I just can't emphasize enough how dumb Joe "plugs" Biden is. He is a complete BOZO. WORLD. CLASS. STUPID. To borrow an overused cliche "He's going to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency".
When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn’t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn’t notice.
The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying “Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.” Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.
Yet, take Biden’s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.
The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.
One should be careful when throwing around terms such as “most dangerous” and “bizarre.” But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.
Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing “A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.” Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.
This isn’t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:
[I]Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.
But just as the vice president’s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president’s minimum responsibilities are.
Compare the uproar over Palin’s answer to Charlie Gibson about the “Bush Doctrine,” a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn’t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his “gotcha” moment.
Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:
-- Will McCain's health care proposals raise taxes? Biden says that McCain’s proposal will cost people money. The Tax Foundation finds that could easily be "roughly deficit-neutral over ten years."
-- Under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan"? No, the tax rates will be similar to the higher rates under Clinton.
-- Did "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country"? No, one year’s worth of spending in Iraq equaled five in Afghanistan.
-- France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon"? No, and it wouldn't have made much more sense if he had said "Syria" instead.
-- Is it really “simply not true” that Obama said that he would meet with the leader of countries such as Iran without preconditions? No, Obama said “I would.”
-- Did Obama warn against letting Hamas participate in Palestinian legislative elections in 2005? No.
-- Do “Iraqis have an $80 billion surplus”? No. If oil prices had remained high, it might have reached $50 billion by the end of this year.
-- Finally, an amusing point as evidence that Biden is just one of the people he pointed to, inviting anyone to have a beer with him at "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del. Unfortunately, people will have a hard time taking him up on his offer, since the restaurant hasn't had that name for probably 15 years.
Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can’t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden’s misstatement on Hamas and Katie’s restaurant. AOL’s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.
Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:
-- FactCheck.org criticizes Palin for claiming that McCain’s health care tax credits will be "budget neutral" – they argue that the tax credit will be larger than the new taxes that the program will impose. Fine, but if the people at FactCheck.org believe that is true and that the Tax Foundation is wrong, Biden’s claim about increased taxes is even more inaccurate. But FactCheck.org doesn't even mention Biden’s statement from the debate.
-- From AOL's news analysis piece. “Palin: Said that it is untrue that the U.S. is killing civilians in Afghanistan. According to an analysis by the AP, however, the U.S. is killing more civilians than insurgents are.”
What Palin actually said was: “Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama’s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (emphasis added).
-- FactCheck.org’s first critique claims that Palin was wrong to claim that troop levels in Iraq are down to their pre-surge levels. They are correct that after the recently announced drawdown, 6,000 more troops will be in Iraq than immediately before the surge. But why not mention that 84 percent of the 38,000 troops in the surge are home or are in the process of coming home?
The media seemsto have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle’s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden’s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden’s recent statement that, "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.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.
It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president, why didn’t that story dominate the news coverage after the debate? John Lottis the author ofFreedomnomicsand a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.
October 23rd, 2008, 14:55
Ryan Ruck
Re: Biden - World Class Bozo
Agree 100% with the title!
October 29th, 2008, 15:49
Ryan Ruck
Re: Biden - World Class Bozo
Just saw this, lol.
Joe Biden Drunk! Day after the Democratic Nat'l Convention - 8/30/2008
October 29th, 2008, 16:30
Beetle
Re: Biden - World Class Bozo
The Bozo now works for Obozo and you know what they say? Birds of a feather...
Vice President Joe Biden wants to make one thing clear: Don't count me out in 2016.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is widely viewed as the Democratic front-runner to succeed President Barack Obama but the vice president is not foreclosing any options on whether he may seek the White House for a third time.
"There may be reasons I don't run, but there's no obvious reason for me why I think I should not run," Biden said in an interview broadcast Friday on CNN's "New Day." The vice president said he would make a decision by summer 2015.
Biden's remarks came after several former advisers to Obama backed efforts to support Clinton if she seeks the presidency again. Obama's 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, recently became co-chair of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that intends to bolster a potential Clinton campaign. Two former senior Obama campaign aides are advising Ready for Hillary, another outside group promoting a grassroots campaign for the ex-secretary of state.
Biden's supporters have downplayed suggestions that the early efforts create an impression that Clinton is the favored heir to Obama's White House. Clinton, the former New York senator and first lady, says she has not yet decided if she will seek the White House again and plans to make a decision later this year.
"He feels very good about his relationship with the president," said Ted Kaufman, a former Biden chief of staff who succeeded the vice president in the Senate.
Biden has been Obama's top deputy on a number of policy fronts, leading the president's gun control campaign last year, which failed to clear Congress. In last month's State of the Union address, Obama called on Biden to lead a task force to review federal job training programs as the administration tackles income inequality.
The vice president expects to campaign for fellow Democrats during the 2014 midterm elections. Biden will headline a Florida fundraiser next week for Alex Sink, who is in a tight congressional race to succeed the late Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla.
The vice president will travel to Minnesota on Feb. 19 for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at a Minneapolis restaurant owned by the sons of Gov. Mark Dayton, D-Minn.
In the interview, Biden said his decision will be based on whether he thinks he's the best qualified person to focus "on the two things I've spent my whole life on, giving ordinary people a fighting chance to make it, and a sound foreign policy that's based on rational interests of the United States."
"I think the future for this country, I know people think I'm too optimistic, but it is incredible," Biden said. "There's so much just within our grasp. Doesn't mean I'm the only guy that can do it, but if no one else, I think, can, and I think I can, then I'd run. If I don't, I won't."
http://static4.businessinsider.com/i...den%20baby.pngGeorgina Bloomberg/FacebookVice President Joe Biden and, apparently, Jasper Michael Brown Quintana.
Vice President Joe Biden seems to have taken a liking to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's grandson.
Bloomberg's daughter, Georgina Bloomberg, posted a Facebook photo on Wednesday of Biden and a young child. In the photo, Biden appears to have a pacifier in his mouth.
"What's a boy to do when the Vice President steals your pacifier?" Georgina Bloomberg wrote next to the photo.
Her son, Jasper Michael Brown Quintana, was born at the end of last year.
The elder Bloomberg was in Washington on Wednesday, where he was recognized as an honorary knight by the United Kingdom. Biden also attended the ceremony, according to a press release from the British ambassador's office.
The Facebook post was first flagged on Thursday by the Independent Journal Review and by the Jewish Insider newsletter.
Biden's office did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Last updated 6:31 p.m.
