Biden Gaffe Watch: “What Biden gaffes?”

Well, that’s a novel approach: answer critics of your gaffes by declaring they weren’t actually gaffes.

“I think we’ve run a really good campaign,” Biden said Monday. “And for all the stuff about gaffes, I don’t think there have been any real gaffes,” Biden said. “I mean, I don’t see anything in your polling data demonstrating any of that stuff you guys love to write about.”

“I never make any big, big gaffes,” he added. “I mean, you guys love saying that about me, but I tell you what, just look at the numbers. I don’t have any problem with what I’ve said and there’s nothing I’ve said that I would back off of.”

Republicans have ripped numerous Biden remarks over the past few months, with Sen. John McCain calling him “the gift that keeps on giving.”

And there you have it: the Biden Gaffe Watch’s first “Biden meta-gaffe.” It takes a true gaffemeister to commit a gaffe about your own gaffes.

UPDATE: Following close on the heels of Biden’s first meta-gaffe is Biden’s first “gaffe sandwich” (my own phrase), which is what I call a rare moment of lucidity enclosed on either end by incomprehensible blather. The moment of lucidity?

“I shouldn’t be going off like this, but…”

The rest of the gaffe sandwich? Well…why don’t you check it out for yourself.

Sarah Palin plays a forbidden game…in public!

Well, this is new. Sarah Palin has asked the unthinkable question directly to a journalist: “Can you imagine if I woulda said such a thing?” CNN’s Drew Griffin has been asked on the air to play “Media Party Switch.”

Gov. Palin brought to the cable news networks (outside of Fox News) something that we in the blogosphere do on a regular basis.  She examined Joe Biden’s recent statement warning that an international crisis would test Barack Obama’s mettle as president before his first six months in the White House are up, and wondered aloud what might have happened if instead she had been the one to say something so bizarre (and manifestly unhelpful to the top of her ticket).

During this entire presidential campaign — and frankly, this pattern is not at all limited to presidential elections — bloggers like me have indulged in a time-honored thought experiment. I’ll call it “Media Party Switch.” Put briefly, it considers any given gaffe, smear, flub, reckless accusation, or other similarly outrageous or boneheaded statement by a Democrat that has gone unnoticed or unreported by the journalistic community, and poses the rhetorical question of what would have happened if the same type of statement had been made by a Republican under the same circumstances.

Readers of WitSnapper have seen me dabble in “Media Party Switch” here from time to time. It’s become a pseudo-regular feature of the Biden Gaffe Watch, in which I wonder more than once when the sum total of instances of Biden’s frothing mouth galloping away from him (also lovingly recapped here by Miz Michelle) might equal, for example, former Vice President Dan Quayle’s infamous misspelling of “potato.”  However, as widespread a practice as this thought experiment is among bloggers, it rarely, if ever, makes it to network or cable news, given how embarrassing such a look in the mirror could be (after all, it’s not the blogosphere that puts the “Media” in “Media Party Switch”).

In Griffin’s CNN interview with Gov. Palin, Griffin doesn’t go so far as to break the omerta among his colleagues and producers by openly musing what the media reaction might have been if Palin had said something like what Biden did. However, he must be given credit (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that he might have been able to see this coming) for opening the door by asking the more general question of whether Palin thinks Joe Biden has been “given a pass” by the media.  Palin strides right through that door, answering that he’d have to ask his own colleagues and bosses as to why Biden’s been given a pass, but she does wonder aloud (video here):

Can you imagine if I would’ve said such a thing?  No, I think we would be hounded and held accountable: “What in the world did you mean by that, VP/presidential candidate?  Why would you say that, ‘Mark my words, this nation will undergo an international crisis if you elect Barack Obama?'” If I would have said something like that you guys would clobber me!

Again, to his credit, Griffin doesn’t waste airtime trying to argue the point:

You’re right! [Both laugh.] You’re right.

Excellent.  Good to hear it.  In that spirit, I look forward to seeing Griffin call Sen. Biden on this statement, or whatever other bizarre statement he’ll inevitably let loose by the time CNN gets him to sit down with them, or for that matter any of the embarrassing wealth of past statements on which the senator has been “given a pass.”  How’s your game of “Media Party Switch,” Senator?

Biden Gaffe Watch: Experience, anyone?

