If Sarah Palin was half the serial gaffer Joe Biden is, the media would be all over her, insisting that her boo-boos showed her to be incompetent. Yet Biden gets a free pass from the pro-Obama mainstream media (MSM) as he continues to mangle his remarks with remarks with multiple faux pas.
His latest was a beauty, and a serious blow to the reputation of his running mate Barack Obama, who’s already fending off attacks on his own inexperience: “Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
And if that wasn’t enough, he went on to say that Barack Obama would not be up to meeting the crisis and would need help.
The media’s reaction: to swallow whole the Obama camp’s spin. He wasn’t talking about Obama alone, the spinners said, but McCain as well – a flat out lie. He specifically named Obama.
That gaffe has also provided fodder for Sarah Palin, who has been repeating it on the stump since Biden uttered it last weekend.
“Did you hear what Sen. Biden said at a fundraiser on Sunday?" Palin asked at a rally in Troy, Ohio. "He guaranteed—he said mark my words, he guarantees that if Barack Obama is elected, we’ll face an international crisis within the first six months of their administration.”
She then touted Biden’s vast foreign policy experience, using it to point out how the top of the Democratic ticket pales in comparison.
“Senator Obama’s own running mate, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has informed us that a serious international crisis is certain if Obama is elected," Palin said, "and that he is not ready to deal with it and America doesn’t need smooth talk that glosses over that question, we need straight talk that answers it.”
If anything, Biden is full of "straight talk" — but it always raises more questions than answers. Biden shocked many when, during a rally, he asked the wheelchair-bound Missouri politician Chuck Graham to “stand up” at a rally. Realizing his gaffe, he then said, “Oh, God love you, what I am talking about? You’re making everybody else stand up though, aren’t you pal.” He then asked everyone in the room to stand up for Graham.
If McCain or Palin had said such a thing the MSM would have been screeching that they had disparaged all disabled Americans.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Biden wasn’t content merely to proclaim that the wealthy would pay higher taxes if Obama wins the election. He felt obliged to claim that letting the government pick your pocket with higher taxes would be a higher form of patriotism.
Said Joe Biden: “It’s time to be patriotic, time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”
That gem evoked barely a tut-tut from the MSM.
In Ohio, Joe told an environmentalist on the rope line that both he and Obama “are not supporting clean coal” in America despite the fact that Obama does support exploiting clean coal.
One of his most outrageous gaffes came during an interview with Katie Couric when, condemning George Bush’s weak response to the current financial crisis, he said that, when the stock market crashed in 1929, “FDR got on television and explained to the American people what happened.”
Few members of the media bothered to point out that FDR was not president in 1929, or that there were no TVs in people’s homes at the time, and for many years thereafter.
Some of Biden’s gaffes turn out to be patent untruths. In Baltimore he told his audience, “If you want to know where al-Qaida lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”
Forced down by hostile gunfire? No, according to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who told the Associated Press that the helicopter was “forced down” by a snowstorm.
“It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges,” Kerry said. “So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed.”
When CBS asked Biden how he felt about an Obama campaign ad that joked about John McCain’s inability to use a computer, Biden took issue with the attack, saying that in light of the fact that McCain could not type on a computer keyboard because of war injuries, it was “terrible.”
“I didn’t know we did it," he said, insisting that he wouldn’t have approved the ad. But then he went on to contradict himself by defending Obama’s inexcusable decision to approve it. “The answer is I don’t think anything was intentional about that. They were trying to make another point,” he said lamely.
Talking to mine workers in Virginia, Biden said, “Hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard coal miner — anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania, that’s where I was born and raised.”
Few in the MSM bothered to report that Biden’s father ran a car dealership in Delaware and had worked in the oil business for Biden’s grandfather.
In Nashua, New Hampshire, Biden even questioned Obama’s decision to choose him as his running mate, saying he should have picked Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight,” he said. “She’s a truly close personal friend. She is qualified to be president of the United States of America. She’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me, but she is first-rate.”
In Fort Meyers, Florida, Biden called Barack Obama “Barack America” and referred to the future “Biden administration," before correcting that beaut by saying an “Obama-Biden administration.”
“Believe me, that wasn’t a Freudian slip,” an embarrassed Biden said. “Oh Lordy day, I tell ya.”
During a CNN/YouTube debate in July, Biden recalled that he was shot at seven times inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
Two weeks later, he changed his story, telling The Hill newspaper, “I was near where a shot landed.” He said a shot landed outside the building in the Green Zone where he and another senator spent the night in December 2005. While they were shaving in the morning he said, the building shook.
“No one got up and ran from the room – it wasn’t that kind of thing,” Biden told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”
Nor anywhere near it.
Then there was this doozy. Speaking about Obama in January, long before he was picked as his running mate, Biden told The New York Observer, “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.”
He forgot to add, “Man, he sure has rhythm.”
Realizing what he had said, Biden explained, “Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around. 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.’”
In June 2006, Biden noted, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
His staff explained, “The point Senator Biden was making is that there has been a vibrant Indian-American community in Delaware for decades.”
Working in 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts, where they belong, of course.
All in all, some record for a man who had the nerve to question Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be a nominee for the vice presidency. Had she racked up such a chronicle of confused rhetoric the MSM would never let us forget it. But with Biden, it’s all just clean good fun.
