Block, Siteadmin, SkipCaptcha, Upload, Automoderated users, delete, edit, move, nsTeam2RO, nsTeam2RW, nsTeam2_talkRO, nsTeam2_talkRW, protect, rollback, Administrators, template
294,884
edits
Changes
→Foreign policy
Biden voted for the [[Iraq War]] in 2002. In a 2005 interview with ''Meet the Press'', Biden advocated a troop surge saying, "I’ve been calling for more troops [in Iraq] for over two years, along with [[John McCain]] and others subsequent to my saying that." On July 23, 2007, Biden said, "there's not a single [[military]] man in this [[audience]], who will tell this Senator he can get those troops out in six months if the order goes today, let's start telling the truth."<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wylferBh3IA</ref> He advocated Iraqi [[federal]]ism based on [[nation]]al and [[religious]] differences for [[Kurd]]s, [[Shiite]]s and [[Sunni]]s.
Biden voted for the [[Iraq War]] in 2002. In a 2005 interview with ''Meet the Press'', Biden advocated a troop surge saying, "I’ve been calling for more troops [in Iraq] for over two years, along with [[John McCain]] and others subsequent to my saying that." On July 23, 2007, Biden said, "there's not a single [[military]] man in this [[audience]], who will tell this Senator he can get those troops out in six months if the order goes today, let's start telling the truth."<ref>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wylferBh3IA</ref> He advocated Iraqi [[federal]]ism based on [[nation]]al and [[religious]] differences for [[Kurd]]s, [[Shiite]]s and [[Sunni]]s.
==Early life==
Biden was born at Scranton State General Hospital in Scranton, [[Pennsylvania]]<ref name="timeline">[http://biden.senate.gov/senator/timeline/ Joe Biden Timeline]</ref> and grew up in New Castle County, Delaware,<ref name="bio">[http://biden.senate.gov/senator/ Joe Biden Biography]</ref> in a middle-class family. His father was a white-collar businessman who did well but had fallen on hard times when Biden was a youth.<ref name="bluecollar">[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/joe_bidens_mythical_bluecollar.html Joe Biden's Mythical Blue-Collar Roots], [[Real Clear Politics]]</ref> Biden attended Archmere Academy, a private Catholic college-preparatory high school in the Wilmington, Delaware area, graduating in 1961.<ref name="bio" /> Biden took a summer job to help his family pay for his schooling.<ref name="bluecollar" /><ref>Archmere Academy [http://www.archmereacademy.com/Default.aspx?tabid=74] Tuition for 2008-2009 is $18,450.</ref> Biden received 5 [[Vietnam war]] draft deferments. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, and from the Syracuse University College of Law in 1968 near the bottom of his class.<ref name="bio" /> After finishing law school Biden worked in the Wilmington, Del. public defenders office where he claims to have represented a member of the [[Black Panthers]];<ref>https://www.aaihs.org/the-1968-occupation-of-black-wilmington/#fnref-43519-4</ref> no evidence has ever been produced to support Biden's claim he ever represented a member of the Black Panthers.
