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Thursday, October 23, 2008

BIDEN'S BUNGLES: A BLATANT BIAS

Joe Biden is a human gaff generator. Yet when he makes erroneous statements or just makes stuff up, it’s passed off as “that’s just Joe,” as if this sort of thing is a characteristic of an otherwise incredibly smart man. But incredibly smart men don’t tell the whoppers Joe tells. Serous statesmen don’t misunderstand the constitution.

Kirsten Powers tells us that Biden gets away with endless idiotic comments because his media pals “know” he’s no idiot. I think that not quite true. They let Joe Biden get away with being an idiot because he’s “their” idiot. Joe Biden is a dangerous man because he thinks he’s smart when in reality he’s a BS artist who has never been called on his BS. It’s gotten him elected and re-elected to the Senate, a relatively innocuous job. It does not make him qualified to be President-in-waiting.

Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden's propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to "gird your loins" because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden's statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden's remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: "It's just Biden being Biden." We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it's not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States "drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon," nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn't take it as evidence that he's clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.


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