Conservative Chronicle
October 22, 2008
JOE BIDEN: October 9, 2008
Palin vs. Biden: Which one is the airhead?
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ow is it that an attractive woman who has been involved in state and local government since the early 1990s without much controversy is passed off in the media now as an airhead? Yet her opponent — long known as an airhead, a braggart and even a plagiarist — now is passed off as a statesman? I have in mind Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware or Scranton, Pa., or wherever he now claims to hail from. In September, Gov. Palin sat before ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’ Katie Couric and was asked any question that popped into their minds or the minds of their researchers. The comely governor responded adequately. She might not win first prize on Jeopardy, but then no Jeopardy winner has governed Alaska. Nonetheless, she is portrayed in the mainstream moron media as an airhead, and Sen. Biden is a statesman. WELL, take a glance at Sen. Biden’s performance just last month. On Sept. 22, he bragged to a Baltimore audience: “If you want to know where al-Qaida lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three United States senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” Two days later, he continued his BSing that al-Qaida’s headquarters had been moved to “the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where (his) helicopter was recently forced down.” Both statements were rehashes of his Sept. 9 garbage spiel that “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan (is) where (his) helicopter was forced down.” Left unsaid by the senator — who rarely leaves anything unsaid — was that the helicopter was “brought down” not by enemy fire but by inclement weather. OK, maybe those outbursts do not reveal Sen. Biden as an airhead, but they do reveal him as a phony. So consider a few more of the senator’s September follies. On Sept. 17, at an appearance in Ohio, Sen. Biden tapped the chest of a reporter (presumably male) and said, “You need to work on your pecs.” Then there was the senator’s interview with Katie Couric. It is Couric, of course, who supposedly revealed Gov. Palin’s intellectual weightlessness, but late in September, she revealed both herself and Sen. Biden to be ignoramuses. While interviewing him on what appeared to be a bus, Couric evoked this response from the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate: “When the stock market crashed (in 1929), Franklin Roosevelt got on television and didn’t
just talk about, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’” Actually, Roosevelt was not president until 1933, and in 1929, there was no “television audience” because there was no television available to consumers. By now, all Biden watchers have had a good laugh at his expense on this one, but the laugh is on Couric, too. Her round, girlish, expressionless face revealed no hint that she was aware of the senator’s botched historical reference.
ed us that he is a plagiarist. In his 1988 presidential bid, he was caught lifting from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock the Welshman’s biographical treacle, adapting it for an American audience thus: “My ancestors who worked in the coal mines in Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.” In Kinnock’s version, his Welsh ancestors “could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football.” This was a dreadful humiliation for Sen. Biden, made all the worse when it was revealed that he had faked his academic record and been accused of plagiarism in law school.
R. Emmett
Tyrrell
SO SEN. Biden, in one month, reminded us that he is a phony and an airhead, but in September, he also remind-
After being forced out of the 1988 race, the senator, one would have thought, never again would mention his “coal-mining” heritage. Yet Sept. 21, while addressing an audience filled with coal miners in Virginia, he fibbed: “I am a hard coal miner — anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa. That’s where I was born and raised.” He was never a coal miner, and most of his early life was spent in Delaware. AMAZING as it sounds, all the recent pratfalls were committed by the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in but one month. Nonetheless, as we enter October, it is Gov. Palin whom the media deem controversial. __________________________________________ R. EMMETT TYRRELL (c) 2008, Creators Syndicate __________________________________________
JOHN MCCAIN: October 14, 2008
Ready to lead? It’s what officers do
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e might still win. And then, again, he might not. What matters most, in some sense, is that Capt. John McCain has chosen not to strike his colors. There is enormous potential significance in McCain’s attempt to rise from the inanity and waste of the weeks since the GOP presidential convention. How do we know for sure he’s making the attempt? We can’t for sure. We can’t know anything in this crazy, extraordinary year of 2008. What we can deduce is that he knows what he’s about to get is plow-cleaned the way things are going. He knows, from deep experience, that it’s time to do something, namely, lead. IT’S WHAT officers do. It’s what McCain is in this thing for in the first place — to lead. It’s his last hope — to be seen leading at a time of stress. At Virginia Beach on Monday, McCain acknowledged what Republicans and conservatives have been saying for days. “We have 22 days to go,” he said. “We’re six points down. The national media has written us off.” Well, why not? Hardly had the McCain-Palin campaign launched at the GOP presidential race than it sprang leaks. Soon it was low in the water. As the stock market sagged, then plummeted, the most McCain could find to say was that the chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission should be fired, and that we should all hate greed. The dramatic moment he had intended, or his advisers had intended for him — the sus-
pension of campaigning in order to help solve the financial crisis — was a bust. The attacks on Obama, likewise, flopped. Bill Ayers was a very bad actor in 1970, but who cares about him in 2008? What are you going to do for us, John? Where do you want to go? The Virginia Beach speech wasn’t a bundle of answers. Its strength was tone, attitude. McCain would lead. He was an
William
Murchison officer, running — he finally seemed to understand — for the role of commanding officer. Commanders get out in front. They say to discouraged troops: Come on, get up, we’re moving. They say: I know what to do, I’ll lead the way. Get up, let’s go. “We’re in a moment of national crisis that will determine our future,” said McCain, acknowledging what everybody else in the country knew. Will we continue to lead the world’s economies, or will we be overtaken? Will the world become safer or more dangerous? ... My answer to you is: Yes, we will lead; yes, we will prosper; yes, we will be safer; yes, we will pass on to our children a better, stronger country.” IT MAY not work in the end. Or it may. The signal factor here is McCain’s evident realization that his strength, in
the name of the political party with which he identifies, isn’t the careful parsing of phrases and programs. His strength is the look that says, here’s what’s wrong, come on, let’s get to work. So up he stands, with just weeks to go before the election, and says, here’s what we do. If not nearly enough at this point, believe and buy in — he has still the chance to leave an important legacy. A McCain wipe out — occasioned by obsession with marginalities rather than penetrating attention to the nation’s economic and security problems — would entrust government for years to a party with no instinct for economic freedom and no eye for discerning easily the difference between friend and foe on the international scene. McCain needs, for various reasons, to give Obama a race for his money. First, because what presidential candidate could relish going down in history as just another Bob Dole, hawking Viagra on television? Second, because scaring even a victorious Obama could slow him down, and also his supporters, as they moved to raise taxes and redefine America’s role in the world. WHAT’S THE program for McCain? The Virginia Beach speech, one can only hope, tips it. The program is to do what John McCain has so often said he wants to do: Lead. __________________________________________ WILLIAM MURCHISON (c) 2008, Creators Syndicate __________________________________________