Biden is a serial plagiarizer. He was accused of, and ultimately admitted to plagiarism while a student at Syracuse Law School.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/17/us/biden-was-accused-of-plagiarism-in-law-school.html Biden Was Accused of Plagiarism in Law School], [[The New York Times]]</ref> He submitted a paper in which he plagiarized from a law review article. After receiving a grade of F, he was permitted to retake the course.<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE3DB143FF93BA2575AC0A961948260 Biden Admits Plagiarism in School But Says It Was Not 'Malevolent'], By E. J. DIONNE JR., SPECIAL TO [[The New York Times|THE NEW YORK TIMES]], Published: September 18, 1987</ref>
In 1966, while still in law school, Biden married Neilia Hunter.<ref name="timeline" /> They had three children together: Joseph R. "Beau" Dien, III, Robert Hunter, and Naomi. Shortly after his election to the Senate in 1972, his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident, and his two sons were seriously injured.<ref name="timeline" /> He eventually remarried to Dr. Jill Biden (née Jacobs), an educator in Delaware's schools.<ref name="bio" /> She currently is an instructor<ref>[http://www.dtcc.edu/catalog/pdf/personnel.pdf Delaware Technical Community College - College Catalog]</ref> teaching at Delaware Technical Community College. Together, the couple added a daughter, Ashley Biden, to the family.<ref name="bio" />
Biden was elected to the U.S Senate from Delaware in 1972. Delaware was a slave state. It did not join the [[Confederacy]] partially because President [[Abraham Lincoln]] suborned the Maryland state legislature and would not permit it to leave the union. Delaware, separated from the south by Maryland, could not secede on its own. Delaware voters in fact rejected Lincoln's plan to compensate for emancipation of its slaves, paid for by the federal government. Delawares Democrat and racist traditions were still very strong when Biden was elected.,<ref>https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-biden-eastland-perfect-together/</ref>
Since 1991, Biden has been an [[adjunct professor]] at the Widener University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on constitutional law.<ref name="bio" />
Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was thrown out of the [[US Navy]] for [[cocaine]] use. Hunter Biden has been a Washington [[lobbyist]] since 2001.<ref>[https://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-08-24-Biden-son_N.htm Biden's son a registered lobbyist since 2001], [[USA Today]]</ref>
===The New Jim Crow===
:{{Main article|The New Jim Crow}}
Biden was a staunch opponent of school desegregation in the 1970s and leading crusader for mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s. Biden described [[African American]] felons in the aftermath of the Central Park 5 jogger case as 'predators' too [[sociopath]]ic to rehabilitate,<ref>https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html</ref> and [[white supremacist]] senators as his friends.
Biden boasts as one of his greatest legislative achievements passage of the 1994 Crime bill which locked up 10% of the Black adult male population of the United States.<ref name="nytimes.com"/><ref>http://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/incarceration_rates_growth_causes/</ref>
When [[President George H.W. Bush]] asked for a record increase in funding to fight the [[War on Drugs]], Biden told a TV interviewer {{Quotebox|"In a nutshell, the President's plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/1989-09-06/news/mn-1646_1_drug-war</ref><ref>http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/first-step-act-skepticism.html</ref>}} [[File:1994 Superpredator Act.jpg|right|350px|thumb|The Superpredator Act of 1994. Feinstein, Kerry and Biden are clearly visible with President Clinton. The bill is known for its sentencing disparities which led to mass incarceration of Blacks.<ref>https://fair.org/home/senate-crime-bill-unscrutinized-by-the-press/</ref>]] Biden, [[Ted Kennedy]], and [[Strom Thurmond]] worked on proposals that raised maximum penalties, removed a directive requiring the US Sentencing Commission to take into account prison capacity, and created the cabinet-level “drug czar” position. In 1984, they passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other things, abolished [[parole]], imposed a less generous cap on “good time” sentence reductions, and allowed the Sentencing Commission to issue more punitive guidelines.
Biden bragged on the Senate floor that it was under his and Thurmond's leadership that Congress passed a law sending anyone caught with a rock of cocaine the size of a quarter to jail for a minimum of five years - the notoriously racist hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. In the same speech Biden took credit for [[civil asset forfeiture]] and seizure laws, and demanded to know why [[Papa Bush]] hadn't sentenced more drug dealers to life in prison or exercise the [[death penalty]] once Congress had given him that power.<ref name="c-span.org"/>
Biden's version of a new crime bill added more than forty crimes that would be eligible for the [[death penalty]]. Biden boasted “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”<ref name="books.google.com"/> The [[NAACP]] and other groups lobbied against the bill.<ref>https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/27/us/civil-libertarians-go-after-crime-bills.html</ref> Although the 1991 crime bill was defeated by Republicans, the 1994 Biden/Clinton crime bill was passed.<ref>''[https://books.google.com/books?id=SGUJBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT142&dq=biden%20strongly%20believes%20the%20administration%20needs%20to%20seize%20control%20of%20the%20issue%20by%20upping%20the%20ante&pg=PT142#v=onepage&q=biden%20strongly%20believes%20the%20administration%20needs%20to%20seize%20control%20of%20the%20issue%20by%20upping%20the%20ante&f=false The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America]'', Naomi Murakawa.</ref>
By 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. [[Human Rights Watch]] reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level they had been under [[Ronald Reagan]].<ref>[https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/ Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote], Michelle Alexander, ''The Nation'', February 10, 2016</ref> Biden's "social planning" had proven effective.
