It’s almost sad how clueless Joe Biden is. (“clueless Joe” may replace “shoeless Joe” as an American icon of a sort, though in this case an icon of dimness). He’s so proud of the supposed wisdom of his father that he quotes it yesterday at his unveiling:
“I was an Irish-Catholic kid from Scranton with a father who like many of yours in tough economic times fell on hard times, but my mom and dad raised me to believe, it’s a saying Barack you heard me say before, my dad repeated it and repeated it. Said champ, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how quickly you get up. It’s how quickly you get up. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s your story. That’s America’s story. It’s about if you get up, you can make it.”
And if you can’t, tough luck. Poor clueless Joe, he’s so proud of Pappy’s alleged wisdom.
Because this is essentially a Republican slogan. Anti-New Deal rugged individualism with contempt for those who need help. It basically says in times of misfortune you’re on your own. If you can’t overcome being fired or foreclosed or struck down by disease, if Fate knocks you down the way it can the best of us and you can’t manage by yourself, than too bad, you’re just a loser by Joe’s lights, or by the lights of his father.
A Democrat, Barack Obama, one hopes, even a compassionate conservative would say; there are times when people need a helping hand and that it’s a more humane thing to do– to help them up rather than to watch them squirm in the dust, trying to get up after they’ve been knocked down (say by one of the credit card companies or banks that financed Joe’s career as a Delaware servant of America’s economy-destroying finance comanies in the Senate.)
But I guess this explains why he sponsored the cruel anti-consumer bankruptcy bill for his paymasters. Still it doesn’t quite explain Biden’s intellectual bankruptcy. He doesn’t even know what party philosophy he espouses.
You wonder why I seem irate about clueless Joe. Because I think it would be an electrifying, transformative thing to elect our first non white President, the final triumph of the civil rights movement. And I think bloviating Joe could easily ruin it.
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