Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

Joe is good buds with the ex-senator who is most deserving of living out his dotage in prison:

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/politics/ny-usdama0828,0,1825927.story

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

QUALIFIED

oh shit he goofed up some "well, duh" historical facts that's just as bad as CONFLATING THE SPANISH PRIME MINISTER WITH CENTRAL AMERICAN DICTATORS or NOT KNOWING WHAT THE BUSH DOCTRINE IS thanks for fighting the good fight

didn't he insult one of Obama's ads yesterday?

thanks for reading my mind, Dave, but you're slipping.

I'm much more offended by his cowardice and whoredom, of course.

we are lucky the mccain campaign is imploding now anyway, no-one cares about biden's foot-in-mouth problems.

"no one"

doc, what about the large chunks of the patriot act he wrote...in 1994!

Dr Morbius is offended

no-one who matters

you should def get a job w/ the DNC.

http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z246/jt_ffroggy/biden.jpg

that picture's pretty cool but would be so much better if we could see Lugar and not Norm

Norm Coleman's head is about to collapse in that photo.

does that costume have a Bank of America mannequin fellating Joe?

Yes, it does. Your attention to detail is amazing.

I just finished Jane Mayer's The Selling of Clarence Thomas. I'm trying to forget Biden was a milquetoast as Senate Judiciary Committee chair.

part of his efforts at Obamalike above-partisanship, 16 years early. He's a visionary!

“It’s good to be back in Athens. Now you say ‘Back in Athens, Biden, when were you here?’ Well I went to the University of Delaware and we came out here to play Ohio University. Now that was 228 years ago and we did just fine, but the thing I loved about the university was that it was such a beautiful town and we all hung around out afterwards.”

“Now I made a little mistake here that day, I made a little mistake.”

“I wandered in, I met this lovely group of Ohio University…students,” Biden said winkingly to laughs from the crowd.

“And uh, without knowing it, I shouldn’t admit this on national television because it’ll reveal that I’m over 60, but I thought that we were gonna go get something to eat. What’s that street you have down there, all you guys? See, I…and so I just said to young, two young women I had met, said well why don’t you…we’ll be right back, I said well I’ll come with you, and they said OK, and I walked into their dormitory and was immediately accosted by a cop who arrested me because back in those days men were not allowed in women’s dormitories.”

“But I promise you I never breached the first floor and it was only a temporary detention. But that’s what I most remember about Athens. So folks, look, it’s good to be back here.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_lizza

what does "never breached the first floor" mean? is it a diaphragm thing?

He greeted the server. "I'm an ice cream guy. Is ice cream down that way? Could I get a sugar cone and chocolate chip?" He turned to a friend, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). "What you gonna have? It's on me -- I'm the last of the big spenders from up north. . . . I'm getting plain old chocolate chip. That's plenty, God love ya." He greeted a woman named Bonita. "Hey, Bonita, I'm Joe. Not the plumber, Joe the Biden." He greeted a man who said his name is Jeff. "Hey, Jim, where you from?"

I fukkin cannot wait for this man to take office.

(given, that was from a dana milbank piece on how he's not allowed to run his mouth on the campaign trail, or whatever. feed the foodless, no more black against old, young against poor, vote once, vote twice for obama/biden, you middle class honkies)

lol joe the biden

"Hey, Bonita, I'm Joe. Not the plumber, Joe the Biden."
so so awesome

hasn't McNasty been calling him Joe the Biden for 2 weeks now?

Biden uses "God love ya" whether he's ordering ice cream or apologizing to paraplegic legislators.

also, he's the #1 or 2 reason I can't vote for Bam

for whom are you finally voting?

ya got me. even the 3rd-party candidates suck this year. (altho voting for an actual Socialist would be a nice tribute to McCain/Palin)

the Daily Show will not be boring

the Daily Show will not be boring

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:28 AM (ten years ago)

sigh

a lot has changed in 10 years

just dropping in to say fuck this clown

but not Joe! xp

The @JoeBiden pizza at Gianni’s in Wilmington where the newest presidential candidate visited pic.twitter.com/0UqzgEikso

— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) April 25, 2019

gets my vote

xpost http://static1.squarespace.com/static/568c12c9c647ad1e518142b3/t/56b4f1f84d088eb6572105ec/1454699003865/ZOSO-LOGO---black.png?format=1500w

the adventures of joe lolo

rip big man, heaven needed a handsy corporate cardboard cutout who was close friends with one of 20th-century america’s premier white supremacists

I look forward to his reputation being dragged into the fucking sewer where it belongs. I hate this guy.

