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Weekend Edition
August 23 / 4, 2008

CounterPunch Diary
"Change," "Hope" ... Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

"Change" and "hope" are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out "Biden" in a nano-second.

The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you'll likely detect Biden's hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample. In concert with his fellow corporate serf, Senator Tom Carper, Biden blocked all efforts to hinder bankrupt corporations from fleeing from their real locations to the legal sanctuary of Delaware. Since Obama is himself a corporate serf and from day one in the US senate has been attentive to the same masters that employ Biden, the ticket is well balanced, the seesaw with Obama at one end and Biden at the other dead-level on the fulcrum of corporate capital.

Another shining moment in Biden's progress in the current presidential  term was his conduct in the hearings on Judge Alito's nomination to the US Supreme Court. From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee's sessions in January, 2006,  it became clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking it  in unbelieving despair as Biden blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did pose two questions about Alito's membership of a racist society at Princeton, but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito "a man of integrity", not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.

read more... and if you don't want to, here's the conclusion:

And Obama picked Biden for the same reason Michael Dukakis chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988: the marriage of youth and experience, so reassuring to uncertain voters but most of all to the elites, that nothing dangerous or unusual will discommode business as usual. Another parallel would be Kennedy's pick of Lyndon Johnson in 1960, LBJ being  a political rival and a seasoned senator. Kennedy and Johnson didn't like each other, and surely after Biden's racist remarks about "clean" blacks, Obama cannot greatly care for Biden. It seems he would have preferred Chris Dodd but the latter was disqualified because of his VIP loans from Countrywide

No surprise that Joe supports public transport.  He used Amtrak to go back and forth to his home in Delaware every night for the last 30 odd years.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-tra il/2008/08/23/joe_biden_d-amtrak.html

The Washington Post calls him the Senator from Amtrak in the above article.

dtaylor i've gathered you don't like obama much and prefer hillary. But what are your thoughts on Mcain. Now you don't have to play along if you don't want but i'd like to know how would you evaluate him as a candidate. What do you like about him and what do you dislike about him? What positions of yours does he espouse? Would you support him on his own merrit or would you support him just to punish obama, or would you abstain all together??

Not silent enough for us.  You can do better.

That makes no sense.  If Hillary spoke for you, all of your posts would be in support of the Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama.

She SUPPORTS him, you clearly do not.

I do not share this commenter's sentiments, but the comment does not violate MyDD guidelines and did not deserve a 0 rating.

You sure talk a lot.