Joe Biden’s Gaffes, False Statements and Plagiarism Round Out The Obama Ticket
By Anita Finlay ("Ani") on October 1, 2008 at 9:00 PM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Debates, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John McCain, Obamedia
Joe Biden is getting ready to flex his big yaw at the debate with Governor Palin tomorrow night. Heaven help us! He is supposed to be the man who adds experience and foreign policy street cred to the inexperienced Obama ticket. Good luck with that, Joe. I suppose his being a 66 year old with a 36-year tenure in the Senate may be comforting to some. But the ultimate beltway insider, with a lobbyist for a son, doesn’t exactly fit with the hopey-changey ‘new politics’ the Obama campaign is trumpeting. So let’s take a look at what Joe brings to the table.
Dominic Lawson, in his piece in The Independent/UK, asks Why Should Anyone Trust Joe Biden:
As part of his Presidential campaign 20 years ago, [Biden] lifted verbatim and without attribution Neil Kinnock’s celebrated remarks: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a University … was it because all our predecessors were thick, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up to play football?”
Biden told an audience at an Iowa fairground: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden’s the first in his family ever to go to University … is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright… who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football?”
Note the overt claim to spontaneity at the outset of the plagiarism; but it wasn’t just that which left his run for the Presidency buried under an avalanche of ridicule. It rapidly emerged that Biden was not the first member of his family to go to university, and that the closest any ancestral Bidens came to working underground was a grandfather who was a mining engineer – and during the campaign Biden also told a number of gratuitous untruths about his own academic record.
Most politicians would not be able to stage a comeback, but due to the forgiving nature – or more accurately – the short memories of the American people, he was deemed fit to once again run for President and to be chosen as Obama’s running mate.
Apparently Senator Biden’s penchant for hyperbole and embellishment has not changed. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael J. Durant (Ret.) made a statement today regarding Joe Biden’s apparently false accounts of near-misses on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq:
“Senator Biden claimed at a debate last year that he’d been ‘shot at’ while visiting Iraq. And he has claimed repeatedly, most recently last week, that his helicopter was ‘forced down’ in Afghanistan — leaving his audience with the impression that it was fire from the Taliban which had grounded the aircraft. Neither of these stories appears to be true, and Senator Biden has never accounted for the discrepancies.”
“‘I’ve been on a helicopter that was ‘forced down’ by enemy fire, and I’ve been ‘shot at.’ Neither is easily confused with being caught in a snow storm or awakened by a loud bang in the night. Senator Biden has a responsibility to come clean on what actually happened, and explain why he would ever say such things to the American people.”
See FOX News Story, Unlike Clinton, Biden Gets Pass for Saying He Was ‘Shot At’ in Iraq :
FOX News has been asking the Obama campaign for details of the alleged shooting in Iraq ever since Biden was tapped to be vice president. Biden campaign spokesman David Wade promised an answer last week, but failed to provide one.
Meanwhile, the gaffe-prone Biden has again raised eyebrows with another story about his exploits in war zones – this time in Afghanistan. Biden said he will grill Republican rival Sarah Palin in Thursday’s vice presidential debate about “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down.”
“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”
But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden’s visit to Afghanistan in February. Fighter jets kept watch overhead while a convoy of security vehicles was dispatched to retrieve Biden and fellow Senators Chuck Hagel and John Kerry.
“We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to,” joked Kerry, a Democrat, to the AP. “Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”
Wow. So Senator Clinton was excoriated re Bosnia sniper fire but Joking Joe gets a pass! More hyperbole, Senator Biden? Seems to be a habit with this guy.
It seems the American people are also supposed to forget not only his plagiarism and false statements, but his own very recent declarations that Senator Obama is:
“not yet ready for the Presidency”
AND
[the presidency is] not a post suitable for “on-the-job training“
When your own VP thinks that you’re not ready and is on record to the American people, that sure seems like a red flag to me. Don’t fret, the media will cover it up like they do everything else.. It gets better. The gaffe-meister had this to say about Senator Obama:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Lawson rightly points out there were many upset African American politicians, wondering was Biden saying – “they are NOT clean?” Oh, Biden, what a boob thou art…
Now he’s down south telling people they should vote for Obama because he is black. You mean that’s the best reason he can come up with. Gee, is Joe a closet racist? He keeps playing the AA card. I thought Obama was supposed to be post-racial, post partisan. Obama shops at Whole Foods and he likes Reaganomics. Wow! He is the perfect package!
Here’s another Joe gem: “Pay more taxes because it is patriotic.” Who is he talking to here? I personally pay enough taxes and I’m sure many Americans feel the same. In light of the current economic crisis, that’s not an attractive sound bite – is he going to pretend he didn’t say that either?
Biden also confessed in New Hampshire that Hillary would be better on the ticket than he is. No kidding. Farewell, Joe and while you’re at it, take Obama with you. Hillary could run the table with one hand tied behind her back. And tell the truth – wouldn’t we all feel a little better if she were the standard bearer of the Democratic Party right now amidst the current economic crisis?