Senator Joe Biden made the strongest case Monday against an inexperienced president since he slammed Barack Obama as overly green during a Democratic primary debate (links via Captain Ed and Miz Michelle).  Oddly enough, this time he meant to argue in favor of Obama’s election, or at least I think that’s what he meant:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Biden doesn’t mention that the “test” to which John Kennedy’s “mettle” was put when he attended a summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was one that Kennedy failed miserably, by both his own and Khrushchev’s accounts.  The Soviet delegation left Vienna with a poor estimation of Kennedy’s talent and character, and a soaring estimation of their capacity to push him around on the world stage.  Khrushchev was sufficiently emboldened that he ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, turning East Berlin into a prison in fact as well as in effect, and went prancing around Cuba planting nuclear missiles hither and yon, bringing us closer to an honest-to-God nuclear exchange than at any time in history.  The former offense stayed in place for more than a quarter of a century (many were shot trying to escape to the West), and de-escalation of the latter was brought about only when Kennedy agreed to hand over strategic intelligence to the Soviets and withdraw valuable missile assets from Turkey, weakening the front line of NATO’s deterrent.

Kennedy came into office after six years in the House and eight years in the Senate.  How prepared can Obama be after an unremarkable four years in the Senate, two of which have been all but pre-empted by his presidential campaign?

I dunno.  Ask Joe Biden.

(In the meantime, Gateway Pundit is floating along on marshmallow “Dear Leader” dreams.)

UPDATE:  GP also has video of Rudy Giuliani demanding an explanation.

Biden Gaffe Watch: Gaffe, a four-letter word

“The three-letter word: JOBS. J-O-B-S, JOBS.”

Still waiting to find out where the media will decide he’s cranked out enough flubs to cross the line between “endearingly eccentric” and “Joe Quayle.”

Biden Gaffe Watch: Whose administration?

Toby Harnden at the UK’s Daily Telegraph brings us the latest installment of the BGW, in which Joe Biden flips the ticket and sings the praises of what a “Biden Adminstration” would do.

Joe Biden is enjoying himself so much on the campaign trail that occasionally he gets to thinking he’s about to become president. “In a Biden…an Obama-Biden administration,” he said during an event at an American Legion hall here in Rochester, New Hampshire this morning, catching himself just in time.

“We know, we know,” he responded jovially as the crowd realised what he’d said. “It’s hard to get used to. We got his thing the right way.” He pointed at a group of men who were barracking him good-naturedly. “These are my old buddies over here from the shipyard.”

I’d treat this as a minor thing (he didn’t even get the whole phrase “Biden Administration” out before he caught himself after all), if this weren’t the second time in six weeks that he’d committed this gaffe:

Last month at an event in Fort Myers, Florida, he referred to the “Biden administration” before correcting the phrase and adding as he laughed and crossed himself: “Believe me, that wasn’t a Freudian slip. Oh Lordy day, I tell ya.”

Oh, Lordy day, indeed.  If Biden weren’t a Democrat, the networks and press would be flubbing his name for “Quayle.”

Biden Gaffe Watch

OK, there have been enough of these by now to warrant their own recurring theme.  Given their surprising frequency and the new focus on Joe Biden in the news, I just know this won’t be the last.

At a major foreign policy address Biden let fly this beaut:

“After seven years, in which our senior diplomatic personnel were not allowed to make a single contact with Iranians, the Bush administration realized the absurdity of its own policy and sent our leading diplomat to Iran,” he said. “The Assistant Secretary of State as he went to Tehran, sat down at the instruction of the President of the United States.”

FoxNews.com (via OpinionJournal.com) provides a Biden-to-Real-World translation:

In point of fact, the one “meeting” that has taken place was in Geneva, Switzerland, when Under Secretary of State William Burns sat in on a discussion between Iranian representatives and the other “P5 +1″ political directors involved in nuclear talks. The meeting, while a first, was not a negotiation; Burns was there merely as an observer, and had no formal role or talks with the Iranians.

So, point by point: Burns was not sent to Tehran; he did not go to Tehran; and there was no such instruction from the President.

Retroactively rounding up the Biden Gaffe Watch archives below the break.

History lesson

OK, the history buff in me couldn’t resist posting briefly on this.  From Ben Smith at Politico (emphasis mine):

Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He 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.'”

As Reason’s Jesse Walker footnotes it: “And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, ‘Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'”

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Franklin Roosevelt had just barely taken office as governor of New York.  He didn’t become president until 1933, and didn’t appear on television for the first time until 1939.  (Moreover, who had TVs then?  A call for calm in a television address following the market crash in 1929 would have reached roughly as many people as, oh…say, a streaming podcast following the Kuwait invasion in 1991.)

File this under the existing meme:  Joe Biden, the gaffe that keeps on gaffe-ing.

Somebody hasn’t stopped running for prez…

Have Joe Biden and Barack Obama actually bothered talking to each other in the last couple of days?

In the space of 24 short hours, we’ve seen:

• Sen. Biden castigating the Obama campaign for the campaign ad mocking John McCain for not being able to use a keyboard (and later implying McCain had it coming);
• Sen. Obama saying Biden “should have waited” before deciding to oppose the bailout of AIG last week;
• Biden jabbing his finger in a young woman’s face and disavowing the development of clean coal technology, contrary to Obama’s stated position (and conflating it with “dirty-coal” plants in China in the process, which kind of ignores the point of CCT as an alternative to dirty coal in the first place).

