Those who count on Democrats' penchant for self-cannibalization to pave the way for President Donald Trump's second term were buoyed by the harsh criticism leveled at former Vice President Joe Biden over a handful of words uttered at a New York fundraiser last week. Reflecting on the dispiriting state of American political discourse, the presidential candidate gave an entirely appropriate illustration of how corrosive things have gotten — in the process leading the kamikaze wing of his party to prove his point.

Biden, chosen by former President Barack Obama to serve as his vice president, endorsed by civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and other black congressional leaders, and blowing his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination away among black voters, spent last week defending himself against charges that he is somewhere between racially insensitive and an outright racist. The reason: At the fundraiser, Biden ruminated about having attempted early in his Senate career to find common ground even with segregationists whose politics he reviled, using as examples Southern Sens. James Eastland and Herman Talmadge — the latter whom Biden labeled "one of the meanest guys I ever knew." As for Eastland, whose opposition to civil rights Biden pointed out disgusted him, Biden said: "He never called me 'boy.' He always called me 'son.'" Nothing about Biden's observation suggested he was remembering Eastland's use of "boy" fondly, or that he was sentimental about the belittling language used by Southern whites for black males. The 10 words seized upon by Biden's rivals to paint him as a segregationist sympathizer were likelier to have been uttered sardonically and at Eastland's expense.

Biden then finished his point, which was this: Though he abhorred what Eastland and Talmadge represented, he wanted to try to locate discrete areas on which they might work together. "At least there was some civility," said Biden, who is hardly off his rocker for being shaken by the ugliness that has engulfed not only Washington but the entire nation, of a sort to which he was then subjected. A frenzy of Biden bashing ensued, courtesy of those seemingly bent on demonstrating just how markedly intellectual dishonesty has supplanted levelheadedness. Sen. Cory Booker, polling at 2%, wasted no time trying to resuscitate a candidacy headed nowhere. He called Biden's remarks "insulting," accused him of "usage of words that harms folks" and called upon Biden to apologize. Biden, of course, had said nothing insulting or harmful to black Americans, as black Biden supporters like Lewis and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn observed. And it required no well-honed sense of irony to note that Booker, no anti-Semite, was caught on video days later answering a question about whether he would be willing to meet with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. "I'm not one of those people who says I wouldn't sit down with anybody to hear what they have to say," Booker replied.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren added some disingenuousness of her own to the mix. "I'm not here to criticize other Democrats," she told The Washington Post, "but it's never OK to celebrate segregationists. Never." Biden had not "celebrated" segregationists in any shape or form. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez then accused Biden of "waxing nostalgic" about segregationists, an accusation not only false but also dishonest. Her charge of racial insensitivity was particularly rich given her invocation of the phrases "Never again!" and "concentration camps" to compare the inhumane detention centers maintained at our borders with the Nazi death camps where millions of Jews were herded into gas chambers and incinerated during the Holocaust.

Disingenuousness is not the best of all possible looks for Democrats headed into 2020. And hubris that it will be overlooked by the electorate is not the best of all possible strategies.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.