Biden may be Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but that doesn’t mean he’s been right on a whole host of issues:
He voted against using American military force to remove Saddam Hussein’s army from occupied Kuwait, but voted for the American invasion of sovereign Iraq in 2003. Later, he voted against the “surge” which has brought a degree of stability to that benighted country, proposing instead that it be allowed to break up along ethnic lines – the now discredited “Biden Plan”.
So all that “experience” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if your policies are cracked up. This is more of Obama’s ‘good judgment’ in surrounding himself with great people.
Boston Globe’s article Biden gaffes leave Democrats with mixed emotions points out:
[H]e can sometimes sound as if he’s straining a bit too hard to prove his importance on the world stage.
“When Russia invaded Georgia, I got a call from Misha Saakashvili. He said, ‘Joe, will you come over? Will you come?’ ” Biden said, in a foreign policy speech in Cincinnati last week. “I went to see him in Tblisi. I sat there while Russian tanks were still on the outskirts of the city. And we laid out a specific proposal. We made it crystal clear what Barack and I would do . . . to preserve the territorial integrity of Georgia.”
Oh. So that’s why it took Barack FOUR different statements over a four-day period to finally get up to speed and sound anywhere near as coherent, forceful or correct as John McCain had on the subject right out of the gate? Not so helpful then Joe, were you?
Katie Couric, interviewing both VP candidates, showed incredible bias in her disrespectful treatment of Governor Palin – not wanting to even refer to her by her proper title. Yet Couric deferred to Senator Biden. Couric did not even bother to correct this precious nugget from Joe:
When the stock market crashed, Franklin D Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened’.
Hey Katie – Hoover was President, not Roosevelt, and who the hell owned a TV in 1929???
[I]magine what hysteria would have ensued if it was Mrs Palin who had constructed a fictitious account of the circumstances surrounding the great Wall Street Crash.
Furthermore, the inane Couric actually asked Senator Biden if he was going to have to soft pedal the debate and “pull his punches” because Palin is a woman. Oh, you mean the same way he and the gang-boy squad of candidates soft-pedaled with Hillary?
Couric should be ashamed of being as sexist as her male counterparts – as should the media for letting him get away with one nonsensical statement after another.
The Globe also points out:
[Biden’s] emotional reactions sometimes appear to drive him to fudge answers. When CBS’s Katie Couric prodded him about an Obama ad criticizing McCain for not knowing how to use a computer, Biden called one of his own campaign’s ads “terrible” and declared that if he’d known about it beforehand, “we’d never have done it.” Later, he not only had to soften his criticism but also admit he had never even seen the ad.
Yep. Mixed emotions. That’s an understatement. And I guess it’s OK that Biden cries repeatedly on the campaign trail. Can you imagine if Palin did this? I’ll never forget the firestorm over Hillary getting misty – ONE TIME in New Hampshire. A tear didn’t even fall for crying out loud.
And do we remember his sexist behavior at the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings?
Oh don’t worry, people, I don’t think Joe will be doing any soft-pedaling.
Tune in Thursday to see if the overbearing, bloviating Biden will emerge, pontificating ad nauseum, flashing his 32 pearlies and opening that mouth big enough to once again insert foot, leg, thigh and hipbone.
I find it hilarious that Governor Palin has been the recipient of such vitriol. Howard Dean et al. are trying to scare voters regarding McCain’s age by saying that Palin is “one heartbeat away from the Presidency.” But it’s OK to have Biden on the Democratic ticket at age 66, having survived two brain aneurisms.
Palin actually doesn’t scare me nearly as much as Biden assuming office. I tell you, I have long feared putting Joe Biden in any important position relating to foreign policy – I worry his propensity for gaffes might trigger an international incident.
But I feel a little sorry for Joe. I don’t think he wanted on this ticket either. Who would? That’s why Webb, Strickland, Rendell et al. turned it down. You know you are going to have to run political interference and be whispering in Barack’s ear all day. I mean, Barack was about to vote to confirm Justice Roberts when someone had to whisper in his ear it was not a good idea. If Obama is elected, Biden knows that whatever goes wrong in his administration, Obama, the soulless wonder, will throw Joe under the bus at the first whipstitch.
But not to worry, the media will continue to wipe the slate clean for them both, and it is likely that the American people, bombarded with so many crises and stressors day after day, won’t even remember last week’s gaffes or falsehoods. And few will be out there to remind them. The media did the same for the Bush administration, softening the blow for him constantly. That hasn’t worked out so well for the American people.
Remember, the corporate-controlled media trumpeted Bush and sold us his war. Here’s a good rule for me: Whoever the media want — vote the other way.
In fact, on behalf of Obama/Biden, the media are going out of their way to create revisionist history by the day.
Now that’s change you can believe in.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
by 
* (Included in the 
* 
.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
