Joe Biden

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You have to be drinking a lot of gravy to buy any of the nonsense dished out by former Reagan scriptwriter Peggy Noonan. Two doozies from her latest grab-bag of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal followed by my comments.

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The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

  • As Peg would have it, the reason why the GOP national election process has hit the skids isn’t because the party’s decades-long appeal to the baser instincts in voters with coded, divisive terms (“welfare queens”) has grown into full-on hate speech, but because Barack Obama, someone she deems an unqualified celebrity, ran for President. Denying Obama, a Harvard Law President and Senator before winning the White House, is a serious-minded person with a sense of history, something you couldn’t assign to the Trumps and Carsons, is as dishonest as telling Americans that postwar prosperity was caused by the free market alone and not because it was matched to a severe, bordering on socialist, tax code. The so-called Reagan Revolution was always based on nostalgia for an America that never existed.

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[Joe Biden] would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump…

  • Like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Noonan thinks Trump’s a gas, with the way he refers to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and African-Americans as “lazy” and sees women as bloody servants. She thinks that Biden’s penchant for awkward foot-in-mouth moments (sometimes in support of equality) is similar to the bigoted rantings of a fascist combover who’s politically inferior to a Kardashian. Now there’s some false equivalency.•

 

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The biggest problems for the GOP in the current Presidential race are too numerous to list. The most pressing one for the Democrats, apart from their primary candidate carrying worrisome scars, is that there’s no suitable second challenger by normal standards. When Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled in 2008, the party had a fallback should one of them take ill or be knocked out for some unforeseen reason. Elizabeth Warren could have been that other option this time but chose not to run. At present, small-state Socialist Bernie Sanders is the safety net.

In the wake of the tragic death of his son, Beau, Vice President Joe Biden has been urged by many Democrats to run and provide a working-class counterpart to the big-money politics of the Clintons. It seems like something he really, really shouldn’t do. Biden certainly offers the authenticity that our Reality TV era demands (despite being a career politician), but someone who’ll be 74 at the time of the 2017 inauguration and has a habit of misspeaking and a belly full of grief probably shouldn’t be your other slam-dunk candidate. That’s a weak bench.

Gawker pointed me to a 1974 Washingtonian profile of Biden written by future sensationalist Kitty Kelley at an inflection point in the Senator’s life–the aftermath of the auto-wreck death of his first wife and baby daughter. The article, notable for Biden’s discomfort at the time with Roe v. Wade, is a very good piece throughout. 

An excerpt:

His 29-year-old sister Valerie and her husband Bruce have moved into the Senator’s house to take care of the children. He commutes from Wilmington every day to be with them when they wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. They like visiting him here, and it is not unusual to see two little blondes streaking through Biden’s reception room. Both seem adjusted to the loss. Beau, now five years old, explains the situation with simplicity: “My father works in his office with the Senators and my mother is in heaven.”

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Named one of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate, Joe Biden looks like Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby in natty pin-striped suits, elegant silk ties, and black tassled loafers. He dresses rich. “I’m a suit-and-tie kind of guy,” he says. “I’ve been this way all my life. I even wore a tie in college. My wife thought I dressed too conservatively and so she would buy a lot of my clothes which is probably the only reason I look so good.” He looks like a Senator—complete with receding hairline and gravelly voice. He has immense self-confidence. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink. Although he makes deprecating noises about some senators and calls Congress an antiquated nineteenth-century institution, he still is proud of his position. He thoroughly enjoys being a politician. “I am proud to be a politician. There is no other walk of life which can do more good for mankind than politics. It influences every thing that happens to the American people. You might think I’m off the wall when I say this, but I believe what Plato said 2,000 years ago: ‘The penalty good men pay for not becoming involved in politics is being governed by men worse than themselves.”

He defines politics as power. “And, whether you like it or not, young lady,” he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, “us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendrnent of yours if we want to.” There’s no time to pursue the point—Biden is summoned o the floor for a vote. On the way over to the Capitol he channels the conversation away from politics, talking about his family: “This is really a big deal for them. I’m the only Senator any of us have ever known. We never even knew anyone who knew a Senator before. At first my dad tried to talk me into running for governor but I told him I didn’t want to be a damn old administrator. I wanted to come to Washington and get something accomplished. He calls me champ now. He and Mike Mansfield are probably the most decent men I’ve ever known. My dad never went to college [he’s an automobile sales manager in Wilmington] and he had never been involved in politics until I started campaigning. But he loves it.”•

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Mitt Romney: Because towel-snapping just wasn't erotic enough. (Image by Jessica Rinaldi.)

It was reported last week that when Mitt Romney was eighteen (or close to it) he arranged the gang humiliation of a fellow student. The boy had longish blond hair and appeared to perhaps be gay. So Mitt Romney got some friends together and they pinned this boy down on the ground and cut his hair against his will. A lot of media people are dismissing the act, as if this square-headed robot from the 1950s pushed someone when he was 12 or called someone a bad name. HE COMMITTED A HATE CRIME! It was a criminal assault. You know those well-intentioned but misguided “It Gets Better” ads? The ones aimed at gay kids, promising them that eventually other people will stop punching them, instead of, say, being aimed at parents who are raising vicious creeps? Mitt Romney is the unseen thug in those ads beating up the kids for being different. Mitt Romney is very lucky he didn’t attack someone in a similar fashion today in Florida. They have this Stand Your Ground law which allows those being attacked to defend themselves with firearms. People in Florida are shot for doing much less than 18-year-old Romney did. Some of them are shot for no reason at all.

I’m sure other people who’ve became President committed hate crimes in their youths. Perhaps Millard Fillmore strangled a tranny prostitute for giving him tuberculosis. But at least we didn’t know about those histories. We know for sure that Mitt Romney, who could become our President, is a huge, bullying asshole.

But why should Mitt Romney’s hate crimes be limited to his youth? Here are some other ones he can commit now:

Murder the Entire City of Detroit: Oh wait, he already did that.

Converting a Guy to a Religion Against His Will: Oh wait, he already did that.

Not Giving a Crap About Very Poor People: Oh wait, he already did that.

Vice President Joe Biden: Accidentally outed an entire nation.

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Other posts labeled “Humor” that seemed funny at the time:

  • Lady Gaga urinates on home plate at Yankee Stadium.

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Joe Biden famously christened health-care reform as a “Big Fucking Deal,” but there is another BFD in his past, an inexplicable one, which may be health-care reform’s undoing when lawsuits go before the Supreme Court next year. An excerpt from Jeffrey Toobin’s excellent new New Yorker profile about Justice Clarence Thomas and his equally conservative wife, Virginia:

“Thomas was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, and neither the Judiciary Committee nor any other part of the government has since seen fit to reëxamine the Thomas-Hill controversy. Still, a good deal of evidence has since emerged about the protagonists and their testimony. Even near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to testify and corroborate Hill’s testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk. The group included Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett; other associates of Thomas, among them Kaye Savage and Fred Cooke, would have testified about the nominee’s long-standing interest in pornography, which would have corroborated Hill’s account. But Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, decided not to call these witnesses. This year, Lillian McEwen, a Washington lawyer who had a long-term romantic relationship with Thomas before he met Ginni, published a memoir, D.C. Unmasked & Undressed. She, too, remarked on the Justice’s ‘strong interest in pornography,’ and she also said that Thomas scrutinized his work colleagues as prospective sexual partners. In short, virtually all the evidence that has emerged since the hearings corroborates Hill’s version of events.”

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Anita Hill, October 11, 1991:

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