“Why should anybody trust Joe Biden?”
Since the Citizens of the World care so much about world opinion, here’s a columnist for the Indepedent newspaper in Britain smacking Joe Biden upside the head. Quoting at length here, but it’s worth it:
Joseph Robinette Biden – known to all as “Joe” – was once the most talked about American politician in Britain. Unfortunately for the senior Delaware Senator, all the talk was accompanied by incredulous laughter. As part of his Presidential campaign 20 years ago, he lifted verbatim and without attribution Neil Kinnock’s celebrated remarks: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a University … was it because all our predecessors were thick, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up to play football?”
Biden told an audience at an Iowa fairground: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden’s the first in his family ever to go to University … is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright… who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football?”
Note the overt claim to spontaneity at the outset of the plagiarism; but it wasn’t just that which left his run for the Presidency buried under an avalanche of ridicule. It rapidly emerged that Biden was not the first member of his family to go to university, and that the closest any ancestral Bidens came to working underground was a grandfather who was a mining engineer – and during the campaign Biden also told a number of gratuitous untruths about his own academic record.
It would be very difficult for a politician in this country to be taken seriously ever again, after such a humiliation; but Americans are a more forgiving people, and so Biden was able to entertain them once again during the current race for the White House. Thus last year he declared that his then rival, Barack Obama, was “not yet ready for the Presidency”, which was not a post suitable for “on-the-job training”, but graciously acknowledged: ” I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Other African-American politicians were hardly amused by the imputation that they were not “clean”, and I don’t suppose Obama himself was grateful. Still, the Illinois Senator was happy to choose Biden as his vice-presidential running-mate, for several reasons. He is not married to Bill Clinton; he has a strong following among white blue-collar voters, which Obama desperately needs; above all, he is said to have the experience which Obama lacks – he has been a Senator for 36 years and is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
For all the longevity of his tenure, Biden does not deserve the description lavished on him last month by the Los Angeles Times (among others) as “an acknowledged foreign policy sage”. He voted against using American military force to remove Saddam Hussein’s army from occupied Kuwait, but voted for the American invasion of sovereign Iraq in 2003. Later, he voted against the “surge” which has brought a degree of stability to that benighted country, proposing instead that it be allowed to break up along ethnic lines – the now discredited “Biden Plan”. Experience is a wonderful thing, of course – but only if you learn the right lessons from it.
Doubtless, however, Joe Biden will stress the immense superiority of his acquired wisdom over Sarah Palin’s much briefer curriculum vitae, when their one-off vice-presidential debate takes place on Thursday in St Louis, Missouri. Indeed, the Democrats and their camp-followers in the press have been chortling in anticipation of a massacre, especially after Mrs Palin’s performance when interviewed last week by CBS’s Katie Couric.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate had been unable to elaborate on the way in which John McCain had attempted to enforce greater regulation on the finance industry, beyond his demand for more supervision of the biggest mortgage lenders; and she struggled to justify her claim that being Governor of Alaska gave her a special insight into the threats from Russia.
Neither of her responses was articulate. But they weren’t factually incorrect. She didn’t make anything up. That’s Biden territory…
Score.
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I trust him like a rabid dog
I resent the inference that a rabid dog is untrustworthy. I trust it to come and bity me in the ***.
Of course, on re-reading your post, that’s probably what you meant. And I meant ‘bite’.
Whenever I hear Biden I think of Captain Ron.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqBchf20MnI&NR=1
Boom!
Maybe it’s time to put “old yeller” down.
or obama?
barf.
The bar is very for Biden, not so much for Palin. More pressure for Palin, but really all she needs to do is show up and get some zingers off which shouldn’t be too hard
We need to figure out how to combat the MSM. This is their election, not Obama’s.
Seems that Dominic Lawson gets it, but the freaking msm here has no clue. Wonder if we could get that fellow to teach journalism at one of our Ivy League Universities. Or should I say one of our institutions of higher mind numbing?
Robinett?
