Irritants du Jour - 2015-02-24

  • Watch out, ladies! The Law School of the University Near Here has announced that Joe "Excuse Me While I Feel Up Your Wife" Biden will be on hand in Concord tomorrow.

    Vice President Joe Biden will receive the second Warren B. Rudman Award for Distinguished Public Service on February 25, 2015, when he visits the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

    Biden and the late Senator Rudman were pals, of course. Their most magical moment was a recreation of one of the scenes in Brief Encounter between Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. The setting was immediately after the Supreme Court's Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision, in which David Souter helped to reaffirm Roe v. Wade. Rudman had previously shepherded Souter's nomination to the Court by quietly assuring Democrats that Souter wasn't as anti-abortion as they (or George H. W. Bush, who nominated him) thought. And so:

    As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.

    “At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.”

    An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! ... You were right!”

    The two men were so jubilant, so giddy—practically dancing—that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

    … except for all those dead babies, of course. They weren't available to dance on the train platform with Joe and Warren.

  • Joe's also famous for … wait for it … getting caught at plagiarism when he was a law student at Syracuse. And now he's getting getting honored by our law school. Is that irony? I can never tell.

  • We might as well continue our Biden theme by pointing out a recent Slate article from Jamelle Bouie: "Why Joe Biden Should Run for President".

    The subtitle (and I swear I am cutting-n-pasting, not just making it up): "The vice president won’t win, but it’d be the best thing for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party."

    Bouie's entire argument seems to be that using Biden as a "sparring partner" would help Inevitable Hillary get ready for the November election. (I would have said "punching bag", but …)

    I don't get it. Why would anyone find this kabuki useful?