#A ‘Black Lives’ pander by Democrats: Devine

Joe Biden’s video address to George Floyd’s funeral was impressive — but only if you just landed from Mars.

With maudlin soundtrack and husky voice, the former vice president oozed empathy as he churned out empty platitudes about “racial justice” that are at odds with his personal history and the record of the Democratic Party he has represented for 47 years.

“I grew up with Catholic social doctrine which taught me that faith without works is dead,” he said, “and you will know us by what we do.”

OK, I accept the challenge.

Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.

If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.

They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”

They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is ­entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.

But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.

They pander with empty ­gestures such as Mayor de Blasio renaming streets after Black Lives Matter.

No one does pandering better than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Her genuflecting performance in African garb was nauseating. But when she found herself unable to get off the floor, she did at least provide an inadvertent metaphor for the Democrats’ electoral prospects in November.

Five months out from an election, it is obvious they are stoking black grievance as an electoral ­necessity.

The priority is not “Black Lives Matter.” It’s “Black Votes Matter.”

How convenient that the Floyd protests erupted just a week after Biden made a catastrophic mistake that threatened the very basis of his presidential run. He lost his temper with popular black radio host Charlamagne tha God, and blurted out the truth of his party’s attitude to race: “If you’ve got a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

The naked racism set off a thunderclap of panic among Democrats. It vindicated the “Blexit” movement Candace Owens founded for black people to break free from the “victim narrative” the party has created for them.

Convulsions on the street these past two weeks reflect the psychic implosion of the Democratic Party as the black vote they have taken for granted for 60 years threatens to slip away. They expose impure motives by fomenting black grievance and empowering black radicals, as black-owned businesses are looted and burned, and urban communities are left bereft.

As for Biden, he acts as if he owns the black vote and has some special empathy on race. But his record tells a different story.

When he arrived in the Senate in 1973, he sucked up to Democratic segregationists who gave him plum committee roles.

He boasted he was the architect of 1994 crime legislation that was disproportionately tough on black lives. Its mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses resulted in the incarceration of a generation of young black men.

The tragic irony is that Floyd was one of those young men and it probably ruined his life.

The son of a single mother, from public housing in Houston, he wanted to make something of himself, and was the first in his family to go to college.

But in 1997 at age 23, he was jailed for 10 months for possession of less than one ounce of cocaine.

If he had been offered drug rehabilitation and a job, perhaps he could have avoided a lost decade of stints in and out of jail.

That’s the context for Biden’s claim to be the candidate for black America.

“What is Mr. Biden doing,” asks black scholar Shelby Steele, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

“Does he really deeply care about black America … or is he using our pain as a kind of advertisement of his own moral vanity … that he thinks will translate into votes and get him elected?”

Steele, who grew up in segregated Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, posed the question on Fox News this week, whether Biden knows that many of the difficulties of black America “have nothing in the world to do with ­racism.”

“White guilt [and] exploitation of black pain is not dissimilar to what segregation did. In either case we end up as blacks dependent on … people like Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, American liberalism …

“We are trained and encouraged to see our opportunities through them. We have to pressure them to make our lives better [as if] it’s not something we can do ourselves …

“We’ve had 60 years of deference, the Great Society programs, the war on poverty, affirmative ­action, busing, public housing … and we’re further behind now than we were in the ’50s and ’60s because it’s not about us. It’s about [a politician] winning power for himself, appeasing what he thinks his voters want.”

In the end, “continually trying to solicit the Joe Bidens of the world in that sort of corrupt symbiosis with white guilt” is a dead end.

“We have to be the engineers of our fate … We are our own best resource.”

If only that were the lesson America takes from Floyd’s life, so that, as his brother Philonise said Wednesday, “his death is not in vain.”

Studio cop-out

Paramount canceling “Cops” is no great loss since the show had passed its use-by date after 33 seasons. But the virtue-signaling only exposes the studio’s hypocrisy.

Didn’t Paramount censor the Taiwan patches on Tom Cruise’s costume in “Top Gun: Maverick” to appease the Chinese Communist Party?

So Hollywood kowtows to the foreign regime that brought us COVID devastation and disrespects the American police who rescue us from devastation every day. Makes sense.

Wee bit of NY woe

It’s disgusting that New York streets are awash in urine because there’s nowhere else for people to go, since bathrooms are closed due to the pandemic. Public toilets are a basic human right, yet we are shockingly underserviced at the best of times. Singapore, by contrast, has more than 30,000 public bathrooms. Fixing the problem is a useful task for Mayor Bill de Blasio, and public pissoirs would be a fitting tribute to his blighted reign.