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January 12, 2006

Memo to Biden: with supporters like ...

... this

The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his mouth. That, though, is no small matter. [...]

The reviews for Biden's first crack at Samuel Alito, the humorless Supreme Court nominee, were murderous. The New York Times had Biden out on Page One -- normally a position to kill for -- only this time it was not a paean to his considerable merits, but an account of how it took him nearly three minutes of throat-clearing to ask his first question and then took the rest of his allocated 30 minutes just to get in four more. [...]

The seniority that makes Biden so knowledgeable on foreign policy -- a conversation with him is always instructive -- is also what cripples. He has been in the Senate since 1973 and suffers, as nearly all senators do sooner or later, from the conviction that he and his colleagues are the center of the world. After all, no one -- with the possible exception of family members -- ever tells a senator to shut up. They are surrounded by fawning staff and generally treated as minor deities. They lose perspective, which is why, now that you've asked, they talk and talk at these hearings. They are convinced the world is watching. Actually, it's only a half a dozen shut-ins on C-SPAN -- and, of course, the nearly catatonic press corps. Everyone else is playing computer solitaire.

And, of course, Biden was caught this morning whining that "The system's kind of broken" because Biden, the excreble Kennedy and the unctuous Schumer won't deviate from their pre-written scripts and give more than a few seconds to Alito. Not that they even listen to his answers, anyway.

Yes, the hearings are a joke and these bully-boys with all the sophistication of juvenile, pampered, indulged, yet value-bankrupt off-spring of the super-rich are to blame.

Posted by Darleen at January 12, 2006 08:13 AM

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