Obama's Hatchet Man

Obama's Hatchet Man


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 25, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Veepstakes: If Barack Obama really were a "uniter," he wouldn't name the "scrappy kid from Scranton" as his running mate/attack dog. Ultra-liberal Sen. Joseph Biden's frequent smile belies the scalps on his belt.

The image of Joe Biden that Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the dominant establishment media want Americans to accept may be that of a tempered, likable working-class Irish Catholic you'd love to have a beer with.

In fact, Biden is known for opposing — and at times destroying — the Republican presidents' nominees for top jobs. During George H.W. Bush's administration, for instance, he helped squash fellow Sen. John Tower's nomination to be secretary of defense in 1989.

Two years before that, he helped destroy the nomination of current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to be CIA director.

As for the current Bush administration, in 2005 as ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden spearheaded the smearing of Bush's nominee for ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton. Inviting witnesses who claimed Bolton had a nasty temper, Biden stopped his confirmation. The president ended up sending Bolton to the U.N. as a temporary recess appointment.

These aren't isolated instances: In 2001, Biden unsuccessfully tried to stop John Ashcroft from becoming attorney general, Gale Norton from becoming secretary of the interior and Theodore Olson from becoming solicitor general.

But Biden's biggest kills have been judicial nominees.

As National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez pointed out last week, in 1991 then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden sucker-punched Clarence Thomas in his confirmation hearings by lying in private meetings prior to his testimony.

"Instead of the softball questions he'd promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head," Justice Thomas recalls in his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." Biden took a quote from a speech Thomas gave out of context to give the impression that Thomas favored some kind of right-wing activism on the Supreme Court, rather than his philosophy of judicial restraint. "The point I'd been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made," Thomas noted. "Senator Biden's smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk."

Biden, of course, failed to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court, even after turning the hearings into an X-rated circus by inviting Anita Hill to make groundless charges of sexual harassment.

But earlier, in 1987, it went Biden's way, when perhaps the greatest judge of our generation was sliced and diced on live TV by Biden and the other liberal Democrats of the Judiciary panel.

Teddy Kennedy's words may be the ones best remembered: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions" he falsely claimed, while "blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters." But it was chairman Biden who orchestrated the destruction of Ronald Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court, adding a new word to our vocabulary — "borking."

As millions of Americans watched, Biden launched into a discussion of Bork's opposition to the high court's 1965 Griswold case, declaring a Connecticut contraception ban unconstitutional.

"It appears to me that you are saying that the government has as much right to control a married couple's decision about choosing to have a child or not, as that government has a right to control the public utility's right to pollute the air," Biden said, adding "that the economic gratification of a utility company is as worthy of as much protection as the sexual gratification of a married couple, because neither is mentioned in the Constitution."

As Bork testified, it was only "the way Justice (William O.) Douglas . . . derived this right" that he was opposed to. But it didn't matter; millions of TV viewers now thought Bork wanted the police spying on married couples in their bedrooms. Then it was on to Biden's next line of questioning — "do you think that there is a basic right, under the Constitution, not to be forcibly sterilized by the state?"

Joe Biden, 35 years a senator, knows how to slip the knife through your ribs while flashing the biggest smile in Washington. Barack Obama is hoping John McCain will be his next victim.



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