By John E. Carey
February 1, 2006
Senator Joseph Biden, Jr., the Democratic Senator from Delaware and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has announced his intention to pursue the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.
Well; now I have seen everything. One of the most self-important in a room of 100 potential egomaniacs steps forward again to become his party’s standard bearer. Joe Biden is going to take another shot at the piñata.
Didn’t he whack himself with the bat the last time?
Here is how Big Joe Biden’s biography, which he undoubtedly wrote himself, begins on his web site:“Joseph R. Biden, Jr. was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972 at the age of twenty-nine and is recognized as one of the nation’s most powerful and influential voices on foreign relations, terrorism, drug policy, and crime prevention.”
Well, I was working on Capitol Hill the year Senator Biden first arrived in the Senate. He jabbered so much even as a freshman Senator that Senate staffers routinely lampooned him behind his back.
All these years later, sadly, they still do.
Senator Biden has been in Washington D.C. ever sine 1972 because he pretty much has never had another job. But after watching him in limited action during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting with ISG co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton this week, one had the feeling that two mental giants were facing….something less.
And the staffers in the passageways of Senate Office Buildings still tell tales of Biden’s endless stream of verbiage.
Fred Barnes said on the Fox News Channel last night, “Biden’s problem, as everybody knows, is, he talks too much.”
Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote for February 1, 2007 editions: “A gifted orator, Biden has been plagued by a reputation for being windy and verbose, whether while chairing a Senate hearing or speaking at political gatherings around the country.”
But if this reputation was not enough; Senator Biden is now insisting, almost daring, the media to resurrect all his real and sometimes meaningful self inflicted wounds.
But before we get to his old wounds, lets review what happened on the day that Biden entered this latest race, yesterday.
The New York Observer published a remarkable story in which Senator Biden shares his off the cuff remarks about his Democratic opponents.
Biden is quoted evaluating presidential rivals Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, former Sen. John Edwards, D-North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.
But with everything Biden said, you might find it hard to believe that he managed to insult Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Shirley Chisholm and other prominent African-Americans on the eve of the start of African-American History Month.
The good Senator Biden opined about Senator Barack Obama, the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
So this really is storybook, man! On the day he announced his candidacy for president, Senator Biden had to issue this apologia:”I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama.”
And then Biden urged reporters to believe one of the oldest excuses of all: the remark was taken out of context.
Actually, the remark was taken out of Senator Biden’s mouth as he was, apparently, inserting a foot.
The conference call confession with reportes sounded like this:
“Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” Biden said on the call.
“And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’”
Well, there is a sound bite that Mr. Obama should have framed just in case he faces off with Mr. Biden for just about anything in the future.
For his part, Senator Obama issued this statement: “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”
What a memorable opening day in this baseball season! A U.S. Senator throws out the first pitch and hits himself with it. Or he throws his hat into the ring (to reveal his neatly and surgically replanted hair), only to harm his own cause just as he elevates another candidate and embarrasses himself.
Just the day before this circus, on Tuesday this week, the sage Senator Biden chaired his own Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His witnesses, there to testify for more than two and one half hours? Former Presidential Chief of Staff and Secretary of State James Baker and a real foreign policy expert, former Representative Lee Hamilton.
The topic? Nothing much. Just the war in Iraq, the “surge,” and the Iraq Study Group (IRG) which the two witnesses co-chaired.
After just a few minutes into this hearing one had the feeling that “one of the nation’s most powerful and influential voices on foreign relations” was facing some real mental muscle. You know what Senator Biden did? He excused himself: as if there was something really important going on elsewhere. I was riveted to the testimony of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton. Joe Biden missed a huge chunk of it. I only hope he had it on TiVo.
The witless-one apparently didn’t want to spend too much time with the witness duo.
And didn’t Senator Biden run for president years ago?
Sure. Joe Biden made himself a candidate in 1988, nearly 20 years ago. So you would think that in that amount of time a man would mellow past the age of ridiculous gaffes.
His last campaign for president tanked when it was revealed that he plagiarized a speech by the leader of the British Socialist Party and palmed it off as his own.
Just last July Senator Biden said before C-SPAN video cameras in his home state of Delaware: “In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
Have you no shame, man? Or have you no brain? If we skip past those questions, then apparently you have no competent staff members that can keep you on the leash.
Joe Biden is still an amateur after all these years of grooming himself. Get a new mirror Senator; you are not presidential material.
Is this the first candidate in history to have to apologize on day one of the campaign for something he didn’t have to say…and a year before he had to say anything? We’d have to ask the History Channel.
Two things are for sure: Senator Joe Biden is a walking Macaca remark factory!
And I, for one, sure hope he stays in the race a while!