I know almost nothing about him aside from the fact that he was VP. Why is he so awful?

love g***neb stumping for joementum 08 in this thread

does that costume have a Bank of America mannequin fellating Joe?

― Dr Morbius, Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:03 PM (

Biden voted for the Iraq war, authored litigation that made bankruptcy more punitive to debtors and beneficial for lenders (who as the senator from delaware are his primary backers), was pro mass incarceration in the 90s, was against busing in the 70s.

Basically if there was a choice between doing the right thing and being a status quo bootlicker, Joe picked being a bootlicker.

Ah, I see. Thanks!

and that's hardly comprehensive

also: hair plugs

also inappropriate touching at least, v possibly worse skeletons lurking nearby

basically he is the exact opposite direction the party is moving in

tbf biden would probably be better than james buchanan, thus far the only president born in pennsylvania

“Sloppy Joe” would have been a better nickname

about the strongest defense that can be mustered for biden, via TPM, is that he's old and most politicians fucked up left and right. but the conclusion is still negative: "It was a different time. But now we’re in this time."

On numerous fronts there are things about Biden, knocks against him that aren’t entirely fair or are things which are properly seen in the context of their times. But they are still things. Biden’s home state of Delaware is the home state of Big Credit Card. He was always close to that industry. He was a big promoter of the 2005-06 era bankruptcy bill. He carries this into an era in which Democratic politics are steeped in the politics of financialization, debt and inequality. It may not be an albatross. But it’s a decent sized bird.

He was also a big promoter of the Clinton crime bill. A lot of the activism against this bill I think takes it greatly out of context. The bill was coming just after the peak of the late 20th century crime wave which totally transformed American politics. Though we know now it had just crested, this was not at all clear at the time. Quite the contrary.

It was also to a great degree meant to counter throw-away-the-key crime politics being pushed by the GOP. If you were alive at the time you’ll remember that much of the 1994 campaign was run on the basis of GOP ads targeting programs like midnight basketball as risible liberal feel-goodism. Even a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for it. It wasn’t responsible for most mass incarceration which was and is happening at the state level and it wasn’t all focused on incarceration. Far from it. Yet for all that, we’re living in an era when mass incarceration and police misconduct against minority communities and more are at the center of the political discussion and rightly so. You can say it was 25 years ago. But it as at best a complicated history to carry into a campaign in 2020. It was a different time. But that makes it complicated to run with a candidate from that different time.

And did I mention the Anita Hill hearings? The logistics of managing that dreadly hearing were a bit more complicated than it looks in retrospect but … well, that happened too.

Then there’s #MeToo. I’m a 50 year old man and my life experiences are not those that have the best insight into the storm around Biden. My general take is that he’s this glad handing, hugging kind of guy. I don’t think these incidents are sexual per se. I don’t think they’re harassment. You can see a lot of this in how he interacts with men. But whatever should have been the etiquette of physical contact and friendly intimacies thirty years ago, this isn’t how we do it today. You can say that he’s a guy in his late 70s who was just acculturated in a different way. But he’s running for President in 2020 today. Again, a lot of explaining, a lot of weight to carry into a campaign in 2020.

The joke about hugs at that union event a few weeks ago is another case in point in my mind. Many interpreted that as a not terribly subtle signaling, telling an older and generally male crowd, ‘Hey, you know you how it is. You know what I’m dealing with here …”

I don’t think it was contrived like that at all. I think it was purely off-the-cuff and straight up. Just his way of having some fun at his own expense with a moment of humor. But when I watched it in real time I was brought back to watching that press conference where Hillary Clinton explained, by implication and elliptically, that after determining which emails were personal and which work-related, she had the former emails destroyed. I remember watching that moment, closing my eyes and thinking, “Is this really where we’re going here? Really? Because I saw this movie when it was in the theaters the first time.”

Then there’s busing. Apparently Biden’s very early politics in the early 1970s was anti-busing. This was a very different time. There was lots of opposition to busing. That’s one reason it didn’t last very long. It wasn’t all racist. This is one of the problems with running for President in an era of boisterous and aggressive movements of social change when you’ve been in politics for literally 50 years. It was a different time. But now we’re in this time.

As you can see in each of these cases I find it a bit nettlesome and grating re-litigating these various episodes from years or even decades in the past. I’m not here to defend Biden. It’s not my job and I don’t think he needs defending. These are things that happened and all need to be seen as part of the eras in question. They are what you make of them. Context and completeness are important. But this is all really the point. Who wants to relitigate the last 50 years of the history of the Democratic party while you’re trying to run a campaign to oust the worst President in American history?