In the debate, Joe Biden displayed a mastery of the most amazing revisionist history yet. How does Biden say with a straight face, even an angry, indignant face, that he and/or Obama Did.Not.Say.That, knowing full well that even the liberal media have it in black and white that he and Obama did in fact say the things Biden was denying last night?
Audacity, indeed.
This September news media exchange, reminded me of the kinds of "gotcha questions" Charles Gibson used to trip up Sarah Palin recently, only Biden brought this upon himself unaided:
"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," Biden told the CBS Evening News on Sept. 22.And this one is just a jaw-dropper:
But Herbert Hoover was president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed. FDR wasn't elected until 1932, and television made its debut a decade later, in 1939.
On the campaign train in Columbia, Mo., on Sept. 9, Biden asked State Sen. Chuck Graham to stand up for the crowd. "Stand up Chuck let me see you," Biden said to Graham, who is in a wheelchair. "Oh, God love you, what I am talking about. You're making everybody else stand up though, aren't you pal." Biden then asked everyone in the room to stand up for Graham.And yet most Americans and most mainstream press get All.Over. Sarah Palin? This commenter nailed it on the media pile-on over Palin's Couric interviews:
Remarkable. If Palin’s words had been uttered by the equally improbable Joe Biden, it would have been chalked up to just being another Biden remark.And yet...no one seems to think this is a problem. Well, it IS no problem, that is, if double standards don’t bother you. - Comment by NOBAMAThis is a good point, but not exactly The Point.
The Point is that the Obama/Biden Phenomenon is the essence of being drunk from the Kool-Aid 1. Obama and Biden actually believe themselves when they lie, over and over again, to the American people.
Would you really rather have a President and Vice President who lie through their teeth, or ones that don't, but one of whom has some learning to do, which even Bill Clinton said he did "on the job"?
This is so horrific, it's scary. And it reminded me of what the majority of Americans have forgotten: Joe Biden's favorite repeat offense, plagiarism, which is simply a grander scale of lying.
Folks apparently really want a President who's 100% silent on his longstanding help to guilty parties (for whom he worked or from whom he took over $100,000 in contributions) who worsened the subprime mortgage mess and brought this country's economic and financial system to its knees.
And for that President's Veep, they want Biden, who after four years of college where he should have learned how to write papers properly, had the audacity to claim, when he blatantly plagiarized a published article in his first year of law school, that
he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources carefully.I'm sure the University of Delaware was upset to hear that. After all, Biden obtained his "Bachelor of Arts with a double major in history and political science" there, after "ranking 506th of 688 in his class."
History? Hmmm.
He did it again, in 1987, plagiarizing without attribution not only the speech of British politician Neil Kinnock, but part of his life story.
Neither the NYT nor Slate are known for being even remotely conservative. Slate recounts the history of Biden's sabotage of his own Presidential campaign and is well worth reading, especially for those who were not even born or were in grade or high school in 1987. According to both publications, Biden fabricated his own background:
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported two incidents of nonattribution, and no one kept track exactly of every time Biden used the Kinnock bit. What is certain is that Biden didn't simply borrow the sort of boilerplate that counts as common currency in political discourse--phrases like "fighting for working families." What he borrowed was Kinnock's life. (from the Slate article)A scholarly journal on plagiarism, called Plagiary, labels Joe Biden with a RED: SEVERE RISK rating. Its founder, Dr. John Lesko of Saginaw Valley State University, also created FamousPlagiarists.com. According to Plagiarism Today:
A close friend of and colleague of mine Dr. John Lesko of Saginaw Valley State University not only runs Plagiary, the only scholarly journal on the topic of plagiarism, but also Famous Plagiarists, a site dedicated to chronicling the plagiarisms of the well-known.A review written in Plagiary puts Obama in the same category as Biden:
Dr. Lesko...gives Biden a "Threat Level" of "Red: Severe Risk", which is the highest level of risk that the site can award...a higher standing than other well-known plagiarists including Kaavya Viswanathan and on par with Jayson Blair. Though these "threat levels" were never intended to be taken as true fact and are intended to be a bit humorous, it is interesting to see that one of the world's foremost experts of plagiarism feels that Biden is such a serious threat.
[I]t is this reader's understanding that wherever there is original authorship and commercial or political success, there will always be those people that would risk all to "share" or "borrow" some of the glory of other people's words, and claim them as their own. It was true of the first person to coin the phrase "plagiarism" in the 1st century, and it will continue to the Joseph Bidens, Barak Obamas, and Kaavya Viswanathans of the present.
by Kyle K. Courtney, Professor of Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights for Northeastern University's M.S. in Information Assurance program in Boston, MA, and of Advanced Legal Research at Northeastern University's School of Law
This was the New York Times' characterization of Biden's response when he was caught plagiarizing that second time in 1987:
Mr. Biden said today, as he did 22 years ago, that he had misunderstood the rules of citation and footnoting.A 33-year, silver-tongued, Washington politician who didn't learn his lesson 22 years before, and still hasn't learned to stop lying 21 years after that?
Good choice for "One Heartbeat Away".
I find it fascinating that folks really want a President and Vice President who both lie through their teeth, when they say they don't want four more years of a President and Vice President they say have lied all along as well.
MORE LINKS:
The American Thinker
Biden's 1988 Campaign Plagiarism Goes Well Beyond What Wiki Reveals
Feeding Frenzy
Biden Gaffes
Other links to Biden's revisionist histories have already been provided here.
And too many to list. Thanks to all these for doing all the great research: Newsbusters.org, Town Hall's Kevin McCullough, Dr. Melissa Clouthier's Information Pollination, The American Thinker, The Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Feeding Frenzy, Plagiarism Today, Plagiary, FamousPlagiarists.com, and ProLifeBlogs.com
1. NOTE: I use that phrase, not because Bill O'Reilly uses it, but referring to the 1978 event from which I first learned it, almost 30 years before BO'R picked it up:
"The term is derived from the 1978 cult suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple, persuaded his followers to move to Jonestown. Late in the year he ordered his followers to commit suicide by drinking grape-flavored Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide...In what is now commonly called the 'Jonestown Massacre', a large majority of the 913 people later found dead drank the brew."