What I’m Thinking: Is It Still Too Late for a Biden/Palin Comparison/Contrast Piece?

Over at Politics Daily, Carl M. Cannon writes a lengthy piece criticizing/analyzing the main-stream media’s treatment of Palin, Inc. during the 2008 election.

The last part of the piece gets interesting.  After arguing that Palin did perform poorly during her Couric and Gibson interviews, Cannon lists Palin’s “sketchy” moments during the Vice-Presidential debate.  Palin earned this criticism, as far as I am concerned:

Gov. Palin certainly had her sketchy moments that night. On one occasion, she called her opponent “Senator O’Biden.” She referred twice to the top U.S. military officer in Afghanistan as “General McClellan.” (His name is David McKiernan). She claimed as mayor to have reduced taxes “every year I was in office,” an assertion that is accurate only if one ignores sales tax increases. Likewise, she maintained that McCain’s $5,000 tax credit for health coverage was “budget-neutral,” which is only possible by repealing the laws of mathematics. She gave McCain more credit than he was due in blowing the whistle on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while repeating a misleading claim against Obama used by Hillary Clinton and McCain on an energy bill. She also exaggerated her own accomplishment regarding a $40 billion proposed pipeline in Alaska.

And here’s where things get really interesting… According to Cannon, then Senator Biden didn’t perform so well; Cannon argues that he was “in a place by himself when it came to bogus claims, absurd contentions, and flights of rhetorical fancy”:

He threw out several assertions that were so preposterous that – had Palin made them – they would have prompted immediate calls for McCain to dump her from the ticket.

The good senator from Delaware warmed up slowly, erroneously claiming that McCain voted with Obama on a budget resolution, and asserting wrongly that Obama wanted to return to the Reagan-era marginal income tax rates. He also embarked on an appallingly wrongheaded monologue about the constitutional history of the vice presidency. But when the talk turned to national security, presumably Biden’s purported area of expertise, he went completely off the grid.

• “John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported,” Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)
• “Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons,” Biden said. “Pakistan’s weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean.” (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles – halfway to Israel.)
• “When we kicked–along with France–we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t…Hezbollah will control it.’” Biden recalled. “Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They’ve been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)
• “The president…insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, ‘Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.’ What happened? Hamas won,” Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden’s strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza’s legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama – but not Biden — signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush’s actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)
• “With Afghanistan, facts matter…we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again…” (He did say it again, but that didn’t make it true. It’s wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden’s math was off by 2,000 percent.)
• “Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he’d) sit down with Ahmadinejad.” (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was “naïve.”)

For Cannon, Biden’s “most discordant claims concerned his Animal House-like history lecture about the office of the vice president.”

It came while Biden was dressing down Dick Cheney, who was not present, for supposedly being unfamiliar with the Constitution. “The idea (that) he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States – that’s the executive branch – he works in the executive branch,” Biden said. “He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and, as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit….He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he’s part of the legislative branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us.”

Lord, would Tina Fey have had fun with this jumble of misinformation – if only Palin had said it! Article I defines the legislative, not executive, branch. The vice president is, indeed, mentioned there. What Biden finds “explicit,” hasn’t been so to previous vice presidents or to most constitutional scholars. Prior to the 20th century, vice presidents didn’t even have offices at the White House compound – they were housed in the Capitol. The notion that a veep’s constitutional authority is to provide advice to a president springs from Biden’s brow; it certainly isn’t mentioned, or even contemplated, in the Constitution, which doesn’t even say whether the vice president should receive a salary.

Should Joe Biden have known this stuff? Since he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, you’d hope so. But even if he didn’t, you’d think it would be news when he unleashed a veritable fount of misinformation to impugn Palin’s knowledge of the federal system while attacking a sitting vice president. It barely rated a mention in the collective mainstream media.

Cannon concludes that the MSM’s deliberate silence on Sen. Biden’s mis-speaks is evidence of their vested interest in left-wing candidates.  Cannon writes:  “Facts matter, the man said. But they didn’t in 2008, not when it came to Joe Biden (our [the mainstream media's] guy) against Sarah Palin (odd outsider). The ladies and gentlemen of the press were more interested in her hair, her glasses, her wardrobe, he accent, her sex life, her kids’ sex lives, and her hunting habits than in whether her opponent knew anything about foreign policy, the Constitution of the United States, or the job he was running for.”

I wonder how all the pundits and Peggy Noonans would have reacted if Palin had: spoken about visiting all 57 American states, forget how she met her husband, forgot how old one of her children was, claimed that the US Constitution was written “20 centuries ago,” said “Muslim” when she meant “Christian,” “mis-remembered” how her parents met, lauded California (!) as a model economy and energy saving state, insulted foreign hosts, fired investigators whose politics weren’t in alignment with the administration’s, insulted one of our oldest allies (here, here, and here), made fun of the handicapped, and insulted a former First Lady with a dispicable and untrue ad hominem attack?  (Should I include tepid support for “freedom fighters” in Iran and vociferous support for a Constitution-destroying Latin-American president in the list, too?  How about sealed scholastic records?)

Habit makes me want to label those kinds of collosal mis-speaks “Bush-isms” not “Obama-isms.”

BTW, see what else I’m politicing.