By Paul
Mirengoff | POWERLINE
Sanders is either an evil man, or a profoundly stupid
one. No wonder the Democratic Party establishment wants to go with Joe
Biden, who is undeniably stupid, but, at least arguably, not evil.
I don’t consider Biden evil, but he’s a nasty piece of
work. I have heard this not just from conservatives, but also from some on
the left who stood in his way on particular matters.
Kevin Williamson presents his indictment in an article
called “Joe
Biden: Not a Socialist, Just a Scoundrel.” Williamson writes:
[Biden] is a vicious self-serving political hack, for one
thing, one whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency. You
may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying
drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank
his lunch,” as Biden puts it.
Never happened.
Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car
wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was
drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he
was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault.
The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of
[the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like
every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms
of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad
happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did
something nefarious.
The driver of that truck went to his grave
haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were
forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The
casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary
people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in
one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.
Unfortunately, it’s also in character:
A man who can lightly misrepresent the circumstances
surrounding the death of his wife and infant daughter is liable to be just as
cavalier when it comes to, say, slavery, telling a largely black audience
that Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — wants to “put y’all back in chains.” (Oh,
that “y’all”!) Cynical doesn’t begin to cover it.
One of the worst features of our political life is the
ugly and dishonest fights we have over Supreme Court nominations — a habit that
can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden, who along with Ted Kennedy, that
pillar of human decency, organized one of the worst smear campaigns in modern
American political history against Robert Bork, whose great crime against
humanity was taking the “extremist” position that the Constitution actually
says what it says rather than what anybody with power wishes it would say at
any given moment. . . .
Don’t like the way Merrick Garland was treated? Mitch
McConnell didn’t start that game — he is just better at it than his
contemporary Democratic colleagues are. For lying partisan viciousness in
the modern mode, Joe Biden is your man.
