Dim-wits in High Places

Vice President Joe Biden has taken the point in the Obama Administration’s campaign to pass another half trillion dollar “Jobs Bill.” Mr Biden appeared at a democrat rally on Capital Hill, attended by fellow democrat senators and congressmen, posing as thoughtful and serious representatives of the American people.

Mr Biden, who was once the most intellectually challenged individual ever to enjoy a seat in the U.S. Senate (which is no small feat since he was a contemporary of the late Edward Kennedy), has gone on to become the dumbest individual ever to stand a single heartbeat from the presidency.

Speaking of republican opposition to Mr Obama’s so-called “Jobs Bill,” Mr Biden quipped, “Are you going to put 400,000 school teachers back in classrooms, are you going to put 18,000 cops back on the street and 7,000 firefighters back in the firehouses? Or are you going to save people with average incomes of $1 million a one-half of 1 percent increase in tax on every dollar they make over a million?”

Mr Biden was referring to the choice between funding a half trillion dollars to be used to hire government union employees and the proposed means of paying for it: a one half of one percent additional tax on incomes above $1 million.

Mr Biden made his remarks despite the knowledge that the rich already pay nearly half of the income taxes collected by the IRS. Mr Biden knows, or would if he had the capacity to fathom subjects of such depth, that the top one percent of income earners (the rich) pay nearly four of every ten dollars collected by the IRS. In fact the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay nearly all income taxes (97 percent). Still, to the radicals now running the government, there is room for the “rich” to pay a little more. Mr Biden knows how much the “rich” pay, and the Obama Administration’s implication that the rich enjoy tax breaks unavailable to middle class Americans is a disingenuous prevarication.

But then, Mr Biden has been wrong about virtually every issue of major importance to U.S. foreign policy (his supposed area of expertise) since entering the senate in 1972. He was one of the democrat party heroes who threw the Vietnamese government under the bus in 1974-1975. During the Cold War, he favored cuts in Defense spending so large that even the very liberal Walter Mondale opposed them. He opposed aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and assistance to the government of El Salvador, then resisting the Marxist FMLN guerrillas. He opposed President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, credited by most observers as the largest single contributing factor to winning the Cold War. To Mr Biden, it was a reckless and irresponsible program. He voted against the Gulf War in 1991 and opposed the surge in the Iraq War in 2007, which won that war.

The only reason Mr Biden is not greeted with howls of derisive laughter whenever he ascends a podium is the fawning American media, who are unable bring themselves to criticize the bumbling vice-president. Mr Biden is after all, a democrat. Many wondered why Mr Obama would ever pick such a dim-witted individual for his vice-president. The answer is obvious: insurance. If Mr Obama was ever forced from office, either for reasons of ill-health or impeachment, Mr Biden would become president. Mr Obama rightly perceived that with Mr Biden as vice president, the American people would hold their noses while patiently awaiting the next election.