Biden: Not a Socialist, Just a Scoundrel

He is a vicious partisan, a coward, and a habitual liar.

“…What can we say for Joe Biden?

For one thing, he is not a socialist.

So, he is not a socialist. What is he?

He is a vicious self-serving political hack, for one thing, one whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency. You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.

Never happened.

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

But that’s Joe Biden. Just a regular guy from Scranton who takes the train to work (with a 20-man security detail swarming the platform at every stop and the aisles roped off to separate him from the riffraff, as I have seen firsthand) whose kids ended up growing vastly wealthy from unpredictable business opportunities to which they had no especial claim beyond their proximity to political power.

Biden was protected by the Democratic political machine and then by Senate seniority; later, he was protected by the Obama administration and by protectors of the Obama administration. And so he continues doing the same things he always has done. Some of you may remember that Biden — who got into trouble for plagiarism back in the 1980s, when I was in eighth grade (and who already was running for president way back then) — was pillaging Margaret Thatcher’s speeches (and Neil Kinnock’s, too, not that anybody remembers him) to flesh out one of his own orations. That was embarrassing. What is [more] embarrassing is that he is still doing it, as the Washington Post reports, with his campaign stealing material for advocacy groups and presenting it as the work of his campaign.

That is a pattern. A man who can lightly misrepresent the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife and infant daughter is liable to be just as cavalier when it comes to, say, slavery, telling a largely black audience that Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — wants to “put y’all back in chains.” (Oh, that “y’all”!) Cynical doesn’t begin to cover it.

P.S. Joe wasn’t IN North Carolina, he was in Virginia!

One of the worst features of our political life is the ugly and dishonest fights we have over Supreme Court nominations — a habit that can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden, who along with Ted Kennedy, that pillar of human decency, organized one of the worst smear campaigns in modern American political history against Robert Bork, whose great crime against humanity was taking the “extremist” position that the Constitution actually says what it says rather than what anybody with power wishes it would say at any given moment, and that the way to amend the Constitution is to amend the Constitution rather than having nine wizards in black robes pull previously undiscovered constitutional mandates out of the penumbras upon which they sit all day. Don’t like the way Merrick Garland was treated? Mitch McConnell didn’t start that game — he is just better at it than his contemporary Democratic colleagues are. For lying partisan viciousness in the modern mode, Joe Biden is your man.

He is a liar, a corruptor of institutions, and a grifter of the first order.

But he’s not a socialist. I’ll give him that.“

No, Joe’s not a Socialist; he’s whatever he needs to be at a given moment in time to advance his personal political prospects, as John Lott notes, also courtesy of NRO:

“November 2020 will be known as the gun-control election.

Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden announced that Beto O’Rourke “will be the one who leads” his gun-control effort. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and Democratic presidential candidate himself, famously promised in a debate in September. They are “weapons of war, designed to kill people efficiently on a battlefield,” he warned.

…People need only look at Virginia to see what Democrats have in store for the nation at large. The state has recently enacted many new measures, including Red Flag laws, gun-lock requirements, a one-handgun-a-month purchase limit, and costly background checks on the private transfer of guns. Virginia has even given its local governments the green light to pass their own, more extreme gun-control laws. In a matter of just a few months, Virginia is going from a gun-friendly state to one of the most restrictive states. That will make it hard for people to exercise their right to self-defense.

Only the courts will be able to rein in these state gun-control laws. Trump’s federal judicial appointments have made a difference, but they have only just reached an approximate political balance. Republicans hold a nominal 5-to-4 majority on the Supreme Court, but John Roberts is not a dependable vote on gun-control issues. (Or just about any other issue!)

The Supreme Court hears fewer than one out of every thousand cases decided by the circuit courts, and those courts are equally divided. Democratic judges hold the majority in circuit courts in 24 states, plus the District of Columbia, while 26 states have Republican majorities. Only a second Trump term in office could really tilt the balance of the federal judiciary.

Biden was Barack Obama’s point person in his push for gun control. That wasn’t by accident. In choosing Beto O’Rourke, a person who openly brags about not owning a gun, Biden has made the election debate over whether people should even be able to own guns. Make no mistake about it, your right to defend yourself is as stake in November.“

And in the EnvironMental Moment, courtesy today of Jeff Foutch, as The Hill informs us…

Youth activists appeal ruling that they can’t sue government over climate change

“Attorneys for 21 youth climate activists are filing an appeal after a judge ruled they cannot sue the federal government for failure to act on climate change. The activists sought a court order to force the government to phase out the use of fossil fuels, but a panel of three judges in January ruled such a decision was beyond the reach of the judicial branch.

Lawyers are now petitioning for a ruling from all 11 judges in the 9th Circuit, arguing that reversing an earlier district court decision fails to ensure the youth activists’ right to a trial…”

“Right to a trial”?  Where does the Constitution set forth a “right to a trial”, other than as a defendant in a criminal prosecution?!? 

But that’s not the best part:

“…In August, two of the three judges said they did not have the power to push the government to address climate change. “Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power,” 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote for the majority. “Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.”

But the decision from the court’s majority sparked a powerful dissent from Judge Josephine Staton, who said the climate change issues raised in the suit were within the court’s authority to redress, and warned that “waiting is not an option.”

“If plaintiffs’ fears, backed by the government’s own studies, prove true, history will not judge us kindly,” Staton wrote. “When the seas envelop our coastal cities, fires and droughts haunt our interiors, and storms ravage everything between, those remaining will ask: Why did so many do so little?”…”

Too bad Justices Blackmun, Burger, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, Marshall and Powell…

…didn’t exercise similar reluctance, particularly as their plaintiff’s case urgently required it also be submitted to the political branches of government for redress.

Notice also the third judge’s dissent, like Roe v. Wade, os grounded in feelings and emotions, rather than the Constitution and the law.

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these memes from Marc Katz…

…Ed Hickey…

…and Balls Cotton…

…along with a suggestion from George Lawlor perhaps Little Mike should consider running for president of…

…which would allow him not only the opportunity to ban the island’s namesake treat in the interest of its inhabitants’ health, but also its guns, private jets, trans-fats, super-sized soft drinks, cigarettes and/or anything else the completely hypocritical, all-knowing, all-powerful also-ran uses or consumes himself, but deems unsuitable for his kingdom’s commoners.

Last, but certainly not least, we were honored the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg thought of us when he saw the following:

For anyone unfamiliar with Stilton’s one-of-a-kind blend of talented art and humor, you can access it here.  The story behind the meme above involves what we’ve always felt to be one of Mr. Jarlsberg’s finest moments (which is saying something!) from back when he published his bits of biting satire at Hope n’ Change:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as life once more imitates art in this tale of an…

Iowa man sentenced to two years for beating, then beheading rabbit

“An Iowa man was given a two-year prison sentence last month after beating a rabbit to death with a stick and beheading it at an animal shelter late last year. Bobby Carothers, 64, was arrested in December after staffers at the Des Moines shelter found the rabbit Petunia in a “beyond gruesome” scene. They identified Carothers as the last person to leave the building.

“I’m having rabbit stew tonight,” Carothers told an Animal Rescue League (ARL) employee as he was leaving the shelter…

Carothers was open about his crimes, telling the arresting deputy he used a stick to kill the rabbit and then cut off its head, records said. He also told police he cut off the rabbit’s ears…”

Reports defense counsel initially planned to blame his heinous act on violent cartoons Carothers viewed in his youth…

…remain unconfirmed.

Magoo