Wow. Hard to read this and not conclude that Biden has integrity issues.
Biden's history of lies and lifted quotes August 26, 2008
BY CAROL FELSENTHAL
I wonder whether Barack Obama’s vetters, Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, knew what they were doing when they settled on Joe Biden. Journalists and McCain opposition researchers must be logging onto Nexis and searching 1987-1988 using the key words “Biden and plagiarism.” There is a feast of material that would make even the most partisan Obama backer question the wisdom of this choice.
Biden, then 44, was forced out of the 1988 presidential race — he officially dropped out on Sept. 23, 1987 — just when his candidacy seemed to be taking off in Iowa, the all-important first caucus, and just as he seemed to be gaining on Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee.
A Dukakis staffer noticed and fed to Maureen Dowd, then a New York Times reporter rather than columnist, that Biden had lifted almost verbatim his closing remarks at a debate at the Iowa state fairgrounds in August 1987. The lines were lifted from a passionate speech delivered by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Here’s Kinnock: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? . . . Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? . . . It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.’’
Not only did Biden not credit Kinnock, he fooled his audience by using the classic liar’s technique of burnishing a lie with detail: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, ‘Why is it that Joe Biden’s the first in his family ever to go to a university? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?. . . It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.’’
Biden was not the first member of his family to go to college, and the closest his ancestors came to a coal mine was a grandfather who was a mining engineer.
Stealing from RFK
Once Dowd broke that story on the front page of the Times on Sept. 12, 1987, it spread quickly through newspapers, magazines, radio and television. The dam holding back Biden’s exaggerations and penchant for lifting words from others broke, and he nearly drowned in his own deceit.
Biden also lifted words from Bobby Kennedy’s speeches — paragraphs that political junkies prized so much they knew them by heart.
Here’s RFK: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.’’
Here’s Joe Biden: “Well, few of us have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can act to affect a small portion of events, and in the totality of these acts will be written the history of this generation.’’
Bobby Kennedy: “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.’’
Here’s Joe Biden: “‘We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. . . . It doesn’t measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials. It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. . . . That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except that which makes us proud to be Americans.’’
Biden said at the time that RFK was “the man who I guess I admire more than anyone else in American politics.” No doubt about that.
Anyone following the primary campaign in 1987 could see there was something eating at Joe Biden. He needed desperately for people to see him as the smartest guy in the room, and that, coupled with his hot temper and surging insecurities, resulted in the following exchange, which was captured on C-SPAN. Although more than 20 years old, it will no doubt find its way into political advertising.
‘I have a much higher IQ’
On April 3, 1987, at a campaign stop in Claremont, N.H., a voter named Frank innocently asked Biden what law school he attended and how he performed there.
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you do,” replied Biden, who went to Syracuse University College of Law. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship.”
He told the astonished man that while he admittedly did not do well his first year because he didn’t want to be in law school, he did much better his second and third years and ended up in the top half of his class. “I won the international moot court competition.”
Without being asked, Biden then boasted about his performance in college, at the University of Delaware, telling Frank that he had been named the “outstanding student in the political-science department. . . . I graduated with three degrees from college. . . . And I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like, Frank.”
There were a number of lies in this outburst and it was not long before they too were enumerated:
• Biden got in trouble in 1965, during his first year in law school. He wrote a paper in which he lifted five pages verbatim from the Fordham Law Review. He was given an “F” in the course. He managed to avoid being bounced from law school, retook the course and earned a B.
• He claimed that he was “the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.” He didn’t. He did have a half scholarship that was need-based.
• He did not graduate from law school in the top half of his class. He graduated 76th out of 85 — and he was near the bottom of his class all three years.
• If he won the moot court competition — and he claimed at the time that he actually did — he did not put it on his resume, surprising for a man prone to so egregiously exaggerating his accomplishments.
• He did not win the award for being the outstanding student in the political science department at Delaware, and he graduated with one degree, not three. He had a “C” average and graduated 506th in a class of 688.
At the time, he told a reporter, “I exaggerate when I’m angry.”
There are other weird outbursts by Biden in more recent years, grandstanding questions to Supreme Court nominees in which it’s impossible to find the question, but not hard to find all kinds of personal information about the senator from Delaware.
One example comes from Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006. When it was Biden’s turn to question Alito, he mentioned that his daughter had applied or been accepted — not clear which in Biden’s ramblings — to graduate school at Princeton, but decided instead to go to the University of Pennsylvania. Biden showed up at the hearing wearing a Princeton hat. Keith Olbermann asked, “Will the hat hurt his hair plugs?”
And that leads to the easy warning that I’ve been telling friends for years, “Never trust a man who gets hair plugs.” The insecurity is right there in the peculiar set of his hair — for all to see. Apparently Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder missed it.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1127016,open082608.article
