Biden's Handlers Try to Unravel Joe's Strom Thurmond Confusion, Dig Deeper Hole Instead

As RedState reported Monday, President Joe Biden took time out from one of his umpteen summer vacations to give a speech honoring the civil rights group Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as it turns 60.

During the speech, Biden attempted - as he often does - to tout his alleged contributions to the civil rights movement, but at one point made a claim that raised eyebrows.

"I was able to literally, not figuratively, talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act before he died," Biden told the audience.

Watch:

BIDEN: "I was able to literally, not figuratively, talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act before he died" pic.twitter.com/5RbUZ4PKTD
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 29, 2023

Except how would that even be possible? Biden was not even elected to the Senate until several years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - which is presumably what he was talking about here - was passed. Further, Thurmond joined several other southern senators in a "multi-speaker" filibuster of the 1964 CRA in an effort that lasted 60 days, and he did not vote in favor of the bill.

Thurmond, who was a Democrat at the time, also has the distinction of being the record holder for the longest filibuster in Senate history by a single person - for just over 24 hours on the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

The Biden White House was contacted in order to clarify Biden's confusing remarks about Thurmond, and here's what they had to say:

A White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital that Biden was instrumental in getting Thurmond's vote for the Voting Rights Act, in 1980.

If true, and as history has shown us we have to be highly suspicious of what Biden says as it relates to his supposed civil rights activism, it's still not the Civil Rights Act he claimed to be personally instrumental in getting Thurmond to support.

Speculation on Twitter was that maybe Biden had been talking about the 1991 CRA:

Could be talking about Civil Rights Act of 1991, but that passed the Senate 93 to 5. https://t.co/liNa1tpLGC
— Jim Antle (@jimantle) August 28, 2023

Either way, Biden taking credit for something that he says he was able to get Thurmond to do "before he died" makes him sound like he was able to get Thurmond to see the light shortly before his 2003 passing out of respect for Biden's supposed efforts and longtime friendship.

On Twitter, conservative commentator Armstrong Williams had a lot to say about Biden's claims in a lengthy tweet explaining who he says really got through to Thurmond on these issues over the course of time - and, surprise surprise, it wasn't Joe Biden:

At the recent Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law conference, Biden made a bold claim - one which I know personally to be absolute revisionist history .
Biden claims that he convinced Strom Thurmond to support the Civil Rights Act. Now, I was very close with Strom Thurmond during this time. I worked for him. It was my first job in Washington. And I can tell you as an absolute fact that Biden did not, as he said, “literally” convince Strom Thurmond to support the Civil Rights Act.
Here’s the real reason why he eventually supported the Civil Rights Act. It’s because people working for him, like myself, had meetings set up with Martin Luther King, Jr widow Mrs. Coretta Scott King, Dr. Legree Daniels, Clarence Pendleton, Art Fletcher, and Sam Cornelius. It was these conversations which eventually changed Strom Thurmond’s mind.
It’s disgraceful that Biden would blatantly take credit for something that he so obviously didn’t do, that real people fought and worked hard for. He deserves no credit -

At the recent Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law conference, Biden made a bold claim - one which I know personally to be absolute revisionist history .

Biden claims that he convinced Strom Thurmond to support the Civil Rights Act. Now, I was very close with Strom… pic.twitter.com/JEM6kIxUlv
— Armstrong Williams 🇺🇸 (@Arightside) August 29, 2023

No matter how Biden's overworked and likely underpaid clean-up crew try to spin it, the likelihood that he had anything whatsoever to do with Thurmond's eventual support of a Civil Rights Act much later on in his life is slim to none.

We anxiously await the media "fact checkers" to intervene on this one, but we won't hold our collective breath. Because we've been there, done that, and got the t-shirt with the Democrat apologists at Politifact and elsewhere, and even if they do look into Biden's claims, the end result will be them boiling it down to "just Joe being Joe."