The problem Michelle is that is a British paper. The American press thinks he is the stones that make BO walk on water…
Nothing would please me more right now than for the McCain campaign to get the “H” out of the way and turn Sarah loose … I have no doubt that she can handle herself admirably when not trying to stick to a bunch of scripted answers they have given her ahead of time … I suspect that there are a number of experienced former office holders in Alaska that could confirm the “Pit Bull” comparisons … given the opportunity she might just take that “bite” mentioned earlier …
Debating Palin will be “beneath” Biden. His arrogance is going to make him implode. If Palin can provoke him, the fuse will light and then it will be GAME OVER.
On September 29th, 2008 at 11:27 pm, flenser said:
Robin
ett? hood. Not very good, but I tried to fix it.Does anyone else have a hard time looking at a picture of Joe Biden and not laugh?
or is it just me?
Absolutely, DesertLover! She must get to shine as only she can do. This Thursday is, I fear, her last chance, after the Couric & Gibson interviews. The news simply will not report anything positive about her. She has to do it herself. She can do this but, as you say, McCain has to let her go.
I think I’m on probation again..
it takes for ever for my comments to pop up.. no matter how benign..
vickisoup said:
There … fixed that for you …
…or in Biden’s case, any lesson.
Biden is probably second on the rating of smugness and arrogance by the left - second only to Kerry and a virtual tie with the Obamamessiah…..
This is the real problem. The best we can do is to keep contributing material to the alternative media outlets and keep voicing our disdain for the MSM .
Raisinette?
Both Biden and his hair plugs are bad performers!
Nice to see that what is left of the UK still has the class to bash the douche bag of the party.
Party on Joe.
And does anyone else think of Henry Blake from M*A*S*H ?
(with apologies to McLean Stevenson)
The only way to combat the MSM is splash the truth on the airwaves and not just on blogs and YouTube. Make ads and show the clips of Dems claiming Fannie and Freddie are sound. That Raines is a great leader. More on b. Hussein and his cronies and corrupt connections.
And why, why why doesn’t McCain make an ad showing he tried to straighten out Fannie and Freddie and the Dems fought him? Why doesn’t he defend this? WHY?
He should have cleared the air with ads immediately when all this hit the fan. Instead he remains silent? Why?
When the Rs get the spine to stand up for what conservatives supposedly believe, I’ll start supporting them again. Until then, if they aren’t willing to stand up for me and for the country, why should I stand up for them?
I’ll stand behind the ones who show themselves to be consistantly worthy. And that’s what we all should do. Flood the worthy Rs with money and starve the unworthy ones.
Gah.. I’m just so tired of all this.
I’m waiting for Biden to proclaim that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was nationally televised on CNN (Confederate News Network–it is Gafftasteristic Biden after all) only to add that; Maj. Gen. George Meade’s “surge” against the invading confederates (while he was for it before it happened) was a total failure. Obama and Biden led a joint press release stating: “Although it will be painful, we must retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan in order to maintain our
control; we meansubjugation, uh, uh, uh hope and change strategy. Ya, that’s it, our hope and change strategy”!With Obama as President and Biden as VP, it may be time to go back to the ’50s and rebuild that underground shelter again. Lord knows what sort of disaster will happen when they sit down with the democratic congress.
Robinette?? If I had the chance, I’d change it to Batman. If he had the chance, he’d change it to Hussein.
Go Sarah!
No, the matter is much more serious than that. She has to re-establish credibility to the American people, as she did when she gave her acceptance speech. In a sense Biden is not even in the picture. If he intends to ignore her, fine. But she cannot afford to do anything less than a stellar job. Can she do it? Yes. Will she? That’s the question.
BO&JB=Martin&Lewis. any questions?
Hussaine / Robinett ‘08. Hmmm
Leave Dean Martin alone. LEAVE HIM ALONE!!!!
Yeah, leave Dino alone. Frank still has friends you know.
Biden is like your looney uncle telling ridiculous stories at family gatherings, keeping everyone entertained - but you wouldn’t want him to be veep. On the other hand, at least he doesn’t want to turn America into the second coming of Marx…
Karl, not Groucho…
I think more of Frank Burns…
Or, as Mike Lange, the long time play-by-play announcer for the Pittsburgh Penguins would say: