NYC Letter: Joe Biden Is An Idiot XV -- All My Heroes Are Barack

Day 1,160 of CHOPE

Mr. Biden is back with another hyperbolic valentine for the boss.

BIDEN: ONLY FDR FACED MORE
DIRE SITUATIONS THAN OBAMA

March 29, 2012 (Politico) - Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to supporters at a fundraiser in Milwaukee, Wis., said that only Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced problems with more dire consequences during his presidency than President Obama. Mr. Biden:

No president, and I would argue in the 20th century and including now the 21st century, has had as many serious problems which are cases of first-instance laid on his table. Franklin Roosevelt faced more dire consequences, but in a bizarre way it was more straightforward.

So, you see, in a bizarre sort of way FDR had it pretty easy. [Pause.] Herbert Hoover -- just spitballing here -- faced far more problems with the onset of the Great Depression (Mr. Biden thinks FDR was president in 1929).

That Joe Biden thinks that the Obama administration is the most momentous of this and the past centuries speaks to both his enormous hermetic vanity and his enormous ignorance of American history. Here's a short list of presidents in Mr. Biden's time range that dealt with more serious problems and their dire consequences than Mr. Obama.

Harry S. Truman authorized the first atomic bombings, oversaw the transition of a war economy to peacetime, originated the Truman Doctrine (containing Communist expansion), launched the Marshall Plan, recognized the state of Israel, authorized the Berlin Airlift, joined NATO, dispatched the Seventh Fleet as a floating buffer between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, and presided over the outbreak of the Korean War. That's a topper.

John Kennedy came to office during a recession, presided over the Bay of Pigs, was dealt the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and the rolling military coups that followed in South Viet Nam, strong-armed the steel industry, committed the space program to put a man on the moon, and abetted the nascent civil rights movement. All that in less than three years. That's a topper.

Mr. Bush initiated two of the largest tax cuts in history, presided over the Hainan Island incident, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was dealt 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble, and took the initial steps to curtail the 2008 financial crisis. That's a topper.

And Mr. Obama? He greenlighted the OBL kill before hitting the links. [Pause.] Who would ever have thought a former New Yorker could get enough of hearing about OBL's demise. [Hard sigh.] But here we are.

"I’ve watched him make decisions that would make another man or woman’s hair curl," the vice president said, repeating his often-told tale of Obama's decision to authorize the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

'Nobody but one person in that entire apparatus said go," Biden said about the national security team — with the only "yes" vote being Leon Panetta.

There is an epigram by Martial that goes something like this, everyone loves their own. He was writing about farts.

CHOPE.

Gush and hagiography.