Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

Biden's "a noun a verb and 9/11" is still my favorite quip thus far.

there's gold in them hair plugs

did Joe Biden kill the Giuliani candidacy? :O

That's not a huge stretch, actually. Biden really put him on the defensive about what had been his biggest (ok, only) selling point.

Of course it was a weakness to be exploited as well. But Biden fucking nailed it, and I love him for that.

from the NYT profile of Credit Card Joe:

During and since his time leading the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden has been derided by some critics as the “Senator from MBNA,” or “(D-MBNA),” because of his close ties to the credit card behemoth that was based in Wilmington, Del., until it was bought three years ago by Bank of America.

Employees of MBNA Corporation had heavily contributed to Mr. Biden, pouring more than $214,000 into his campaign coffers going back to 1989, making the company his single biggest supporter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Moreover, in 2003, after Mr. Biden’s son Hunter had graduated from law school, MBNA hired him as a management trainee and quickly promoted him to executive vice president. After Hunter Biden left the firm to become a partner at a Washington lobbying firm, the company paid him a $100,000 annual retainer to advise it on the Internet and privacy issues. Mr. Biden also paid Hunter’s law firm $143,000 for “legal services,” including nearly $60,000 in outstanding bills just last month.

In another MBNA connection that has raised questions, Mr. Biden sold his Delaware house for $1.2 million in the mid-1990s to John Cochran, a senior executive of the company who would become its chairman and chief executive.

Campaign consultants for Raymond J. Clatworthy, a Delaware businessman who ran twice against Mr. Biden, tried to make an issue of the sale in their race in 1996, suggesting a sweetheart deal, but Mr. Biden produced an appraisal of his home that matched the purchase price.

Mr. Biden became an early supporter of a controversial bankruptcy law that was championed by the company and other credit card issuers and finally passed in 2005, making it more difficult for consumers to erase their debts. Mr. Obama, who voted against the measure, recently skewered the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, for backing the bill, saying it allowed “banks and credit card companies to tilt the playing field in their favor, at the expense of hard-working Americans.”

A report last year by Credit Suisse, the investment bank, concluded the law had had a “profound impact” on the country’s subprime mortgage crisis, leading directly to a rise in foreclosures.

Mr. Obama has made the bankruptcy bill an issue on the campaign trail, announcing a plan in July to revise the law and give more protection to debtors. He has argued that his opposition to the legislation demonstrated his support for working families, while casting Mr. McCain, who voted for the measure, as being in the pocket of credit card and banking industry lobbyists.

in case anyone is curious about what would make vote 3d party -- or not at all -- for president, it is this.

when will tad check in on this one?

Eisbar otm, obv

http://blogs.timesunion.com/jericsmith/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/grinderman.jpg

Cockburn on Biden,

a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second.

The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample. ...

Another shining moment in Biden’s progress in the current presidential term was his conduct in the hearings on Judge Alito’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee's sessions in January, 2006, it became clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking it in unbelieving despair as Biden blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did pose two questions about Alito’s membership of a racist society at Princeton, but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito "a man of integrity", not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.

In all, Biden rambled for 4,000 words, leaving Alito time only to put together less than 1,000. A Delaware newspaper made deadly fun of him for his awful performance, eliciting the revealing confession from Biden that "I made a mistake. I should have gone straight to my question. I was trying to put him at ease."...

His “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish “neo-conservatism”. Here again the ticket is well balanced, since Senator Obama has, within a very brief time-frame, exhibited great fidelity to the same creed....

Why did Obama chose Biden? One important constituency pressing for Biden was no doubt the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Obama, no matter how fervent his proclamations of support for Israel, has always been viewed with some suspicion by the lobby. For half the lifespan of the state of Israel, Biden has proved himself its unswerving acolyte in the senate.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08232008.html

good ol' cockburn, still worrying about that "Israel lobby"

yes, they're mythical, right?

(or just wholly unrepresentative of the Israeli political spectrum)

wholly unrepresentative of american jews, who have also shown no real animus toward obama beyond pre-existing partisan identification, so i don't know where cockburn is coming from

Robert Dreyfuss (and Reidar Visser) The Nation:

On Iraq, Biden is worse than McCain

Perversely, by selecting Biden, Obama might in fact hasten the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, if only because Iraqis won't be able to stomach Vice President Biden pompously lecturing them on why Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds can't live together. ... Biden has quietly suppressed talk of his partition plan even on his own web site, in cleaning up his act in preparation for being named Obama's running mate.

