Way back in August, I described Joe Biden as "kind of a bozo." But then the whole world decided that they either hated or loved Sarah Palin, and everybody decided that therefore, through some sort of reverse osmosis process, Biden must be a Steady Hand on the Tiller etc etc.
Nah, he's a garrulous old hack, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's the wrong thing in a Vice President. The VP is supposed to be the next best thing to the President, which means people (especially foreigners, who don't know any better) listen to him, which means he isn't supposed to talk too much. He's supposed to just stand there looking sad while they lower the dictator of Bebukustan into the ground. Al Gore was good at that.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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25 comments:
Steve,
Did Biden say something recently that he shouldn't have?
What was your reason for this post?
I don't know how good politicians like Obama do it. How can anyone have the discipline to always give the correct answer? It would be a living hell for most people.
I can't stand either one of the VP candidates, but I agree that Palin is probably more of a liability in the election than Biden.
However, the biggest liability is McCain himself. I don't know why the Republicans thought people would be enthusiastic about yet another open borders, pro-war neocon.
Heh, Ol' smilin' Joe probably had figured out who to copy off of back in his formative years. BTW, notice the easy pass he gets for graduating B+ in poli sci from a non elite U (Delaware) and law school (Syracuse) and managed only 76/80 in class rank. He had to beg the Law Dean not to kick him out for plagiarism. If I were a tin-horned dictator I'd rather sit next to Sarah Palin then this guy.
-Frank
That was a neutron bomb he detonated on his own campaign, wasn't it? And how about that assist from Albright? I wonder if she is either that obtuse or if she was being a good Hillary supporter and did it on purpose.
It's too bad the obvious questions aren't being asked by professionals. Most everyone I've read believes Biden knows something. What does Biden know? What all scenarios does he see possibly playing out? What will the unpopular action be that Obama takes? Theories and speculation are exploding on the web. I've seen: his unpopular action will be a draft; his unpopular action will be that Israel will attack Iran and not be assisted; the foreign affair will be Chavez tries to seize Cuba; the f.a. will involve Iran and Russia; etc.
The sad (or revealing) part being that Obama should have known better. I mean it's not like Biden just popped up on the scene 2 years ago when he challenged a corrupt political regime and became governor of Alaska. I mean we could excuse him if that were the case. Instead, Biden's been a well-known plagiarizing asshat for quite some time - an asshat Obama's bee working with for 4 years (to the extent Obama's spent any days "working" in the Senate at all).
Have you read this?
http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122463690372357037.html
"Even as the Department of Homeland Security sought to deport them, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. goaded banks and credit unions to bring undocumented immigrants into mainstream banking"
Remember these were great loans according to the journal, Less than 5% delinquent!
Well I think that's much less disturbing than Palin's view of elitism.
What is an elitist? Anyone who thinks they're better than someone else.
WTF?!?!?!?!?!
I thought that was a non-marxist.
Although I do think Biden's inner asshole is going to cause his mouth to write a few checks that obama is unwilling to cash.
I don't know why the Republicans thought people would be enthusiastic about yet another open borders, pro-war neocon.
Maybe you can set me straight, because all this time I've been assuming that the Republican primary voters, by and large, didn't (and probably still don't) have a #^@&ing clue that McCain is an open borders fanatic, and assume(d) that he's for closing and policing the border because he's such a warmonger.
Republican primary voters are probably more in favor of open borders than the rank and file, so I dunno...
Btw, anybody else notice the nice dovetail between the recently-released Pew study (Biden receives the least coverage of the four by far) and Biden's foot-in-mouth disease?
Klaosoldanburg said:
"Well I think that's much less disturbing than Palin's view of elitism.
What is an elitist? Anyone who thinks they're better than someone else."
Biden is just as bad. In a speech (I believe at the convention) he asserted that it's an American value that everybody is just as good as everybody else. Sounds just like Elsworth M. Toohey.
Off Topic:
Steve,
When is your Obama book comming out? The election's getting close. If you want to profit off it you better get moving!
