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"It's easy being vice president — you don't have to do anything." February 25, 2010, C-SPAN audio
If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan
with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500
feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are. –addressing the National Guard, Baltimore 9-22-08.
Jimmy Orr, Christian Science Monitor, points out, “In both retellings of his story, Biden seemed to have left out the
part that it was a snowstorm that forced his chopper down, leading some to think that he was implying that it was brought
down by hostile forces
Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them.
The weapons inspectors said he had them. He cataloged — they cataloged them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know,
pipe dream. This was, in fact, cataloged. –about Sadaam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, Meet the Press
- 2007
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. -on Barack Obama - 2007
[It wasn’t Biden’s plagiarism that knocked him out of the 1988 race. It was “‘I
think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do”–a bizarre videotaped putdown that Biden immediately called into question
with five (5) boasts about his academic record, four (4) of which turned out to be easily disproved B.S.]
[Joe had plagiarized a law review article he wrote while at Syracuse Law School. (During his first
year there, he was accused of having plagiarized 5 of 15 pages of a law review article. Biden said it was inadvertent due
to his not knowing the proper rules of citation.) He received an F in the class, but was allowed to take it over. ]
Joe plagiarizing:
1) Kinnock: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get into university? Why is Glenys the
first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get into university? Was it because all our predecessors
were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? The people who could make
wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was
it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Does
anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance
or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand."
Biden: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go
to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to
college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations
to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest? Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry
and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast
Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? No, it's not because they weren't as smart.
It's not because they didn't work as hard. It's because they didn't have a platform upon which to stand."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden's Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad," New York Times, Sept. 12, 1987.
[Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn't the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his
ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock's words. Once exposed, Biden's campaign team managed to come up
with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate's description of one who "would come
up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football." At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction
that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life.]
2) Robert Kennedy: "The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education
or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence
of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom
nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell
us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
Biden: "We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It doesn't
measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our
public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. That bottom
line can tell us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America
except that which makes us proud to be Americans."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.
3) Kennedy: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of
events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
Biden: "Well, few of us have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can act to affect a small portion of
events, and in the totality of these acts will be written the history of this generation."
Source: Maureen Dowd, "Biden Is Facing Growing Debate on His Speeches," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1987.
No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social
Security; it's not about the solvency of Social Security.
Well, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about? You’re
telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, I’m
telling you.”
"Stand up, Chuck, let 'em see ya." –-to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair,
Columbia, Missouri, Sept. 12, 2008
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk
about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened." –apparently unaware that FDR wasn't
president when the stock market crashed in 1929 and that only experimental TV sets were in use at that time, interview with
Katie Couric, Sept. 22, 2008
"Jill and I had the great honor of standing on that stage, looking across at one of the great justices,
Justice Stewart." –mistakenly referring to Justice John Paul Stevens, who swore him in as vice president, Washington,
D.C., Jan. 20, 2009
"I would tell members of my family -- and I have -- I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now.
It's not that it's going to Mexico. It's you're in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through
the aircraft." –freaking us out about swine flu, "Today Show" interview, April 30, 2009
"Look, John's last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle
class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." -Athens, Ohio, Oct. 15, 2008
"A man I'm proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next President of the United States —
Barack America!" --at his first campaign rally with Barack Obama
"If your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night before you put the kids to bed and you
talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Ladies and gentlemen,
that is not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven
kitchen tables to sit at."
"There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11." --on Rudy Giuliani
"I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani. I said every sentence Rudy utters has a noun,
a verb, and 9/11 in it. I was wrong. He called me to tell me after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an Amen in every sentence
he says too."
"Yes." --Joe Biden, giving a one-word answer during a Democratic debate to NBC Anchor Brian Wiliams,
who cited criticism of Biden's "uncontrolled verbosity" and tendency to be a “gaffe machine” in asking whether
he would "have the discipline you would need on the world stage"
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and
a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." --referring to Barack Obama at the beginning of the 2008 Democratic
primary campaign, Jan. 31, 2007
"I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack got tested for AIDS. There's no shame in being tested for
AIDS. It's an important thing."
"I've had a great relationship [with Indian Americans]," Biden said. "In Delaware,
the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts
unless you have a slight Indian accent.... I'm not joking."
"I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden sniped at the voter. "I
went to law school on a full academic scholarship." That claim was false, as was another claim, made in the same rant, that
he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. Biden wrongly stated, too, that he had earned three undergraduate degrees,
when in fact he had earned one—a double major in history and political science. Another round of press inquiries followed,
and Biden finally withdrew from the race on Sept. 23.
The sheer number and extent of Biden's fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at
the time as worrisome, to say the least. While a media feeding frenzy (a term popularized in the 1988 campaign) always creates
an unseemly air of hysteria, Biden deserved the scrutiny he received. Quitting the race was the right thing to do.
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