Barack Obama Picks Joe Biden For Vice President
Well, I will admit, I was suckered into the prospect of being one of the first to know Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential candidate. I signed up for his text message alert, and received my text message about two hours after seeing it on the news. For the sake of diplomacy, I will let bygones be bygones, and pretend it was a minor oversight that the news media was alerted 2 hours prior to his faithful followers.
Disregarding that minor oversight on the behalf of the Obama campaign, as my text message stated two hours after the news report did… “Barack Obama has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee”. This announcement is somewhat shocking, at least to me, considering Barack Obama’s promise of change. Ironically Joe Biden has been in Washington for longer that many of Barack Obama’s most ardent supporters have been alive. It is also ironic that Biden had called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” I am sure Martin Luther King Jr. would disagree with that statement, but I digress.
Well let me re-phrase, I am not digressing I was actually making a point. Joe Biden is the man who made the word “articulate” a racial slur, because it was somehow demeaning to black people. See the Chicago Tribune which offered these words of advice:
Note to Biden. Well-spoken black people hate it when white people call them “articulate.” It’s the modern-day version of what white people used to say back in the day when they thought that by saying “He’s a credit to his race” they were saying something that a black person would welcome hearing.
Those dated words, like Biden’s comments, were patronizing at the very least. And they also appeared to carry some pretty negative assumptions about the majority of the race.
Well Barack Obama already has the black vote pretty much locked up with over 90% in most polls I have looked at, so I assume his patronizing remarks towards blacks will not have any negative affect on the Obama campaign. I sure hope Indian Americans can look past Biden’s other racial comment when he remarked ” “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
But more important to the Obama campaign, and something I am sure McCain will touch upon, is that Joe Biden does not believe that Barack Obama is ready to be President:
“I think he can be ready, but right now I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”
If Barack Obama’s own Vice Presidential candidate does not believe he is ready to be President, how are the American people expected to?
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Haha… One leaves for a few months and upon return, the wingnuts seem nuttier than they seemed to be before–which, to your credit, Charlie, is no easy task. Only a select and febrilely determined few can continually pump out as much vitriol as you’ve managed to accrue in my absence–but again, it redounds to your credit, so don’t take umbrage at my saying this. To underscore the utter exclusivity of your country club, as it were, I’ll quote Dick Lugar, R-Indiana, who congratulated Obama “on his selection of my friend, Senator Joe Biden, to be his vice-presidential running mate” and who professed to have “enjoyed for many years the opportunity to work” with the latter. Let’s also take into account the words of Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, who said “Joe Biden is the right partner for Barack Obama. His many years of distinguished service to America, his seasoned judgment and his vast experience in foreign policy and national security will match up well with the unique challenges of the 21st Century. An Obama-Biden ticket is a very impressive and strong team. Biden’s selection is good news for Obama and America.” Not to be outdone, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, also a Republican and right of center, attested, “No one on the Democratic side knows more about foreign policy than Sen. Biden.” What do they all have in common? They’re Republicans. And even they recognized that Joe Biden was a brilliant choice.
You, on the other hand, choose to dwell on the words he offered at the start of his presidential campaign with righteous indignation, as though you were a good Christian appalled at his saying that about Obama, even as Obama has already put it behind him and forgiven Joe publicly. Or… could it be mere sanctimony? I can’t really tell (read: we all know which it is). The fact that you have expressed more concern about it than Obama, at whom the words were aimed, speaks to the real purpose of your adding this post: to tear asunder a party more united, more prepared, and more mobilized than it has been since 1932. And the fact that you have the gall to cite the name of Dr. King should send you into a state of feverish embarrassment; for were you not the selfsame individual who spoke of African-Americans as though they were the docile pets of the left wing, animals populating the Democratic zoo? And are you not the selfsame individual who incessantly goes on long, vacuous, xenophobic diatribes against Hispanic migrants whose only crime is wanting to better their situation, for doing exactly what the Statue of Liberty and the mythos of the American Dream say is the beauty of America–that through hard work, dedication, and perseverance, anything and everything is within reach? The sheer, unmitigated temerity of your using — and bedaubing — his good name in your puerile and enormously misguided endeavor to level a cheap political attack at Joe Biden betokens a moral paucity, an ethical indigence beyond mine or anyone’s characterization. Especially when one takes into account that, were we living in the sixties, you’d probably be decrying the freedom riders as ‘communists’ and casting aspersions about the Congress of Racial Equality, asking yourself aloud in front of the television set, “What do these niggers want from us?”
I would caution you against reprising this pathetic line of attack.
Oct 2nd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
[…] to why even your own Vice Presidential pick has claimed you are not ready to be commander in chief. “I think he can be ready, but right now I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.” - Joe […]