One of the most glaring ironies of the Obama Administration is the gratuitous belittling of Vice President Joe Biden. It is, of course, because he’s gaffe-prone in the context of a partisan, show bizzy media that magnifies everything and ignores nothing packing a punch line.
But the main reason Barack Obama chose Biden for vice president was that he knew more than Obama did–from inside the Belt Way to outside the hemisphere. Biden personally knew world leaders and was experienced enough to have chaired the Senate’s Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. And he had run credibly as a presidential candidate himself. In fact, too bad nobody paid enough attention to Biden in 2006 when he pragmatically made the case for splitting Iraq into three largely autonomous regions.
But what struck a nerve already raw from media overkill the other day was a comment by syndicated columnist Thomas Sewell, the African-American academic seemingly intent on reminding the public that he’s not some Uncle Tom Democrat.
The Hoover Institution senior fellow penned a piece recently about Obama’s lame-duck presidency, Constitutional overreach and impeachment speculation. His best reason for rejecting impeachment: the resultant ascent of Joe Biden to president.
He then rhetorically hammered the vice president. “Some cynics long ago referred to Obama’s choice of mental lightweight Biden to be his vice president as ‘impeachment insurance,'” jeered Sewell.
There’s a huge, slanderous gulf between gaffe meister and “mental lightweight.”
Presumably “impeachment insurance” was not available to President George H.W. Bush, when he chose Dan Quayle as his generational running mate. And imagine what impeachment premiums would have been for President John McCain.