Commentary: A nation rages over the death of George Floyd. As Trump tweets, Biden leads.
'The absence of leadership was deafening Friday in the White House Rose Garden, where cameras and reporters sat focused on an empty podium for nearly an hour as Minneapolis burned, and a nation raged, over the senseless killing of George Floyd.
Floyd, who was black, died in police custody Monday after officer Derek Chauvin was captured on video holding his knee on Floyd’s neck and throat for nearly nine minutes. Floyd’s pleas for his life — “I can’t breathe” — were all too familiar after the death of Eric Garner, who spoke the same dying words from a police chokehold in Staten Island, N.Y., in 2014.
A static shot of the president-less Rose Garden was shown at the bottom of the screen on MSNBC and other outlets (“The president will speak soon”) as news of the unrest erupted around it: Clips of demonstrators, horrifying footage of Floyd’s last moments, a press conference announcing that former officer Chauvin had finally been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
Then finally, a voice of competent governance broke into the news to address the unfurling crisis. But the words about justice and healing weren’t coming from the capital.
"One of the things every human being must be able to do: Breathe. So simple. So basic. So brutal,” said former Vice President Joe Biden, who was livestreaming from his home studio in Delaware. “[The] same thing happened with [Ahmaud] Arbery. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. ... It’s a list that dates back 400 years,” he said.
“The original sin of this country still stains our nation today,” Biden said of slavery‘s lasting, brutal legacy on the lives of black Americans. “If we stand by and remain silent, we are complicit.”'>>>
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-05-29/george-floyd-joe-biden-donald-trump-failure-leadership?
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