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"Objection, Your Honor. Assumes facts not in evidence."

Sustained.

"I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends," Biden said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. "It's already beginning in the House now ... If we can't change, we're in trouble. This nation cannot function without generating consensus. It can't do it."

That's a murderous quote, in that it causes your consultants and campaign officials to throw themselves into the outgoing tide.

In 2008, you may recall, during his last, doomed presidential campaign, Joe Biden used to crack wise about how the Republican Party was not your father's Republican Party. Since then, he was vice president for eight years in an administration that was sabotaged at every turn by an intractable Republican legislative majority.

Biden served under Barack Obama and still thinks Trump is an aberration for the Republican Party. Win McNamee Getty Images

In 2014, President Obama offered the Republicans the Grand Bargain of a lifetime that included a partial abandonment of Social Security and the Republicans threw it back because they didn't want to raise taxes on their donor base. Biden was one of the administration's primary brokers in that farce.

In 2016, the Republican legislative majority simply refused to recognize President Obama's right to nominate a new Supreme Court justice. And, ever since the 2016 presidential election, they have fallen in giddy lockstep behind a president* whose insane stewardship in the office Biden himself says was the primary reason Biden got into the race at all.

That is one murderous quote to hang around your neck in 2019.

An epiphany?

Lord, no.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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