Is Joe Biden trying to find a way off the Obama ticket? Preposterous you say? How else do you explain Biden’s actions this week? Is he really that afraid of debating Sarah Palin.:)?
A nice overview from Newsweek,
Biden Turns on the Gaffe Machine
In the past few days–just as Palinsanity has begun to die down–Biden has made a series of strange public statements that suggest he’s either at odds with Obama on key policy issues or that he isn’t aware of what Obama believes. Individually, they’ve served to cloud Obama’s message on matters of substance; taking together, they suggest that someone in Chicago should give the guy a good talking to. If he or she can get a word in edgewise, that is.
He don’t know much about history
He (Biden) was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.
“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.'”
There is nothing wrong with Biden’s statement, except the fact that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and TV was not yet invented. Other than that…
He knows where Osama bin Laden is because his helicopter was forced down in Afghanistan
“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden said. “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.”
As Bruce noted at QandO, the reason Biden’s helicopter “forced down” wasn’t bullets or RPG’s, but snow. This lead Mark Steyn to quip,
In fairness, in the weeks after 9/11, many experts cowered in terror before the soi-disant “brutal Afghan winter”. But I believe Senator Biden is the first to assert it’s under the direct control of Osama bin Laden.
Biden says NO to clean coal, Barack Obama’s campaign position says YES
“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean. We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama.
The Obama web site says the following about clean coal,
Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology: Obama’s Department of Energy will enter into public private partnerships to develop five “first-of-a-kind†commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology.
Biden says Obama campaign ad about McCain’s use of a computer was “terrible”
Asked by CBS’s Katie Couric about an ad Obama released earlier this month mocking John McCain for not being able to use a computer, Biden criticized the commercial and suggested it had been aired without his knowledge.
“I thought that was terrible by the way,” Biden said of the computer ad in an interview broadcast tonight on the CBS Evening News
Asked why it was aired, Biden said: “I didn’t know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it.”
Biden was against the AIG bailout before he was for it
From ABC News’ Jake Tapper,
Lauer was talking about how Obama hit Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., for flip-flopping on the AIG bailout — saying he opposed it one day then announced he supported it the next day.
But, as Lauer pointed out, scarcely three minutes after McCain said he opposed the AIG bailout last week, “in an interview with Meredith Vieira, Joe Biden, your running mate was asked the exact same question: ‘should the federal government bail out AIG?’ And he said, ‘No, the federal government should not bail out AIG.'” (As we noted at the time.) “And I think that, in that situation,” Obama said, “I think Joe should have waited, as well.”
If the answer is no, Biden does not want off the ticket, then what are you left with? A fast talking slow-witted buffoon who has little regard or understanding of his running mates policies, who has quickly become the furthest thing from an asset to the campaign one can think of….unless you are referring to the McCain campaign that is.