WASHINGTON — How is it that an attractive woman who has been
involved in state and local government since the early 1990s
without much controversy is now passed off in the media as an
airhead? Yet her opponent, long known as an airhead, a braggart,
and even a plagiarist, is now passed off as a statesman? I have
in mind Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska and Senator Joe Biden of
Delaware or Scranton, Pennsylvania, or wherever he now claims to
hail from. In September Governor Palin sat before ABC’s Charlie
Gibson and CBS’s Katie Couric and was asked any question that
popped into their minds or the minds of their researchers. The
comely governor responded adequately. She might not win first
prize on Jeopardy, but then no Jeopardy winner
has governed Alaska. Nonetheless she is portrayed in the
mainstream moron media as an airhead and Senator Biden is a
statesman.
Well, take a glance at Senator Biden’s performance just last
month. On September he 22 bragged to a Baltimore audience that,
“If you want to know where al-Qaida 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.” Two days later he
continued his B.S.-ing that al-Qaida’s headquarters had been
moved to “the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where
my helicopter was recently forced down.” Both statements were
rehashes of his September 9 garbagespiel that “the superhighway
of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan [is] where my
helicopter was forced down.” Left unsaid by the senator — who
rarely leaves anything unsaid — was that the helicopter was
“brought down” not by enemy fire but by inclement weather.
Okay, maybe those outbursts do not reveal Senator Biden as an
airhead, but they do reveal him as a phony. So consider a couple
more of the senator’s September follies. On September 17 at an
appearance in Ohio, Senator Biden tapped the chest of a reporter
(presumably male) and said, “You need to work on your pecs.” Then
there was the senator’s interview with Couric. It is Couric, of
course, who supposedly revealed Governor Palin’s intellectual
weightlessness, but late in September she revealed both herself
and Senator Biden to be ignoramuses.
While interviewing him on what appeared to be a bus, Couric
evoked this response from the Democrats’ vice presidential
candidate: “When the stock market crashed [in 1929] Franklin
Roosevelt got on television and didn’t just talk about, you know,
the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
Actually Roosevelt was not president until 1933, and in 1929
there was no “television audience” because there was no
television available to consumers. By now all Biden-watchers have
had a good laugh at his expense on this one, but the laugh is on
Couric too. Her round, girlish, expressionless face revealed no
hint that she was aware of the senator’s botched history.
So Senator Biden in one month reminds us that he is a phony and
an airhead, but in September he also reminded us that he is a
plagiarist. In his 1988 presidential bid he was caught lifting
from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock the Welshman’s
biographical treacle, adapting it for an American audience thus:
“My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast
Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football
for four hours.” In Mr. Kinnock’s version his Welsh ancestors
“could work eight hours underground and then come up and play
football.” This was a dreadful humiliation for Senator Biden,
made all the worse when it was revealed that he had faked his
academic record and been accused of plagiarism in law school.
After being forced out of the 1988 race, the senator, one would
have thought, would never again mention his “coal mining”
heritage. Yet on September 21, while addressing an audience
filled with coal miners in Virginia, he fibbed: “…I am a hard
coal miner — anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania. That’s
where I was born and raised.” He was never a coal miner and most
of his early life was spent in Delaware.
Amazing as it sounds, all the recent pratfalls were committed by
the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in but one month.
Nonetheless, as we enter October it is Governor Palin whom the
media deem controversial.
