If it weren’t so sad, this
story from the Washington Times would be too funny. It
seems that money from President Obama’s $862,000,000,000 “stimulus”
bill of two years ago has been spent to upgrade the Wilmington,
Del., AMTRAK station. Vice President Biden lobbied personally, we
read, to get the funding for the station he has famously used ever
since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. Now, AMTRAK,
grateful for his support, has all on its own initiative decided to
name the spruced-up station the Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. AMTRAK
station.
Well, we all wanted to know who would replace the late,
beloved Robert Byrd of West Virginia as the king of pork. Now we
know. Washington legend has it that Sen. Byrd modestly turned down
all attempts to re-named the Mountaineer State for him. It seems
the name “Byrdland” was already taken.
Now, where might this newly famous Delaware train station
be located? You’ll remember the old English rhyme — “Send a Fool
to Dover/He’ll come back a Fool all over.” Wrong. Joe Biden is no
fool. He travels to Wilmington. So that’s where the station got
named for him. He bragged that he has logged some 7,000 round trips
between Wilmington and Washington.
And he travels in style. We all recall how President Obama
named Biden as his “sheriff” for the gusher of stimulus spending.
He memorably said Joe Biden would watch over the expenditures to
make sure no funds were misspent. That’s because, the president
said:
“Nobody messes with Joe!”
But the president neglected to tell us what would happen
if we caught Joe messing.
“We would not be spending a penny on it today without the
Recovery Act,” Mr. Biden said. “We have no time
to wait. We cannot wait. That’s what the Recovery Act is
about.”
So we didn’t wait. Why, if we waited, the unemployment
could go as high as eight percent, Joe warned us. Currently, the
jobless rate is closer to nine percent.
The Washington Times reports that the
refurbishing of this particular railroad station went over budget
by some $5.7 million. Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government
Waste seems not to have gotten President Obama’s order not to mess
with Joe, especially while Joe was messing with our national debt.
She told the Times.
“It’s an absolutely perfect monument to a guy whose entire
history has been overspending and overpromising,” she said. “It
would make sense [Mr. Biden’s] name would be slapped
on a bloated, over-budget train station in
Wilmington.”
Ah, but Leslie Paige, you don’t appreciate the historic
nature of this particular AMTRAK station. Grove City College
Professor Paul Kengor found this gem while sifting through ash heap
of former Sen. Warren Rudman’s memoirs:
“At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at
me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his
memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had
agonized over his vote for [Supreme Court Justice David Souter],
and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the
crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and
crying.”
An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over
and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were
right!”
The two men were so jubilant, so giddy-practically
dancing-that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut
we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because
sometimes, there are happy endings.”
Not since Napoleon met Tsar Alexander on a raft in the middle of
the Niemen River had there been such an historic meeting. Or,
perhaps since Lee and Grant shared a little writing table at
Appomattox.
And the epochal event that inspired that famous embrace
during the Rudman-Biden Wilmington Summit? Souter had just
voted to keep abortion-on-demand legal. Biden and Rudman could weep
for joy. The rest of us could just weep.
Maybe since they’re already $5.7 million over budget at
the Wilmington station, they could spring for a few thousand to put
up a plaque to commemorate the meeting of Rudman and Biden on that
platform in 1992.
So, President Obama is right: “Nobody messes with Joe,” at
least not while he’s messing with us.
