing the problem:

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That’s Aunt Sarah Palin.

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I stopped watching the videos because so many were not out of context despite his fans’ insisting, but yeah this one is a ridiculous point against him. Saying “some veterans need help because they can’t face normal life after seeing things more horrible than any movie could portray” is reasonable.

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Proud to be a graduate of the University of Delaware and an honorary Delawarean. I worked for VP Biden as a Young Democrat in the 80’s and have always admired him.

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It’s not that he said veterans need help. It’s that he said because they need help, they aren’t strong.

It’s the mandarine candidate’s worldview, dividing everyone into winners and losers. That he considers veterans with PTSD members of the latter category, not the former.

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I hate Trump… but the direct quote on this subject that everyone is pissed about is:

Look we need that so badly and when you … when you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can’t handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn’t see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

I think people are twisting the words a bit here. He is an a**hole that should not be president and he has no tact or skill as a public speaker but, that just sounds like him flattering the crowd more so than dissing PTSD vets.

What am I missing (I repeat; I hate him, he should not be president)

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Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. If you care, if you really care that much, don’t send them to war in the first place.

You could argue that’s what they are trying now, with drones and stuff. Only, you still get all the PTSD just not as many bodily injuries. And that’s only if you ignore the casualties on the other side and the obvious conclusion that a people not able to fight the enemy that is constantly bombing them will strike back somewhere else.

I’m not well versed enough in American politics to know about Bidens stance on war but he doesn’t strike me as someone who’s against it. If he is, (at least partly) responsible for sending people out to war, I find this speech hypocritical.

Edit: 6 edits later, it’s less of a ramble.

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"He’s not a war hero, He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Ah yes, all that empathy and understanding from trump really warms my cockles.

May the tiny-handed vulgarian never win so much as a scratchoff ticket.

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There are two possible ways of reading this, neither of which are particularly flattering to Trump. The first, and most generous, is perhaps that he was talking about “a lot of people” in the non-military sense, as a way of trying to flatter vets by talking shit about the general public’s ability to “handle” what goes on in a theater of war. Still not a particularly kind thing to say, but par for the course when it comes to Trump tearing down instead of building up. However, given the context of the rest of his statement, I don’t think “a lot of people” can really be read that way, because “they see horror stories” and “events that you couldn’t see in a movie”. The implication being that “a lot of people” who do experience those things are unable to handle it, which is why they have mental health problems.

Which brings us to the second way of reading his statement, which is that only “strong” people are capable of “handling” the things that they’ve seen, while anyone who isn’t “strong” obviously can’t. That by definition includes vets suffering from PTSD, because if they were “strong” enough to “handle” what they saw, they wouldn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder. That is an ignorant, bullshit, nonsense, dangerous, destructive argument.

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“Is he a ‘funny’ uncle?”