America’s Dumbest Vice President

October 21, 2011
By Sinclair Soul

On a few occasions this past week, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that failure to pass President Obama’s latest and greatest “jobs” bill would result in more rape, murder, and all kinds of mean and nasty stuff. It was a shameless display of demagoguery, the likes of which most of us abandoned in junior high school. But for good ole Joe, it is the just the latest in a long pattern of using his privileged position as a public servant to spit out asinine, outrageous, weird, and downright dumb things. Biden is like the immature adolescent who overhears his parents candidly speaking and then goes on to repeat it at a family gathering.

Just to recap some of Joe Biden’s most infamous gaffes:

• In June 2006, a C-SPAN camera caught this remark by Biden –
  “…You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent, I’m not joking…”
• Speaking of his future boss Barack Obama in 2007, Biden said;
  “…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…”
• While giving a speech in 2008, Biden pointed out Missouri State Senator Chuck Graham in the crowd saying; “Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya…”, despite the fact that Graham was confined to a wheelchair.
• Even though Franklin D. Roosevelt was not inaugurated until 1933 and the first television broadcast was not until the 1936 Olympics, Biden claimed in a 2008 interview;
  “When the stock market crashed (in 1929), 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…”

And there are many more examples – Biden calling J-O-B-S a three letter word, saying it was a great honor to be sworn in by “Justice Stewart” after he had been sworn in by Justice John Paul Stevens,
not knowing the web address of the site he had gone on TV to encourage viewers to visit, and being caught on a live mic saying to the President “this is a big fucking deal” during the ceremonial signing of the Obamacare bill.

When he says such outrageous, idiotic, or reprehensible things, the mainstream press and the Democratic party shrug and say, “Oh, that’s just Joe” and move on to the latest serious issue of national importance, usually involving one of Sarah Palin’s children. But there is a more serious issue with the Vice President beyond having little to no sense of tact. Biden is a serial plagiarist dating back nearly a half century.

While at Syracuse University Law School in the late 1960s, Biden was found guilty by an academic disciplinary board of plagiarizing an academic paper. He threw himself “at the mercy of the board”, which ultimately decided not to expel him from the school. Later as a Delaware Senator in the 1980s, Biden began using a life story which spoke of his family members working long days working in the mines and reciting poetry at night, which paved the way for him to become the first college graduate in his family. Problem is, this is the same story that British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock had used in a speech and Biden (who could not confirm any coal miners in his heritage, while many on his mother’s side had attended college) never revealed that he was quoting Kinnock.

On this latest “more rape, murder, crime unless” issue, Biden looks to want to quell serious and thoughtful debate by appealing to the most base emotion of fear. Again, this is something that most of us abandon when we reach maturity, which begs the question, is this ploy sincere desperation or cynical politics? In either case, I don’t see any voter with the slightest bit of sophistication buying it.

Bottom line is, whether you think Vice President Biden is disingenuous, crafty, conniving, or just plain dumb, I think the most important thing we can all agree on is that we hope the Secret Service does their absolute finest diligence in protecting President Obama. Otherwise we may all be in some “big fucking” trouble.

Update 01/19/12
Biden Tells San Francisco Crowd ‘The Giants’ Are Going To Super Bowl

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Sinclair Soul is a championship-level background singer and now political columnist for BigBlueBullfrog.com. His column, “The Soul of the Nation” thoroughly examines the state of American politics and culture from a Soul perspective.