Joe Biden is a National Embarrassment (Update: That's the Point, and With Examples by Hillary and Obama)

The one thing worse than the Vice President’s almost daily gaffes is the fact that he just can’t keep his mouth shut.  Hubert Humphrey was pretty bad about his inability to have an unuttered thought, but Joe Biden left him in the dust long ago.

Recent examples that still echo through the empty halls reserved for critics in the mainstream media include Biden’s comments about how nice it is that John Ryan “likes his dad, and quotes him too”.  When Ryan was 16, he discovered his father’s body, dead from a sudden heart attack.  This has been talked about in the last several days during the media’s incipient vetting process for Ryan, but Biden seems to have missed that, along with our obvious conclusion that Ryan has been a complete stranger to him for the last fourteen years that Ryan has been a principal member of the House of Representatives. 

This falls into line with some of Biden’s other tasteless, clueless remarks, like lamenting the death of the mother of the Irish Prime Minister standing next to him (she is still alive), or telling Missouri state Senator Chuck Graham to stand up during a political rally and wave to the crowd (Graham is confined to a wheelchair), or relating how President Franklin Roosevelt went on television when the stock market crashed (it crashed before he was President, and television did not exist outside a laboratory), or telling America to avoid airlines and subways because of the swine flu (panicking people about a major portion of America’s transportation industry).  He has already spoken of how East Indians have taken over 7-11s and doughnut shops, how the Democrats will still have at least a 30% chance of getting it wrong on the stimulus package (he was right on that one), how the word “jobs” has three letters (he is arithmetically challenged like Obama, with his 57 plus 1 states of the union), and praised Obama – when he didn’t call him “Barack America” – for being an “African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” (imagine that!).  Then there is the sprinkling of his f-bombs (now an official Merriam-Webster word) throughout his comments that aren’t nearly as off-mike as the administration would like. 

Glossed over (actually, completely absent) in recent reportage on this subject is Biden’s outrageous claim, on top of the absurd notion that killing bin Laden was a “gutsy call”, that Obama’s dithering decision on the operation – the decision, not the operation itself – was the most audacious plan in over “500 years”. 

Now we see that Biden told an audience in Virginia (after saying that they can win in North Carolina) that Romney wants to “unchain” Wall Street, and in so doing (as he relates to the predominantly Black audience) then “he gon’ put you’awl back in chains”.  Some of the print media have cleaned up the phrase – they can’t gloss over the “you’awl” and “chains” – but the twang throughout the sentence is unmistakable.  Besides the clear allusion to slavery, he manages to deliver the threat in a ‘you people’ kind of way.

Notice the vain attempt to connect with the audience by trying to assume a 'down home' patois, like it’s really cool to shun any sense of proper rhetoric.  Even Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou have condemned Ebonics, but Biden feels that he can emphasize a point for those who aren’t as "articulate" as Obama.  And if you think that this pandering is limited to just Joe, then you have forgotten about Hillary Clinton:

and even Obama himself, who forgets that he was born four years before the events he describes, which he claims led to his birth, picks up on the accent that would be hard to acquire growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia:

(Isn’t it interesting that people who are so strongly opposed to any connection between church and state, will practically leap into a pulpit of a Black church to deliver political stem-winders?) 

As for Biden, what does it say about the judgment of someone who would place him just a heartbeat away from the most powerful post in the world, who would place this nation in jeopardy by having such a buffoon in a position of such responsibility?  Seriously, isn’t that alone a reason to turn Obama out of the White House?  The reason he was on the ticket in 2008 is because, by dint of seniority and little else, he had lasted long enough to be the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which title (certainly not Biden’s intelligence or record) lent a balance to Obama’s lack of experience in … well, practically everything.

John Fund expounds on how Biden has become such a liability to the Democrats – the ones who proclaim through the media (but I repeat myself) how every Republican since Dwight Eisenhower has been some kind of dim-witted fool, but somehow they hold that Joe Biden is just a loveable, avuncular guy who we should just accept ("Oh well, that’s just Joe.").  This is the same story line that unfolded when former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught red-handed stealing politically sensitive documents from the National Archives, and Bill Clinton’s 'aw-shucks' reaction was that Sandy was some kind of absent-minded professor who always had a messy desk.  (Did I say red-handed?  'Red-legged' would be more accurate, since he had the documents stuffed in his trousers and his socks.)  The media have given the Democrats a pass on that one too. 

Rudy Giuliani was direct in his assessment yesterday:

I’ve never seen a vice president that has made as many mistakes, said as many stupid things.  I mean, there’s a real fear if, God forbid, he ever had to be entrusted with the presidency, whether he really has the mental capacity to handle it.  I mean, this guy just isn’t bright.  He’s never been bright.  He isn’t bright.  And people think, ‘Well, he just talks a little too much.’  Actually, he’s just not very smart.

And the Editorial Board of National Review was close behind today, under the title of ‘Joe Biden’s Moral Illiteracy’:

To suggest as Biden did that Romney’s program has something – anything – in common with slave-trading is vile even by the standards of Democratic campaign rhetoric.  That no Democrat of note has spoken up against it is a testament to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the party and the political movement it represents.

After all these years that Biden has been in the Senate and Blair House – coming up on 30 – he has shown no evidence of reforming his ways.  The best that the Democrats can do is to try and muzzle him.  The best that the Republicans will do is just have Paul Ryan show up at the Vice Presidential Debate on 11 October – that should be a major highlight of the campaign.

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Update:  Daniel Greenfield has an intriguing take on the Biden factor.  It's not so much that Biden is on the ticket despite his incompetence, he's on the ticket because of his incompetence.

Joe Biden, never a serious candidate, was the perfect match for Obama.  A dumb old white man, to confirm all the dirty impulses of the left, while mockingly giving mainstream Democrats someone they could relate to.  Biden's gaffes aren't an embarrassment, they are the whole point, signaling the end of the old American era of leadership. . . .

Biden is the successor of every dumb white male father figure on TV gawping at the screen, tumbling over chairs and down the stairs, scratching his head cluelessly at the wiser new generation around him.  He is every man in a commercial who can't figure out how to start a car, make coffee or clean the house until his wife or a helpful minority figure shows up and explains it to him. . . .

Biden still does not understand what he is.  He is a fellow traveler, a dupe, a scarecrow of the old white male liberal establishment hung up over a cornfield to attract unknowing liberals while serving as a figure of fun to the left.  And despite his corruption and arrogance, there is something sad and pathetic in the spectacle of a hollow man with capped teeth set in a grin making a fool of himself for the amusement of the Post-American crowd.  A crowd that he thinks are laughing with him, when they are actually laughing at him.

(H/T again to Donald Sensing)

*****
Update: But wait . . . there's more.