Visit more serious news at:
http://peace-and-freedom.blogspot.com/
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TIME Magazine said: “
It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now, there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile a gaffe, it’s been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or, more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down.”
See:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1585476,00.html
March 22, 2007 at 8:54 am |
A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile a gaffe, it’s been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or, more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.It’s very interesting click on this linkbuilding BIG muscle
March 26, 2007 at 8:11 am |
http://www.registan.net/index.php/2007/03/23/joe-bidens-letter-to-nursultan-nazarbayev/#comments
Giffen is accused of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American businessmen from bribing foreign officials. However, Giffen’s attorneys are contending that their client’s actions and those of his bank, Mercator, were carried out with the knowledge and encouragement of the CIA under then-director Robert Gates. Gates’ nomination as director by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 survived a bitter battle that saw 31 Senators voting against Gates’ confirmation (an additional five did not vote). It was then-Senate Intelligence Committee staff director George Tenet who shepherded Gates’ nomination through the Senate, ensuring him the support of former President Bush after George W. Bush’s 2000 selection as President. Tenet was the highest-ranking holdover from Clinton to Bush. The elder Bush was said to have pressed his son to keep Tenet on board at the CIA for Tenet’s help in ensuring Gates’ confirmation at a time when independent counsel Lawrence Walsh was bearing down on George H. W. Bush for his role in the Iran-contra scandal and the BCCI and Savings & Loan collapses. Gates was Deputy Director of the CIA under Bill Casey during the height of the Iran-contra scandal and was fully involved with the principal players, including Oliver North and Richard Secord.
The following is what Giffen’s attorney William Schwartz told U.S. Judge William Pauley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York about his client’s role with the CIA under Robert Gates:
“Mr. Giffen was not just a businessman coming back and reporting to the CIA, he was in some respects their emissary . . . it is no secret, that Mr. Giffen not only had a very close relationship with senior officials of the Kazak government, he had a very close relationship with senior officials in various American intelligence agencies, most particularly the CIA and National Security Council. And as we show in our papers, your Honor, it was well known to those agencies, and it has been publicly acknowledged in an article by Seymour Hersh and a book by former CIA agent [Robert Baer], that Mr. Giffen provided very important information to the government of the United States, and that essentially the government of the United States was very interested in exploiting, with his approval, Mr. Giffen’s closeness to the leaders of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
“Indeed, one of the incidents we have shown in our papers, your Honor, and has been publicly reported, was that Mr. Giffen was asked to intervene at one point by the United States when it was learned that the government was perhaps selling MIGs and other armaments to Korea and Iran, and he did and the problem was taken care of. It was very important to the intelligence apparatus of this country that Mr. Giffen be in a very close position with the leadership of Kazakhstan.
“Your Honor, I think there may well be evidence at trial to show that Mr. Giffen routinely reported to the CIA upon his return from his numerous trips, his very frequent trips to Kazakhstan, that he had very close relationships with the government of the United States, that some of the best intelligence that we received throughout the government of Kazakhstan came from Mr. Giffen.
“When the government of the United States needed something to be done in Kazakhstan, Mr. Giffen was asked to do it. Mr. Giffen was in a position that was of great importance to the American government, and the American government we believe, your Honor, wanted him to be there and indicated to him that it wanted him to be there.”
U.S. intelligence insiders report that the Kazakh operations of the George H. W. Bush administration were coordinated from Enron in Houston, which hired some 300 ex-KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union to help coordinate U.S. moves to control the energy supplies of newly-independent republics like Kazakhstan. In addition, Enron employed a number of associates of Robert Gates who retired from or left the CIA to work on the oil and gas deals in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Giffen was a top liaison to Kazakhstan, having become a Kazakh passport-carrying government adviser to Nazarbayev.
Because the Kazakh oil and gas fields were in poor condition and needed refurbishment, Halliburton was later brought in by Enron and the U.S. oil company consortium developing the Tengiz fields to help in the effort. Halliburton’s President and CEO at the time was Dick Cheney. The billions of dollars needed to refurbish the Kazakh production facilities were requested by George H. W. Bush from the Saudis, whose former Oil Minister Sheik Zaki Yamani was an ardent backer of the plan, which, from the Giffen trial, now appears to have included bribes paid to Kazakh government leaders with the support and acquiescence of Bush, Sr., Baker, and Gates.
As with other growing scandals involving Bush-controlled secret accounts, oil and pipeline deals, and connections with foreign governments and groups like “Al Qaeda,” the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and various terrorist groups in Europe, George W. Bush is trying to cover his own tracks as well as those of his father and his Vice President, Dick Cheney. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources report that the Bush family’s secret deals around the world are beginning to become a huge sinking ship with a number of “rats” jumping off and spilling the beans to law enforcement officials and intelligence agents.