Senator Joe Biden became famous 20 years ago for clumsily ripping off a speech by Neil Kinnock, a Labor Party challenger to Britain's Margaret Thatcher. The Conservative prime minister handily dispatched the lightweight Kinnock, and Biden's borrowings sunk his presidential quest. A neat symmetry there.
And now Biden's ethically challenged conduct will be brought up again. Biden himself is making sure this will happen. When asked whether he was Obama's choice, Biden lied, saying "I'm not the guy."
That lie is the perfect entree to many a media article, not to mention the inevitable Maureen Dowd column, picking apart Biden's history of lying and plagiarism, going back to his law school days.
From Beldar, with a hat tip to Patterico:
Got that? Biden stole someone else's legal scholarship, and passed it off as his own. He's lucky he wasn't expelled outright, but the F he received in that course as part of the penalty for his misconduct doesn't explain by itself how he managed to graduate only 76th out of 85 in his law school class.
(John McCain also graduated near the bottom of his class from Annapolis, and that also reflected a middling academic performance brought further down by conduct demerits — but McCain's misbehavior mostly reflected his unwillingness to submit to Naval Academy hazing, and none of it involved cheating or any other violations of the Academy's famous Honor Code.)
Biden's law school cheating might be discounted if he'd learned his lesson and lived an exemplary, plagiarism-free life thereafter. But of course, he didn't. His own first run for the presidency exploded in 1987 when he was caught repeatedly plagiarizing again, and simultaneously caught telling obvious lies about his academic record.So now the press will be fixated with refreshing these memories for the benefit of today's voting public. This strategy is simply brilliant on Obama's part. The more attention devoted to Biden's ethically challenged record, and the less to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, etc, the better for Obama.
And then there's the A-word: arrogance. Joe Biden loves the brilliance of Joe Biden. He's really, really smart. Just ask him! During his disastrous presidential run, Biden told a critical questioner: "I think I have a much higher IQ than you do."
The kicker is that really smart people know better than to go around boasting about their high IQs. By preening himself in public about his alleged intelligence, Biden showed that he's really rather dim. That's the S-word: stupidity.
Compared to Biden, Obama is not only humble, he's a Mensa charter member.However, some of Obama's supporters who received text messages of Biden's selection don't appreciate his brilliance. They're annoyed because they got the message in the middle of the night.
It's 3:00 AM, and your children are safe and asleep...
...but there's a cell phone in the other room, and it's ringing. Must be one of your a**hole friends drunk-dialing you, or perhaps a wrong number from a different time zone. Wait, no: it's Barack Obama! He wants you to "be the first to know" something that CNN and the AP reported three hours ago: Joe Biden is his runningmate! . . .
. . . The Obama camp did an amazing job of keeping this secret all week, and especially all day yesterday, but they got greedy. They were never going to be able to keep it secret right up until a few hours before the rally. If they really wanted their supporters to "be the first to know," they needed to send the text yesterday evening during prime time, at the latest.
Instead, they waited too long, then panicked, and annoyed a bunch of supporters (and news/political junkies) in the process. Idiots.
Oh! The ingratitude of those who don't appreciate the brilliance of The Precious!