Reverse osmosis? The correct analogy is to an optical illusion. When you put someone who is "kind of a bozo" next to a full blown imbecile, suddenly they don't seem like so much of an idiot anymore. Rather than take advantage of Biden's gaffe-laden prolixity, the McCain campaign picked such an utter buffoon she skewed the perspective enough to make Biden look like a dignified, experienced statesman rather than the loudmouth, hotheaded politician he really is.
You missed the real "I told you so" moment, Steve, predicting Palin's dismal performance by her inexperience with national politics, and, more importantly, the very average IQ suggested by her college record.
Palin's accomplishments are legend; I don't like her being a sarcastic pitbull and I think it diminishes how extraordinary she is.
Jake Tapper does an excellent job with Biden's gaffes with his "Oh, That Joe" series and he's almost up to #40.
I completely agree with Captain Jack Aubrey on Obama and his pick of Obama. Spengler, who I've been reading more of lately, called it quintessentially weak and predicted that it cost him the election. An alpha male probably would have picked Hillary, but definitely not Joe Biden.
Palin's "average" IQ? Getting rid of an incumbent Governor, a Republican, and defeating the Democratic challenger? In the fairly brutal AK politics (lots of oil money)?
Right ....
For those who don't know ... Biden said in a speech that Obama believers must support him when four or five challenges come up and Obama's response appears "wrong" and "weak" and that Obama will be "tested."
Off the top of my head that would be:
1. Iran closes the Gulf and Obama just goes along, oil shoots back up to $130 a barrel or higher. [This would be a contradiction of US policy since FDR, to keep the Gulf under US Naval Control.]
2. Iran takes over Iraq, and Obama just nods his head. Again, Oil shoots up dramatically.
3. Russia invades Ukraine.
4. Pakistan collapses into Taliban rule, as the leaked NIE says it very well might, AQ and the Taliban have control of their nukes.
5. Some sort of Iran-Israel nuclear exchange, with Obama backing Iran or even invading Israel as advisor and likely National Security advisor Samantha Power wanted, to liquidate Israel and install Hamas in it's stead. The war could come from missiles stationed in Lebanon and Syria, both Iranian satellites. Iran is reputedly close to or has nukes of the gun-type already, note Oppenheimer did not bother to test that type -- dead simple to create.
Biden also said that Obama's domestic policies would drive the Administration's standings in the polls way down -- likely Reparations, seizing 401Ks, things like that.
Kaus defines a gaffe as saying what a Politician really thinks. Big gaffer, that Biden
Here is Pat saying what Steve just did, but with much more passion as only he can say it:
Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media.
Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.
Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.
Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama:
"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ... Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said … we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
A "generated crisis"? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Tehran?
This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them.
Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about?
If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know.
Instead, what we got was Obama's airy dismissal of Joe's words as a "rhetorical flourish" and a media – rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference – acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests.
Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it.
Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and ... said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television.
Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?
Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe.
Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate.
Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party's role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan's deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War?
In the most crucial vote he ever cast – to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq – Joe concedes he got it wrong.
Is Joe's record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq war, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year-old nephew to "teach him a lesson"?
"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know," says Joe humbly. Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it.
Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills. Yet when Hillary's campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama's cocaine use on "Hardball," he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard.
The people apparently had a "right to know" of Bush's old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.
The media cannot get enough of the "Saturday Night Live" impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.
Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?
"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate-crime charges.
How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.
Is there a media double standard? You betcha.
svigor said...
Maybe you can set me straight, because all this time I've been assuming that the Republican primary voters, by and large, didn't (and probably still don't) have a #^@&ing clue that McCain is an open borders fanatic, and assume(d) that he's for closing and policing the border because he's such a warmonger.
Republican primary voters are probably more in favor of open borders than the rank and file, so I dunno...
It only takes a few to spread the word, svigor. McCain failed it bad, and he did so quite a while ago. Not everyone forgets these things, and better judgment advises against forgiveness in this case.
Don't forget his worst transgression of all, his plagiarization of Neil Kinnock's speech back in '88 and its accompanying appropriation of Kinnock's family background, complete with coal miner grandfather (which Biden never had). Coincidentally I just blogged about Biden's pathological lying this morning too.
Halfbreed
Amazing how many "anonymouses" show up talking like Testing99 right after his ranting about Obama destroying Israel.
