The American Spectator

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The nation continues to pay the price for not listening to Joe Biden.

Just ask Joe Biden.

“On September the 10th, the day before the attack on the World Trade towers, I gave a speech at the National Press Club,” Biden told the two hundred high school and college students gathered at College Convention ‘08, striking his best Nostradamus pose, head tilted slightly forward, focusing an intense seconds-long stare on any student who happened to make eye contact.

“In that speech I predicted there would be a massive attack on the United States of America from terrorists and it would come in the belly of a plane.”

The Fifth Nag of the Apocalypse foresaw tragedy, but no one heeded his call. And so they suffered.

There is hardly a domestic or international problem Biden wouldn’t have already solved, were it not for the intransigence of…well, basically everyone save Joe Biden. “The first global warming bill produced in the history of the United States of America was the Biden bill 22 years ago,” the six-term senator angrily snarled, fairly shouting the addendum, “Twenty-two years ago!”

What, again, was the shorthand for the first-ever debt forgiveness bill, which if properly implemented would have put global poverty and environmental degradation on the path to extinction? Oh, yes, it was the…Biden bill. And lest we forget: “The first public financing bill ever produced in the United States Congress was a bill introduced by Joe Biden,” Joe Biden boasted.

And if only his Congressional colleagues, the current president and the rest of the United States governmental apparatus would hand over the reins, the man who rivals Steve Forbes and Bob Dole in third-person self-references, could withdraw all troops from Iraq within one year “leaving no chaos behind.”

“I’m the only person…if my daughter were here, she’d say, ‘Dad, don’t say that,’ because it sounds so self-serving,” Biden said, pausing as if to earnestly weigh this imagined advice from his daughter. “But I’m the only person who has put forward a plan that will end the war.”

Sorry, honey, Papa’s got to share his visionary transcendence with The People. And if by now we hadn’t figured out what a Man of Great Consequence Joe Biden was, the longtime Delaware Senator dropped — along with all pretense of subtly — a name.

“The reason I’m late, and I apologize, is when I got off the plane, as I’m waiting for my bag in your relatively small airport, my cell phone rang,” Biden explained, apropos of nothing, really. “The Prime Minister of Israel is calling. Calling me because he wants to discuss with me and get my opinion on what happened at Annapolis.”

HAVING ESTABLISHED HIMSELF in his own eyes at least, Biden set out to unmask the false prophets in our midst.

“I’ve been a friend of Hillary Clinton for nineteen, twenty years,” he intoned with a strange mixture of sarcasm and gravitas. “Chris Dodd is my closest personal friend in public life. Bill Richardson and I are buddies. I know Barack. He’s on my committee, but he hasn’t been involved very much, he’s new, so I don’t know him very well.”

Gasps and giggles arose from the crowd at this apparent dig at the moonlighting Mayor of Purple America, the man Biden not so long ago praised as “the first mainstream African-American [candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” even if Obama made it clear during the Howard University debate their relationship would remain platonic.

“No, I mean that sincerely,” Biden protested, nudging the knife in a little deeper under the cover of faux collegiality. “I’m the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He’s a member. He’s only been there…this is halfway through his first term and he’s been running most of the time.”