This subject has already been diaried, however, it was just a link and a paragraph. So I will attempt to add my two cents, for what it's worth.
Via Correntewire.com, Joe Biden's Trent Lott moment talks about Biden's visit to a South Carolina Rotary Club. Feet-in-mouth ensue.
Biden starts out with a little Southern bonding.
Delaware, he noted, was a "slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."
This can be interpreted as just a harmless appeal to his crowd, or a peek into where his true feelings lie. I wouldn't read that much into it; yet, it's not going to do his presidential ambitions, which are in my opinion already DOA, any good.
Biden devoted much of his speech to the war in Iraq.
"America needs, and I need, for the Republican Party to get back up," he said.
"There’s not a single problem out there that cannot be solved without a bipartisan coalition," said Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I actually don't have a problem with what he's saying here. After all, one party rule is never good.
The question is, how is the Republican party going to resurrect? By admitting its mistakes? By shunning its divisive practices of the past?
Color me unconvinced.
And what kind of bipartisanship is Biden stumping for? I fear it bears close relation to the "warped version of bipartisanship" that Holy Joe Lieberman is infamous for.
Here's where Biden goes and shows his true colors, and they aren't in step with the American people.
"The mid-term election may have been a rejection of the policies of this administration," Biden said. "But it was not an embrace of the Democratic program or the Democratic Party. We’re in a state of flux right now and have a lot of problems that need to be resolved."
This is, ladies and gentlemen, a dirty lie.
For all who don't know, Biden is beholden to the credit card companies, which comfortably set up shop in his home state of Delaware.
Back in early 2005, Senator Dick Durbin proposed an amendment to the infamous S. 256, the Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 -- better known as the Bankruptcy Bill, a law pushed by credit companies which made it more or less impossible to declare bankruptcy.
Durbin's amendment, called the GI Protection Amendment, would have exempted U.S. servicemen and women from the so-called "means test," a procedure which under the new law every bankruptcy aspirant must submit to before he is allowed to sue for bankruptcy. It also would have protected soldiers from losing their homes to creditors during their deployments, and would have offered some debt protections to the spouses of slain servicemen. It also would have offered some protections to soldiers in trouble because of payday loans.
Now, the logic of this amendment seemed unassailable. Soldiers sent to war often end up in financial trouble, and reservists sent to war for long deployments have it even worse, often seeing their small businesses fail or bills pile up while they trade in their normal salaries for meager army wages. It seems like a small concession to make to soldiers to offer some relief on these fronts, in exchange for asking them to risk their necks for some pointless military adventure dreamed up by a bunch of half-wit Ivy League trust fund babies who'll never go broke and whose kids will never serve.
So Durbin's amendment made sense, but of course it died, 62-38. Most of the Republicans voted against it, but they weren't alone. Some Democrats voted nay, too, including that great old friend of the credit industry, Joe Biden.
In the election cycle immediately preceding the historic Bankruptcy Bill, Joe Biden collected some $62,125 from the credit industry, putting him in 12th place among all American politicians. To date, for his career, he's taken over a quarter of a million dollars from credit card companies, many of which are headquartered in Delaware. So it was no surprise that Biden was one of the chief pimps for this notorious law.
Almost every new Democratic congressman in the class of '06 is an economic populist. In fact, name me one who isn't.
The most well known new faces, Jim Webb and Jon Tester, are unapologetic about it. Here's so called "conservative" Webb from his Wall Street Journal opinion piece:
The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.
With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.
So, my friends, ask yourselves this: Whose side is Joe Biden on? Is it yours?