Let Biden try. I'm voting for the best guy.. if McCain runs and wins the nomination for the Repubs and someone like Biden or Lieberman wins the Dem nomination, I'm considering McCain.

IF that happens, so much for what a Dem or Repub means.

-- donut e-goo (donut), Sunday, June 19, 2005 9:35 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

lot of stupid shit on this thread

morbz that article lost me two sentences in with

"Obama, whose mushy Iraq plan excites no one, is marrying his own's flawed ideas -- which mostly revolve around beefing up US forces in Afghanistan and unilaterally attacking Pakistan --"

the guy I saw saying those things sure looked and sounded like Obama.

i for one am excited to attack Pakistan unilaterally

"BRING'EM ON"

http://www.postwritersgroup.com/mugshots/krauthammerdesksmall.jpg

If I had a krauthammer...

I thought that was Tony Shalhoub at first.

im going to multilaterally attack pakistan

lot of stupid shit on this thread

care to elaborate

"BRING 'EM ON"

http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/programGuide/program/Kevin340x255.jpg

White peeps w/curly brown hair all look like Kevin McDonald to me.

haha!

but whatever it's 3 o'clock in the morning and 91° here so my um "analytical skills" are sharply cut w.the perverse boredom of bein unable to get to sleep

-- mark s (mark s), Monday, 20 June 2005 01:11 (3 years ago) Link

it's 3am. do went want mark s taking the call?

well, it's a bit cooler tonight than it was then

Joe is good buds with the ex-senator who is most deserving of living out his dotage in prison:

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/politics/ny-usdama0828,0,1825927.story

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

QUALIFIED

oh shit he goofed up some "well, duh" historical facts that's just as bad as CONFLATING THE SPANISH PRIME MINISTER WITH CENTRAL AMERICAN DICTATORS or NOT KNOWING WHAT THE BUSH DOCTRINE IS thanks for fighting the good fight

didn't he insult one of Obama's ads yesterday?

thanks for reading my mind, Dave, but you're slipping.

I'm much more offended by his cowardice and whoredom, of course.

we are lucky the mccain campaign is imploding now anyway, no-one cares about biden's foot-in-mouth problems.

"no one"

doc, what about the large chunks of the patriot act he wrote...in 1994!

Dr Morbius is offended

no-one who matters

you should def get a job w/ the DNC.

http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z246/jt_ffroggy/biden.jpg

that picture's pretty cool but would be so much better if we could see Lugar and not Norm

Norm Coleman's head is about to collapse in that photo.

does that costume have a Bank of America mannequin fellating Joe?

Yes, it does. Your attention to detail is amazing.

I just finished Jane Mayer's The Selling of Clarence Thomas. I'm trying to forget Biden was a milquetoast as Senate Judiciary Committee chair.

part of his efforts at Obamalike above-partisanship, 16 years early. He's a visionary!

“It’s good to be back in Athens. Now you say ‘Back in Athens, Biden, when were you here?’ Well I went to the University of Delaware and we came out here to play Ohio University. Now that was 228 years ago and we did just fine, but the thing I loved about the university was that it was such a beautiful town and we all hung around out afterwards.”

“Now I made a little mistake here that day, I made a little mistake.”

“I wandered in, I met this lovely group of Ohio University…students,” Biden said winkingly to laughs from the crowd.

“And uh, without knowing it, I shouldn’t admit this on national television because it’ll reveal that I’m over 60, but I thought that we were gonna go get something to eat. What’s that street you have down there, all you guys? See, I…and so I just said to young, two young women I had met, said well why don’t you…we’ll be right back, I said well I’ll come with you, and they said OK, and I walked into their dormitory and was immediately accosted by a cop who arrested me because back in those days men were not allowed in women’s dormitories.”

“But I promise you I never breached the first floor and it was only a temporary detention. But that’s what I most remember about Athens. So folks, look, it’s good to be back here.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_lizza

what does "never breached the first floor" mean? is it a diaphragm thing?

He greeted the server. "I'm an ice cream guy. Is ice cream down that way? Could I get a sugar cone and chocolate chip?" He turned to a friend, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). "What you gonna have? It's on me -- I'm the last of the big spenders from up north. . . . I'm getting plain old chocolate chip. That's plenty, God love ya." He greeted a woman named Bonita. "Hey, Bonita, I'm Joe. Not the plumber, Joe the Biden." He greeted a man who said his name is Jeff. "Hey, Jim, where you from?"

I fukkin cannot wait for this man to take office.