The senior senator from Delaware has long been understood to be something less than serious – a sort of Ted Baxter of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Now I have taken to calling him Slow Joe Biden on my radio program, because vanity alone can no longer account for his many miscues. The political class has to come to grips with the fact that the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations is never going to win the spelling bee.
Since Biden was first elected to the Senate at a very young age – he graduated from college in ’65 and was sworn-in in 1973 – many made the assumption that he was a sort of brilliant wonder kid. Turns out, he was just lucky – a fact we began to recognize when Biden got drummed out of the presidential campaign in 1988 for plagiarism. Even then, some mistook dim-wittedness for sloth. Biden’s recent flops cannot, however, be charitably dismissed as the errors of a lazy man. Wartime makes many things clear, and it is now crystal clear that Joe Biden is thick.
First came Biden’s now infamous demand for a “mano-a-mano” ground war, a demand issued to a Council on Foreign Relations audience. Biden was taped that day, and I for one am very thankful, for there has been great satisfaction in replaying the entire segment of his speech over and over again – especially after Biden claimed he was taken “out of context.” Biden’s blustering about America giving evidence to our enemies of being a high-tech bully because we bombed and bombed and didn’t get dirty with the use of ground troops grows even more ridiculous with every passing week. If Biden runs again for the presidency, this taped selection will get more airplay than Paul singing “Yesterday.”
Then, last week, Biden faithfully delivered another supply of material for those of us who handicap political nags instead of horses. This time, Biden was denouncing the decision by President Bush to withdraw from the 1972 ABM treaty. Biden made two errors. First, he spoke again – inexplicably – with tape recorders rolling. Second, he again appeared to lack a prepared text.
Right off the bat, Biden adopted a pompous tone that depends upon stretching out the pronunciation of two syllable words in an attempt to achieve weightiness. This pseudo-stentorian riff would make even a serious man silly. Robert Byrd can sound this way because he’s got a red vest and hails from West Virginia. But with Biden, it’s Jim Carrey playing Hamlet.
The awful delivery then combusts with Biden’s goofy use of an extended series of rhetorical questions – questions so evidently without merit that Biden’s answers don’t even matter. Biden “asks” if we need national missile defense because airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers. Then, he “asks” if we need national missile defense because of the anthrax attacks. And then, in a frenzy of speculation, he demands to know why did the president withdraw now? Biden’s answer: Because the president has done a good job of waging war in Afghanistan, and because it is Christmas.
You read that right. On Dec. 12, 2001 the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accused the president of the United States of timing a historic decision involving our country’s basic defense posture to take advantage of the public’s preoccupation with shopping and office parties. If you live in one of those desolate places that doesn’t get my radio program, listen over the Internet between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. EST at
the website for my home station in Los Angeles, KRLA. I will be replaying Joe Biden’s j’accuse many times in this season of celebration because it is simply unmatched in the annals of genuinely dumb things said by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden believes – he said it, not me – that the president blew off the ABM treaty now because fewer people would notice or care because it’s the Yuletide season.
Thus far, Biden is the only person I have heard make this extraordinary charge. Perhaps others have been deterred by the vast media coverage devoted to the announcement. Perhaps others tempted to accuse the president of bad faith realized that the presence of whirring cameras undermined the charge. Or perhaps the other critics of the president’s decision possess the intellectual ability to challenge the decision on its merits and don’t have to resort to reducing this central question of national survival to an attack on the president’s character – which, make no mistake, it is. Biden’s lack of allies in this preposterous charge is probably owing, however, to the rock-solid reality of the president’s integrity. Only Biden would project his own evident attachment to dissembling onto the president who has won praise for his manifest honor, candor and purpose.
Because Chairman Biden is in a very visible position, the secretary of state went out of his way to save Chairman Biden from the fallout of his “mano-a-mano” foolishness. Even Senator Helms graciously stepped in to buttress the “he was taken out of context” defense. The Biden Doctrine that demanded American casualties as the price of international credibility was so stupid that we witnessed the launch of a bipartisan rescue mission to make sure the world knew we would stand by our buffoons in a time of crisis.
And how does the senator respond? By attacking the president’s credibility. Not only dumb, but wholly without class as well.
So the Emperor of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy caucus has no clothes and he hasn’t got a clue on the stakes involved with wild assertions and sweeping misstatements. But along with Daschle, Leahy and Clinton, he’s one of the Party of the Left’s Big Dogs so he gets gentle treatment from the elite media. The trouble with Biden is that the world doesn’t know that we and the Beltway people know that he’s not to be taken seriously. Ted Baxter is taking a few turns on the world’s stage and nobody but we Americans are in on the joke.
Perhaps Slow Joe Biden can at least do us the favor of sticking to a prepared text.
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In ‘The Embarrassed Believer’, Hugh Hewitt is reviving Christian witness in an age of unbelief and is available in WND’s online store.
