A heartbeat away…

My syndicated column today takes you through a tour of all the latest Joe Biden gaffes that aren’t getting replayed endlessly on the nightly news and comedy shows. I said yesterday that the McCain camp ought to toss the “erratic” label right back in Joe Biden’s face and defuse that rhetorical bomb. Right on cue, Team Obama has released a new ad called…”Erratic.”

Ball’s in your court, McCain. Or will it be left to Sarah again to strike back?

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The increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

If the prospect of Joe Biden sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency doesn’t give you palpitations, you are not paying attention.

Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance, and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness, and her intellect.

Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: Wear high heels, shoot caribou, and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.”

Team Obama is hammering John McCain as “erratic” in the closing days of the election campaign. There are now 615,000 Google hits and counting using the search terms “erratic McCain.” Last week, the New York Times devoted an entire article to the Obama-Biden line of attack, titled “In Friendly Region, Biden Cites McCain as Erratic.”

Who’s erratic? Throughout the primary and general election cycles, Biden has lurched from attacking Obama as not-ready-for-primetime (“The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training,” September 2007) to ready-to-lead (“Barack Obama is ready. This is his time,” August 2008) and back again. This week, Biden warned America that an Obama victory would invite a dangerous global showdown between tyrants and the naïf Obama. “Mark my words,” Biden said Sunday at a Democratic fund-raiser. “It will not be six months [after the inauguration] before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” In a follow-up appearance, he told followers to brace for the worst and “gird your loins.”

Out of Biden’s mouth, this is called candor. Out of anyone else’s mouth, it would be “fear-mongering,” “negative campaigning,” and a “distraction.”

Tooting his own horn while vandalizing his running mate’s, Biden bragged: “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know.” Yeah. Colleagues like that guy who had a mere 143 days of Senate experience before launching his presidential bid and choosing you to shore up his meager credibility, Joe.

In fact, Biden has spent the entire campaign questioning his running mate’s judgment. Last month, he mused out loud: “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more than I am to be vice president of the United States of America…She is easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me.” Biden assailed the campaign’s position on clean coal, openly criticized the campaign’s idiotic ad attacking John McCain for not using e-mail, and warned the pro-gun control Obama that “if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”

Dan Quayle will have “POTATOE” etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden’s own spelling mishap last week while attacking John McCain’s economic plan?

“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.”

No, Joe. “D’-O-H” is a three-letter-word.

Nightly news shows still haven’t tired of replaying Sarah Palin’s infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Joe Biden’s botched interview with Couric last month – in which he cluelessly claimed: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

Er, here’s what really happened: Roosevelt wasn’t president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn’t available to the general public until at least ten years later.

During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Sarah Palin would never have been able to get away with: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” Biden said. “He has the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive — he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”

Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government – the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship – would know better.

Joe Biden’s erratic and gaffe-tastic behavior is the least of America’s worries. He’s worse than a blunderbuss. He’s an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He’s a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar, and wordly wise man. He’s a man who can’t control his impulses.

And he could be a heartbeat away. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Palin-says-“You Betcha” skit.

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