Testing 99,
That post you just made is ridiculous. None of those things would be allowed by Obama. I dont like Obama and didn't vote for him (Chuck Baldwin--yes I know he has no chance), but those are outlandish accusations.
Don't worry Testing, we are not going to "abandon" Israel or give up Naval Control of the Gulf. We have 16 carrier groups and an awesome air force, Iran has less toys than Blackwater's "navy" has, and twice as old.
Testing, if the prospect of an Obama/Biden ticket bothers you so much, maybe you should have done like I did and cast your lot with a more electebale Romney, Thompson, or Tancredo, all of whom were members of our congress who were better on the economy and immigration/cultural matters than Yosemitie/RioGrande/So-moderate-you-cannot-even-tell-he-is-a-GOP'er-media-darling(until Barack)-McCain.
Steve, this is OT, but do you have any comment on "folk hero" Sarah Palin's recent endorsement of amnesty?
http://www.univision.com/content/content.jhtml;jsessionid=GIESMZQST0KIUCWIAA4SFEYKZAADYIWC?chid=3&schid=10414&secid=25534&cid=1716304&pagenum=2
There go the hopes that she's a stealth patriot who will take over when McCain conveniently dies on Jan. 20. I see no reason whatsoever to prefer McCain to Obama now.
I love Pat as much as the next paleocon, but have to take issue with:
cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history
The domino theory was wrong. Losing Vietnam wasn't much of a defeat after all. Communism kept them mired in poverty for a few more decades until eventually after the cold war ended they decided to get a real economy. So what? No harm to us beyond the 60 000 men and God knows how much money we wasted on the war.
A real strategic defeat would have been losing someplace important to the Soviets. Like, say, half of Europe. Oh, wait...
"The VP is supposed to be the next best thing to the President, which means people (especially foreigners, who don't know any better) listen to him, which means he isn't supposed to talk too much."
Perhaps, but he is no worse than the vacuous chatty Cathy Palin, who has a much bigger potential of being a total disaster (as opposed to just crummy) if she had to take over the presidency. While not in the best interest of the country, I think it works well for Obama symbolically, the standard PC reversal of stereotypes. Here we have the white guy as the hothead shooting his mouth off and the black guy as the calm, cool voice of reason.
bill,
What I can't figure out about McCain is how he was allowed to even breathe the same air in DC as George W. Bush, after the latter handed him his ass in the primaries. And McCain's repeated insults of Bush as a sitting president should have landed him in whatever equivalent US politics has of the gulag.
Somehow, someway, in violation of every rule of the game, we end up with a short, geriatric, bad-tempered cancer patient as the Republican candidate. I'm still trying to figure out what just happened.
--Senor Doug
He may be all that, but he has a record comparable to that of many previous president, many of whom were old and not in great health.
What is weirder, is the Obama rise. This person really was (and is) a nobody with no record of accomplishment--well, community activist, ok. Taking mafia money. He has ordered his Columbia and Harvard records sealed -- how do we even know what he did there. No writings of any note except his autobiography which makes this all even weirder. Why does a nobody senator, years before he's a candidate for POTUS, write an autobiography?
People, this was all planned. You have to understand that or else you're just children. I know, I know, it's all complicated and you may never see whose at top of the strings no matter how much you cran your neck. But never believe this deck of cards at face value.
McCain does not serve most of our interests as far as I know, but for all I know maybe he would. He's less of a lier than Obama, at least at this point in his life.
Somebody said it very well: there is no more culpable, vile and anti-American citizen force in the U.S. today than the mainstream media. NYT, Post, LA Times, Salon on line mag, CNN, Yahoo news page.Newsweek etc. ect. Owned by very few, a very few who know each other.
All more guilty even than Congress. Congress is afraid, some of them for their lives. I realize that now.
Re the rise of Obama: I've heard the claim(don't remember where) that the Obama candidacy began as a Kennedy clan operation. There were no details, so I don't when the relationship was supposed to have begun.
Also, it is good to recall that Bill Ayers' father, Thomas (recently deceased), was a MAJOR civic and political player in Chicago.
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