In May 2019 journalist and historian Shaun King observed, {{Quotebox|I’ve heard a very dangerous lie being told about how the systems of mass incarceration were built in this nation. I didn’t expect to have to respond this way because I didn’t expect Joe Biden to lie about the 1994 Crime Bill. He wrote it. He fought for it. And the results were devastating. Every single expert on this topic agrees.<br><br>This week Joe Biden took the stance that not only is he not sorry for the Crime Bill, but that it didn’t even increase mass incarceration. And it’s shameful because either he’s willfully lying, which is horrible, or he’s just plain ignorant about the true impact of the bill, which is also horrible. Either way, I have a major problem with it because these laws are still in effect and they are doing damage in our communities every single day, 24 hours a day.<ref>https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/videos/688203931610804/</ref>}}
The Leftist ''Jacobin'' magazine summed up Biden's record: {{Quotebox|"It’s not as if Biden didn’t know what he was doing.... He just didn’t care. Biden had made a calculated decision that the elections he would win were worth the damage he inflicted....<br>But even if Biden has subsequently learned the error of his ways, the rank cynicism and callousness involved in his two-decade-long championing of carceral policies should be more than enough to give anyone pause about his qualities as a leader, let alone a [[progressive]] one."<ref>https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/biden-crime-mass-incarceration-police-prisons</ref>}}
==='Predators beyond the pale'===
In a 1993 Senate floor speech Biden warned of "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale" and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them. Biden described a {{quotebox|"cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally ... because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity."}} Biden went on in the same breath, {{quotebox|"It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons."}} Biden said, that he didn't care "why someone is a malefactor in society" and that criminals needed to be "away from my mother, your husband, our families." Biden added "we should focus on them now" because "if we don't, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now."
Biden's 1993 "predator" remarks are similar to comments then made by first lady [[Hillary Clinton]] where she warned of "Superpredators" who had "no conscience, no empathy" and who need to be brought "to heel."
=== Joe Biden, his struggles with grief and his unresolved emotional wounds ===
[[File:Bill Clinton and officials on Air Force One.jpg|thumbnail|200px|[[Bill Clinton]], Joe Biden and other Clinton administration officials.]]
''See also:'' [[Joe Biden, grief and cognitive decline|Joe Biden and grief]]
Politico in an article entited ''How Grief Became Joe Biden’s ‘Superpower’'' indicates:
{{Cquote|There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy. In 1972, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident; in 2015, one of his two sons who had survived the crash died of a rare strain of brain cancer. These wretched tentpoles are not only tragedies the 76-year-old Biden has had to endure. They influenced major decisions he made about his political career—first, his priorities in the Senate; later, his decision to opt out of the presidential election of 2016. And they defined him as a person as well, according to longtime friends, former aides and veteran politicos in his home state of Delaware.<ref>[https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/25/joe-biden-2019-profile-grief-beau-car-accident-224178 How Grief Became Joe Biden’s ‘Superpower’]</ref>}}
The ''Washington Post'' states concerning Biden: "In a candid 2012 speech to military families and friends who had lost a loved one in action, Biden spoke about the anger, crisis of faith and wounds that don't really ever heal."<ref>[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/05/31/joe-bidens-heartfelt-thoughts-on-grief/ Joe Biden’s heartfelt speech on grief], Washington Post</ref>
The Associated Press indicates concerning Biden:
{{Cquote|After the accident, Biden had no interest in the Senate anymore. No ambition for anything, really. His world view shrank to taking care of his boys.
“For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he would later reveal.
Biden didn’t just have to deal with grief. He had the added burden of processing it in public.
<ref>[https://www.apnews.com/e5a1e70314eb44219448eeb850c65f1e Biden’s prism of loss: A public man, shaped by private grief], Associated Press</ref>}}
==Embarrassing or silly remarks==
==Embarrassing or silly remarks==