Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 2:50:41 AM
Biden’s like a politician in a movie with a perfect grasp of a world that doesn’t exist. “Biden, the Master Gasbag”
As we know, the conventional wisdom was wrong. Palin wasn’t stellar.
But she crushed those low expectations, salvaged her political career
and turned herself back into an asset for the McCain campaign.
But what about Biden? Overwhelmingly, the professional political class
proclaimed that he blew Palin away on “specifics” and “knowledge” and
“seriousness.” The New York Times said Biden avoided making any gaffes,
“while showing a clear grasp of the big picture and the details.” The
Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib proclaimed on ABC’s “This Week” that
Biden avoided any “verbal excesses or rhetorical flourishes.”
The Associated Press called Biden the “master senator ... rattling off foreign policy details with ease.”
That’s true in a sense. Biden was at ease; he easily rattled off a string of falsehoods and gasbaggeries.
But here’s the difference. Palin is supposed to be everything Biden
isn’t, according to liberal pundits and mainstream reporters alike. For
weeks they’ve been saying she’s ill-prepared, uninformed and lacks the
requisite experience. But that criticism is also an excuse of sorts.
Biden
has no excuse. He’s been in the majors for nearly 40 years, and yet he
sounds like a bizarro-world Chauncey Gardiner. The famous simpleton
from Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” (played by Peter Sellers in the
film) offered terse aphorisms that were utterly devoid of specific
content but nonetheless seemed to describe reality accurately. Biden is
the reverse: He offers a logorrheic farrago of “specifics” that have no
connection to our corner of the space-time continuum.
In short,
he just makes stuff up. But he does it with passionate, self-important
intensity. He’s like a politician in a movie with a perfect grasp of a
world that doesn’t exist. He’s not an expert, he just plays one on TV.
No
one seems to care. Biden convinced the focus groups he’s an expert. The
media, with a few exceptions, let it all slide. But imagine if Palin
had made any of these gaffes. It would be incontrovertible proof that
her critics are right.