Caroline Kennedy’s BlackBerry must be smoking with hate email from the Obama campaign these days.  “Thanks a million for the yeoman vetting process, lady.”

It’s hardly unusual for running mates to disagree.  Eight years ago Joe Lieberman was forced to “evolve” his positions on a number of issues (affirmative action, the content of Hollywood output, etc.) in order to make sure he didn’t make things too difficult for Al Gore.  Much was made in 1980 of the differences between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush on supply-side economics (“voodoo economics,” according to Bush during the primaries).

John McCain and Sarah Palin are famously on opposite sides of the fence regarding drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an issue near and dear to the Alaska governor’s heart for years.  However, the difference between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin is that with the latter, you get the clear impression that they have at least discussed the matter between them, even if they haven’t come to a meeting of minds yet.

Points of disagreement between Obama and Biden, on the other hand, always seem to come as a surprise to them both when asked about them by reporters or voters, and you’re invariably filled with dread at what the next conversation between the two of them is probably going to be like.

Forced down? By whom? Hillary’s sniper?

Sen. Joe Biden’s helicopter was “forced down” in Afghanistan mountains crawling with al-Qaeda?  That’s what he told a National Guard audience in Maryland today.  From Jake Tapper (emphasis mine):

“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.”

… [E]arlier this month at a fundraiser, he made a similar remark, when discussing how he doesn’t care about the Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s controversies like whether she sold a state plane on eBay, or when she went from supporting to opposing the Bridge to Nowhere.

“What I care about is: What in God’s name is she going to do — along with John McCain — about the thousands of people who don’t have health care?” Biden said according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Biden said he would ask Palin about “The superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down…John McCain wants to know where Bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where. That’s where Al Qaeda is. That’s where Bin Laden is. It’s not in the country of Iraq.”

OK…when Joe Biden tells — actually, no, let’s say, when a normal person tells a National Guard audience that his helicopter was forced down in the middle of what he says is a hotbed of al Qaeda activity, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?  Yes, of course, you wonder how he managed to survive the rest of the attack.  In other words, you get the impression that his helicopter was forced down by enemy activity.

What Biden doesn’t mention is that his helicopter was grounded by weather, and he and his travel-mates were driven back to base without incident before they traveled elsewhere.  Tapper again:

In February 2008, Biden — along with Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. — was on a chopper that made an emergency landing in the mountains of Afghanistan.

A snowstorm had forced them down.

No one was injured, and the Associated Press reported at the time that “the senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and left for Turkey.

Sen. Kerry was not quite so traumatized by the ordeal as Sen. Biden evidently was:

[Kerry told the AP at the time] We sat up there and traded stories.” Kerry joked, “We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to do it…Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”

Given Biden’s well-documented history of creative self-aggrandizement, I doubt he was unaware how his harrowing tale of being forced out of the air in the epicenter of al Qaeda activity might sound, especially in front of a military audience.  You would think that he might have learned something from Hillary Clinton’s “tall tale” about dodging nonexistent sniper fire in Bosnia. I know the prospect of Sinbad making me look stupid would definitely make me think twice about spinning yarns that transform me into a combat veteran.

Joe Biden: Conscience of the Obama ticket? UPDATE: Never mind.

A couple of weeks ago, the Obama campaign released a campaign ad sneering that John McCain doesn’t use a computer.  (Link via Power Line.)  Protests soon arose that the ad was a cheap shot, since the reason McCain doesn’t use a computer is because his Vietnam-era injuries make it very uncomfortable for him to use a keyboard.  (McCain also has trouble with things like tying his shoes, combing his hair, and putting on a shirt, for the same reason.)

Most people had given up waiting for the Obama campaign to apologize, or express regret, or at least disclaim any intent toward horrendous taste, in some buried statement issued over a weekend when nobody would read it.

As it happens, no such statement has been forthcoming from the Obama campaign, let alone Sen. Obama himself, but a surprise confession has issued from what you might think was the unlikeliest of places:  Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden.

Details, plus a whiplash-inducing UPDATE, below the break.

Freedom is slavery. Beggary is patriotism. UPDATE: The adman cometh

Senator Joe Biden has achieved transcendence: he is now even more Orwellian than Orwell.

AP headline: Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act. Well, OK, Senator, but expect Congressman Rangel to take some umbrage at your questioning his patriotism.

Joe Biden: the gaffe that keeps on gaffe-ing.

UPDATE: You knew the McCain campaign would get some ad mileage out of this:

You know, I think I’ll start counting the number of McCain ads that begin along the lines of “Joe Biden actually said…”  I’ll probably need a whole new category before long.  Hell, maybe even a new blog.