“He knows what he is doing and appears to possess a highly developed sense of responsibility. He is the type of individual one is more than willing to take a chance on, for he is unlikely to sell short your expectations.”
Weeks was the professor of the class teaching technical writing in Biden’s freshman year. It was a course that, in his words, “nearly sunk me my first semester.” The quote comes from a letter of recommendation following graduation from law school that Biden was browsing through several years later. The quote is a good one to pick; not too effusive, rational, but providing important information. It speaks of the kinds of qualities one would normally be expected to want in a President.
“Biden Admits Plagiarism in School but Says it was not `Malevolent’”
Joe Biden first stepped into prominence for America outside the Delaware region when ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 1988. That was the same year that Gary Hart was torpedoed by an unwise decision to board a boat christened Monkey Business and the same year that Michael Dukakis made the decision to ride in a tank. Dark, dark days for the Democratic Party. At the time it seemed the day it became public knowledge that Joe Biden was guilty of plagiarism was the day that Joe Biden would no longer be known to American outside the Delaware region. Back in those days, plagiarism was enough to disqualify you as a serious contender for the nation’s top office. Good times. Today, of course, just being smart enough to know who to plagiarize might be considered a sign of high intellect. Remarkably, Biden did manage to resurrect himself from the ashes which consumed Hart and Dukakis.
“If you go ahead with Bork, it’s going to be a long, hot summer.”
One of the centerpieces of the book is the confirmation hearings for Robert Bork to become a Supreme Court justice. It was a horrible nomination if only because Bork brought so much baggage that any of a thousand other candidates would have been better qualified and easier to get through the confirmation process. Biden chaired the committed conducting the advising before consenting and right from the beginning he knew Bork was a bad roll of the dice by Pres. Reagan. Bork’s views on privacy were out of the touch with the mainstream then and have only become more so in the decades since.
I made a mistake. I underestimated the influence of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocons; I vastly underestimated their disingenuousness and incompetence.
The chapter is titled “My Mistake.” The context is the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The “mistake” was Biden’s voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002 following the infamous address to the UN by Colin Powell. In a larger sense, the mistake was trusting and underestimating the deviousness of the Bush administration. If a much, much larger sense, however, the mistake was that Biden could possibly have bought the snake oil being sold in the first place. Millions of Americans knew that WMD would never actually be found in Iraq for the simple reason they weren’t there. And how did they know this yet somehow Colin Powell and Joe Biden did not? Because millions of Americans trusted the man who had actually been to Iraq in search of the WMD and the man who was telling anyone who would listen that there were none. Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector, had firsthand knowledge that Iraq had been up to 95% disarmed of their existing weapons of mass destruction and he was shouting this news at the top of his lungs to anyone listening. Unfortunately, those who should have been—like Joe Biden—instead allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by incompetence.
