"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation...This young man named Barack Obama...came over to this country. He met this woman...(who) had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided...it might...be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama... So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama."
He forgot to mention that this took place in 1965. He was born in 1961.
"Just words, just speeches..."
But now Biden has gone out of his way to upstage that minorly reported-on gaffe.
"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,'"
That's right. Hoover was President when the stock market crashed, and television was still experimental. Obviously he was trying to tie Obambi to FDR, but no such luck. In fact, terrible luck, with the gaffe streak Biden's had lately:
- He's also said that Hilldog would have made a better VP than he.
- He asked, at a rally, a state legislator to "stand up...let 'em see you." Unfortunately, he didn't actually know who in the heck he was talking about. The legislator was in a wheelchair. This was promptly followed with, "Ohhh, my God."
- When a reporter asked him about that terrible "McCain can't e-mail" ad, Biden said it was terrible. Later, after actually seeing the ad, he called it "OK", and once again called the McCain campaign a bunch of invidious liars.
Oh, Joe Biden. What a crack-up. No wonder the internets are buzzing with rumors that Obama's going to drop him on or around October 5th, due to a manufactured alibi that Biden has "health problems". Then they'll go with Hillary.
Of course, there's so much more that I could write about Joe Biden.
That the President of Iraq said that Biden's "plan for Iraq" drafted a while ago would have been a terrible foreign policy disaster, that it would have been impossible to execute and it could have resulted in ethnic cleansing.
That SC Justice Clarence Thomas brings up Biden in his memoir (read this, very telling):
Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech that I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said: “ ‘I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would . . . strike down laws restricting property right.’ ” That caught me off guard, and I had no recollection of making so atypical a statement, which shook me up even more. “Now, it would seem to me what you were talking about,” Senator Biden went on to say, “is you find attractive the fact that they are activists and they would like to strike down existing laws that impact on restricting the use of property rights, because you know, that is what they write about.”
Since I didn’t remember making the statement in the first place, I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say in reply was that “it has been quite some time since I have read Professor Macedo. . . . But I don’t believe that in my writings I have indicated that we should have an activist Supreme Court or that we should have any form of activism on the Supreme Court.” It was, I knew, a weak answer. Fortunately, though, the young lawyers who had helped prepare me for the hearings had loaded all of my speeches into a computer, and at the first break in the proceedings they looked this one up. The senator, they found, had wrenched my words out of context. I looked at the text of my speech and saw that the passage he’d read out loud had been immediately followed by two other sentences: “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self-government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.” The point I’d been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.
Throughout my life I’ve often found truth embedded in the lyrics of my favorite records. At Yale, for example, I’d listened often to “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” a song by the Undisputed Truth that warns of the dangers of trusting the hypocrites who “pretend to be your friend” while secretly planning to do you wrong. Now I knew I’d met one of them: Senator Biden’s smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk. Instead of relaxing, I’d have to keep my guard up.
Ken Duberstein, a Washington lobbyist who had volunteered to help steer me through the confirmation process, called the next morning to say that Joe Biden wanted to talk to me before the vote. I called the Judiciary Committee cloakroom, and after a brief wait, Senator Biden came on the line. I held the receiver sideways so that Virginia could hear him speak as we stood together in the kitchen. The senator said that he was torn over his decision and had actually brought two statements with him to the committee meeting that day, one for me and the other against. He had decided to oppose me. He’d voted to confirm Justice Scalia, he explained, and now regretted it; he thought it was possible that I might turn out like Justice Scalia, so he couldn’t vote for me.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m confirmed or not. But I entered this process with a good name, and I want to have it at the end.”
“Judge, I know you don’t believe me,” he replied, “but if any of these last two matters come up, I will be your biggest defender.” (The other matter to which he was referring was the leak of my draft opinion.)
He was right about one thing: I didn’t believe him.
So, besides having hair plugs, what's so special about this big-mouthed, smooth-faced, typical, "old-politics", lying politician?
Well, he's supposed to be "the" aggressive guy for Democrats. But surely he has shot himself in the foot so many times, what with his past racist Indian remarks and his comments about the Presidency not for "on-the-job training," that we'll put this so-called "attack dog" on a leash.
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